Workshops are used to explore a specific topic, to transfer knowledge, to solve identified problems, or to create something new. In funded research projects and other research endeavours, workshops are the mechanism used to gather the wider project, community, or interested people together around a particular topic. However, natural questions arise: how do we measure the impact of these workshops? Do we know whether they are meeting the goals and objectives we set for them? What indicators should we use? In response to these questions, this paper will outline rules that will improve the measurement of the impact of workshops.

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Museums hold collections of objects. Interventions, such as audio descriptions, objects, and maps, make these accessible to the visitors with visual impairments but 2-dimensional objects, such as maps, photographs and paintings, can still present challenges. An inter-disciplinary project works to improve access to visual art works via audio and touch interfaces. The outputs include an improved understanding of the how to improve access to the art collections for the audience and a re-usable technology to deliver audio in a non-linear fashion to the audience within a gallery. We discuss the project's development strand. The steps taken, such as participatory and experimental approaches, are considered with the issues that arose whilst working on the software, such as improving the communication how touch is used to perceive the world and the difficulties this posed. We pose ongoing research questions for non-visual interaction.

Reliably building and maintaining systems across environments is a continuing problem. A project or experiment may run for years. Software and hardware may change as can the operating system. Containerisation is a technology that is used in a variety of companies, such as Google, Amazon and IBM, and scientific projects to rapidly deploy a set of services repeatably. Using Dockerfiles to ensure that a container is built repeatably, to allow conformance and easy updating when changes take place are becoming common within projects. Its seen as part of sustainable software development. Containerisation technology occupies a dual space: it is both a repository of software and software itself. In considering Docker in this fashion, we should verify that the Dockerfile can be reproduced. Using a subset of the Dockerfile specification, a domain specific language is created to ensure that Docker files can be reused at a later stage to recreate the original environment. We provide a simple framework to address the question of the preservation of containers and its environment. We present experiments on an existing Dockerfile and conclude with a discussion of future work. Taking our work, a pipeline was implemented to check that a defined Dockerfile conforms to our desired model, extracts the Docker and operating system details. This will help the reproducibility of results by creating the machine environment and package versions. It also helps development and testing through ensuring that the system is repeatably built and that any changes in the software environment can be equally shared in the Dockerfile. This work supports not only the citation process it also the open scientific one by providing environmental details of the work. As a part of the pipeline to create the container, we capture the processes used and put them into the W3C PROV ontology. This provides the potential for providing it with a persistent identifier and traceability of the processes used to preserve the metadata. Our future work will look at the question of linking this output to a workflow ontology to preserve the complete workflow with the commands and parameters to be given to the containers. We see this provenance within the build process useful to provide a complete overview of the workflow.

This study investigated how museum visitors with very low or no vision perceived and processed tactile pictures and/or audio-descriptions of visual paintings. Two visual paintings were selected and a focus group was established ( N = 8). Qualitative interview and observation data were collected. This study found two types of museum visitors: those who explored the tactile picture first and those who rather listened to the audio-description. When exploring each element in the tactile picture, they all started by exploring the element’s global (shape) outline and, when struggling to recognise it, turned to the audio-description. They preferred the audio-description to start describing where their fingers were. Tactile texture attracted their attention, sparked their curiosity, and enabled them to create a mental image of the tactile picture, but also confused them. They preferred the global (element shape) outline to be straightened out, so that curves become angular, and texture only for targeting certain elements.