Addressing sentiment in museums: Archaeological perspectives and multimodality

Start:   May 08,   2019 05:00 PM
End:     May 08,   2019 06:30 PM

Location: Room 803, UCL Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL

This seminar will focus on the presentation of SENSIOM, a dashboard software for sentiment analysis designed by UCL Qatar and Tyche Tech. Dr Papaioannou from UCL Qatar will present the design principles of this software that measures the emotional responses of museum visitors offering performance indicators for their museum experience.

Starting from existing models for sentiment analysis, the UCL Qatar and Tyche Tech team have transposed the key design principles of these models onto the museum context, using as data the written and shared online comments of museum visitors.

Operating within the field of sentiment analysis and behavioural studies, Dr Papaioannou will discuss the gains and losses from using written language as the basis for the creation of an algorithm for sentiment.

Acknowledging that SENSIOM accounts for only part of the museum experience, as expressed through language, this talk will reach out to multimodal communication theory and will explore ways to account for the visitor experience arising in other modes of communication, such as image and movement. It will also discuss the future applications of this software on understanding the museum experience of visitors in archaeological museums. The talk will be the basis for a discussion on the role of multimodal communication theory in coding image and writing for machine learning.

Dr George Papaioannou is Associate Professor at UCL Qatar, teaching at the MA in Museum and Gallery Practices. His research focuses on new technologies in museums, including augmented reality and big data. Alongside his archaeological excavation work in Jordan and Oman, he has participated on a number of research projects involving digital applications in museums. He is currently writing a book on museology as a discipline of information sciences.

The Visual and Multimodal Research Forum is a research hub for academic discussion on multimodality run by the UCL Centre for Multimodal Research. For information about future events visit: https://multimodalforum.wordpress.com/

For any enquiries, please contact sophia.diamantopoulou@ucl.ac.uk