Thesis title: Visual exploration of digital cultural artifacts
The research described in this thesis aims at studying the synergy between user interaction, semantic technologies and knowledge exploration tools for digital libraries. This research has identified open challenges in the Digital Humanities research field related to:
the user support in viewing, searching and exploring a digital library multimedia content;
the scalability of systems for extracting and exploring a book corpus;
the difficulty of approaching these tools for users who are not experts in information technology;
the quality of knowledge extraction;
the difficulty in maintaining systems based on semantic technologies.
The research competence was demonstrated by studying user interaction with a designed and developed system based on automatic knowledge extraction, semantic technologies and visual search based on the serendipity effect to discover unexpected things.
The system described in detail in this thesis (with its pipeline, components and interaction paradigm) is proposed as a possible solution to the open problems identified in the research field of digital humanities.