Abstract
The EU-funded MuseIT project aims to co-design, develop, and co-evaluate a multisensory, user-centred platform for enriched and inclusive engagement with cultural assets for everyone, regardless of variations in abilities. The project’s core principles are inclusion, accessibility, participation, and equal opportunity for all. In previous research, we identified a need for a better understanding of disability and the diversity of needs to facilitate and broaden accessibility when developing technological systems for the digital transformation of cultural heritage museums. MuseIT addresses these needs through close collaboration with people with disabilities and representatives from cultural institutions. The project focuses on developing digital technologies to represent cultural heritage artefacts in multiple modalities by translating their semantic content into knowledge graphs. These graphs are then used to create multisensory representations of the artefacts. Beyond text, image, and sound, haptic representations map both sensations and meaning-bearing words and sentences to the body. The haptogram vocabulary rethinks patterns from Social Haptic Communication (SHC), employed in co-design with users through our tool called HaptiDesigner. Additionally, an alternative method automatically converts a high number of precomputed word embeddings into haptic signals for pattern designs in the Unitouch studio. While promising to translate cultural heritage objects to the tactile domain, ongoing work also explores conceptual and technological challenges to enable their presentation in the context of a virtual museum exhibition modelled and produced by project partners.
Presenters
Elena MaceviciuteProfessor Emerita, Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås, Sweden
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Cultural heritage, Disability, Multimodal, Representation, MuseIT
