Digital Applications for Cultural and Heritage Institutions

Abstract

Computing in the arts, humanities and heritage sectors is becoming more pervasive, and increasingly sophisticated technologies are being developed to capture, explore, and disseminate information regarding artefacts, historical knowledge, and cultural inheritance. Conferences and symposia are central to the complex industry which has built up around using computational techniques to facilitate novel research and increased public access to cultural heritage. These are essential for fostering crossfertilisation of knowledge and expertise between "memory institutions" such as libraries, archives, museums, and archaeological and historic sites; academic disciplines such as history, archaeology, and art history; and practitioners in the computer industry. Often, proceedings of these conferences appear online, or selected papers are published in journals, but rarely is a snapshot of conference papers from across different years and disciplines brought together in a comprehensive publication to give a panorama of the diverse research explored across the "multiplicative relationship: culture x technology" (pg. 2). Possibilities. This allows synergies across projects in different disciplines which use a similar technological approach to become apparent, and demonstrates that the projects featured are not focussed on traditional academic humanities research, but in illuminating and investigating ways in which our understanding of culture and history may be increased.The first section, Strategic Developments, features three papers indicating the strategic potential of work in the area, including the pan-European road-mapping project DigiCULT, which scoped European developments and perspectives. This is then juxtaposed with a project report from Canada, and then Russia, to demonstrate how computing in cultural heritage can both pull, and be pushed by, strategic decisions in this area. International co-operative projects, often featuring input from different languages and cultures, are detailed in the second section, including projects in archaeology and local history, which involve input from, in the first instance, Terras, M. (2007) The fact that the book features thirty-two papers (with contributions from over sixty authors) in a three-hundred page volume necessitates that the contributions are brief: the shortest paper is a little over three pages long. The concise nature of the papers, and the accessible stance, means that those wishing to understand the technical underpinnings of the research will have to chase up further references: although a comprehensive list of abbreviations, glossary, and contact details for the authors are provided, many papers would have benefited from ensuring they supplied more detailed references and project information. That said, the broad sweep of the book's coverage, and the many papers featured, serves as a good guide to the range of research being undertaken in this area. It is also refreshing that so many papers are from countries which may be viewed as having fewer resources than the...

Framing collaborative processes of digital transformation in cultural organisations: from literary archives to augmented reality

“…The usual model of culture-technology partnership sees organisations in the role of receivers, or end-users of the technology. Besides commissioning and outsourcing tasks to technology firms or R&D labs (Sapsed et al, 2015;Hemsley, Cappellini and Stanke, 2017), a common approach to developing digital projects takes the form of research-led initiatives strongly relying on the facilitation of the academic partners (Holdgaard and Klastrup, 2014;Ciolfi et al, 2016;Li and Ghirardi, 2018). Further, many digital initiatives maintain an indirect, limited relationship with the core exhibition or the collection to which they are supposed to respond to.…”

SAR Sentinel 1 Imaging and Detection of Palaeo-Landscape Features in the Mediterranean Area

“…Starting from this heritage, new applications and developments are expected [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11], particularly from the use of open data, such as satellite Sentinel 1 and 2 (S-1 and S-2) that are part of Europe's ambitious Copernicus program [11]. All the Sentinel missions were released under an open data policy to foster knowledge, innovative applications, and advanced developments.…”

Infrastructuring for Collective Heritage Knowledge Production

“…Large efforts have been invested in designing digitization processes and forming interoperable digital collections with shared data standards and formats (see e.g. Ioannides et al 2016, Hemsley et al 2017.…”