Tangible Cultural Analytics: The Adoption of Recommender Systems Within Cultural Research

The prospect of implementing recommender systems within the context of cultural research has not been explored nearly as much compared to implementation in e-commerce websites and applications. Recommender systems allow for users to be shown new objects either based upon object similarity or based upon what the algorithm thinks the user will like – which can be derived from user feedback and comparing the user to other similar users. This paper discusses how a recommender system could benefit an augmented reality application that enables 3D viewing of artifacts – as part of the Tangible Cultural Analytics (TCA) project at Ryerson University’s Synaesthetic Lab. This paper outlines four recommender systems: 1) content-based filtering, 2) collaborative filtering, 3) cluster models 4) search based models, and 5) hybrid models; discussing the pros and cons to each. Ultimately, a content-based model without the user profile aspect was chosen for this stage in the prototype. This model showed us just how much potential these recommender systems have when helping cultural researchers uncover new relationships and pieces of history through the study and comparison of artifacts.