MuseumViz -- Towards Visualizing Online Museum Collections

TL;DR

MuseumViz is a visualization framework that enhances user experience in online Indian museums by providing interactive visualizations, making artifact browsing more intuitive and comprehensible.

Contribution

It introduces a novel visualization framework with four interactive visualizations tailored for online museum data, improving accessibility and user engagement.

Findings

83% of users found MuseumViz easier to browse artifacts

Demonstrated on 723 artifacts from the Archaeological Survey of India, Goa

Enhanced user comprehension and engagement with visualizations

Abstract

Despite the growth of online museums for India's cultural heritage data, there is limited increase in terms of visitors. Over the years, online museums adopted many techniques to improve the overall user experience. However, many Indian online museums display artifacts as lists and grids with basic search functionality, making it less visually appealing and difficult to comprehend. Our work aims to enhance the user experience of accessing Indian online museums by utilizing advancements in information visualization. Hence, we propose MuseumViz, a framework which processes data from online museums and visualizes it using four different interactive visualizations: the Network Graph, TreepMap, Polygon Chart and SunBurst Chart. We demonstrate MuseumViz on a total of 723 cultural heritage artifacts present in the Archaeological Survey of India, Goa. Based on our evaluation with 25 users, about 83% of them find it easier and more comprehensible to browse cultural heritage artifacts through MuseumViz.