A TUI to Explore Cultural Heritage Repositories on the Web

Abstract

This article presents a paper-based Tangible User Interface (TUI) that facilitates the production of complex queries on a Cultural Heritage (CH) repository. The system helps to easily make use of the data elements and Boolean logic that describe the collections. This research presents a design methodology divided into two main phases: A User Experience (UX) and User Centred Design (UCD) where potential users' behaviours are analysed, followed by the development and evaluation of the TUI prototype.The TUI uses off the shelf electronics and a paperbased set of tokens to engage the user with the system, thus facilitating the exploration with CH collections through querying.

Afrobits: An interactive installation of African music and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade

“…We carried out a series of workshops with Liverpool Museums, local Liverpool artists and students, where we explored how artists and general audiences including children, could create such interactive tools. We noted that conductive inks were a very flexible way of producing interactive points (Fray and Pereda 2019;Pereda et al 2018). We found throughout our workshops that despite such flexibility, users would still have to get involved to some degree with the programming of such interactions.…”

SABLIER : a Tangible Interactor to Navigate through Space and Time

“…For more genericity in the application domain, it is possible to use objects which do not carry information on the specific content but on more abstract concepts. For example in [37], the objects used represent search fields on a database. They are placed on an interactive tabletop to create a query, for instance WHAT : paintings; WHO : Picasso; WHEN : 1935 (Figure 1c).…”

Sketching music: Exploring melodic similarity and contrast using a digital tabletop

“…The hybrid approach combining the physicality of TUIs and the flexibility of GUIs arguably makes digital tabletops ideally suited for applications where the amount of information is excessive (Pereda 2019), or the manipulations are too sophisticated, or both (Ishii 2008). Unsurprisingly, a large proportion of musical TUIs aimed at musicians are based on the touch-screen tablet idiom, sometimes incorporating small graspable objects, such as ROTOR (Reactable Systems 2015) based on a concept similar to that proposed by Rutter, Mitchell, and Nash (2014).…”