The Chronicle project was part of the Horizon Services Campaign. It was a cross-cutting project intended to develop a middle-ware platform to support the aims and objectives of four of the other Service Campaign projects; namely: Panopticon, Hybrid Gifting, In My Seat, and Memory Machine. As is the nature with dynamic research projects, some projects made lesser use of the Chronicle platform whilst others made greater use. To wrap up we will finish by describing how Chronicle was used in two of the service campaign projects.
Panopticon utilised the Chronicle platform for storing experiential data from people playing video games that enabled them to then share that data with a 3rd party. Users were invited to play a video game, during which their facial expressions were algorithmically analysed to determine their emotional states during game-play. This analysis data was stored in Chronicle with a unique identifier that the user was given. At the end of this experience, the experiential data was used to generate a souvenir that the user could take away with them. They were also optionally given the choice to take away their data, destroy it, or ‘gift’ it to the experimenters in order to use for future analytical work.
Hybrid Gifting utilised the Chronicle platform to associate digital content with physical gift cards that could be passed on to a recipient and the digital content accessed by that recipient. The project held two gift card making workshops where the participants were tasked with making physical gift cards that incorporated a unique identifier from Chronicle. Amongst the available options for embedding the codes were RFID tags and Artcodes. Digital content could then be associated in Chronicle with these unique identifiers and a phone application could be used to scan the identifiers and retrieve the digital content by the recipient of the physical card.
Chronicle is open source and links to the source code and documentation can be found on the Chronicle website at https://chronicle.horizon.ac.uk/