Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Visualising Museum Stories, Eoin Kilfeather

Publications

Storytelling is fundamental to our ability to understand, and find meaning in, the world around us. Stories allow us to organise and share knowledge, and to identify the relationships between objects, events, and experiences. Within museums stories allow visitors to engage with collections and to gain meaningful understanding of museum objects. Stories transform a collection of objects into a meaningful knowledge structure that connects the objects and give them meaning.

This paper describes the Open Source Storyscope system that has been developed by the EU FP7 DECIPHER project. Storyscope's workspace and tools allow museum professionals and visitors to research, develop, …

Web Supported Emplotment: Using Object And Event Descriptions To Facilitate Storytelling Online And In Galleries, Trevor Collins, Paul Mulholland, Annika Wolff

Publications

The process of emplotment refers to the selection of significant events in a story and the identification of pertinent relations between them, in order to produce a plot providing an interpretation of those events. We are investigating how models of emplotment can be applied to develop web-based tools for creating and interpreting narratives. In particular, we are focusing on the process undertaken by art gallery professionals to design and present exhibitions. This paper presents a set of plot relations developed in collaboration with museum professionals from two national galleries in Ireland, and shows how theories of narrative and digital cultural …

Storyspace: A Story-Driven Approach For Creating Musuem Narratives, Annika Wolff, Paul Mulholland, Tevor Collins

Publications

In a curated exhibition of a museum or art gallery, a selection of heritage objects and associated information is presented to a visitor for the purpose of telling a story about them. The same underlying story can be presented in a number of different ways. This paper describes techniques for creating multiple alternative narrative structures from a single underlying story, by selecting different organising principles for the events and plot structures of the story. These authorial decisions can produce different dramatic effects. Storyspace is a web interface to an ontology for describing curatorial narratives. We describe how the narrative component …

Curate And Storyspace: An Ontology And Web-Based Environment For Describing Curatorial Narratives, Paul Mulholland, Annika Wolff, Trevolr Collins

Publications

focus on describing the heritage objects that the museum holds in its collection. These are used to manage and describe individual heritage objects according to properties such as artist, date and preservation requirements. Curatorial narratives, such as physical or online exhibitions tell a story that spans across heritage objects and have a meaning that does not necessarily reside in the individual heritage objects themselves. Here we present curate, an ontology for describing curatorial narratives. This draws on structuralist accounts that distinguish the narrative from the story and plot, and also a detailed analysis of two museum exhibitions and the curatorial …

An Event-Based Approach To Describing And Understanding Museum Narratives, Paul Mulholland, Annika Wolff, Trevor Collins, Zdenek Zdrahal

Publications

Current museum metadata tends to be focused around the properties of the heritage object such as the artist, style and date of creation. This form of metadata can index a museum’s collection but cannot express the relations between heritage objects and related concepts found in contemporary museum exhibitions. A modern museum exhibition, rather than providing a taxonomic classification of heritage objects, uses them in the construction of curatorial narratives to be interpreted by an audience. In this paper we outline how curatorial narratives can be represented semantically using our Curate Ontology. The Curate Ontology, informed by a detailed analysis of …

Deciphering The Story Of The Musuem, Eoin Kilfeather

Publications

No abstract provided.