Articles by Sara Santoro Bianchi

The paper illustrates the role of interactive multimedia for museum professionals in Emilia Romagna region. Their introduction is affecting the role of the traditional museum, but their effectiveness for exhibition interpretation has not been explored in depth until now. The authors discuss the problems that museum professionals have had in the use, implementation and evaluation of multimedia: the main is the lack of an adequate communications strategy in the museum educational projects. The paper presents the results of a survey on the use of multimedia program in an archaeological museum in Emilia Romagna. The evaluation project was carried out with different groups of one targeted audience: schoolchildren. The evaluation has investigated if visitors spend more time with the objects after using the application or are they distracted and absorbed by the novelty of the technology, and in general if the program creates a positive attitude towards archaeology and museums.

The authors present the research activity carried out at the Istituto di Archeologia of Bologna University. The projects concern in particular ceramic artefacts, from attic black-figured pottery to coarse ware. The procedures followed for the storage, retrieval and data analysis use DBMS, IRS, CAD and statistical packages. A database system was created in order to examine the diffusion of Athenian pottery during the first half of the VI century and to consider possible “export models”, archaic trade overseas of attic black-figured pottery and the role of fine Athenian vases in their own production context. In the coarse ware research project, statistical procedures and quantitative analyses were carried out in order to create a problem-oriented classification in which the pottery was used as an anthropological indicator. Finally, some computer graphics applications were undertaken with some fragmentary coarse ware vessels, and a comparison made with the traditional graphical representations.