‘Discover the Treasures of Lit & Phil’: Using Arts Engagement and Digital Technologies in an Independent Library

This project is a collaboration between Denise Lengyel,  Ahmed Kharrufa and Rob Anderson from Open Lab and The Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne (Lit & Phil). 

For this, we use artworks displayed at Lit & Phil and Open Lab's Sticker Stories, i.e. a web app, which is open to the public and can be accessed through QR codes attached to the artworks. Sticker Stories allows people to leave comments and share stories anonymously, which are moderated by experimental AI. It also guides people towards more information on the artworks and people displayed in them, so people can get to know more about important historical figure. 

We then look at the anonymised data of people's engagement to see how they interact with Sticker Stories and Lit & Phil. For example, we look at which comments people leave and which artworks or other offers of Lit & Phil they engage with. 

We hope that this will help us to better understand how such an interaction and the sharing of comments and stories can be supported.

What we did

We created a bespoke version of StickerStories for Lit & Phil. The first phase of the project ran from July to September 2024. The project is currently in its second phase, where we will run a survey on the use of the system with people visiting the Lit & Phil. We aim at publishing the results at relevant academic venues such as INTERACT, CHI or DIS. We also plan to organise an outreach event (talk with workshop elements) at Lit & Phil about this project.