Visiting Styles in an Art Exhibition Supported by a Digital Fruition System

We investigate the user dynamics related to the interaction with artworks in an exhibition. In a first step, we characterize visitors in a cultural heritage scenario and after, we study how these interact with available technologies. Accordingly with the fact that the technology plays a crucial role in supporting spectators and enhancing their experiences, the starting point of this research is the analysis of real data coming from visitors of the art exhibition named The Beauty or the Truth that was located in Naples, Italy. The event was equipped with several technological tools arranged within the halls of the exhibition, with the aim to create a novel metaphor that stimulates the user enjoyment and the knowledge diffusion. The collected log files from a suitable expert software system are used in a flexible framework in order to analyse how the supporting pervasive technology influence and modify behaviours and visiting styles. Finally, we carried out some experiments to exploit the clustering facilities for finding groups that reflect visiting styles. The obtained results have revealed interesting issues also to understand hidden aspects in the data and unattended in the analysis.