Investigating the Effectiveness of Narrative Relations for the Exploration of Cultural Heritage Archives: A Case Study on the Labyrinth system

Abstract

Exploratory environments can overcome the limitations of keyword-based access, criticized for the difficulty of formulating specificqueries in large and complex domains and for its incapability ofpromoting personalized exploration paths. In this paper, we describe a task-based user study (n=16) aimed at testing the use ofa narrative model for supporting exploratory search in culturalheritage archives. The results show that a narrative model can actually support the exploration of cultural heritage archives, accommodating unknown and unexpected elements and relationsinto user-created paths, although further investigation on failed tasks is needed.