Hasil untuk "Museums. Collectors and collecting"

Leonardo Pesce, Alessio Ludovico De Santis, Martino Calvo et al.

Cryogenic phonon detectors are adopted in light dark matter searches and coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering experiments as they can achieve low energy thresholds. The phonon mediated sensing of silicon particle absorbers has already been proved with Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KIDs), acting both as sensors and athermal phonon absorbers at the same time. In this work we present the design and the performance of an improved detector, where the KID acts only as sensor and is coupled to dedicated phonon collectors. The separation between the detector and the collectors increases the variation of the quasi-particle density within the device, thereby enhancing its responsivity. The meander of the KID is composed of a 77nm trilayer wire of Aluminum-Titanium-Aluminum, while the phonon collectors are made of a 100nm Aluminum layer and act as quasi-particles funnels. Inside the collectors, the absorbed athermal phonons generate quasi-particles which, after diffusion, are trapped in the lower-gap superconducting trilayer. The performance of this setup is compared to that of a standard phonon-mediated KID, showing an increase in responsivity by around a factor of five.

Chen Feng, Sébastien Lugan, Karine Lasaracina et al.

Museums increasingly rely on digital content to support visitors' understanding of artworks, yet little is known about how these formats shape the emotional engagement that underlies meaningful art experiences. This research presents an in-situ EEG study on how digital interpretive content modulate engagement during art viewing. Participants experienced three modalities: direct viewing of a Bruegel painting, a 180° immersive interpretive projection, and a regular, display-based interpretive video. Frontal EEG markers of motivational orientation, internal involvement, perceptual drive, and arousal were extracted using eyes-open baselines and Z-normalized contrasts. Results show modality-specific engagement profiles: display-based interpretive video induced high arousal and fast-band activity, immersive projections promoted calm, presence-oriented absorption, and original artworks reflected internally regulated engagement. These findings, relying on lightweight EEG sensing in an operational cultural environment, suggest that digital interpretive content affects engagement style rather than quantity. This paves the way for new multimodal sensing approaches and enables museums to optimize the modalities and content of their interpretive media.

Camila de Azevedo Gibbon, Patricia da Silva Neubert, Thiago Magela Rodrigues Dias

Resumo A Ciência Aberta é compreendida aqui como um ecossistema agregador de movimentos que compartilham da mesma perspectiva de abertura, transparência e colaboração da ciência. Em alinhamento com este prisma, a região latino-americana apresenta tradição na adoção de práticas e iniciativas de Ciência Aberta para potencializar sua infraestrutura científica. Desse modo, a pesquisa tem como principal objetivo analisar a publicação científica latino-americana sobre Ciência Aberta. Mais especificamente, busca-se investigar a apropriação das facetas de Ciência Aberta pelos países latino-americanos e campos do conhecimento, além de comparar as características de sua indexação entre uma base de dados regional e uma internacional. Com uma abordagem metodológica descritiva, documental-bibliográfica e quantitativa, o universo da pesquisa é composto por 1.687 artigos científicos com ao menos uma autoria afiliada a instituições latino-americanas indexados nas bases de dados Scientific Electronic Library Online e Web of Science. Com relação às temáticas de Ciência Aberta, a faceta de Ciência Cidadã foi a mais encontrada no corpus (28,47%), seguida por Acesso Aberto (23,47%). O próprio termo “Ciência Aberta” concentra apenas 9% do quantitativo analisado. Observando as facetas de Ciência Aberta com relação aos campos do conhecimento, Tecnologia (32,62%) e Ciências da Vida & Biomedicina (31,68%) são os destaques. Ao analisar as bases separadamente, Web of Science indexa artigos, principalmente, da faceta de Ciência Cidadã e Scientific Electronic Library Online de Acesso Aberto.

Francisca Hernández Hernández

In response to a traditional museology that considered ethnological and anthropological museums as mere storage warehouses for objects from the colonial era, a new form of museology emerged, focusing more on people than objects, with a component of social commitment and dialogue with other communities, and with strong criticism of official institutions. It was Jacques Hainard (1943-), director of the Museum of Ethnology in Neuchâtel (Switzerland), who initiated this critical movement with his proposal of museology of rupture, particularly significant in the way exhibitions were conceived. This article aims to focus on Fernando Estévez González (1953-2016), professor of Anthropology at the University of La Laguna (Spain), considered the main representative of this museology in Spain, though he has not been widely recognised and valued by Spanish museologists. Starting from the same ethnographic philosophy of rupture that Hainard used in Neuchâtel, Estévez set out to apply it to the Anthropological Museum of History of Tenerife, organising a series of exhibitions in which he attempted to analyse tourism and its interaction with natives through souvenirs, delved into dialogue with contemporary art and his commitment as an ethnographer to break with scientific neutrality, and championed narrating and defending the memory of social minorities and indigenous cultures.

This book considers how art market stakeholders, including art dealers, collectors and agents, have shaped museum collections and affected exhibition practices since the mid-nineteenth century. Based on new archival research and data analysis, it explores the role of dealers not only in selling directly to museums, but in influencing museum collecting priorities, as well as potential donors. It also examines the important but hitherto overlooked contribution of the female curator-agent. The book is divided into three sections, which address the relationship between art dealers and museums, women as art agents and influencers, and the strategies of entrepreneurial collectors. Featuring contributions from a wide range of international specialists in the market for decorative arts and antiquities, as well as European modernism, The Art Market and the Museum explores the origins and development of the modern Western art market and the global art networks that operated not only in Paris, London and New York, but in cities such as Glasgow, Vienna, Melbourne and Kansas City. It is perfect reading for scholars and researchers on the history of the art market, museum studies and art history more broadly.

Jonathan Conlin

The Clearwater Bequest of 1933 is a landmark in the development of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s holdings of American silver, and in the American Colonial Revival more broadly. Alphonso Trumpbour Clearwater (1848–1933) was a judge, antiquary and pillar of society in Kingston, New York. Drawing on the Clearwater papers at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, as well as his correspondence with curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums, this essay considers the origin in late nineteenth-century fairs of Clearwater’s collecting of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century silver; his evolving taste and relations with dealers, curators and rival collectors in the decades before and after the opening of the Metropolitan’s American Wing (1924); and the interaction of his views on what kind of silver ‘belonged’ in his collection with his views on what kind of people did and did not ‘belong’ in the United States.

Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik, Helena Motoh

Recent decades have brought the topic of researching East Asian collections in Europe and the world to the forefront of research and academia. The colonial and postcolonial frameworks of collecting practices, the cultural and socio-political settings in which the collectors assembled their collections, as well as the history of displaying East Asian objects in museums and other institutions, were researched both in the political centres of those practices and on their peripheries. In a differently structured approach, the collections of objects themselves came into the focus of the research, including their materiality and their “biographies”, providing a novel perspective on the historiography of collections. The Department of Asian Studies at the Faculty of Arts (University of Ljubljana), Science and Research Centre Koper, Celje Regional Museum and the Mari­time Museum of Piran hosted an international symposium entitled Orphaned Objects: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to the Research of East Asian Objects at the Faculty of Arts on 18 September 2023. The symposium was organised as part of the project Orphaned Objects: Examining East Asian Objects Outside Organised Collecting Practices in Slovenia (J6-3133, 2021–2025), funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency. This volume includes most of the papers presented during the symposium.

Dario Giuffrida, Maria Clara Martinelli, Francesco Armetta et al.

Highlights: • A multi-approach methodology was used for a thorough examination of a prehistoric cup decorated with engravings, found at the Bronze Age settlement of Filo Braccio in Filicudi Island (Messina). • Photogrammetry and near-infrared (NIR) imaging were combined to create a metrically correct digital replica (with switchable texture); 3D and 2D views were exported to study the vessel’s morphology and decorations. • To enrich the visiting experience, the 3D model was integrated into a web-based viewer, and enriched with informative annotation, making it easily accessible through mobile devices and computers. Abstract: This paper presents a multidisciplinary study combining photogrammetry, near-infrared (NIR) imaging and archaeological analysis to analyse a 1900-1800 BC engraved cup, found at the Bronze Age site of Filo Braccio in Filicudi, Aeolian Islands, Italy. The artefact is unique within the contemporary ‘Capo Graziano’ culture, featuring a rare complex figural scene engraved along the exterior walls; the “scene” provides insights into the prehistoric culture of Filicudi and the Aeolian Islands. The study focused on generating an accurate three-dimensional (3D) model to i) support archaeological research on the artefact's engravings and ii) create engaging digital media for remote and on-site visitors. Photogrammetry used high-resolution photographs taken around the object and control points for metric accuracy assessment. This study also utilises NIR and visible light imaging to examine the engraved cup. The photogrammetric workflow provided a realistic 3D model textured with both visible and NIR data: the 3D model enabled to improve the reading of the engraved scene, revealing horizontal registers of figures, while NIR imaging highlighted material inhomogeneity. The resulting 3D model achieved a high level of detail, with 4381407 faces and a root mean square (RMS) reprojection error of approximately 3.9 μm. The NIR imaging revealed additional surface details not visible in the standard photographs. For dissemination, the optimised 3D model was uploaded to Sketchfab with informative annotations, enabling remote study and cultural promotion of the artefact. This multi-approach methodology offers a valuable tool for comprehensive artefact documentation and analysis, providing new insights into the artefact's complex figural scene.

Gianluca Genovese, Ivan Heibi, Silvio Peroni et al.

We investigated the use of virtual technologies to digitise and enhance cultural heritage (CH), aligning with Open Science and FAIR principles. Through case studies in museums, we developed reproducible workflows, 3D models, and tools fostering accessibility, inclusivity, and sustainability of CH. Applications include interdisciplinary research, educational innovation, and CH preservation.

Mara Solen, Nigar Sultana, Laura Lukes et al.

While previous work has found success in deploying visualizations as museum exhibits, it has not investigated whether museum context impacts visitor behaviour with these exhibits. We present an interactive Deep-time Literacy Visualization Exhibit (DeLVE) to help museum visitors understand deep time (lengths of extremely long geological processes) by improving proportional reasoning skills through comparison of different time periods. DeLVE uses a new visualization idiom, Connected Multi-Tier Ranges, to visualize curated datasets of past events across multiple scales of time, relating extreme scales with concrete scales that have more familiar magnitudes and units. Museum staff at three separate museums approved the deployment of DeLVE as a digital kiosk, and devoted time to curating a unique dataset in each of them. We collect data from two sources, an observational study and system trace logs. We discuss the importance of context: similar museum exhibits in different contexts were received very differently by visitors. We additionally discuss differences in our process from Sedlmair et al.'s design study methodology which is focused on design studies triggered by connection with collaborators rather than the discovery of a concept to communicate. Supplemental materials are available at: https://osf.io/z53dq/

Ada-Astrid Balauca, Sanjana Garai, Stefan Balauca et al.

Museums serve as repositories of cultural heritage and historical artifacts from diverse epochs, civilizations, and regions, preserving well-documented collections that encapsulate vast knowledge, which, when systematically structured into large-scale datasets, can train specialized models. Visitors engage with exhibits through curiosity and questions, making expert domain-specific models essential for interactive query resolution and gaining historical insights. Understanding exhibits from images requires analyzing visual features and linking them to historical knowledge to derive meaningful correlations. We facilitate such reasoning by (a) collecting and curating a large-scale dataset of 65M images and 200M question-answer pairs for exhibits from all around the world; (b) training large vision-language models (VLMs) on the collected dataset; (c) benchmarking their ability on five visual question answering tasks, specifically designed to reflect real-world inquiries and challenges observed in museum settings. The complete dataset is labeled by museum experts, ensuring the quality and the practical significance of the labels. We train two VLMs from different categories: BLIP with vision-language aligned embeddings, but lacking the expressive power of large language models, and the LLaVA model, a powerful instruction-tuned LLM enriched with vision-language reasoning capabilities. Through extensive experiments, we find that while both model types effectively answer visually grounded questions, large vision-language models excel in queries requiring deeper historical context and reasoning. We further demonstrate the necessity of fine-tuning models on large-scale domain-specific datasets by showing that our fine-tuned models significantly outperform current SOTA VLMs in answering questions related to specific attributes, highlighting their limitations in handling complex, nuanced queries.

Ulrike Egerer, Scott Dana, David Jager et al.

To ensure efficient and reliable operation of a concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) plant, its solar collector field needs to accurately focus sunlight. The optical efficiency and structural integrity of the solar collectors is significantly influenced by wind conditions in the field. In this study, we present insights into dynamic wind loading on parabolic trough CSP collectors. We derive novel conclusions by analyzing a first-of-a-kind measurement campaign of wind and structural loads, performed at an operational CSP plant. Previous research primarily relied on wind tunnel tests and simulations, leaving uncertainty about wind loading effects in operational settings. We demonstrate that the parabolic trough field significantly alters the turbulent wind field within the collector field, especially under winds perpendicular to the trough rows. Our measurements within the trough field show reduced wind speeds, changes in wind direction and turbulence properties, and vortex shedding from the trough assemblies. These modifications to the wind field directly impact both static and dynamic support structure loads. Our measurements reveal higher wind loads on trough assemblies compared to those observed previously in wind tunnel tests. The insights from this study offer a novel perspective on our understanding of wind-driven loads on CSP collectors. By informing the development of next-generation design tools and models, this research paves the way for enhanced structural integrity and improved optical performance in future parabolic trough systems.

Katarzyna Barańska

Ilona Sármány-Parsons

In 1894, Gustav Klimt was commissioned to create a series of allegorical paintings for the University of Vienna. When the paintings were revealed in 1900, professors and the general public voiced strong resistance to their permanent installation. Art historical literature on the Vienna Secession and the Faculty Painting affair has tended to take the position of advocating for modern art, casting the entire debate as a fight for artistic freedom wherein Klimt was a victim of conservative philistines. Other literature on the Faculty Paintings focusses on the erotic message of the pictures; the works are viewed as documents of a sexual identity crisis that burst to the surface in fin de siècle Vienna. This article is a newly translated English version of a chapter titled “1900—Pyrrhic Victory: The Press Campaigns Surrounding the Faculty Paintings,” from Secession expert Ilona Sármány-Parsons’ book *Die Macht der Kunstkritik: Ludwig Hevesi und die Wiener Moderne* *(The Power of Art Criticism: Ludwig Hevesi and Viennese Modernism)* (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2022; translated from Hungarian edition, Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2019). Contrary to the two aforementioned framings of Klimt’s Faculty Paintings, the article examines the role of art critics in the affair and argues that the discourse around the event actually reveals reasonable criticisms of philosophical, rhetorical and artistic stagnation in the Secession movement. While a broad spectrum of contemporaneous critical voices are invoked, the influential critic Ludvig Hevesi’s contributions to the debate come under particular scrutiny.

Francesc Xavier Hernàndez-Cardona, Rafael Sospedra-Roca, Josep Ramon Casals-Ausió

El Fuerte de la Trinitat, construido a mediados del siglo XVI, es un extraordinario ejemplo de arquitectura militar europea de mediados del siglo XVI, concebido como una máquina de artillería, y con la misión de proteger el puerto natural de Roses (Girona, España). La fortificación tuvo dilatado historial bélico que terminó durante la Guerra de la Independencia (1808-1814), convirtiéndose en un montón de ruinas. En 2002, el ayuntamiento de Roses planificó una ambiciosa intervención arquitectónica para recuperar la fortificación. Las obras restauraron la volumetría exterior en su conjunto, con materiales de construcción actuales. Los grandes espacios interiores resultantes de la intervención tenían poco en común con las estructuras originales. A partir de 2016, se inició el proyecto de museografía con el objetivo de abrir el fuerte al público. La estrategia se centró en la realización de un 3D, utilizado para planificar propuestas las museográficas y hacer comprensible un espacio interior, que presentaba un aspecto muy distante al de la construcción original. Se procedió a la realización de un laborioso trabajo de campo, analizando las fuentes y los restos estructurales que se conservaban, y aventurando las posibles soluciones arquitectónicas que en su día tuvo la fortaleza. A partir de las evidencias y las hipótesis se procedió a realizar una reconstrucción de arqueología virtual y se desarrolló una iconografía didáctica para explicar el fuerte a un público visitante de amplio espectro, y a estudiantes de enseñanza reglada. La museografía comenzó a implementarse entre los años 2019 y 2021. Teniendo en cuenta variables y necesidades comprensivas de los usuarios y visitantes la propuesta de arqueología virtual se planteó a partir de criterios realistas, basándose en el 3D, en las texturas y en los colores. El factor humano y mueble se incorpora a partir de técnicas matte painting con el apoyo de grupos de recreación histórica.

Luc Bordes

Throwing sticks and boomerangs are present in the collections of many French and international museums. Collected mainly in the 19th and 20th centuries by travelers, they were mainly analyzed from a stylistic point of view, to relate them to their region of origin. Some of these objects were made by the indigenous populations especially to be exchanged with Europeans and only bear macro-traces of manufacture. However, many others can have additional various traces of use and repair which reflect a real function and which are often less studied. Indeed, these traces can shed light on the functionality of the object in relation to their physical characteristics, which determine their aerodynamic properties. However, these throwing weapons were not only used as projectiles. In some cases, a major modification of the object may have taken place to adjust it for a new use.

A. Fronzetti Colladon, F. Grippa, R. Innarella

This paper explores the association between brand importance and growth in museum visitors. We analyzed 10 years of online forum discussions and applied the Semantic Brand Score (SBS) to assess the brand importance of five European Museums. Our Naive Bayes and regression models indicate that variations in the combined dimensions of the SBS (prevalence, diversity and connectivity) are aligned with changes in museum visitors. Results suggest that, in order to attract more visitors, museum brand managers should focus on increasing the volume of online posting and the richness of information generated by users around the brand, rather than controlling for the posts' overall positivity or negativity.

Michael Coblenz, Michelle Mazurek, Michael Hicks

Rust is a general-purpose programming language that is both type- and memory-safe. Rust does not use a garbage collector, but rather achieves these properties through a sophisticated, but complex, type system. Doing so makes Rust very efficient, but makes Rust relatively hard to learn and use. We designed Bronze, an optional, library-based garbage collector for Rust. To see whether Bronze could make Rust more usable, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with volunteers from a 633-person class, collecting data from 428 students in total. We found that for a task that required managing complex aliasing, Bronze users were more likely to complete the task in the time available, and those who did so required only about a third as much time (4 hours vs. 12 hours). We found no significant difference in total time, even though Bronze users re-did the task without Bronze afterward. Surveys indicated that ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes were primary causes of the challenges that users faced when using Rust.

Bingyu Lu, Edgar Olivera, Jonathan Scharf et al.

Lithium metal has been an attractive candidate as a next generation anode material. Despite its popularity, stability issues of lithium in the liquid electrolyte and the formation of lithium whiskers have kept it from practical use. Three-dimensional (3D) current collectors have been proposed as an effective method to mitigate whiskers growth. Although extensive research efforts have been done, the effects of three key parameters of the 3D current collectors, namely the surface area, the tortuosity factor, and the surface chemistry, on the performance of lithium metal batteries remain elusive. Herein, we quantitatively studied the role of these three parameters by synthesizing four types of porous copper networks with different sizes of well-structured micro-channels. X-ray microscale computed tomography (micro-CT) allowed us to assess the surface area, the pore size and the tortuosity factor of the porous copper materials. A metallic Zn coating was also applied to study the influence of surface chemistry on the performance of the 3D current collectors. The effects of these parameters on the performance were studied in detail through Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Titration Gas Chromatography (TGC). Stochastic simulations further allowed us to interpret the role of the tortuosity factor in lithiation. By understanding these effects, the optimal range of the key parameters is found for the porous copper anodes and their performance is predicted. Using these parameters to inform the design of porous copper anodes for Li deposition, Coulombic efficiencies (CE) of up to 99.56% are achieved, thus paving the way for the design of effective 3D current collector systems.

Sandra Milena ROA-MARTÍNEZ, Silvana Aparecida Borsetti Gregorio VIDOTTI

Resumen Considerando la tecnología eye tracking como método de colecta de datos originados por el registro del seguimiento visual de las personas, se propone como objetivo de este trabajo orientar conceptual y metodológicamente el desarrollo de futuras investigaciones que pretendan usar esta tecnología para la evaluación de la usabilidad en ambientes digitales informacionales. Fue usado un enfoque metodológico descriptivo y prospectivo para el desarrollo de este trabajo, a partir de un levantamiento bibliográfico, análisis de literatura y experiencias en trabajos previos. Como resultado, se obtuvo un conjunto de pasos que constituyen una propuesta de procedimiento para evaluación de aspectos de usabilidad usando la tecnología eye tracking. Se destaca que se encuentra un amplio panorama y configuraciones para evaluar usabilidad usando eye tracking. El procedimiento propuesto pretende guiar futuras investigaciones relacionadas; además se presenta un consolidado de métricas con un significado en términos de evaluación de aspectos de usabilidad. Concluyendo, entre los principales aspectos de usabilidad medidos durante la evaluación por métricas de eye tracking están: eficiencia en la búsqueda, interfaz y visibilidad y que el procedimiento propuesto, además de guía, garantizará que los objetivos propuestos en este tipo de investigaciones sean claramente formulados y cumplidos al igual que la validez de sus resultados.