Using Event Spaces, Setting and Theme to Assist the Interpretation and Development of Museum Stories

Abstract

Stories are used to provide a context for museum objects, for example linking those objects to what they depict or the historical context in which they were created. Many explicit and implicit relationships exist between the people, places and things mentioned in a story and the museum objects with which they are associated. We describe an interface for authoring stories about museum objects in which textual stories can be associated with semantic annotations and media elements. A recommender component provides additional context as to how the story annotations are related directly or via other concepts not mentioned in the story.

The approach involves generating a concept space for different types of story annotation such as artists and museum objects. The concept space is predominantly made up of a set of events, forming an event space. The concept spaces of all story annotations can be combined into a single view. Narrative notions of setting and theme are used to reason over the concept space, identifying key concepts and time-location pairs, and their relationship to the rest of the story. Story setting and theme can then be used by the reader or author to assist in interpretation or further evolution of the story.