Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2010

Museums are vast resources, but much of their information is inaccessible to visitors. Typical labels for artifacts provide few details, making it difficult for non-expert visitors to learn about an artifact, and to find its relevance to other artifacts or to themselves. Although museums have developed interpretive aids such as brochures and audio guides, these are limited and do not offer visitors the possibility to explore artifacts both broadly and deeply as they go through an exhibition. Visitors often have questions that go unanswered or pass through an exhibition without being engaged. As visitors all have their own personal interests and preferences, it would be difficult to offer a usable version of any current interpretive aid that includes all of the information, stories, and related content that each visitor would like. Personal mobile devices provide a platform for interactivity and access to an unlimited amount of information, presentation of rich media, and flexibility for customized experiences both inside the museum and beyond. To bridge the gap between museum collection information and visitor engagement, I propose a framework for increasing engagement through resonant, rich, and interactive experiences mediated by a personal mobile guide, and present a case study and functional prototype mobile guide for the Hall of Architecture at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T18:23:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 tese.pdf: 897004 bytes, checksum: 01569f30a7a9bd0feb6b20e5db201c73 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005-05-05 / This research, part of the DIRECT Project (LAEL/PUC-SP), aims at analyzing the characteristics of city tour and museum guides in two different sociocultural contexts: Brazil and Spain. In this way, it investigates the cultural context and the situational context of the corpora of this study. The theory focuses on Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday, 1994). Although this grammar offers various elements that could also reveal characteristics in the discourse of these professionals, Theme was chosen because it makes possible the study of the organization of the message, the point of departure the speaker selects for grounding what he is going to say (Halliday (1994: 34). Besides, it is possible to compare how two different languages and cultures organize their message. This research has three goals: (1) to identify similarities and differences in the discourse of city tour and museum guides; (2) to identify similarities and differences in the discourse of Brazilian and Spanish city tour and museum guides; (3) to establish if there is one or two genres according to the general structure of the discourses and to Thematic options. Thus, this study is composed of 04 corpora: one of visits to two Brazilian museums; one of visits to two Spanish museums; one of two city tours in Brazil; one of two city tours in Spain. The visits were recorded in cassette tapes and transcribed. The theory about genre follows the ideas of Hasan (1989), Swales (1990), Bathia (1993), Fries (1995), Eggins & Martin (1997) and Ramm (2000). The Theme was studied through the ideas of Halliday (1994), Eggins (1994), Berry (1995), Thompson (1996), Barbara & Gouveia (2001) and Gouveia & Barbara (2001). Results show that city tour and museum guides organize their discourse in a very similar way and that there are some idiosyncratic differences, what is expected as the study deals with two sociocultural contexts / Esta pesquisa, parte do Projeto DIRECT (LAEL/PUC-SP), tem o objetivo de analisar as características do discurso de guias de turismo e monitores de museus em dois contextos sócio-culturais diferentes: Brasil e Espanha. Investiga-se, portanto, o contexto de cultura e o contexto de situação que envolvem os corpora aqui tratados. A base teórica do trabalho está na Gramática Sistêmico-Funcional (Halliday, 1994). Embora esta gramática ofereça vários elementos que também poderiam ressaltar características no discurso dos guias e monitores, escolheu-se o Tema por permitir que se estude a organização da mensagem, o ponto de partida que o produtor do texto, aqui o guia e o monitor, seleciona para embasar o que vai dizer. Além disso, é possível fazer uma comparação na forma como essa organização do discurso é feita em duas línguas e culturas diversas. A análise tem três objetivos: (1) identificar as semelhanças e diferenças do discurso de guias de turismo e monitores de museus; (2) identificar as semelhanças e diferenças do discurso de guias e monitores brasileiros e espanhóis; (3) estabelecer, através da análise da estrutura geral dos discursos e das escolhas Temáticas, se há um ou dois gêneros. Para tanto, a pesquisa está composta por 04 corpora: um de visitas realizadas a dois museus brasileiros; um de visitas realizadas a dois museus espanhóis; um de dois city tours realizados no Brasil; um de dois city tours realizados na Espanha. A coleta dos dados foi feita através de gravação das visitas em fita cassete e sua posterior transcrição. A teoria sobre gênero segue as idéias de Hasan (1989), Swales (1990), Bathia (1993), Fries (1995), Eggins & Martin (1997) e Ramm (2000), e a de Tema, Halliday (1994), Eggins (1994), Berry (1995), Thompson (1996), Barbara e Gouveia (2001) e Gouveia e Barbara (2001). Os resultados da pesquisa mostram que os guias e monitores organizam seu discurso de forma muito semelhante e que as diferenças entre o Brasil e a Espanha são poucas e idiossincráticas, já que são contextos sócio-culturais e línguas diferentes

Η παρούσα εργασία ασχολείται με τη μελέτη των τεχνολογιών ανάπτυξης εφαρμογών σε περιβάλλον φορητών συσκευών και συγκεκριμένα σε Windows Phone 7.5 (ή Mango) συσκευές. Ιδιαίτερα δόθηκε έμφαση στη δημιουργία πολυμεσικών εφαρμογών πολιτισμικού περιεχομένου, οι οποίες θα είναι όχι μόνο λειτουργικές αλλά θα διαθέτουν επίσης ένα φιλικό περιβάλλον διεπαφής έτσι ώστε να αποτελούν μια ευχάριστη εμπειρία για τον τελικό χρήστη. Με αφορμή αυτό το ερέθισμα, σχεδιάσαμε και αναπτύξαμε το Museum Guide – ένα ολοκληρωμένο περιβάλλον διαχείρισης περιεχομένου που έχει σαν στόχο την ξενάγηση σε ένα χώρο πολιτισμού, όπως για παράδειγμα ένα μουσείο, εκμεταλλευόμενο τις πολλές δυνατότητες που προσφέρει μια Windows Phone 7.5 συσκευή. Έτσι χρησιμοποιώντας το Museum Guide ο επισκέπτης του μουσείου μπορεί να βλέπει τα εκθέματα καθώς και συνοδευτικό υλικό που περιλαμβάνει κείμενο, εικόνες, αρχεία ήχου και βίντεο. Επιπλέον μπορεί να επιλέγει κάποια από αυτά τα εκθέματα ως αγαπημένα και να μοιράζεται τις εμπειρίες του με τα υπόλοιπα μέλη της ομάδας του μέσω άμεσων μηνυμάτων. Για τη λειτουργία των άμεσων μηνυμάτων δημιουργήσαμε έναν ενσωματωμένο messenger που λειτουργεί πάνω από xmpp πρωτόκολλο με τη βοήθεια της βιβλιοθήκης Matrix. Εκτός από τα παραπάνω, το Museum Guide δίνει τη δυνατότητα στον χρήστη να λάβει πληροφορίες για ένα συγκεκριμένο έκθεμα, βγάζοντας απλά μια φωτογραφία τού εν λόγω εκθέματος με την κάμερα του κινητού. Την λειτουργία αυτή την ονομάζουμε on-demand ξενάγηση και δόθηκε ιδιαίτερη έμφαση στον αλγόριθμο με βάση τον οποίο γίνεται η αναγνώριση της φωτογραφίας που βγάζει ο χρήστης. Για το σκοπό αυτό μελετήσαμε και αξιολογήσαμε διάφορους αλγορίθμους αναγνώρισης εικόνας και καταλήξαμε στη χρήση hashing τεχνικών με τη βοήθεια της βιβλιοθήκης pHash. / The current thesis is on study of application development technologies in portable devices environment and namely in Windows Phone 7.5 (or Mango) devices. Especially emphasis was placed on creation of multimedia applications with cultural content which will not only be functional but also have a friendly interface in order to be a pleasant experience for the end user. In response to this stimulus, we designed and developed the Museum Guide – an integrated content management environment which aims at guidance in an area of culture, for example a museum, exploiting the capabilities of a Windows Phone 7.5 device. Thereby the visitor of the museum can use the Museum Guide to see the exhibits as well as accompanying material including text, photos, audios and videos. Additionally the visitor can mark any of these exhibits as favorites and share their experiences with the other members of their group through instant messages. For the operation of instant messaging, we have created an embedded messenger which works over the xmpp protocol using the Matrix library. Besides the above, the Museum Guide gives to the user the opportunity to receive information about a specific exhibit, just taking a photo of this exhibit with phone’s camera. We call this operation on-demand guidance and we emphasized especially on the algorithm of user’s photo recognition. For this purpose we studied and evaluated various image recognition algorithms and came to the conclusion to use hashing techniques with help of pHash library.