Using Collaboratively Constructed Document Collections to Simulate Real-World Object Comparisons

While the layout of a museum exhibition is largely prescribed by the curator, visitors to museums view connections between exhibits in ways unique to themselves. With the assistance of a large-scale survey of museum visitors we identify that the view taken by museum visitors of a collection of exhibits can be represented by similarity over documents associated with each exhibit. We show that even when using a basic document similarity measure there is a correlation between document similarity and visitors’ judgements of relatedness of exhibits aligned to these documents.