Heritage preservation in the post-digital era: How much information is enough?

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold Thwaites
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Heritage Preservation ◽  
Content Creation ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Digital Heritage ◽  
New Research ◽  
Research Initiatives

Digital media have revolutionized the practice of scholarship from archives to the creation of content. Continuing into the next decades, the application of digital technologies will remain a pivotal component to cultural heritage research-creation projects. Heritage preservation by means of virtual heritage or digital heritage broadly refers to the use and application of computational tools and methods to humanist fields of study. It embraces a transdisciplinary approach to inspire new research initiatives, while at the same time employing digital media technologies for content creation and sharing across the public space. This article provides an overview of the information design process applied to the digital preservation and re-presentation of cultural heritage. It employs principles of digital heritage to create a matrix of cultural heritage content within the themes of legacy, transmission and transformation. The intangible nature of world heritage is of increasing concern. How that can be preserved and how it becomes sampled and preserved in digital archives for the future are key questions, originating from the inquiry – How much information is enough? This article endeavours to illuminate that question though an exemplar research-creation project, showcasing the materiality of the digital, its embodiment, agency and the resulting impact on the audiences it seeks to inform.

JPEG 2000: guide for digital libraries

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
David Barina ◽  
Ondrej Klima
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Digital Libraries ◽  
Rate Distortion ◽  
Jpeg 2000 ◽  
Heritage Preservation ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Compression Performance ◽  
Digital Heritage ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Cultural Heritage Preservation

Purpose The joint photographic experts group (JPEG) 2000 image compression system is being used for cultural heritage preservation. The authors are aware of over a dozen of big memory institutions worldwide using this format. This paper aims to review and explain choices for end users to help resolve trade-offs that these users are likely to encounter in practice. Design/methodology/approach The JPEG 2000 format is quite complex and therefore sometimes considered as a preservation risk. A lossy compression is governed by a number of parameters that control compression speed and rate-distortion trade-off. Their inappropriate adjustment may fairly easily lead to sub-optimal compression performance. This paper provides general guidelines for selecting the most appropriate parameters for a specific application. Findings This paper serves as a guide for the preservation of digital heritage in cultural heritage institutions, including libraries, archives and museums. Originality/value This paper serves as a guide for the preservation of digital heritage in cultural heritage institutions, including libraries, archives and museums.

scholarly journals Minority Community Resilience and Cultural Heritage Preservation: A Case Study of the Gullah Geechee Community

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 2266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ladan Ghahramani ◽  
Katelin McArdle ◽  
Sandra Fatorić
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
Community Resilience ◽  
Eastern United States ◽  
Heritage Preservation ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Minority Community ◽  
The Face ◽  
New Research

The Gullah Geechee community of the south-eastern United States endures today as a minority group with a significant cultural heritage. However, little research has been conducted to explore this community’s resilience in the face of climate change and other environmental impacts. The database Web of Science was searched and 109 publications on the Gullah Geechee community were identified. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, we analyzed the publications to identify patterns and primary research themes related to the Gullah Geechee community’s resilience. Findings revealed that Gullah Geechee‘s cultural heritage is vulnerable to climatic and societal changes, but can also be a source for enhancing community resilience and promoting more sustainable community-led heritage and tourism developments. A framework is proposed for building community resilience in the context of minority and/or marginalized communities (e.g., Gullah Geechee). This study highlights the urgent need to not only better understand and incorporate a community’s economic dimensions and losses in various decision- and policy-making processes but also their cultural and social dimensions and losses. This systematic analysis can help inform both heritage preservation and community-led tourism practices and policies related to the Gullah Geechee community, as well as help direct new research efforts focusing on minority and/or marginalized community resilience.

Transposing, Transforming, and Transcending Tradition in Creative Digital Media

2015 ◽  
pp. 141-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip Andrew Prager ◽  
Maureen Thomas ◽  
Marianne Selsjord
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
Interactive Media ◽  
Arts And Crafts ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Creative Cognition ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Creative Insight ◽  
Digital Aesthetics ◽  
Computer Based

How can digital media technologies, contemporary theories of creativity, and tradition combine to develop the aesthetics of computer-based art today and in the future? Through contextualised case-studies, this chapter investigates how games, information technologies, and traditional visual and storytelling arts combine to create rich, complex, and engaging moving-image based artworks with wide appeal. It examines how dramatist and interactive media artist Maureen Thomas and 3D media artist and conservator Marianne Selsjord deploy creative digital technologies to transpose, transform, and transcend pre-page arts and crafts for the digital era, making fresh work for new audiences. Researcher in digital aesthetics, creative cognition, and play behaviour Dr. Phillip Prager examines how such work is conducive to creative insight and worthwhile play, discussing its remediation of some of the aspirations and approaches of 20th-century avant-garde artists, revealing these as a potent source of conceptual riches for the digital media creators of today and tomorrow.

scholarly journals Development of New Solutions in the Field of Presentation and Preservation of Cultural and Historical Heritage in The North+ Region

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
Galina Bogdanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Heritage Preservation ◽  
Digital Conversion ◽  
The North ◽  
Historical Heritage ◽  
New Research

The accelerated development of interdiscipli-nary and digital technologies has prompted the need for con-tinuous new research in all areas, including the preservation and presentation of cultural and historical heritage. This re-port examines and presents the activities of the project “Digital cultural treasure North +” with participation of Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, BAS, for improving access and dissemination of cultural heritage. Some of the technological solutions developed in connection with the digital conversion of materials created in the digital center, the platform and the North+ network have been studied. Keywords: Interdisciplinarity, Digital Technology, Cul-tural and Historical Heritage, Preservation, Representation, Digitization, Protection, Digital Center

scholarly journals UNESCO and the Challenge of Preserving the Digital Cultural Heritage

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-64
Author(s):  
Sabine von Schorlemer
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Significant Risk ◽  
Heritage Preservation ◽  
Digital Heritage ◽  
Digital Cultural Heritage ◽  
Emerging Trends ◽  
Cultural Heritage Preservation

In recent years there has been a growing awareness of the need to preserve the digital cultural heritage, a part of which is at significant risk of being lost. In light of the pressing demands to develop informed and targeted strategies, this article analyses UNESCO’s approach towards the preservation of the digital cultural heritage. Being the lead UN agency in the field of cultural heritage preservation, the organization responded to the challenge early on, notably by adopting the Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage. The article thus outlines UNESCO’s competencies regarding the digital cultural heritage as well as its concept thereof, before examining the organization’s strategies for the preservation of digital cultural heritage. Furthermore, by providing an outlook on some emerging trends, i.e. increasing privatization and commercialization, future requirements are identified.

Planning for Urban Media

2015 ◽  
pp. 141-164
Author(s):  
Scott McQuire ◽  
Nikos Papastergiadis ◽  
Frank Vetere ◽  
Martin R. Gibbs ◽  
John Downs ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Research Initiative ◽  
Space Material ◽  
Regulatory Model ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Public Environment

Large video screens situated in public spaces are characteristic of the highly mediated public environment of contemporary cities. While screens are now able to support a range of content, including interactive applications, urban planning policy still treats them largely as commercial display surfaces only. This locks planning into a regulatory model based on minimizing the impact of advertising, and underestimates the possibilities for public screens to incubate innovative modes of urban communication. This chapter discusses a research project focusing on public use of interactive gaming on the Big Screen at Federation Square in Melbourne. The project was part of a larger research initiative exploring the impact of digital media technologies on how people interact with each other in public space. Material was gathered from a combination of observations and interviews. In addition to informing further development of similar interactive events at public sites, the findings raise important questions for urban planning in the context of pervasive digital media.

scholarly journals Conservation approach to the industrial heritage of Vojvodina

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 377-386
Author(s):  
Anica Draganic
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Evaluation Method ◽  
Partial Evaluation ◽  
Present Condition ◽  
Heritage Preservation ◽  
Industrial Heritage ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
New Research ◽  
Cultural Heritage Preservation

This article presents new research, which has the objective of defining theoretical and methodological approaches to valorisation and conservation of the industrial heritage. It studies the present condition of industrial heritage in Vojvodina and the evolution of the conservation approach during the period under study (1945- today) through legislation and the documentation of the Institutes for Cultural Heritage Preservation. It indicates the previous inadequate partial evaluation, which has resulted in a loss of many important evidences of the industrial past. A mental schema, based on the Nara document of authenticity, is set as a tool for an interdisciplinary research and evaluation of industrial heritage authenticity. The proposed evaluation method, tested on the example of the brewery in Zrenjanin, results in a conservation project that offers a potential framework for future conservation approach to the industrial heritage of Vojvodina.

scholarly journals “We Demand Better Ways to Communicate”: Pre-Digital Media Practices in Refugee Camps

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philipp Seuferling
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Media Activism ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Media Environments ◽  
And Control ◽  
Media Practices

This article provides a historical perspective on media practices in refugee camps. Through an analysis of archival material emerging from refugee camps in Germany between 1945 and 2000, roles and functions of media practices in the camp experience among forced migrants are demonstrated. The refugee camp is conceptualized as a heterotopian space, where media practices took place in pre-digital media environments. The archival records show how media practices of refugees responded to the spatial constraints of the camp. At the same time, media practices emerged from the precarious power relations between refugees, administration, and activists. Opportunities, spaces, and access to media practices and technologies were provided, yet at the same time restricted, by the camp structure and administration, as well as created by refugees and volunteers. Media activist practices, such as the voicing of demands for the availability of media, demonstrate how access to media was fought for within the power structures and affordances of the analogue environment. While basic media infrastructure had to be fought for more than in the digital era and surveillance and control of media practices was more intense, the basic need for access to information and connectivity was similar in pre-digital times, resulting in media activism. This exploration of unconsidered technological environments in media and refugee studies can arguably nuance our understanding of the role of media technologies in “refugee crises”.

Creative economy: Towards cultural heritage capitalization

2017 ◽  
pp. 100-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Abankina
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Creative Industries ◽  
Creative Economy ◽  
Heritage Preservation ◽  
Creative Potential ◽  
Strategic Development ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Cultural Heritage Preservation

The paper analyzes trends in the development of the creative economy in Russia and estimates the export potential of the Russian creative industries. The author demonstrates that modern concepts of cultural heritage preservation focus on increasing the efficiency of its use and that building creative potential and systematic support of the creative industries are becoming a key task of the strategic development of regions and municipalities in the post-industrial era.

Coda: The Rosetta Stone

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Digital Code ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Origin Point

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document