Vayanou, M., Karvounis, M., Kyriakidi, M., Katifori, A., Manola, N., Roussou, M., & Ioannidis, Y. (2012). Towards Personalized Storytelling for Museum Visits. In 6th International Workshop on Personalized Access, Profile Management, and Context Awareness in Databases (PersDB 2012). Istanbul, Turkey. Retrieved from http://persdb2012.cs.umn.edu

Abstract: Storytelling is a new way to guide museum visitors, where the traditional set of exhibit-centric descriptions is replaced by story-centric cohesive narrations with carfully-designed references to the exhibits. Personalized storrytelling customizes the narrations according to different user characteristics, either statically or dynamically during the visit. In this paper, we describe the basic elements of an effort towards achieving personalized storytelling for museum visits in the context of the CHESS project. We outline the user and story models employed, we detail the main tools and mechanisms to bootstrap personalization for first-time visitors, and we describe the overall system architecture. The results of some very preliminary experiments with actulal visitors are encouraging and show several directions for future work.

Roussou, M., Katifori, V., Pujol Tost, L., Dollis, N., Chaffardon, C., Valoti, I., Rennick Egglestone, S., & Schnaedelbach, H. (2012). Seamlessly blending the off-site and on-site museum experience with the use of personalised digital mobile technologies. In MuseumNext 2012. Barcelona, Spain.

Abstract: Recent research on the use of mobile technologies, social networking, interactive digital storytelling, and augmented reality, amongst others, promises to make cultural heritage sites more attractive but also to provide new means for making cultural knowledge, interpretation, and analysis more effectively conveyed to the public. A research project titled CHESS (Cultural Heritage Experiences through Socio-personal interactions and Storytelling) aspires to combine the above and to enrich the museum visit by personalising and (dynamically) adapting interactive stories about cultural exhibits and artefacts to each individual visitor. Essentially, CHESS proposes to create narrative-driven cultural “adventures”, which adapt continuously to their visitors, extend over space (e.g., physical/on-site and virtual/ off-site) and time (before, during, and after the visit), and involve users according to their varying interests, needs and desires. Two different museums participate as test beds in this effort, the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece and the Cité de l’Espace in Toulouse, France.

Pujol, L., Roussou, M., Poulou, S., Balet, O., Vayanou, M., & Ioannidis, Y. (2013). Personalizing interactive digital storytelling in archaeological museums: the CHESS project. In G. Earl, T. Sly, A. Chrysanthi, P. Murrieta-Flores, C. Papadopoulos, I. Romanowska, & D. Wheatley (Eds.), Archaeology in the Digital Era. Papers from the 40th Annual Conference of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA). Southampton, UK, 26-29 March 2012: Amsterdam University Press. Retrieved from dare.uva.nl/cgi/arno/show.cgi?fid=545855

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to present the state-of-the art research project in digital storytelling for museums titled CHESS (Cultural Heritage Experiences through Socio-personal interactions and Storytelling). The goal of CHESS is to research, implement and evaluate an innovative conceptual and technological framework that will enable both the experiencing of personalised interactive stories for visitors of cultural sites and the authoring of narrative structures by the cultural content experts. We believe that the new modality of extended museum visit that CHESS proposes will make cultural heritage sites more attractive and effectively conveyed to audiences (especially to “digital natives”) and will provide new means to leverage and exploit the existing digital libraries that have been developed since several years in the cultural heritage world.