A Case Study for the Development of Methods to Improve User Engagement with Digital Cultural Heritage Collections

The amount of digital cultural heritage data produced by cultural heritage institutions is growing rapidly. Digital cultural heritage repositories have therefore become an efficient and effective way to disseminate and exploit digital cultural heritage data. However, many digital cultural heritage repositories worldwide share technical challenges such as data integration and interoperability among national and regional digital cultural heritage repositories. The result is dispersed and poorly-linked cultured heritage data, backed by non-standardized search interfaces, which thwart users’ attempts to contextualize information from distributed repositories. A recently introduced geospatial semantic web is being adopted by a great many new and existing digital cultural heritage repositories to overcome these challenges. However, no one has yet conducted a conceptual survey of the geospatial semantic web concepts for a cultural heritage audience. A conceptual survey of these concepts pertinent to the cultural heritage field is, therefore, needed. Such a survey equips cultural heritage professionals and practitioners with an overview of all the necessary tools, and free and open source semantic web and geospatial semantic web platforms that can be used to implement geospatial semantic web-based cultural heritage repositories. Hence, this article surveys the state-of-the-art geospatial semantic web concepts, which are pertinent to the cultural heritage field. It then proposes a framework to turn geospatial cultural heritage data into machine-readable and processable resource description framework (RDF) data to use in the geospatial semantic web, with a case study to demonstrate its applicability. Furthermore, it outlines key free and open source semantic web and geospatial semantic platforms for cultural heritage institutions. In addition, it examines leading cultural heritage projects employing the geospatial semantic web. Finally, the article discusses attributes of the geospatial semantic web that require more attention, that can result in generating new ideas and research questions for both the geospatial semantic web and cultural heritage fields.

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Harmonized Spaces, Dissonant Objects, Inventing Europe? Mobilizing Digital Heritage

Culture Unbound Journal of Current Cultural Research ◽

10.3384/cu.2000.1525.113295 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 3 (3) ◽

pp. 295-315

Author(s):

Alexander Badenoch

Keyword(s):

Cultural Heritage ◽

The European Union ◽

Digital Heritage ◽

European Citizenship ◽

History Of ◽

Online Availability ◽

Smooth Space ◽

Web Platform ◽

Heritage Collections

Technology, particularly digitization and the online availability of cultural heritage collections, provides new possibilities for creating new forms of ’European cultural heritage’. This essay analyzes the emerging sphere of European digital heritage as a project of technological harmonization. Drawing on Andrew Barry’s concepts of technological zones, it examines the various ways in which agency and European citizenship are being reconfigured around cultural heritage. It explores the “Europeanization” of digital heritage in three areas. In the first section, it analyzes the recent agenda for digital heritage of the European Union as a harmonizing project to create a smooth space of cultural heritage. In the next sections, the development of a harmonized virtual exhibit on the history of technology in Europe forms a case study to explore processes of harmonization at the level of the web platform, and in the aesthetics of digitized objects. It argues that rather than seeking to elide the points of unevenness and ’dissonance’ that emerge in harmonization processes, we should instead look for ways to embrace them as points of dialogue and discovery.

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The Acropolis on the Immersive Web

The Journal of Media Innovations ◽

10.5617/jomi.8794 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

pp. 41-51

Author(s):

Maria Engberg ◽

Jay David Bolter ◽

Colin Freeman ◽

Gunnar Liestøl ◽

Blair MacIntyre

Keyword(s):

Augmented Reality ◽

Cultural Heritage ◽

Real Time ◽

Virtual Environment ◽

Cultural Artifacts ◽

Digital Cultural Heritage ◽

Heritage Site ◽

Virtual And Augmented Reality

We report here on an application of reality media (virtual and augmented reality) to digital cultural heritage. The particular challenge we address is: how to combine VR and AR to bridge the gap between the center (the museum housing cultural artifacts) and periphery (the heritage site where the artifacts were found) while at the same time attending to, even enhancing, the aura of both artifacts and sites? Our proposed solution is to implement the cultural heritage technique known as situated simulation (sitsim) in combination with a social virtual environment called Hubs. Our case study is a sitsim of the Acropolis in Athens, which can function on location and remotely and offers real-time conferencing capabilities for its participants.

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EXPLORING CULTURAL HERITAGE COLLECTIONS IN IMMERSIVE ANALYTICS: CHALLENGES, BENEFITS, AND A CASE STUDY USING VIRTUAL REALITY

ISPRS - International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ◽

10.5194/isprs-archives-xliii-b4-2020-599-2020 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol XLIII-B4-2020 ◽

pp. 599-606

Author(s):

K. Koebel ◽

D. Agotai ◽

A. Çöltekin

Keyword(s):

Virtual Reality ◽

Cultural Heritage ◽

Visual Analytics ◽

User Study ◽

Data Sets ◽

Time Interaction ◽

Heritage Collections ◽

Exploration Task ◽

Insight Into

Abstract. Immersive analytics, at the intersection of visual analytics and virtual reality has recently gained some traction. Taking a similar approach, VaRt-DataExplorer project is concerned with exploration of data spaces in Virtual Reality (VR) in the context of cultural heritage collections. Our main objective is to facilitate better a understanding and insight into spatially referenced cultural heritage data sets. Within the scope of the project, this goal would be achieved by providing potentially ‘intuitive’ forms of real time interaction with the data, and rendering quickly recognizable visuospatial representations to offer more context to cultural artifacts. In particular, a spatial context is provided to the viewers by referencing geographical aspects of the data. Due to the incomplete and imprecise nature of data in this domain, thoughtful attention is given to visualization fidelity. Our initial user study suggests that using an immersive VR offers benefits for the exploration task for the viewer and the user experience provided by VaRt-DataExplorer has received high ratings.

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From Bookshelves to the City Streets: Church Histories and the Mapping of Chicago's Religious Diversity

Collections ◽

10.1177/155019061601200408 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 12 (4) ◽

pp. 433-444

Author(s):

Christopher D. Cantwell

Keyword(s):

Cultural Heritage ◽

Religious Diversity ◽

Religious Life ◽

Religious History ◽

World's Fair ◽

Digital Map ◽

Recent Scholarship ◽

The City ◽

Heritage Collections

In 2013 the Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture at the Newberry Library in Chicago undertook an initiative to expand the use of its collection of church and synagogue records through a new digital project titled Faith in the City: Chicago's Religious Diversity in the Era of the World's Fair. Though recent scholarship in the study of religion has highlighted the importance of such documents in understanding the contours of American religious life, the collection's origins as a genealogical resource have long shaped its use. By locating curated portions of the library's church histories on a digital map of the city alongside nearly two dozen essays on Chicago's religious history, Faith in the City aims to publicize the collection to new communities of users while also enhancing how local and family historians engage with the material. The following case study provides an overview of Faith in the City's development, the interventions it hopes to make, as well as challenges the platform faced. It concludes by briefly considering the potential of map-based presentations of cultural heritage collections.

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Modeling of Vanished Historic Mining Landscape Features as a Part of Digital Cultural Heritage and Possibilities of Its Use in Mining Tourism (Case Study: Gelnica Town, Slovakia)

Resources ◽

10.3390/resources9040043 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 9 (4) ◽

pp. 43

Author(s):

Pavel Hronček ◽

Bohuslava Gregorová ◽

Dana Tometzová ◽

Mário Molokáč ◽

Ladislav Hvizdák

Keyword(s):

Cultural Heritage ◽

3D Modeling ◽

3D Model ◽

Underground Mining ◽

3D Models ◽

Digital Cultural Heritage ◽

Historic Mining ◽

Mining Heritage ◽

Virtual Mining

The study provides a methodology for 3D model processing of historic mining landscape, and its features as mining digital cultural heritage with the possibility of using new visualization means in mining tourism. Historic mining landscapes around the towns of Gelnica (eastern Slovakia) had been chosen for the case study. The underground mining spaces around Gelnica, which are currently inaccessible to clients of mining tourism, were processed using 3D modeling. Historically, correctly processed 3D models of mining spaces enable customers of mining tourism to virtually travel not only in space, but what is most important, in time as well. The up-to-date computer-generated virtual mining heritage in the form of 3D models can be viewed via the Internet from different perspectives and angles. The models created this way are currently the latest trend in developing mining tourism.

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