Enhancing Accessibility and Navigation of Heritage Collections Through Interactive Spatiotemporal Maps

Abstract

Visualizing data allows us to interactively explore and analyze datasets, which can be dynamic, noisy, and heterogeneous. In the field of cultural heritage, more and more museums and cultural institutions are exploiting modern visualization systems to disseminate their content in an attractive, usable, and interactive way, which involves displaying data on spatiotemporal maps. The SeMap project has built an online resource that displays more than 200,000 cultural objects from the CER.ES repository, which was created by a network of more than 100 Spanish museums. In this repository, SeMap analyzes the textual data to extract meaning, showing the results on interactive spatiotemporal maps, which bring new experiences and perspectives around such objects. This article explains the strategies to visualize such information, as well as an evaluation of the finalized tool by second-year university students on a Data Science graduate programme, as part of the subject of Data Visualization. Results show that most of the students find the tool usable although they do not fully understand the cultural-related content.