Digital Heritage and Culture

The following sections are included:

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Editors
• Contributors
• Glossary

Digital heritage today leverages on leading-edge information technologies and is underpinned by a host of processes including digital asset management and digital preservation. This burgeoning digital heritage ecosystem enables art, culture and technology professionals to co-create novel fusions of new media with historical and cultural artifacts. As one may expect, museums and other heritage institutions are being metamorphosed rapidly to deliver advanced visualization, interactive and social-media services. In these dense, rapidly developing digital ecosystems, new media and mobile platforms are becoming the new drivers of online culture experience. It is pertinent to ask if a digital heritage ecosystem could ever be stable or sustainable. One suspects “no” to the first and a “possible yes” to the second goal…

The following sections are included:

• Introduction to the National Palace Museum
• Achievements of the IT-enabled Innovative Service in the NPM
• The Strategic Implication of Adopting IT-enabled Innovative Service at the NPM
• Possibilities: Showcase IT-enabled Innovative Service Achievement
• Challenges
• Conclusion
• References

The following sections are included:

• Motivation
• Designing Modes for Co-Creation and Collaboration
• Designing and Deploying Research Methodologies
• Visitor Study Lab
• Sustainable Outcomes in Europe and Asia
• Future Growth Ambitions
• References

The digital landscape has changed radically in the past decade, and so has institutional thinking about the Web. As recently as the 1990s, museums were terrified of other websites linking to their websites without their express permission. Some cultural institutions and libraries were apprehensively putting thumbnail images of their works online — for reference only (certainly not for reuse or publication). When websites started making high-resolution images available online, many cultural heritage institutions saw this as a foray into dangerous territory and took all possible measures to lock down and “protect” their digital assets. Fast forward to now, and many museums are giving away high-resolution TIFF files as part of their newly minted open access policy. In a slow but certain sea change, museums today are aggressively vying for visibility and users on the Web through as many channels as they can possibly manage — Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Google Art Project, Flickr, Weibo, Tumblr, and others…

MoMA is dedicated to the conversation between the past and the present, the established and the experimental. Our mission is helping you understand and enjoy the art of our time…

OneMillionMuseumMoments (Sarraf and Din, 2013) invites museum visitors and museum professionals to share their own “museum moments” — their experiences interacting within the museum environment and the projects developed to interpret the museum environment. Utilizing and integrating channels of social media and other technologies, OneMillionMuseumMoments engages the community by simply asking, “what is your museum moment?”…

Documentaries offer tremendous opportunities to emotionally and intellectually connect museum visitors to stories and interpretive content. Though we often think of documentaries as films, these projects may also take alternate forms such as gallery learning games, interactive exhibits, immersive storytelling theaters, applications on mobile and wearable devices, and even a thrilling ride experience in the museum. This chapter will address a documentary approach to storytelling using examples from a variety of different platforms…

The Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and Museum (BTRTM) was founded in 2002 by Venerable Shi Fa Zhao. This was after a period of collaboration with the Singapore Tourism Board…

While digital media is a relatively new medium, interactive technologies (originally based on a combination of analog and digital media) have been available to, and actively used by cultural institutions for many decades. Specifically, interactive technology has played a significant role in museum exhibitions, since the late 1980s. For this reason, the world of museums is a convenient microcosm in which to examine the transformative role of digital media on such essential factors as mission, operations and public programs. Furthermore, a brief summary of this history can provide some insights to contemporary practitioners and scholars on the development of both a strategy and an implementation policy in developing a digital heritage ecosystem.…

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• Basic Interpretation and Appreciation of Asian Art and History
• Essence of the Story and New Media Integration
• A Case Study: Yuan Ming Yuan — Qing Emperor’s Splendid Gardens Exhibition
• Using New Media for Creative Interpretation
• About the Exhibit
• Conclusion
• References

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• Basic Ideological Assumptions
• Creation of the VCM
• Project Origin and Conception
• Target Audience
• Defining the Content
• Launch of the VCM
• Cooperation Model
• Administrative Structure
• Implementation Problems
• Quality Issues
• Copyrights
• The VCM and Other Virtual Museums
• Recent Developments
• Reference

The main theme of this chapter is the development and implementation of a digital library system for Lontar Foundation, an independent and non-profit organization, established in 1987. With its primary aims to promote Indonesian literature and culture through the publication of translations of Indonesian literary works, Lontar is ready to open its culturally-related contents to the wider public. In summary, after much planning and implementation work over a few years, Lontar has delivered a repository of its collections through the Lontar Digital Library (LDL).

The use of personal devices for mobile tours in museums and heritage sites, which began with audio tours decades ago, is experiencing a renaissance in the age of the smart phone. Visitors to museums and heritage buildings or ruins spend a large percentage of their time on site using their smart phones or tablets for finding information, texting or taking pictures to send to friends and families. For heritage professionals, the logical progression was to find ways to turn these personal devices into next-generation guides that tell stories and convey contextual information. With the onset of apps, there has been a surge of creative energy as organizations use advanced mobile technologies to transform the experience of visitors to museums and to historical and archaeological sites, with the potential not yet fully realized. Mobile technology can now bring inanimate artifacts to life, provide virtual windows to the past and add layers of knowledge and information to give users deeper insights. More and more heritage organizations are testing the waters by creating their own mobile media and native apps, and while the results have sometimes been ineffective or gimmicky, some early adopters have already gotten it right. The successes so far are driving a paradigm shift of how heritage organizations relate to their collections, to the public and even to the world at large.

The six installations described in this chapter contribute to the reframing of cultural heritage interpretation and the reformulation of somatic, kinesthetic and embodied experiences in immersive digital environments. These installations have been articulated through a series of trans-disciplinary experiments in large-scale, interactive cinematic display systems and are designed for major exhibitions in the public domain. The immersive display systems and their associated visual, sonic and algorithmic techniques offer compelling means for mapping and remediating cultural heritage landscapes and are based on significant tangible and intangible world heritage from India, Hong Kong and China…

The following sections are included:

• From Product to Process
• Contributions of Technological Development to the Interpretive Process
• Visualization as a Process Rather than a Product
• Productions of Visualization
• Visualization for the Interpretive Research and Exploratory Learning
• The Reconstruction Process: From Research Finding to Visualization
• Conclusion
• References

This chapter proposes innovations in evaluation techniques that will help us understand visitor cognition in large-scale interactive immersive visualization environments (IIVEs). I Sho U (literally “I Show You”) is a design-led method for encouraging visitors to engage with the evaluation directly inside the space of experience. This research enhances current visitor evaluation methodologies by developing visitor agency. It is applicable for large and diverse visitor communities, in a range of museum contexts. I Sho U compiles quantitative data about a qualitative experience and this data is visible in real-time to participants and to stakeholders (such as curatorial staff and exhibition developers). This ongoing research is being undertaken by the Laboratory for Innovation Galleries, Labraries, Archive and Museums (iGLAM), College of Fine Arts, University of New South West (UNSW) in collaboration with design research at Swinburne University, Australia. The case study introduced in this chapter used five I Sho U interfaces at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum, deployed for visitors engaged with two IIVEs (see the two Pacifying the South China Sea Pirates projects (2013) in Chapter 13). While the methods discussed here are using IIVEs for prototyping purposes, the application is easily reconfigured for any situation or museum context. I Sho U is ultimately applicable to the entire situated experience of going to a museum irrespective of the nature of the content on display.

The following sections are included:

• Here Comes the Crowd
• About This “Crowd”
• Crowdsourcing
• Purposes of Crowdsourcing
• Crowdsourcing and Technology Requirements
• In Summary
• Crowdfunding — The Basics
• Crowdfunded Cultural Heritage Projects
• Crowdfunding Platforms
• Success Factors and Challenges
• Selecting a Crowdfunding Platform
• In Summary
• Conclusion — Just the Beginning
• Recommended Reading and Resources
• References

The following sections are included:

• Index
• Selected Figures in Color