The research institute in the Humanities at Maynooth University has organised a Masterclass on ‘Multimodal Engagements with Cultural Heritage‘. This 3-day Masterclass was designed to introduce participants to methods of producing and re-using cultural heritage. During three days, participants will learn how to convert physical objects to digital and then back to physical through 3D printing techniques. Second, we will re-embed some of those physical objects with digital information.
I will be leading the second part where we will design a Tangible User Interface to query data from Europeana. We will be using physical objects and embed them with interactive properties to perform queries in Europeana’s repositories.
The interactive system that we are going to build combines a wide range of technologies such as TUIO/ReacTIVision to connect the physical objects to the computer and use them to produce queries through Europeana’s API using JQuery and JavaScript.
You can see the interface working on my Youtube channel.
Learning Objectives
Day1. The Semantic Web and Linked Data
The first part of the Masterclass will introduce basic concepts of how current Web technologies such as the Semantic Web are being used to enhance the quality of the information in cultural heritage organisations.
Part 1. Foundations of Semantic Web and the Europeana Data Model
Part 2. Europeana API
Day 2. Tangible Interaction on the Web
Europeana’s data is very complex and extensive. By understanding how the data model uses the different semantic concepts to conceptualise the information, those semantic relationships and data fields can be used to query and visualise according to our user needs.
Part 3. Visualising Europeana Data
- Foundations of HTML, CSS and JavaScript
- Foundations of JQuery
- Europeana API Call. Part 1 – getJSON
- Europeana API Call. Part 2 – Listing Objects
- Europeana API Call. Part 3 – Visualising on HTML (DOM)
- Europeana API Call. Part 4 – Query Forms
- Adding Multimedia to the Results
Extending Visualisations with JQuery UI
Part 4. Tangible Interaction on the Web
- Introduction to reacTIVision/TUIO (EuropeanaVision)
- EuropeanaVision – TUIO First Query
- EuropeanaVision – Query with Forms
- EuropeanaVision – Final Build!
Through this Masterclass, we will also work with participatory design principles to explore what particular behaviours users might have when approaching this type of content. The main objective of this second part of the Masterclass is to re-think how we can interact with Cultural Heritage on the Web and how those interactions might take place.