The use of world-simulation videogames for cultural heritage (CH) communication presents one of the greatest opportunities for engaging people with the safeguarding of cultural resources. However, not all simulation videogames have the capacity to transmit heritage values efficiently. This article reviews the use of serious and commercial videogames in CH to frame and properly identify characteristics for the selection and assessment of videogames in the context of cultural communication. Based on the analysis of the capacities of videogames to motivate, immerse and represent reality, the videogame Minecraft is identified as one of the optimal solutions to represent and promote engagement with the cultural built environment. As such, the authors assessed the capacity of the videogame Minecraft to be used as an efficient tool to communicate built heritage environments, considering identified criteria on immersion, motivation, and fidelity on simulation.
<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Currently, non-formal Heritage Education strategies present an immense potential to valorise and protect cultural heritage (CH), while promoting the transmission and production of knowledge. Integrating the potential of technologies in cultural heritage management practices, particularly in the field of ‘heritage documentation’, presents a way to empower both experts and non-experts with tools to better understand and record CH assets. It also allows to use research to advance on conservation, and to create and strengthen links between communities and their heritage. To achieve these in a non-formal context, a learning process/path needs to go beyond merely taking the contents out of the classroom; it requires the development of a strategy where students interact directly of the heritage assets, the communities and the institutions during a continuous amount of time, allowing for immersion, meaningful experience, and dialogue.</p><p> In 2018, under coordination of the University of Lisbon and Tampere University of Technology, took place the International Summer School ‘Unveiling the Hidden Hamina’, in Finland. The course was focused on integrating a non-formal academic course on Heritage documentation with a community-centred approach to cultural heritage. Its primary goals were to develop a learning path merging communities and course contents, to tackle current challenges in Heritage documentation, and to solve some current problems identified by local CH institutions. This paper provides a description of the course program and learning activities, the community engagement strategies, the integrated socio-cultural agenda and the main outcomes obtained by the course.</p>
Abstract. The identity and experience of past human societies has crystallized in the buildings that survive up to the present day, as architectural and archaeological heritage. The challenges of their study, management and communication are now in constant reshaping, as new technologies consistently bring new tools, opportunities and trials. Today, the values and meanings attached to this heritage by their communities are to be promoted by the strategies towards cultural heritage research, protection, enhancement, reuse or dissemination, as defined by the Faro Convention (CoE, 2005), but community involvement and interdisciplinarity are still goals often difficult to attain. In this contribution we aim to present two different case studies where strategies of state-of-the-art documentation and historical-archaeological assessment were brought together to address communities’ requests for heritage valorization while providing opportunities for interdisciplinary work, specialized education, and content creation. One is in the Finnish town of Hamina, a star-like fortress system which echoes the Renaissance urban ideals, achieved only in another place in Europe (Palma Nova, Italy), where an International Summer School took place to address the community’s requests for study and documentation. Another is in the Portuguese village of Muge, Salvaterra de Magos, where the need for scientific study and documentation addressed the owner’s goals for site musealization while providing interdisciplinary work and education to several undergrad and masters students in archaeology and architecture, while building contents for community engagement and outreach.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.