  This article presents an affective based sensemaking system for grouping and
suggesting stories created by the users about the items of a museum. By relying
on the TCL commonsense reasoning framework1, the system exploits the spatial
structure of the Plutchik's wheel of emotions to organize the stories according
to their extracted emotions. The process of emotion extraction, reasoning and
suggestion is triggered by an app, called GAMGame, and integrated with the
sensemaking engine. Following the framework of Citizen Curation, the system
allows classifying and suggesting stories encompassing cultural items able to
evoke not only the very same emotions of already experienced or preferred
museum objects, but also novel items sharing different emotional stances and,
therefore, able to break the filter bubble effect and open the users' view
towards more inclusive and empathy-based interpretations of cultural content.
The system has been designed tested, in the context of the H2020EU SPICE
project (Social cohesion, Participation, and Inclusion through Cultural
Engagement), in cooperation the community of the d/Deaf and on the collection
of the Gallery of Modern Art (GAM) in Turin. We describe the user centered
design process of the web app and of its components and we report the results
concerning the effectiveness of the of the diversity seeking, affective driven,
recommendations of stories.
