Development and comparison of a prototype for visualizing artifact information for museum professionals

Abstract

This study presents a prototype for visualizing artifact information, allowing museum professionals to manage and utilize it without needing computer science expertise. The proposed prototype enables users to enter and manage data pertaining to artifacts and visualize the information in various methods using the entered data. Therefore, museum professionals can use it in various practical settings, such as discovering new relationships between artifacts, deriving research and exhibition topics, and developing content. This study utilized data from approximately 270 traditional paintings and 70 painters from the Joseon Dynasty of Korea to implement the visualization. Users can identify the association between the works using the patterns depicted in the paintings and their implied meanings based on the network graphs. The region of activity, period of activity, and frequency of pattern usage can be visualized by artists by combining maps, timelines, and word clouds, depending on the characteristics of the data. The developed prototype was compared with Gephi and Neo4j, commercial network graph generation tools, to determine whether it had sufficient functions for visualizing artifact information. The main process of data visualization was divided into data management, data visualization, and data exploration, while the necessary details for each step were determined as the criteria of the comparative analysis. They were compared after entering the same data into each software. The comparative evaluation was conducted in the process of creating and exploring network graphs.