About

Bombe label

The Bletchley Park Text system was 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 was later turned into a museum dedicated to telling the story of the work done there and the influence it had on modern-day communications and computing technology.

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

Demonstration

Demonstration

Visitors accessed resources related to their chosen subjects in the following ways and could modify their selected terms:

  • Stories – Stories could be viewed in the archive related to the visitor’s interests
  • Connections – Pathways could be discovered through the story archive connecting the visitor’s chosen subjects
  • Categories – Stories could be viewed about visitor’s chosen subjects which were arranged in a list of categories
  • Hierarchy – Stories could be viewed about visitor’s chosen subjects which were arranged in a hierarchy of categories
  • Spotlight – Stories could be explored from the archive directly and indirectly related to visitor’s chosen subjects
  • Modify – Visitor’s chosen set of subjects could be modified

People

Design and Implementation

Paul Mulholland

Trevor Collins

Zdenek Zdrahal

Content Preparation & Description

Magda Machkova

Graphic Design

Sarah Sutcliffe

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.