Chih-Ming Chen

Purpose: Digital curation in libraries enables learners to engage in richer, more immersive and interactive experiences than traditional physical curation, leveraging diverse media resources and interactive technologies. However, few studies have explored innovative digital curation approaches that integrate immersive and gamified technologies to enhance curatorial learning performance and motivation. To create a more effective digital curation approach than traditional physical curation, this study developed a Mixed Reality Digital Curation System (MRDCS) that integrates curated content with gamified learning through clue collection and task challenges in a blended virtual-physical environment to enhance learners' performance and motivation. Design/methodology/approach: This study employed a true experimental design, with 26 university students participating in the Fang Hao Special Exhibition. The experimental group consisted of 13 participants who used the MRDCS within a blended virtual-physical curation environment, while the control group comprised 13 participants who engaged in self-guided viewing in a physical curation environment. Findings: Results show that MRDCS learners, especially those with low prior knowledge, achieved significantly better learning performance than the control group. Additionally, MRDCS learners – regardless of high or low prior knowledge – demonstrated significantly higher learning motivation, including value and expectation dimensions. These findings highlight the potential of MR-enhanced digital curation, incorporating gamified mechanisms, to foster effective learning in exhibition settings. Research limitations/implications: This study yields several valuable research findings; however, it has a limitation in that the sample size is small due to the challenges of experimentation, primarily caused by the limited availability of high-cost HoloLens 2 equipment. This limitation affects the statistical power of the study. However, the external validity of this study is still maintained to some extent, as the study employs a true experimental design with randomly selected and representative research subjects. Practical implications: This study demonstrates that integrating Mixed Reality (MR) with digital curation creates a powerful blended virtual-physical learning environment that significantly enhances both learning performance and motivation. Practitioners in education, museum curation and exhibition design can adopt the MRDCS to provide immersive, interactive and gamified experiences that actively engage learners. Originality/value: This study is original in its design and focus on blending digital curation with MR and gamified learning in an integrated virtual-physical context – an area with limited prior research. The development and empirical testing of the MRDCS provide a novel contribution by combining digital media, immersive technology and game-based tasks to enhance curatorial learning.

Purpose: To support digital humanities research more effectively and efficiently, this study develops a novel Knowledge Graph Analysis Tool of People and Organizations (KGAT-PO) for the Digital Humanities Research Platform for Biographies of Chinese Malaysian Personalities (DHRP-BCMP) based on artificial intelligence (AI) technology that would not only allow humanities scholars to look at the relationships between people but also has the potential for aiding digital humanities research by identifying latent relationships between people via relationships between people and organizations.Design/methodology/approach: To verify the effectiveness of KGAT-PO, a counterbalanced design was applied to compare research participants in two groups using DHRP-BCMP with and without KGAT-PO, respectively, to perform people relationship inquiry and to see if there were significant differences in the effectiveness and efficiency of exploring relationships between people, and the use of technology acceptance between the two groups. Interviews and Lag Sequential Analysis were also used to observe research participants’ perceptions and behaviors.Findings: The results show that the DHRP-BCMP with KGAT-PO could help research participants improve the effectiveness of exploring relationships between people, and the research participants showed high technology acceptance towards using DHRP-BCMP with KGAT-PO. Moreover, the research participants who used DHRP-BCMP with KGAT-PO could identify helpful textual patterns to explore people’s relationships more quickly than DHRP-BCMP without KGAT-PO. The interviews revealed that most research participants agreed that the KGAT-PO is a good starting point for exploring relationships between people and improves the effectiveness and efficiency of exploring people’s relationship networks.Research limitations/implications: The research’s limitations encompass challenges related to data quality, complex people relationships, and privacy and ethics concerns. Currently, the KGAT-PO is limited to recognizing eight types of person-to-person relationships, including couple, sibling, parent-child, friend, teacher-student, relative, work, and others. These factors should be carefully considered to ensure the tool’s accuracy, usability, and ethical application in enhancing digital humanities research.Practical implications: The study’s practical implications encompass enhanced research efficiency, aiding humanities scholars in uncovering latent interpersonal relationships within historical texts with high technology acceptance. Additionally, the tool’s applications can extend to social sciences, business and marketing, educational settings, and innovative research directions, ultimately contributing to data-driven insights in the field of digital humanities.Originality/value: The research’s originality lies in creating a Knowledge Graph Analysis Tool of People and Organizations (KGAT-PO) using AI, bridging the gap between digital humanities research and AI technology. Its value is evident in its potential to efficiently uncover hidden people relationships, aiding digital humanities scholars in gaining new insights and perspectives, ultimately enhancing the depth and effectiveness of their research.

Purpose: This study aims to develop an associative text analyzer (ATA) to support users in quickly grasping and interpreting the content of large amounts of text through text association recommendations, facilitating the identification of the contextual relationships between people, events, organization and locations for digital humanities. Additionally, by providing text summaries, the tool allows users to link between distant and close readings, thereby enabling more efficient exploration of related texts. Design/methodology/approach: To verify the effectiveness of this tool in supporting exploration of historical texts, this study uses a counterbalanced design to compare the use of the digital humanities platform for Mr. Lo Chia-Lun’s Writings (DHP-LCLW) with and without the ATA to assist in exploring different aspects of text. The study investigated whether there were significant differences in effectiveness for exploring textual contexts and technological acceptance as well as used semi-structured in-depth interviews to understand the research participants’ viewpoints and experiences with the ATA. Findings: The results of the experiment revealed that the effectiveness of text exploration using the DHP-LCLW with and without the ATA varied significantly depending on the topic of the text being explored. The DHP-LCLW with the ATA was found to be more suitable for exploring historical texts, while the DHP-LCLW without the ATA was more suitable for exploring educational texts. The DHP-LCLW with the DHP-LCLW was found to be significantly more useful in terms of perceived usefulness than the DHP-LCLW without the ATA, indicating that the research participants believed the ATA was more effective in helping them efficiently grasp the related texts and topics during text exploration. Practical implications: The study’s practical implications lie in the development of an ATA for digital humanities, offering a valuable tool for efficiently exploring historical texts. The ATA enhances users’ ability to grasp and interpret large volumes of text, facilitating contextual relationship identification. Its practical utility is evident in the improved effectiveness of text exploration, particularly for historical content, as indicated by users’ perceived usefulness. Originality/value: This study proposes an ATA for digital humanities, enhancing text exploration by offering association recommendations and efficient linking between distant and close readings. The study contributes by providing a specialized tool and demonstrating its perceived usefulness in facilitating efficient exploration of related texts in digital humanities.

Purpose: The prevalence of children myopia in Taiwan is among the highest in the world. The study aimed to understand the status of the final prescription of the spectacle prescribed by the Taiwan optometrists when they conducted the visual inspection of elementary school, middle school and high school students, and to evaluate the influencing factors of their decision-making behavior. Methods: Among the attendants of the continuing education course activities held by optometrist associations in Taiwan, an anonymous questionnaire survey was given on the spot to optometrists who have passed the national examination. This study received 442 questionnaire surveys, including 174 optometrists and 268 assistant optometrists. The data were analyzed by using chi-square test in IBM SPSS. Results: There are statistically significant differences in the decision-making of spectacle prescription for myopia of − 1.00D~− 1.50D and − 2.25D~− 2.50D in the primary school stage between optometrists and assistant optometrists. There are also significant differences for myopia of − 2.25D and above in the middle school students. By the time of high school, there are significant differences for myopia from − 0.75D to − 3.25D and above. The higher the grade, the greater the difference in the final prescription of the spectacles given. As for the judgment factors of the final prescription, only children among elementary school and junior high school show a statistically significant difference in professional judgment between optometrists and assistant optometrists. There is no significant difference in the judgment factors for high school children. Depending on the educational level of optometrists and assistant optometrists and their distribution area, the prescription decisions are also different. Conclusion: The optometrists prefer to prescribe full correction for schoolchildren, while the assistant optometrists mostly prescribe under-correction in prescriptions for low-degree myopia and lower grades. Further investigation is needed to study its impact on children’s visual health.