Constructing Visual Narratives of Museum Experiences

The technological enrichment of museums serves as a prime area of research focused on the changing role of information and communication technologies and the visualization of personal data. While previous research projects have focused on using mobile and interactive technologies as electronic museum guides this project takes a different approach. It seeks to develop new methods to visualize the data collected from a user’s trip through a museum enabling the user to construct a presentation that they can use to reflect, communicate, and share their experiences with others. To this end, four styles of visual narratives (each targeting a particular purpose) were designed, developed, and tested via a prototype. Our usability study was based upon a series of evaluation criteria such as effectiveness, operability, overall satisfaction, flexibility, and sociability. It demonstrates the users do in fact prefer the proposed narrative visualization and our visualization styles serve distinct purposes.