Chatbot

Chatbot è un sistema di conversazione, testuale o vocale, basato su Intelligenza Artificiale (Natural Language Processing e Machine Learning). È in grado di comprendere, analizzare e generare linguaggio umano. Sebbene il termine ChatterBot sia stato coniato da Michael Mauldin nel 1994, possono essere individuati dei diretti antesignani – ad esempio i sistemi ELIZA e PARRY, realizzati negli Stati Uniti già tra gli anni ’60 e ’70 – nati dallo sforzo congiunto da parte di scienziati di vari ambiti disciplinari, e in particolare di ingegneri e informatici, per far dialogare uomo e macchina. Negli ultimi anni, grazie al miglioramento della performatività di tecnologie e linguaggi, è stato possibile diversificare la destinazione d’uso dei chatbot. In particolare l’articolo considera la presenza di chatbot in ambiente MAB. L’analisi si concentra sui sistemi realizzati dalle Case Museo di Milano e dal MAXXI di Roma e su progetti in corso (ICCU, Europeana ecc.), proponendo anche una comparazione con esperienze straniere (ad esempio Field Museum di Chicago). I casi di studio sono stati selezionati al fine di offrire una panoramica dell’utilizzo di chatbot all’interno di percorsi museali e in relazione alla strategia stessa di ciascun museo. Vengono considerati diversi approcci (gamification, guida virtuale, aumento dell’esperienza di visita) per evidenziare le opportunità in campo educativo e comunicativo, nonché i limiti e gli scenari futuri. Esattamente a cento anni dal conio della parola robot, i chatbot (ossia robot che chiacchierano, che conversano con gli umani, e per giunta di arte) offrono l’occasione per rinnovare il quesito circa il confine tra umano e non umano, tra “l’uso umano degli esseri umani” e “la simbiosi uomo-computer”.

The present is the key to the paleo-past: Charles R. Knight’s reconstruction of extinct beasts for the Field Museum, Chicago

ABSTRACT Although he was legally blind, Charles R. Knight (1874–1953) established himself as the premier paleontological artist in the early 1900s. When the Field Museum, Chicago, commissioned a series of large paintings to document the evolution of life, Knight was the obvious choice. Knight considered himself an artist guided by science; he researched and illustrated living animals and modern landscapes to better understand and represent extinct life forms within their paleoecosystems. Knight began the process by examining fossil skeletons; he then constructed small models to recreate the animals’ life anatomy and investigate lighting. Once details were finalized, Knight supervised assistants to transfer the study painting to the final mural. The Field Museum mural process, a monumental task of translating science into public art, was accompanied by a synergistic tension between Knight, who wanted full control over his artwork, and the museum’s scientific staff; the correct position of an Eocene whale’s tail—whether uplifted or not—documents a critical example. Although modern scientific understanding has rendered some of Knight’s representations obsolete, the majority of his 28 murals remain on display in the Field Museum’s Evolving Planet exhibit. Museum educators contrast these murals with contemporary paleontological knowledge, thereby demonstrating scientific progress for better public understanding of the nature of science.

Between the arch and the basket: Queer notes on heterocentric indigenous people in museums and Museology

This paper is dedicated to presenting four notes taken from my field and research notebooks on the relationship between museums, museology and indigenous sexualities dissenting from the western heterosexual matrix. Above all, it seeks to promote a theoretical relationship between LGBT Museology and Indigenous Museology, as well as other ways of thinking about museums related to indigenous peoples. The first note deals with the anti-object of the heterocentered indigenous, that is, the way of understanding the original peoples without sexual dissent from the heterosexual matrix of the West; the second presents the historical contributions about the invention of indigenous sexual dissidences, discussing from colonial records about the ruptures imposed on indigenous societies with regard to the colonization of their se xualities; the third presents the solid basis of the theoretical field of Sociomuseolgia where it would be possible to think of an Indigenous Museology from its intersection with the LGBT Museology; finally, it analyzes some of the main experiences of indigenous outings carried out in the Peruvian Travesti Museum, in the Americans GLBT Historical Society and Field Museum and in the headquarters of the SOMOSGay group, in Paraguay, indicating, with this, cases where the relationship between sexual dissidents, indigenous peoples and Museology were problematized in an efficient or promising way. At the same time, I question the power and possible paths of an LGBT Museology intersected with an Indigenous Museology. This relationship is justified by the need to overcome the violent colonial inheritances that the process of inventing indigenous sexual dissidences has left today. Keywords: Indigenous people; Museology; LGBT; Queer Theory

“Lucy” Up Close

How did Answers in Genesis make particular decisions about what to display in its exhibits at the Creation Museum? This chapter hones in on the ‘Lucy’ exhibit, the Australopithecus used to depict human evolution and our common ancestor, to examine how Answers in Genesis constructs a plausible counterclaim and compellingly depicts this to visitors. Unpacking the materiality of objects in a contested exhibit affords a close up understanding of how a group attempts to make ideas and objects credible—what techniques do they use and how do they accomplish a plausible ‘look and feel.’ The Creation Museum is compared to three natural history museums across the US that feature Lucy in its human origins exhibits: the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum, and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. Throughout this comparative work, this chapter underscores how mainstream institutions vary in their approach and anticipation of challengers like AiG.

Biofluorescence in the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus)

The occurrence of biofluorescence across Mammalia is an area of active study. We examined three specimens of the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) from Tasmania and New South Wales, Australia, housed in the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, Illinois, USA) and the University of Nebraska State Museum (Lincoln, Nebraska, USA) under visible light and ultraviolet (UV) light. The pelage of the animals appeared uniformly brown under visible light and green or cyan under UV light, due to fluoresced wavelengths that peaked around 500 nm. Our observations are the first report of biofluorescence in a monotreme mammal.

Reducing the Pain of Getting your Backlog Published

Discussions about the need to document and describe collections at a gross level have been in progress for at least two decades. The original form was the 2008 Natural Collection Description (NCD), which was never ratified. Although a number of implementations were set up using it, it was by and large, acknowledged to be cumbersome and out-of-date even at inception. Over the past three years there has been a concerted effort by the Collection Description Standard (CD) Interest Group to rationalise and create a practical and usable formulation. This presentation describes its use to document the real collections of the Field Museum. We attempted to model a set of Collections Description records by using a range of organizational levels within the Field Museum Collections, beginning at the institution-level by referencing the "Field Museum of Natural History" Global Registry of Scientific Collections (GrSciColl) record, and including its departments (e.g., "Zoology Collections"), collections (e.g., "Invertebrates Collection"), and more specific accessions (e.g., "Philip Carpenter Collection"). We then added our modeled records to a CD Wikibase site developed by Maarten Trekels to see how the CD standard could work in that system. No underlying structure was in place in Wikibase, and this allowed us to compare interpretations. It became clear very soon into the process that it was imperative to understand and clearly map out the connections between records at the different levels before attempting data entry. It was not a fun surprise as an afterthought and so systems built to implement this standard will need clear guidance on preparatory steps for data validation. In some cases, data fit easily into the CD fields as defined, but others were more complex to think about and manipulate. Further issues included fields duplicated unnecessarily between dimensions, and some fields missing entirely. It was also difficult to compare and match newly defined terms for describing the standard (e.g., Dimension and Class) with terms defined by Wikibase (e.g., Item and property). Some aspects of the standard were confusing especially where museum concept and research needs were less than obviously aligned. Ultimately we need something useful for researchers and understandable by Collection staff. Overall, documentation beyond plain field definitions needs to be included with the release of the standard. It should contain, but not be limited to, required core fields, fields needed to create hierarchical relationships, definitions of the difference between hierarchical and lateral relationships and resource roles associated with dimensions. Examples are also needed regarding how to plan and structure CD records that represent a complex collection. We foresee a need for extensive documentation to spare users difficulty and ultimately make the standard more usable.

Las “Reliquias Calchaquíes” de metal de la Colección Zavaleta en el Field Museum of Natural History de Chicago. Un análisis integral.

El Field Museum of Natural History de Chicago (Illinois, Estados Unidos) posee una gran cantidad de piezas arqueológicas procedentes de tres provincias del Noroeste argentino (Salta, Tucumán y Catamarca) que fueron adquiridas en 1904 durante la Louisiana Purchase Exposition, feria universal llevada a cabo en Saint Louis (Missouri, Estados Unidos) donde Manuel Zavaleta, su colector, llevó parte de su compilación de objetos con fines de obtención de un rédito económico. Este artículo propone abordar un universo específico de éstos, las piezas elaboradas en diversos tipos de metal, desde un análisis integral no solo contemplando sus características, sino también haciendo una revisión desde la estadía de los objetos en Saint Louis hasta su actual resguardo en el museo de Chicago. Hoy día la muestra de objetos metálicos de la institución es de 185 ítems. Análisis morfológicos, funcionales y tecnológicos fueron efectuados así como un seguimiento de los mismos en el registro archivístico y fotográfico del museo. Los artefactos arqueológicos fueron también sometidos a evaluación composicional mediante un analizador portátil por fluorescencia de rayos X provisto por la institución. Sus resultados en términos semi-cuantitativos, y junto a una evaluación de los alcances y limitaciones de este tipo de acercamiento analítico, son presentados.

High-quality casts of the missing holotype of Petalodus ohioensis Safford 1853 (Chondrichthyes, Petalodontidae) at the Field Museum of Natural History and their bearing on the validity and priority of the species

The validity of the chondrichthyan species Petalodus ohioensis Safford 1853, has long been in doubt due to the poor quality of the published figures and the unknown whereabouts of the holotype. That situation changed with the discovery of casts of the holotype in the collections of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. The quality of the casts is poor, but sufficient to establish P. ohioensis as a valid species and as a senior synonym of P. alleghaniensis Leidy 1856. Recently, casts of the holotype of much better quality were found in the collections of the Field Museum of Natural History, accompanied by documentation indicating that they were likely obtained directly from Safford by O.P. Hay in 1896. The Field Museum casts clearly show the bands of ridges at the base of the crown on the labial and lingual sides, which are not visible on the Yale Peabody Museum casts.

The Abyssinian Art of Louis Agassiz Fuertes in the Field Museum

This book documents the paintings and drawings executed by Louis Agassiz Fuertes during the Field Museum of Natural History’s seven-month expedition to Ethiopia (Abyssinia) in 1926–27. During that time Fuertes completed 70 field watercolors that illustrate 55 species of birds and four species of mammals. He also executed 34 pencil drawings, which illustrate 13 species of mammals and 11 species of birds, plus numerous miscellaneous sketches and small watercolors. This book identifies and describes the biology of all 69 species of birds and mammals illustrated by Fuertes and includes 32 color reproductions of Fuertes’s watercolors that were published as a limited-edition album in 1930 by the Field Museum. The 60,000-word text provides brief summaries of all these species’ ecology, behavior, and reproductive biology as well as information about their current populations and conservation status. A review of Fuertes’s life, his influence on modern bird and wildlife art, and his participation in and artistic contributions to the Field Museum’s Abyssinian Expedition is also included, as well as more than 250 bibliographic citations.