twidale@uiuc.edu

The availability of advanced computing technologies is leading to radical changes in business, education, and society in general. The aim of this project is to explore the potential of new technologies to enhance the experience of visiting a museum. The focus of this proposal is not remote access to the virtual museum; rather, I wish to examine a relatively under-explored area: how to enhance the experience of an actual museum visit in real life, through the deployment of different information technologies. The research approach will be to draw on the experience and expertise currently used in museums to address this issue, and to match it up with existing, cutting edge, and soon to be developed technologies that could be applied in innovative ways. The work will be done in the context of a range of museum types – not just science museums, but those oriented to art, culture, human history, the natural world, etc.

One very common way in which museums attempt to enhance the experience of visitors is by providing docents. These are usually volunteers with particular interests and specialist knowledge who are trained to provide guided tours and to answer visitors questions. We have explored the nature of ‘the docent function’ in an attempt to clarify the different kinds of things that can be done (Rayward & Twidale 1999). In this work we came to the conclusion that there were a wide range of things that museums did to ‘add value’ to their collection, all of which could be considered part of the docent function, even if they were not actually done by docents. For example, while a visitor is looking at an artifact (such as an amphora) a docent could explain more about where and how it was found, how it was used and its significance in helping our understanding of the people who made it. A written display could also provide a similar explanation, although it would probably not be as entertaining. Both the talk and the display serve the docent function, but use different media and technologies with their own particular attributes. Indeed it was our contention that it was precisely the docent functions that made a collection of artifacts more than just a collection and turned it into a museum.

Although we coined the term ‘cyberdocent’ as a shorthand for the exploration of technologies that might be used to provide certain docent functions, there already exist examples of ways of providing that information other than just by using people. Clearly a wall chart of text can convey information that a docent may explain to the user, but naturally the two media have different functionalities. The wallchart is always present, but the wording is fixed. There is only so much text that can be presented and revising it is time consuming. Too much text is intimidating, but too little information is frustrating. If you are reading the text, you aren’t looking at the artifact. By contrast, a docent can modulate her presentation based on the backgrounds, interests and even real-time reactions of her audience. However you must be there at the right time to join the tour to hear the explanation, and for a group of mixed ages and experiences, the docent must choose an appropriate single level of detail to pitch at. Docents may not always be available at the time you want them, and you may not want to follow at the exact speed and the exact itinerary of the group.

A classic example of an early cyberdocent is the cassette audio tour. This is a kind of duplicated disembodied docent voice. Personal audio machines are available for hire and are often provided on the occasion of special exhibitions. In effect, they offer the individual viewer a personal but necessarily invariant pre-recorded commentary about selected items located throughout an exhibition. On the other hand, despite these constraints, the audio-guide provides a certain kind of flexibility not possible with a live docent and a tour group. They can be switched off and back on as the visitor takes a detour or backtracks and then resumes the tour, and they can repeat their commentary as often as needed.

New technologies offer new opportunities. CD-ROMs are now being used for audio tours. They have better sound quality than audio tapes. But more importantly they can hold a large store of information which can be accessed randomly, whereas audio tapes hold only a limited amount of information which has to be accessed sequentially. Thus, with CD-ROMs it is possible to design mechanisms that enable a user to move at his or her own pace and in any order through the collections, retrieving the commentary related to particular items in an exhibition as needed by inputting a code provided near the item. Moreover it is possible, given the capacity of CD-ROMs, to envision the provision of multiple audio extracts in order to offer commentary in various languages or at different levels of detail or focusing on different aspects of the artifacts. Thus one extract might be geared to children, another might offer general overview information and another provide more detailed information. However, the amount of audio data that can be held on CD-ROMs is itself limited, and the increased multimedia capacity of DVD technology provides opportunities for greater flexibility in the amount and kinds of information that can be presented.

One of the ways that docents can help visitors to increase their enjoyment of a visit is by providing alternative insights into viewing and interacting with artifacts. This might be accomplished by sharing skills of how to look at a work of art, or reassuring for the visitor that their reactions and impressions are indeed appropriate and a good way to study a painting. It might include providing background information, sharing the results of scholarship in an accessible form, or showing practical or contemporary linkages with an artifact that may seem remote because of distance, time or complexity.

The tour group also emphasizes the social aspect of museum visiting. Many visitors arrive in groups (couples, families, friends, etc.) and discuss together what they see and experience. This social interaction is part of the pleasure of the museum-going experience, as well as having significant educational importance. A docent can enhance this, both by creating a larger social environment in the tour (adding to the social aspect for solitary visitors), and also by making comments, providing information, or asking open-ended questions that serve as topics for post tour conversations and discussion after the tour members resume their visit as separate groups.

An artifact can be understood and explained in many different ways. Ideally, you would have a personalized tour by a friendly expert sharing their enthusiasm and helping you to engage with the meaning of the artifact based on what you know and what you are interested in. There are many levels of detail about the item to suit the needs of visitors with different levels of interest, amount of time to spare, previous education in the area, experiential background, etc. We can think of the different kinds of explanations as multiple layers of meaning for the artifact. A printed exhibition catalog can thus be regarded as attempting to address this layering by offering additional information for people who want to know more about a particular artifact. However, the constraints of cost and space limit the amount and variety of layers that can be offered this way.

As well as layers of increasing sophistication of analysis, there are also layers based on different themes. For example, an Egyptian mummy could generate many different types of discussion and analysis: Egyptian history, religious practices, the physics, chemistry, and biology of mummification, the techniques of analysis, radiology, carbon dating, pollen analysis, pathology, how archaeologists work, current academic debates in Egyptology, whether mummies should be put on display at all (repatriation and reburial), comparisons with other cultures (including our own), mummification, embalming and other funeral rites.

Just as a single artifact can be used to tell many different stories, a combination of artifacts can create many different tours of real or virtual exhibitions. For example, a steam locomotive next to a canal boat helps explain the evolution of transport infrastructures, while the same locomotive next to an early steam mine pump helps explain the evolution of steam technology.

One aim of museums is to share with a visitor different ways of ‘seeing’ the artifact. Different tours for example can feature the same artifacts for different purposes. This may be part of the aim of enhancing a deeper understanding of the natural world, helping people appreciate an important but difficult scientific concept or helping the visitor to appreciate different insights from viewing a work of art. All these fit within a broader educational aim. Technologies afford new ways of supporting this process.

The main technological focus of this project will be the use of wireless PDAs and their potential interaction with walk-up computer workstations, large screen displays, conventional PCs in a media center and (via the museum’s web server) the visitor’s home computer. All these technologies already exist and their hardware costs are falling rapidly so that a careful examination of useful and usable applications in this project will coincide with the feasibility of testing in a future research bid, probably to the National Science Foundation and/or to the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Thomas and Mintz (1998) survey a number of recent approaches that employ varying multimedia technologies in different kinds of museums. They examine the potential for productive interactions between virtual representations and actual physical artifacts. Mase et al. (1996) propose the use of techniques related to intelligent agents and virtual reality to augment artifact representations. Milosavljevic et al. (1998) explore the use of dynamic artifact labels to tailor descriptions to the individual visitor. Cheverst et al. (1999) describe the use of hand-held computers and wireless technology to support tourists visiting a city. Effectively this extends the idea of the Cyberdocent out of doors and provides a potential connection between several different museums. There are even attempts at "automating" the human docent by building robots to provide guided tours (Burgard et al. 1999). The use of PDAs as educational devices for children is being investigated by many researchers (Inkpen 1999; Soloway et al. 1999), as is their use as input devices for large shared displays (Myers et al. 1998; Greenberg et al. 1999).

Part of the work of the project will be to critically design, analyze, test and revise detailed scenarios to uncover the systems requirements. As an example however I sketch one out here in cursory form.

Caveat: The scenario below is currently science fiction. I am not proposing to implement it during the fellowship! Rather, I believe that with careful analysis we can explore the implications of this rough sketch and propose a research path to develop self-contained components of such an idealized tour. Each component would be intended to add to the museum visit experience in its own right and also to contribute to the evolving vision. However, for the reasons outlined later in the proposal, I think that this requires careful exploration of the space of possibilities before diving in to the development of exciting technologies. The fellowship will afford me the opportunity to undertake such a consideration.

The visitor to the Science Museum rents a PDA with attached headphones. Using a walk-up graphics terminal she chooses a particular tour that highlights the achievements of women in science and engineering. There is not a specific gallery devoted to this. Rather the galleries are themed by broad concepts such as "The Environment", "Our Bodies", "Work", "The Home". The tour will involve walking around the galleries, looking at particular exhibits from the perspective of the themed tour. The visitor indicates she wants the one-hour version of the tour (she can change this if she decides she wants to spend more or less time on the tour), and because she is a regular visitor to the museum, the system uses details about her profile to construct a tour using reasonable assumptions about levels of interest, background knowledge and references to things seen on other tours. (All these features can be over-ridden by the user, but allow slightly more tailoring than a standard one-size-fits-all vanilla tour). Last time she took a tour, she had planned her visit from home, using features at the museum website, and so could just pick up the PDA and get going. But this one is a spontaneous visit.

Putting on the headphones and looking at the PDA, she starts the tour. The PDA shows a map and an indication of where to go. As she is a regular visitor, this is a little superfluous, but useful for first time visitors who can get rather lost in finding the way to an out of the way collection. Best of all, because of the wireless connection, the map can update based on where in the museum the user is currently standing. Although map reading is perhaps a useful skill to be practiced, it can get a little confusing, particularly when your kids need the bathroom in a hurry.

Arriving at the Difference Engine exhibit, she listens to a more elaborate description of the life and work of Ada Lovelace than is available on the displays. Being a software engineer, she is interested in Lovelace, and chooses the option for even more information. The PDA has details about books and websites about Lovelace. She decides she doesn’t want to use the nearby monitor to look at the websites recommended (PDAs are great for bits of information but its nicer to use a bigger monitor for lots of text), but notes that she wants the system to make this information available for use later (maybe at home) and to remind her when she gets to the gift store to take a look at the Byron family biography they have in stock. The PDA communicates with the museum web server, adding the chosen information to our visitor’s personalized web pages there. It will use the spatial awareness from the wireless network to flash a reminder on the screen when it detects that she is near the bookstore.

Some kids are trying out the virtual Difference Engine simulator shown on the fancy plasma display nearby. As there is a whole bunch of them, their teacher has them using their PDAs to issue votes on what to do next. "So much better than handling the fights over who gets to hold the joystick – that’s fine for small families but not for my girlscout pack", she thinks. Which reminds her, she must use the ‘make your own tour’ feature to put together something for them. She’s promised to take them all to the museum next month and it would be good to assemble a load of hands-on activities, that also relate to the theme of her own work, so she can talk about that as well. But first, she wants to see what they have about Grace Hopper, so she decides to carry on with the tour up to there and then she’ll play around with the ‘fun and educational activities to do and talk about with your kids’ feature. She remembers a colleague talking about Hopper and decides that if the exhibit is good, she’ll send him an e-postcard about it, choosing a few pictures and chunks of text and adding a quick note of her own. It’s fun to spread the word about the museum’s latest innovations this way.

The scenario illustrates some of the key issues to be explored in the fellowship:

• How to support multiple tours through a museum’s collection, looking at the exhibits in different ways.
• How to provide different layers and levels of meaning, information, interpretation, and support for interactivity for individuals and groups.
• How to help visitors to find things of interest, while still affording serendipity, reflection, engagement with others and with the artifacts themselves.
• How to integrate different technologies to support different kinds of activities; audio, moving around, using walk-up terminals, use of media centers and remote access before and after a visit.
• How PDAs can be used on their own and in conjunction with other technologies.
• How to integrate cyberdocent technologies with traditional docent functions including enhancing conventional guided tours.
• How to support learning around an artifact, between artifacts, inside the museum, outside in other formal and informal learning contexts and in interaction with different kinds of people.
• How to design interfaces to these systems to support the needs of museum visitors (they may not be computer experts, the systems must be easy to learn, and not detract from the museum-going experience).
• How to design an engaging interface that keeps the interest of discretionary users.
• In particular how to design suitable interfaces for the small screen of PDAs as they move from their current status as a gadget for the techno-literate to being as pervasive in our culture as VCRs and ATMs (not that those are glowing examples of good design).
• Do the needs for the technologies vary by museum type (science museum, art gallery, museum of world cultures, etc.) and if so in what ways?

As noted, for many people a museum visit is a social event. Technologies should encourage rather than inhibit this. Thus part of the work will be to examine ways in which this interactivity can be enhanced. It might be by the system asking questions for people to think about and discuss. It might be by playing games, either using a simulation, trying to achieve a goal that requires a certain understanding of a concept, or by something like a treasure hunt around the museum, collecting clues that dynamically change the next thing to hunt for. As the scenario notes, PDAs can be used to control more sophisticated monitors or physical or virtual simulations. They can also be used for collective interactions such as voting, or sharing information as with MIT’s work on nametags (Borovoy et al. 1998). Many things are possible and the question is how to choose activities that can achieve the different goals, including learning goals, for a museum visit. Research in constructivism emphasizes the importance of activity in learning. This is not just pressing buttons in a science museum. It can also include easy ways for the visitor to tell stories, take notes, construct diaries of a visit, or send messages to friends, either in the museum or elsewhere. Given that the PDA knows where you are, it is possible to link brief notes to particular exhibits and to pre-existing text or graphics.

It is a persistent problem in Computer Science that there is inevitably a gap between the developers of a system and the intended end users. In Software Engineering this is known as the Requirements Capture problem. Life is so much easier when Computer Scientists design systems to be used by themselves or by other Computer Scientists. That is because they know thoroughly the nature of the problem, what users currently do, the difficulties and inefficiencies that they encounter, what they would like to do, and what is currently technologically and economically possible to design. This applies both to regular applications and to innovative research and development using cutting edge technologies. From a consideration of this idealized state, we can see the problems that will arise when addressing more complex situations involving various kinds of users or publics. What do the end users really want to do? What do they actually find difficult with the existing arrangements? What is currently possible? Effective design needs a considered interaction between user needs and the current economic-technological space of possibilities. All too often that does not occur. Where users are insufficiently involved, there is the danger of technology-led applications, solutions in search of a problem, applications that solve problems that people don’t have and fail to solve or even worsen the problems that users actually have.

There is a substantial literature, particularly in Computer Supported Cooperative Work research of case studies of deployments that failed precisely because of an inadequate understand of what real people really do in their work and the consequent development of systems that although masterpieces of ingenuity, solved the wrong problems (Grudin 1989). Equally, just involving the local experts is insufficient. Such a person may be very clear what they want ("I want to tell my computer to get me all the correct information, like on Star Trek") but unaware of the realistic potential of current technologies. This may be an over-estimate of current abilities based on hype and science fiction, or equally unfortunate, an underestimate, or lack of systems development insight to see how a combination of technologies could be employed, maybe not to ‘solve’ their problem, but to provide a distinct improvement on existing practice. Thus if you don’t know that a solution to a problem is now possible, you may not even think of it as a problem, you may not even be aware that you have the need for it. This is illustrated by the frequent difficulty of marketing radically new technologies. You have to explain to people why they would want them at all, if they’ve never had that option before. Thus you couldn’t have invented it in the first place solely by asking them what they wanted.

What is needed is more work on bridging the gap between the explicit and implicit needs of the user and the current state of the art (and what could be reasonably done to advance the state of the art). For this project I’m proposing to do this in the case of museum visits, but clearly the approach has far wider implications. To be effective, I believe that the approach has to resist the Computer Scientist’s temptation to ‘rush to code’. Normally that is taken to mean the desire to start coding and skimp on systems design. I’m taking it to mean an even broader approach - that as soon as an issue arises, there is a temptation to work on an intriguing design solution. Instead I believe it is in the long term more productive to first explore the larger design space of many possible design challenges, to review the technical feasibility and likely payoffs of the different approaches and only then begin considering the normal design issues. Such an approach is based on user studies, detailed analysis and the application of scenario based design. At its best it can lead to the choice of a particular project area to focus on that shows the greatest chance of eventual end user take-up and success. It can indicate critical factors, especially about usability, that must be addressed and are often ignored in the pursuit of ever more impressive functionality. It can even produce a whole range of development options and uncover critical research issues that only arise when a certain juxtaposition of technologies and needs occur. For example, I expect that this work will raise significant issues for Quality of Service, data compression, data quality, CSCW, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning and HCI research.

Scenario based design (Carroll 1995) does not just consist of thinking up illustrative stories. It involves the use of these stories of plausible activities to explore the design space. By examining a scenario, alternative functionalities can be considered. These functionalities can then be ranked both by expected impact on different (perhaps sometimes competing) design goals (such as maximizing learning, maximizing enjoyment, maximizing interaction) as well as by expected development costs (including for innovative designs the tractability of the research issues that would need to be addressed). Choices can then be made about future research and development based on this multi-factorial analysis. Furthermore, to explore a design space in greater depth, a scenario can be adjusted by changing some of its assumptions to other plausible values and exploring likely breakdowns and how these should be addressed. These what-if sub-scenarios form a wider space around the originating scenario, and some of them can be promoted to first class scenarios themselves.

The proposed work complements current NCSA/Alliance efforts to design, prototype and deploy access and computational grids, and evaluate impacts on science, education and society at large. It also is closely linked to ongoing work on science and education portals, not least because it examines a particular case of use of multiple access technologies, ranging from museum, classroom, or home-based workstations to PDAs. In the case of projects such as RiverWeb, or scientific visualizations of cosmic evolution for display at the Hayden Planetarium, there is an explicit aim of promoting scientific literacy through informal education. In keeping with its interdisciplinary research interests, NSCA has also contributed technical expertise and vision to the arts and humanities. Indeed, as in science museums, the use of advanced information technologies in art and cultural museums can serve distinct educational objectives: to facilitate enjoyment and understanding of exhibit content, and to make such technologies more accessible to visitors who would never consider themselves engineers or computer scientists and yet who will increasingly be using computational technologies in their lives.

The present, funded Mississippi RiverWeb Museum Consortium is one NCSA initiative whose goals clearly synergize with the activities proposed here. The Digital River Basin, and the portals, both museum- and web-based, that will support multimodal access to it will constitute a rich, interactive exploration environment for different styles and levels of learning. Though the DRB will be shared by all three museum partners, each museum will deploy it within its own, distinct gallery context, thus providing a testbed for studying different patterns of use and a richer basis for exploring the need for alternative cyberdocent functionality. This helps to ensure that the work can explore the generic aspects of the cyberdocent concept by exploration in several different but interlinked contexts.

In addition, the Consortium will develop a unified web site through which museum goers could plan their visits remotely, then, when visiting the museum, pick up a cyberdocent that will guide them according to their plan (or suggest alternative exploration pathways) and record their visits for possible further exploration back home or in the classroom. Thus it provides a productive context for the exploration of cyberdocent prototypes.

The aim of this project is not to develop an actual working system, but rather to undertake a detailed study of the problem space. The process of scenario based design will also include the development of selected scenarios into demonstrators using rapid prototyping technologies to create mockups. These can be used to further clarify the implications for actual usage and to engage museum experts (who may not have advanced computing experiences) in the discussion of the potential of the designs. The work will result in a report outlining a final prioritized set of scenarios and requirements for technologies to enable their implementation. The report will include a research agenda and development strategy, clarifying how separate research projects could address different components of the overall vision, such that each is capable of contributing to a museum visit in its own right, but how when put together they can provide the kinds of integrated learning, cultural and social experiences hinted at in the visit scenario described earlier in this proposal. The prototypes developed will serve as proof of concept to be used in future research bids. Thus in addition to a textual scenario for such a bid, it will be possible to include screenshots and even web-based animations of what the to-be-developed system might look like, as well as providing a strong design rationale for this based on the analysis that led to the development of the prototype.

It is expected that this work will lead to one or more NSF proposals. These will range from a focus on the technological challenges of integration of multiple hardware types and interfaces for interaction between PDAs, web servers, and large screen displays, through to the educational aspects including Informal Science Education. Another possible source of funding would be a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

I intend to meet and work with various members of the NCSA to understand the range of emerging technologies that might be applied to achieve the goals of the research. Existing contacts include Lisa Bievenue, Larry Jackson and Umesh Thakkar. One focus will be to work with the NCSA RiverWeb museum prototyping team, especially David Curtis, in order to learn from their experiences of development and evaluation. Initially, I would like to visit one of the partner museums, probably the Illinois State Museum, and conduct visitor studies, using ethnographic methods of analysis coupled with aspects of cognitive diagnosis as a means of evaluating learning environments (Twidale 1993, Twidale et al. 1994) to determine the plans goals, beliefs and misconceptions of museum visitors, both about the concepts addressed in the RiverWeb exhibit and the interface of the application itself. In consultation with the museum partners, I would also make use of formative evaluation data emerging from the project. This study will attempt to answer questions such as: "what do visitors currently fail to appreciate, or find confusing in an exhibit, and how could we address that need?" Consequently it serves a crucial role in the requirements capture process, identifying opportunities for the most effective technological provisions. The customizable RiverWeb portals to the Digital River Basin could provide an excellent testbed for an examination of existing and potential docent functionality, and the introduction of PDAs into informal learning environments. into an already extant technical and conceptual infrastructure.

I would also continue with my ongoing work with the Spurlock Museum to explore the needs of a museum of world cultures. The Spurlock has been undergoing a computerized re-inventorying of its entire collection as part of its preparation for the move to a new building. Thus it has a wealth of extant information about its collection, both that to be put on display and that for which there is no space for permanent display. This affords the opportunity to explore ways of making parts of that information available in an accessible and comprehensible manner. The example earlier in this bid of different uses of a mummification exhibit was inspired by work undertaken at the Spurlock.

The findings from these initial studies of museum activity will inform the first round of developing detailed scenarios of different kinds of personalized tours and other docent functions. These scenarios will then be critiqued, adapted and extended, using insights derived from further visits to the museums mentioned here, as well as other museums (particularly the major museums in Chicago). These studies will test the underlying assumptions in the initial design about visitor behavior, reactions to sources of information, and use of different kinds of docent functions. The most promising resultant scenarios will be prototyped, using mockups of the envisaged interface, perhaps developed in Macromedia Director. This affords opportunities for deeper analysis of their assumptions and technical, social and educational implications. Overall an iterative prototyping approach will be employed cycling through real world observation, analysis, scenario construction and analysis and prototype construction and analysis. The graduate research assistant and undergraduate hourly employee will be involved in the prototyping activities, experimenting with alternate visualizations of information types for the PDA and its interface for interaction with the networked technologies.

The following timeline illustrates the ordering of activities. An iterative development is to be used, consisting of cycles of analysis, design, development and evaluation. Wherever possible, it will be attempted to cycle through this loop as quickly as possible. Thus some of the activities may be started earlier than the timeline begins.

The details are on the budget form. As noted the Graduate Research Assistant and hourly paid undergraduate would be involved in the development of demonstrator scenarios, focusing on the design of the interface and the adaptation and re-representation of content information to provide alternative tours and layering examples. The software budget is for Macromedia Director and graphics and database programs to take advantage of access to extracts from the Spurlock Museum’s digitized information. The travel budget is for visits to RiverWeb museums, other museums in the Chicago area and attending a conference on Museum Informatics.