In addition to providing information to individual visitors, electronic guidebooks have the potential to facilitate social interaction between visitors and their companions. However, many systems impede visitor interaction. By contrast, our electronic guidebook, Sotto Voce, has social interaction as a primary design goal. The system enables visitors to share audio information -- specifically, they can hear each other's guidebook activity using a technologically mediated audio eavesdropping mechanism. We conducted a study of visitors using Sotto Voce while touring a historic house. The results indicate that visitors are able to use the system effectively, both as a conversational resource and as an information appliance. More surprisingly, our results suggest that the technologically mediated audio often cohered the visitors' conversation and activity to a far greater degree than audio delivered through the open air.

Design experience and theoretical discussion suggest that a narrow design focus on one tool or medium as primary may clash with the way that everyday activity involves the interweaving and combination of many heterogeneous media. Interaction may become seamless and unproblematic, even if the differences, boundaries and `seams' in media are objectively perceivable. People accommodate and take advantage of seams and heterogeneity, in and through the process of interaction.

We describe an electronic guidebook prototype and report on a study of its use in a historic house. Supported by mechanisms in the guidebook, visitors constructed experiences that had a high degree of interaction with three entities: the guidebook, their companions, and the house and its contents. In this paper, we report a qualitative analysis of how different properties of the guidebook helped or hindered visitors ’ attempts to balance the competing demands of these attentional entities. Based on the visitors ’ comments and behavior, we distill a set of design principles.

Abstract. We describe an electronic guidebook prototype and report on a study of its use in a historic house. Visitors were given a choice of information delivery modes, and generally preferred audio played through speakers. In this delivery mode, visitors assigned the electronic guidebook a conversational role, e.g., it was granted turns in conversation, it introduced topics of conversation, and visitors responded to it verbally. We illustrate the integration of the guidebook into natural conversation by showing that discourse with the electronic guidebook followed the conversational structure of storytelling. We also demonstrate that visitors coordinated object choice and physical positioning to ensure that the electronic guidebooks played a role in their conversations. Because the visitors integrated the electronic guidebooks in their existing conversations with their companions, they achieved social interactions with each other that were more fulfilling than those that occur with other presentation methods such as traditional headphone audio tours. 1

would like to thank our collaborators in these studies: Madeline Gregg and her student teachers

As one important experiment in the social or user-generated classification of online cultural heritage resources collections, art museums are leading the effort to elicit keyword descriptions of artwork images from online museum visitors. The motivations for having online viewers— presumably largely non-art-specialists—describe art images are (a) to generate keywords for image and object records in museum information retrieval systems in a cost-effective way and (b) to engage online visitors with the artworks and with each other by inviting visitors to express themselves and share their descriptions of artworks. This paper explores the question of how effective non-specialist art keyworders can be in capturing (“tagging”) potentially useful concepts and terms for use in art information retrieval systems. To do this, the paper compares evidence from art museum visitor studies which describe how non-specialist art viewers react to and describe artworks and use museum-supplied information in their initial encounters with artworks. A theoretical model of artwork interpretation derived from art museum visitor research provides a framework with which to examine both the activity and the products of artwork tagging for image and information retrieval. 1.

This paper discusses the use of a shared mixed reality system that supports co-visiting of museum exhibitions for both on-site and on-line visitors. We briefly present the prototype system that uses wireless communication technologies to combine handheld devices, virtual environments and hypermedia to support a museum visit. We then discuss its use, focusing on the ways that the system shaped the visiting experience with regard to collaboration in the exploration of artefacts, mutual exchange of suggestions and creative conversations among the visitors. We conclude with implications for both the design of mixed reality experiences for museums and the character of the museum.

We describe an electronic guidebook prototype and report on a study of its use in a historic house. Supported by mechanisms in the guidebook, visitors constructed experiences that had a high degree of interaction with three entities: the guidebook, their companions, and the house and its contents. In this paper, we report a qualitative analysis of how different properties of the guidebook helped or hindered visitors' attempts to balance the competing demands of these attentional entities. Based on the visitors' comments and behavior, we distill a set of design principles.

This paper discusses the use of a shared mixed reality system that supports co-visiting of museum exhibitions for both on-site and on-line visitors. We briefly present the prototype system that uses wireless communication technologies to combine handheld devices, virtual environments and hypermedia to support a museum visit. We then discuss its use, focusing on the ways that the system shaped the visiting experience with regard to collaboration in the exploration of artefacts, mutual exchange of suggestions and creative conversations among the visitors. We conclude with implications for both the design of mixed reality experiences for museums and the character of the museum.

This paper discusses the use of a shared mixed reality system that supports co-visiting of museum exhibitions for both on-site and on-line visitors. We briefly present the prototype system that uses wireless communication technologies to combine handheld devices, virtual environments and hypermedia to support a museum visit. We then discuss its use, focusing on the ways that the system shaped the visiting experience with regard to collaboration in the exploration of artefacts, mutual exchange of suggestions and creative conversations among the visitors. We conclude with implications for both the design of mixed reality experiences for museums and the character of the museum.