Writing Postcards from the Museum: Composing Personalised Tangible Souvenirs

Abstract

Building a long-lasting personal relationship with visitors by maintaining their engagement after the visit is one of the most challenging endeavours cultural heritage sites face. When successful, this connection fosters new opportunities for the visitor to get in touch with the heritage, e.g. to visit again or to take part in cultural activities. One way to establish a personal connection is via personalisation services that generate souvenirs for the visitors to take away and foster future engagements with the heritage. This paper discusses how the techniques for personalised text generation can be applied to produce post-visit postcards exploiting the interaction logs collected during the museum visit. The personalised postcard summarises the visit, creates a link with what was experienced and suggests further paths for content discovery. A user study conducted over four weeks confirms the appreciation for the personalised postcard and suggests future developments.