MuseumViz -- Towards Visualizing Online Museum Collections
This work addresses the issue of poor user experience for visitors to online Indian cultural heritage museums, though it is incremental in applying existing visualization techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of low visitor engagement with online Indian museum collections by developing MuseumViz, a framework that uses interactive visualizations to enhance user experience, resulting in 83% of 25 users finding it easier to browse artifacts.
Despite the growth of online museums for India's cultural heritage data, there is limited increase in terms of visitors. Over the years, online museums adopted many techniques to improve the overall user experience. However, many Indian online museums display artifacts as lists and grids with basic search functionality, making it less visually appealing and difficult to comprehend. Our work aims to enhance the user experience of accessing Indian online museums by utilizing advancements in information visualization. Hence, we propose MuseumViz, a framework which processes data from online museums and visualizes it using four different interactive visualizations: the Network Graph, TreepMap, Polygon Chart and SunBurst Chart. We demonstrate MuseumViz on a total of 723 cultural heritage artifacts present in the Archaeological Survey of India, Goa. Based on our evaluation with 25 users, about 83% of them find it easier and more comprehensible to browse cultural heritage artifacts through MuseumViz.