Visitor dynamics in a cultural heritage scenario

We propose a biologically inspired mathematical model to simulate the personalized interactions of users with cultural heritage objects and spaces in the real case of an exhibition. The main idea is to measure the interests of a spectator with respect to an artwork by means of a model able to describe the users behavioural dynamics. In our approach, the user is assimilated to a computational neuron, and its interests are deduced by counting potential spike trains, generated by external currents. As an effort, we relies on an huge amount of log files that store visitors movements and interactions within a beautiful art exhibition named The Beauty or the Truth located in Naples, Italy. The technological tools deployed within the exhibition aim to create a novel metaphor stimulating user enjoyment and knowledge diffusion and the collected log files are useful data to analyse how such technology an influence and modify user behaviours. We also performed an experimental analysis exploiting clustering facilities to discover natural groups that reflect visiting styles. This is particularly suitable to provide the tuning of a heuristic classifier. The obtained results revealed to be particularly interesting also to understand other important aspects hidden in the data and unattended in our first analysis.