Abstract

Given the growing interest in Cultural Heritage (CH) and considering that 2018 has been declared the European Year of Cultural Heritage, but also following the successful workshop at MobileHCI 2016, MobileCH 2018 will be again the meeting point between cultural heritage and personalization research – using any kind of mobile technology to enhance the personal experience in cultural heritage sites. This workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners who are working on various aspects of CH and are interested in exploring the potential of cutting-edge mobile technology (onsite as well as online) to enhance the CH visit experience. The expected result of the workshop is a multidisciplinary research agenda that will be based on recent research results, will define future research directions, and forge new research collaborations.

Background

CH has traditionally been an area that is favored by personalization research. Visitors come to CH sites to experience and learn new things, usually without a clear idea of what to expect. CH sites are rich in objects and information; much more than the visitor can absorb during their limited time of a visit. The above possess the following challenges: How can we use state-of-the-art technology to provide an engaging experience for the ‘digital’, ‘mobile’ and ‘traditional’ CH visitors, before, during and after their visit? How can we exploit visitor information from their previous interactions with CH venues, their interaction with the current venue, and data extracted from the ubiquitous Web? (How) can this kind of support be a basis for maintaining a lifelong chain of personalized CH experiences? From a technological point-of-view, the evolution of methods for managing and integrating Open Data, as well as for delivering mobile services, opens new research opportunities about personalization. For example, we can expect improvements in the presentation of information, in the exploration of content and in the discovery of events suitable for the specific user/group. New research can also be foreseen to improve the collaboration among users with similar interests, the facilitation of human learning and the adaptation of technology to heterogeneous user contexts and devices.

Personalization could improve the interaction and experience of visitors both in CH virtual spaces (like web platforms or social media) and visitor interaction with CH guide systems on-site. As discussed by Falk, CH visitors differ, and their visit experience is a combination of physical, personal, socio-cultural and identity-related aspects. Hence, visitors may benefit from individualized support that takes into account their particular contextual and personal attributes. Personalization can also be related to collaboration for preserving, enriching and accessing cultural heritage, by considering crowdsourcing techniques and based on the active involvement of a broad range of people. In parallel, several projects have developed – and keep developing – data collection tools and museum or city guides, as means of demonstrating concepts like location, context awareness, and smart built environments. Together, these represent two ends of the “production” process of bringing cultural heritage from the research environment to its consumers. A key challenge is to address many classes of ambience: touristic routes, cities, archaeological sites, ancient buildings and museums, as well as spontaneous sources of artwork such as street art. Finally, at present, various initiatives are inviting people to engage with their online collections (e.g., Tate Modern, Powerhouse Museum), or reach out to them via Social Web platforms (e.g., Flickr the Commons, Brooklyn Museum on Facebook, augmented reality browser of Netherlands Architecture Institute with Layar). However, personalization strategies for CH have been largely limited to research projects and experiments (e.g., PEACH , INTRIGUE , Kubadji, PIL , CHIP , PrestoPrime , WantEat ) and mainly focused on ad-hoc, within-session or -visit personalization, or visitor behavior analysis.

Goals of the Workshop

Introducing novel, mobile technology is an ongoing process, as new technologies continue to appear. As part of this ongoing research, the workshop aims at examining state-of-the-art research and building a future research agenda for personalization in Mobile Cultural Heritage. The high-level goal is to incorporate the individual CH experience as a link in a chain of a lifelong CH experiences; one that is built on the visitor(s) past, connected with their daily life and which provides the foundation for their future experiences.

Audience

The workshop aims to be multi-disciplinary. We welcome researchers, practitioners, and students from the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) area, as well as from the domains of CH and Humanities (including museums, archives, libraries, and more). We also expect to attract personalization researchers who want to explore this class of contexts. The expected number of participants is 20. To publicize the workshop we will distribute the call through relevant mailing lists, as well as through personal emails to key researchers and research groups in the area of applying novel technologies to CH.

Topics

Any work which is at the same time relevant to the Mobile HCI 2018 general list of topics, and that is being applied to cultural heritage is relevant to the workshop. Specific topics of interest, when applied to cultural heritage are:

• Navigation and browsing in digital and physical cultural heritage collections
• Recommendation strategies for CH
• Adaptation strategies for text and non-verbal content in CH
• NLG techniques for mobile user modeling in CH sites
• Integration of virtual and physical collections
• Ambient Cultural Heritage
• Mobile museum guides & personal museum assistants
• Context-aware information presentation in CH
• Interactive user interfaces for CH applications
• Personalization for group of visitors to CH sites
• Personalization across the whole of an person's digital ecosystem
• Long term personalization
• IoT and Cultural Heritage
• The cloud and Cultural Heritage

Important dates

Long papers (8 pages), short papers (5 pages) and position papers (4 pages)

• Submission: May 10th, 2018 May 17th, 2018 (11:59pm AoE Time Zone)
• Notification: June 15th, 2018
• Camera ready: June 29th, 2018

Poster and Demonstrations (up to 2 pages)

• Submission: June 30th, 2018
• Notification: July 6th, 2018
• Camera ready: July 13th, 2018

Workshop registration

See https://mobilehci.acm.org/2018/registration-information/ for more details. At least one author of each paper must register.

• Early registration: 150€ until July 16th, 2018
• Late registration: 180€ after July 16th, 2018