Understanding Art Exhibitions: From Audioguides To Multimedia Companions Giuseppe Barbieri1 , Augusto Celentano2 , Renzo Orsini2 and Fabio Pittarello2 1 Dipartimento di Storia dell’arte e conservazione dei beni artistici, Universit`a Ca’ Foscari, Venezia, Italia
[email protected] 2 Dipartimento di Informatica, Universit`a Ca’ Foscari, Venezia, Italia {auce,orsini,pitt}@dsi.unive.it
Abstract This paper elaborates on mobile devices for assisting the visitors of an art exhibition to understand the exhibition and its content. A model for a new class of multimedia guide is described, instantiated into a prototype for an exhibition on sacred Ethiopian art in Venice. The model offers several levels of use to different classes of users. A prototype guide has been evaluated through questionnaires and traces of users’ exploration, automatically extracted from the guide records.
1
Introduction
Understanding art requires education; even the supposed evidence of meaning of Classic art and Renaissance painting (to cite only two easy examples) requires a museum visitor to be knowledgeable about the author and to understand elements of composition, history, methodology of analysis, detail interpretation, which are at the core of courses on art history and art criticism. Modern and contemporary art, loosing the aesthetic resemblance between the artwork appearance and the subject, and multiplying the materials and techniques, makes more evident the need for organized and methodic knowledge about the artist, his/her historical, political and cultural context, the used techniques and their role in the society, the overall context in which the artwork has been conceived, made and exposed to the public. Generally speaking, any form of art presents so many facets that its fruition cannot rely on the visitor immediate perception only, but requires (at different degrees) explanations and comments to be understood and enjoyed. In museums a basic level of knowledge is provided by two common devices: the large panels introducing the artworks of a room, of an author, or of a section, and the (small) labels aside each artwork with basic data such as title and date and, sometimes, a short comment.
Labels have been introduced by Tommaso Puccini, the superintendent of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, who lived between 1749 and 1811; around 1780, he decided to place a label aside each artwork with the name of the artist, the subject, the execution date and the technique used. This practice ended an era when fruition of art was a pure aesthetic process, in which the visitor could recognize the masterpieces but was otherwise attracted by other issues such as the vastity and variety of a collection, the personal ability to discover details, and so on. The labels gave the visitor the ability to know rather then to experience, replacing knowledge for pleasure: who is the author, what is the content (often based on allegories or historical events not immediately evident), what inspired the author (e.g., a replica of another artwork). The personal experience in appreciating an artwork, often in company of the collectionist hence reserved to few people, was replaced by a collective, accessible knowledge of objective information. The history of art and of art criticism has been greatly influenced by this little revolution, but a discussion on such issues would lead out of the scope of this paper, whose focus is on the possibility (the need) of regaining (part of) the ancient esprit that led visitors to art collections, and that current ITC can help to establish. It is generally acknowledged that today’s attitude in visiting art exhibitions (mainly with masterpieces) is neither to know nor to experience, but rather to recognize and to recall; hence, information provided to users must support knowledge elicitation, which should drive the artwork examination process after recognition has been made. In the remainder of this paper we shall discuss the main issues about the design and the evaluation of a new type of multimedia guide devoted not only to present facts about the exhibition and the artworks, but mainly to help the visitor to understand what he/she is visiting, integrating factual information with the proper cultural context. The audiovisual channels used for communicating information might be used also for addressing the emotional side of the visit, giving the user the sense of a more complete experience.
A prototype of such a guide, based on the Apple iPod touch, has been experimented for an exhibition about religious Ethiopian art, ”Nigra Sum Sed Formosa - Sacred and Beauty in the Christian Ethiopia”, held at Ca’ Foscari in Venice, Italy from March 13 to May 10, 2009 (http://www.nigrasum.org/). The guide has been conceived in the framework of a research project about new interactive systems for rich art fruition involving the Department of Computer Science and the Department of History of Arts and Cultural Heritage Preservation at Ca’ Foscari University. The goal of the project is to design multimedia guides that do not address visitors only with simple, albeit correct, comments on the artworks on display, but rather provide ample knowledge about the exhibition themes. Such a goal requires a balance between the simple linearity of a guided tour aimed at explanation and a rich hypermedia structure aimed at involving the user emotionally. Indeed, it is a goal common to all museum and exhibit guides, but the ways it is claimed or pursued are varying and, at our knowledge, often limited by the existing habits and practices about audio guides.
2
New directions for art guides
From a humanistic perspective a good guide should give visitors not only information, but also, and mostly, experience coming from the interaction with the artworks. Multimediality, the technological key to unreveal such experience, cannot be limited, as often done, to provide impressive views on information fragments; it must be taken as a way to allow the visitor to enter the artwork meaning from a personal emotional point of view. Using interactive multimedia portable devices delivering information in the shape of engaging audiovisual presentations is a starting point and not a goal [3, 5]. From a technical perspective designing such a guide faces several challenges, the most notable being the almost unreachable ease of use of the widespread and simple, albeit limited, keypad-based audioguide. Any enrichment leading to more choices than listening to an audio comment raises problems of use, dividing the users according to their skill with portable devices. The operations of an audioguide are explained and learned in seconds, while any PDA class device requires minutes, a time span unbearable in large museums. Indeed, PDA class devices are being introduced in museums visited by a large public [2]. An interesting case is the Ship Museum in Barcelona (http://www.mmb.cat) that provides visitors with a touch smartphone of the Windows Mobile class. The PDA functions are constrained to the selection of a presentation typing on a numeric keypad the number marking the proper museum section. Each presentation is an audio comment, accompanied by additional con-
tent in the shape of images and short texts. As an additional bonus, the visitors can bookmark relevant images and texts, that will be sent to their e-mail address at visit’s end. The bookmarked information is sent as a simple list of attachments, without any structure or reference to the museum context. The Apple iPod touch is changing the landscape of interactive guides, due to the excellent quality of audio and video playback, to the interaction style and to a fashionable appeal of the device itself. IPod touch based guides are available at several museums, among which the New York MoMA and the Tate Liverpool Gallery are notable examples. Indeed, in both cases the iPod is used as an unstructured mediatheque. At MoMA it is promoted as the MoMA Audioguide (http://www.moma.org/visit/plan/atthemuseum/ momaaudio) delivering audio-only comments with limited interaction capabilities. At Tate Liverpool an exhibition on Klimt masterpieces was supported by a catalog of audiovisual presentations with very simple visual content (http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/gustavklimt/ tour.shtm). None of the two guides uses at full extent the video capabilities of the iPod to enrich the vision of the artworks, nor they use gestual interaction out of list selection. ¨ Also the Oberes Belvedere Gallery in Vienna (http://www.belvedere.at) delivers guides on iPod touch devices, which “simulate” a traditional keypad audioguide. The user interacts with a virtual keypad displayed on the iPod screen selecting artworks by number, and listens to audio comments with very limited playback control: there are no advance/back controls, the volums is controlled with the hardware buttons on the iPod side, and the only allowed operations are pause/resume and return to the keypad for a new selection. Such a “downsizing” of the iPod capabilities turns a sophisticated multimedia device into a very basic audio player.
3
The art guide as a visitor’s companion
The goal of the guide we have designed is to help the visitor to understand the value (artistic, historical, religious) of the artworks and of the exhibition as a whole while being on site. Information access modalities support different styles to visit the exhibition, including non-linear visits that—according to [4, 7]—represent the behaviour of a significant part of visitors. Figure 1shows the organization of the guide content as it appears through the user interface. The user can access the content by selecting a section of the exhibition, a specific artwork from a catalog, a room on a map, or a keyword from a tag cloud. Access by section give users information about six exhibition themes: Icons, Crosses, Devotional objects, Religious architecture, Testimonials, and Drawings. The first three sections deal primarily with artworks of a same type.
Table 1. Questionnaire evaluation - part 1 (a) Guide chapters Catalog Rooms Sections Keywords Used by 85% 81% 69% 66% Score (1–5) 4.1 4.1 4.0 4.1
Figure 1. Organization of the guide content
The other three sections include artworks of different types, homogeneous as to the context to which they refer. Accessing the guide content by section exploits the potential of the device, with multimedia files such as movie fragments, audio recordings, images, interviews, traditional religious songs, and so on. The artworks are accessed by several catalogs: a general catalog collecting all the artworks, and partial catalogs for the artworks of a section or located in a room. Each artwork is presented with an audio comment (much as in a conventional audioguide), with one or more images that can be zoomed in to discover details; in some cases a longer audiovisual presentation shows more information through animations and slide shows. A set of maps allows visitors to access the artworks contained in each room. User may also access information by selecting keywords from a tag cloud, an information structure borrowed from the so-called Web 2.0 and often used to present the result of the collaborative tagging of users [6]. In this guide the tag cloud is used to group multimedia presentations by evocative words that are orthogonal to the exhibition sections. In order to be used by a wide range of users with different skills and attitudes towards both the Ethiopian culture and the use of personal devices, the guide has been designed for being both engaging and usable, fitting the visitors background without being trivial. The graphic appearance has an important evocative role in suggesting atmospheres and themes. Real images from the artworks have been used to identify the different contents, instead of symbolically styled icons. Navigation is kept at a minimum level of complexity, avoiding deep hierarchies and paths. Interaction has been designed for being accessible—in its basic functionalities—also by unexperienced users. As a
Used by Score (1–5)
(b) Interface functions Touch Scroll Flick 86% 85% 80% 4.2 4.4 4.2
Evaluated by Score (1–5)
(c) Content type Audio Audio- Artwork comments video pages 81% 78% 82% 3.9 4.1 4.1
Enlarge 53% 4.1
consequence, the standard gesture of tapping on the screen (the equivalent of the click operation on a desktop interface) has been extensively used for selecting items and accessing information in menus, indexes and pages. For example, tapping on the image of an artwork page reveals a popup menu leading to supplemental audiovisual content. Browsing through artworks is accomplished by the standard iPod gesture of flicking the pages. More complex gestures—such as the enlarging gesture operated with two fingers—have been used only for zooming into images. The evaluation of the guide use, discussed in Section 4, shows that such gesture, although intuitive in principle, requires a learning phase the prevents many visitors to use it.
4
Evaluation of the guide use
We released three different versions of the guide. The second version, issued shortly after the exhibition opening, was improved mainly with the content and with a more evident identification of the guide chapters. The third version of the guide included a context-dependent audio-visual helpand further improvements in the navigation structure. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the guide we adopted two different tools: a questionnaire and an automatic tracking system of user gestures. All the data collected are related to the second and to the third version of the guide.
4.1
Questionnaire
The questionnaire was submitted to the visitors except in hours of great affluence. Table 1 presents a synthesis of the analysis on a sample of 176 questionnaires. A general appreciation of the guide is evident. However, it is perceivable from Table 1(a) how the habit of using sequential audio guides influences the visitors that, even in presence of a more articulated device, privilege direct catalog access to introductions and theme explanations. It is also evident
from Table 1(b) that the more advanced user functions, such as multitouch gestures to zoom into images, present some difficulties, and a consistent part of the users didn’t even realize that such function was supported. The results suggest that multitouch gestures, associated to power and ease of use in advertising this class of devices, is still not perceived as a natural interaction and may require a learning phase hard to be satisfied in the short time of an exhibition visit. We may expect that, with the rapid spreading of touchbased devices and the standardization of gesture-based interaction, users will be aware of these functions without an explicit help. The lesson learned for the immediate time is that we need to support the users with explicit information about the functions available. Table 1(c) shows a satisfactory appreciation level for the different types of content provided by the guide, with a slight preference for the audiovisual content of the introductory sections and the artwork descriptions, compared to the audio-only comments associated to the artworks. Additional information comes from questions related to the ease of use of the guide and to the availability of help tools, summarized in Table 2 for versions 2 and 3 of the guide. Only a minor part of users where often in trouble when accessing information, as shown in Table 2(a). Most of them were only sometimes bothered by access problem. A minor, but significant part of users (i.e. 19%), declared that they never had problems with the second version of the guide. The improvements to the third version of the guide (the availability of a back button and the integrated help) increased this percentage to 28%. Table 2(b) shows data about the use of the help: a leaflet in version 2 and an integrated video presentation in version 3. As expected, the video help was more appreciated, and was considered useful by the 68% of the users and a must from an additional 10%. These percentages represents a considerable improvement if compared to the appreciation of the paper leaflet, that can be explained in particular by the contextual access from any section of the guide and by the use of a video presentation showing the real use of the device. The printed help had also the problem that in some cases, due to visitor affluence, leaflets were not available; a poster displayed near to the iPod counter supplied the same information, but the high percentage of “no answer” in the first row of Table 2(b) is a signal of its inadequacy. Table 2(c) displays the user responses to difficulties about navigation in the guide content. For the second version of the guide returning to the starting screen was the preferred solution, followed by asking assistance to human guides available in each room. For the third version of the guide these solutions were still the most used, but with smaller percentages. It is interesting to note that for this version of the guide a minor but significant part of the users relied on the video help for recovering from troubles.
V.2 V.3
Table 2. Questionnaire evaluation - part 2 (a) Ease of use No answer No Some A lot of difficulty difficulty difficulties 7% 19% 63% 11% 4% 28% 54% 14%
(b) Help∗ No answer Useless Useful Necessary V.2 49% 10% 35% 5% V.3 14% 8% 68% 10% ∗ A leaflet for version 2 and an integrated video for version 3
V.2 V.3
(c) Management of difficulties No answer Home Help Go on Ask 23% 50% n/a 14% 25% 32% 38% 14% 14% 18%
V.2 V.3
(d) Request for Additional Support Functionalities No answer Help Back Home Other 27% 15% 42% 27% 1% 47% 4% 22% 21% 7%
Other 2% 3%
Finally, users were asked about their preferences for additional functionalities to improve the ease of use (Table 2(d)). A significant percentage of users of the second version of the guide (42%) requested the availability of a back button to retrieve their previous steps. Such functionality was implemented in the third version. The other answers show that, for both versions of the guide, a part of the users requested additional functionalities that were already available. This problem might come from the graphical interface style: rather than using standard traditional symbols for the home and back buttons, we used symbols and colors consistent with the graphic style of the exhibition installation. Some users might have considered these symbols as decorative elements rather than functional icons, missing their presence as navigation aids. A final encouraging result shown in Table 2(d) is that an increasing part of the users of the third version of the guide (47% vs. 27%) expressed no need for additional support functionalities.
4.2
User behaviour analysis
User behaviour analysis is based on the automatic recording of user activity. We have collected more than 100.000 records, each corresponding to a user gesture on the screen or to a file access, counting for more than 900 different visits in a time span of about nine weeks. We plan to use data mining techniques to analyze a so huge collection and to reveal recurrent user patterns; a preliminary synthetic analysis of the traces has already given us precious knowledge about the real use of the guide. A first result is that approximatively 15% of the visitors
Home Catalog Sections Maps Tags Seclist Maplist Video Artwork
- 1.669 1.254 3.035 928 509 1.187 - 1.003 744 - 4.333 932 - 1.219 94 1.297 - 1.508 - 1.275 2.141 441 - 1.416 -
two rk Ar
Vid eo
pli st Ma
list Sec
Tag s
Ma
ps
ns tio Sec
talo Ca
Ho
me
g
Table 3. In and out paths from the guide sections
- 1.634 128 - 1.524 - 3.678 - 1.290 57 - 3.088 22 716 - 14.786
data not shown in Table 3, audio comments associated to artwork pages have been played in the 30% of the cases. From these facts a few conclusions can be preliminarily drawn: (1) the visitors have preferred the “utility” part of the guide, i.e. the maps and the room catalogs; (2) the visitors have exploited the audiovisual content of the guide in a significant way, with a preference for the video presentation with respect to the audio only comments; (3) in general the interface should be simplified, since the users have sometimes followed non efficient paths, like returning to the home page to continue the visit: this is confirmed also by the questionnaires.
5 who took the guide has used it for less than ten minutes, while 12% of the visitors uses it for more than two hours. We do not have data on the average time of visit, but the exhibition occupies only nine rooms, and two hours are an ample time. Overall, the average time of guide use is around 52 minutes, distributed according to the Zipf law. Considering the visit paths, we divided the guide pages in homogenous sets, and studied the in/out-paths from a set to another. The result for more than 600 visits from the second version of the guide is shown in Table 3. The sets are: Home, the initial page; Catalog, the list of the artworks; Sections, the pages related to the exhibition themes, with links to the audiovisual content; Maps, the pages related to the exhibition rooms; Tags, the pages accessed by keywords from the tag cloud; Seclist, the list of artworks related to each section; Maplist, the list of the artworks present in each room; Video, any audiovisual content; Audio, the audio comments of the artworks, Artwork, the pages containing the description of the artworks. A cell at row i and column j contains the number of times a page in set j has been reached from a page in set i. For example, artworks pages (column Artwork are reached primarily from lists associated to the room maps (3088 times), then from the general artwork list (Catalog, 1634 times), and very seldom from the lists associated to the themes pages (57 times); a large number of times they are reached from other artwork pages, confirming that the users have used frequently the flicking gesture to advance to the next artwork. From Table 3 a few important facts come immediately into evidence: (1) from the home page the preferred next page is the map, then the catalog, then the theme index and the tag index; (2) the audiovisual presentations have been reached almost equally often from the sections’ pages as well as from the tags’ ones; (3) the partial catalogs of each section have been scarcely used, while those associated to the exhibition rooms have been heavily used; (4) from the artworks pages, besides browsing sequentially the artworks, the users have returned often to the home page, to the room map and, sometimes, to the artwork catalog. According to
A family of guide models
Tuning the guide to the visitor abilities with personal devices emerged as a requirement during the exhibition after the examination of the early questionnaires. While they showed that visitors were generally satisfied with the guide, some visitors returned the device a few minutes after picking it up, saying it was too difficult to use. Such visitors where mostly elder persons not used to personal devices. In a few cases they expected a more conventional guide, with some kind of “next” button to advance in the exhibition, making up a simple guided tour. We cannot detail here, for space constraints, the technical solution adopted for the management of the guide content; the reader is referred to a previous paper [1] for a deeper presentation. We overview here the overall information organization to understand how the architecture we have developed can be used to build a family of art guides with the same basic content units but with different cognitive paths between them and different presentation structures and styles, designed to accomplish the need of users with different expectations, different abilities in using personal devices, and different experiences with art guides. Content management is based on a database organizing the artwork data in collections. Each artwork belongs to many collections: the general catalog, the set of artworks contained in a room, the set of artworks of a guide section, and so on. The database manages also the references to multimedia files which are the ultimate components of the guide content; three types of multimedia materialexist: (1) audio recordings, which are played when the user selects the audio function in an artwork page, like a conventional audio guide; (2) audiovisual presentations related to general information about a theme, accessible from any of the of six sections and from selected artwork pages; (3) interviews with the exhibition curators, introducing the main themes of the exhibition. It is possible to design, on such material, at least four different guide models, simpler than the one we have built, assisting the users in different ways both with respect to the operation complexity and to the information richness.
Anyway, due to the limited exhibition duration, they were not implemented at full extent but only at demonstration level in the iPod devices. The four guide models are: (1) an audio catalog; (2) an audiovisual catalog; (3) a guided tour; (4) a guide personalized on the visitor type. Audio catalog. The set of audio presentations which are accessed through the catalog section of the guide can be stored in the iPod Music section, collected into a playlist with tunes properly numbered to match the artwork identifiers. The guide works as a traditional audioguide except that, instead of typing the artwork number on a keypad, the comment is selected from a scrolling list. More than one catalog can be accessed using several albums and playlists, each collecting a subset of the audio comments according to a thematic (section) or spatial (room) criterium. Audiovisual catalog. The extension from audio-only comments to audiovisual comments turns the audioguide into a visual guide; however, the guide organization is the same as the previous case. The presence of video allows the guide designer to present introductory material, to show and compare artworks, to address the visitor with detailed visual analysis not available in an audio-only guide. In both guide models, the previous one and this one, the visitor gestures are limited to list scrolling and unitouch selection, avoiding troubles in commanding the guide functions. Guided tour. The guided tour model is an extension of the multiple collections model that can be implemented using different playlists. The sequential activation of the tour step is built into the iPod control system for audio and video, which allows the user to go to the previous or next item of a playlist at play end, or to skip to next or previous step interrupting the playback. The tour path is represented as a list, that can be accessed at any intermediate point since the basic iPod controls allow the user to choose the item to start with. Personalized guide. This model opens a wide fan of possibilities due to the many ways in which content, presentation and sequence of information can be combined to fulfill the needs of different categories of users. In the context of this paper we simply note that personalization can rely on the basic mechanism of aggregation of atomic multimedia presentations into sets, called catalogs, playlist, chains, tours, according to the semantic context in which they are used. The sets are accessible through two basic mechanisms: direct selection and previous/next selection, both implemented as basic controls in the iPod touch software.
6
Conclusion
Designing an art guide is an educational activity that must consider the relationship between the visitors and the artworks in designing what content must be delivered and what
freedom the users have in accessing it. The relationships are much more complex than those suggested by the linear paper guides and audioguides usually available at museum entrances. Yet, the richness of the personal interactive multimedia technology risks to divert the user attention from content to presentation. Different art contexts and themes require different styles for presenting an art collection (not to speak about explaining, which is a debated subject expecially in contemporary art exhibitions) helping the visitors to access it with satisfaction. The guide structure and the run-time environment we have implemented can be adapted to other contents with limited changes, making this project a first step towards the building of a generic content management system for portable multimedia guides. Indeed, we are currently developing an adapted version of the guide for a part of the exhibition ”Topological gardens”, organized by the Philadelphia Museum as the USA official participation to the Venice Biennale of 2009 and dedicated to Bruce Nauman. The huge differences in the exhibition themes, the number of artworks and the way they are presented and commented provide a good test bed for evaluating the design of the guide and the appreciation of the visitors.
Acknowledgments Valeria Finocchi has coordinated the content preparation. Marek Maurizio has contributed to the implementation of the content database. The project has been supported by Banca Popolare Friuladria - Cr´edit Agricole.
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