Digital Cultural Items in Space: The Impact of Contextual Information on Presenting Digital Cultural Items

Abstract

Cultural heritage practitioners continue to engage with ever-changing technological opportunities, and digital cultural items (DCIs) offer the potential for engaging interactive experiences. As DCIs become more prevalent, we are motivated to seek new presentation opportunities from the medium and understand its affordances with regard to contextual information. In this publication, through a series of Speak Aloud tasks with (n = 15) participants, we explore how contextual information can improve user experiences with DCIs. The aforementioned study’s results demonstrate that the inclusion of contextual information when presenting a DCI can, in fact, improve a visitor’s understanding of a DCI’s size and scale plus also the perceived realism of a DCI. Moreover, we observe that contextual information, and its recommended addition, supports the generation of a narrative by the visitor audience. In conclusion, we advise on how contextual information can improve the relationship between a visitor and a DCI, toward interacting with a DCI in a manner very similar to that of its analog counterpart.