Exploring Values in Museum Artifacts in the SPICE project: a Preliminary Study
This work addresses the need for more inclusive museum experiences for visitors, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing frameworks and theories.
The paper tackled the problem of enhancing diversity in museum visitor perspectives by developing a semantic reasoning tool that associates museum artifacts with moral values and emotions, and it was preliminarily tested on a museum collection.
This document describes the rationale, the implementation and a preliminary evaluation of a semantic reasoning tool developed in the EU H2020 SPICE project to enhance the diversity of perspectives experienced by museum visitors. The tool, called DEGARI 2.0 for values, relies on the commonsense reasoning framework TCL, and exploits an ontological model formalizingthe Haidt's theory of moral values to associate museum items with combined values and emotions. Within a museum exhibition, this tool can suggest cultural items that are associated not only with the values of already experienced or preferred objects, but also with novel items with different value stances, opening the visit experience to more inclusive interpretations of cultural content. The system has been preliminarily tested, in the context of the SPICE project, on the collection of the Hecht Museum of Haifa.