A Mobile App to Learn About Cultural and Historical Associations in a Closed Loop with Humanities Experts

Abdullah Daif,Manuel Ramos-Cabrer,Silvia González-Soutelo,Maddalena Bassani,José Pazos-Arias,Ahmed Dahroug,Angeliki Antoniou,Alberto Gil-Solla,Martín López-Nores

doi:10.3390/app9010009

Abstract

The Horizon 2020 project CrossCult aims to highlight historical and cultural associations between different characters, locations, events, venues, or artworks, to develop new strategies with which to promote intercultural and cross-border aspects of history and heritage. This paper presents a pilot app that provides graph-based visualizations of those associations, arranged by Humanities experts in relation to several reflective topics, and glued together by narratives that may present the same facts from diverse points of view. After querying a knowledge base that brings together several Linked Data resources, the associations are curated by the experts using a dedicated tool, to ensure that only meaningful associations appear on the mobile app. In turn, the app users can contribute new associations in the form of written text, which the experts can turn into new concepts and properties in the knowledge base. Here, we present the design of the mobile app and the experts’ tool, together with the results of early experiments aimed at assessing the instructional value of the proposal.

Highlights

History and cultural heritage are most often approached in an isolated and one-sided manner, which prevents from understanding the past as a shared and global experience [1]
In the approach we have followed in CrossCult’s Pilot 2, it is up to Humanities experts to specify the reflective topics pursued in a given experience, and to select the most relevant associations to display in the app
The assessment of the mobile app looked at the feedback gathered through the emojis interface of Figure 7, the textual comments provided in the last screen (Figure 8) and the replies to a paper-based questionnaire, that would take up to 15 min to fill in

Summary

Introduction

History and cultural heritage are most often approached in an isolated and one-sided manner, which prevents from understanding the past as a shared and global experience [1]. The protection of cultural diversity and the promotion of intercultural dialog are among the most pressing contemporary challenges [2], and many scholars and policymakers have highlighted that the active usage of Internet-enabled mobile devices could be the key to realizing a shift to new models, that help people develop awareness of their own identities through an understanding of their own and others’ histories and cultures [3,4,5] In this line, the consortium running the H2020 project CrossCult (www.crosscult.eu) has developed pilot applications aimed at highlighting historical and cultural associations between characters, locations, events, venues, or artworks.

CrossCult Overview

The Pilot 2 mobile app

The Experts’ Tool

Evaluation

Conclusions and Future Work