Digital archives of memory institutions are typically concerned with the cataloguing of artefacts of artistic, historical, and cultural value. Recently, new forms of citizen participation in cultural heritage have emerged, producing a wealth of material spanning from visitors’ experiential feedback on exhibitions and cultural artefacts to digitally mediated interactions like the ones happening on social media platforms. Citizen curation is proposed in the context of the European project SPICE (Social Participation, Cohesion, and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement) as a methodology for producing, collecting, interpreting, and archiving people’s responses to cultural objects, with the aim of favouring the emergence of multiple, sometimes conflicting, viewpoints and motivating users and memory institutions to reflect upon them. We argue that citizen curation urges to rethink the nature of computational infrastructures supporting data management of memory institutions, bringing novel challenges that include issues of distribution, authoritativeness, interdependence, privacy, and rights management. To approach these issues, we survey relevant literature toward a distributed, Linked Data infrastructure, with a focus on identifying the roles and requirements involved in such an infrastructure. We show how existing research can contribute significantly in facing the challenges raised by citizen curation and discuss challenges and opportunities from the socio-technical standpoint.

Building on our previous work presented at the Eurographics GCH conference, this paper further explores the characteristics of an “authentic experience”, developing a framework that can be applied to the development of XR and hybrid applications in the field of cultural heritage. While recognising the broader concept of authenticity, we have not focused on an in-depth analysis of it. Instead, we focus specifically on “authentic experiences”. Here, we have extended the definition of authenticity beyond realism or sense of presence, proposing instead a multi-dimensional approach to engaging users cognitively, emotionally, and sensorially (the “Self” dimension) and, at the same time, including two other fundamental dimensions (the “Others” and the “World”) intrinsically connected to the “Self”. We have then further detailed these three dimensions, which are the pillars of the perception of authenticity, identifying their “components” and “elements”. Finally, we transformed the elements into “actionable” design indications, setting the ground to further develop specific design (UI and UX) strategies for digital heritage and serious game applications.

In May 2019, A Night in the Forum videogame was published in the Sony PlayStation store, for PS VR. It was the final result of the REVEAL EU project, whose goal was to identify strategies, features, and tools to develop educational titles in a more efficient, cost-effective, and valuable way, exploiting their educational, cognitive, and engaging potential for schools and cultural tourism. Environmental Narrative videogames was chosen as a genre suited for this purposes. This article presents how known issues in the production of videogames have been faced, the solutions identified, and results obtained.

November 2011 saw the opening of the exhibition “Archeovirtual” organized by CNR ITABC - Virtual Heritage Lab - and V-MusT Network of Excellence, in Paestum, Italy, under the general direction of BMTA ¹ . The event, that was part of a wider European project focus on virtual museums, turned to be a great opportunity to show many different projects, applications and installations about Virtual Reality and Cultural Heritage. The four-days exhibition was an occasion to get in touch with the newest experiences with virtual reconstructions, 3D models, interactive environments, augmented reality and mobile solutions for cultural contents; at the same time, it was an opportunity for organizers to directly face the audience's impact towards projects. That because of the necessity to investigate more on social and behavioral aspects in order to positively affect the learning benefits of public. So doing, we could build in the future applications much more tailored on the final costumers, closer to their abilities and necessities. During the show four types of investigative tools were employed to evaluate the general visitor's behavior and the effectiveness of interfaces, to understand their expectations and experiences, and to obtain a reference grid of values to test if users' experience fit with organizers' ones. The first outcomes revealed that audience's impact toward interactive applications seems depending on the capability of technology to be “invisible” otherwise technology has to assure a wide range of possibilities in content accesses. In definitive, virtual museums need to have an always more integrated approach between cultural contents, interfaces and social and behavioral studies.

Presently, social cohesion (SC) is a priority at different levels. Cultural heritage is an ideal context to promote SC through interactive digital technologies designed to engage groups of visitors. The purpose of the present study is to identify how to design digital heritage applications for SC and how to measure it. The results are based on the design of a cultural probe kit used to identify the design elements on top of which a collaborative and hybrid prototype, the Brancacci POV, was developed. Here, we analysed the results of this prototype, which included 107 visitors with respective groups of 5 participants and guided by an expert. From this analysis, the possibility of strengthening SC when collaborative tasks are included emerged. Additionally, it appeared to be possible to shorten the distance between citizens and cultural institutions if “mediated dialogue” approaches were adopted and if focus, motivation, trust and “in-group” perception of inclusion emerge when digital heritage experiences were set in intimate and quiet environments.