Constructing and connecting storylines to tell museum stories

Abstract

Over the past decade a number of systems have been developed that tell museum stories by constructing digital presentations from cultural objects and their metadata. Our novel approach, informed by museum practice, is built around a formalization of stages of museum storytelling that involve: (i) the collection of events, museum objects and their associated stories, (ii) the construction of story sections that organise the content in different ways, and (iii) the assembly of story sections into a story structure. Here we focus in particular on this final stage of building the story structure. Our approach to providing intelligent assistance to story construction involves: (i) separating overlapping or conflicting story sections into separate candidate storylines, (ii) evaluating candidate storylines according the criteria of coverage, richness and coherence, (iii) assembling storylines into linear, layered or multi-route structures and (iv) ordering the story sections according to their setting within the storyline. © Springer International Publishing 2013.