Bletchley Park Text

Project overview

The Bletchley Park Text system is an information service provided for visitors to Bletchley Park, the home of the British Government's Code and Cipher School during the Second World War. The Park is now a museum dedicated to telling the story of the work done there and the influence it has had on our modern day communications and computing technology.

Visitors to the museum identify the items of interest to them by sending SMS text messages containing keywords taken from labels on the exhibits. These messages are later used to select relevant resources, which are organised into a number of views and presented as a personalised website for the visitor to explore when they return home from their visit.

 

Demonstration

Visitors can access the resources related to their chosen subjects in the following ways and modify their chosen set of terms:

• Stories - View the stories in the archive related to your interests
• Connections - Discover pathways through the story archive connecting your chosen subjects
• Categories - View stories about your chosen subjects arranged in a list of categories
• Hierarchy - View stories about your chosen subjects arranged in a hierarchy of categories
• Spotlight - Explore the stories from the archive directly and indirectly related to your chosen subjects
• Modify - Modify your chosen set of subjects

Click here to try the system for yourself

 

People

The Bletchley Park Text system was developed for Bletchley Park by Paul Mulholland, Trevor Collins and Zdenek Zdrahal (design and implementation), Magda Machkova (content preparation and description) and Sarah Sutcliffe (graphic design) at The Open University, UK. The interviews and historical accounts presented in this system were collected by the Bletchley Park Trust.

 

Publications

Mulholland, P., Collins, T., and Zdrahal, Z. (2005). Bletchley Park Text: Using mobile and semantic web technologies to support the post-visit use of online museum resources. Journal of Interactive Media in Education (Portable Learning: Experiences with Mobile Devices. Special Issue, eds. A. Jones, A. Kukulska-Hulme and D. Mwanza), 2005-review/24. ISSN: 1365-893X.

Collins T., Mulholland, P. and Zdrahal, Z. (2005). Semantic Browsing of Digital Collections. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2005: 4th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2005, Galway, Ireland, November 6-10, 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 3729. pp. 127 - 141. ISSN: 0302-9743

Mulholland, P., Collins T. and Zdrahal, Z. (2005). Spotlight browsing of resource archives. ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT'05), Salzburg, Austria. Available from the ACM Digital Library.