Museums and Digital Culture: From Reality to Digitality in the Age of COVID-19

Museums increasingly recognize the need to address advances in digital culture which impact the expectations and needs of their audiences. Museum collections of real objects need to be presented both on their own premises and digitally online, especially as digital and social media becomes more and more influential in people’s everyday lives. From interdisciplinary perspectives across digital culture, art, and technology, we investigate these challenges magnified by advances in digital and computational media and culture, looking particularly at recent and relevant reports on changes in the ways museums interact with the public. We focus on human digital behavior, experience, and interaction in museums in the context of art, artists, and human engagement with art, using the observational perspectives of the authors as a basis for discussion. Our research shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated many of the changes driving museum transformation, about which this paper presents a landscape view of its characteristics and challenges. Our evidence shows that museums will need to be more prepared than ever to adapt to unabated technological advances set in the midst of cultural and social revolution, now intrinsic to the digital landscape in which museums are inevitably connected and participating across the global digital ecosystem where they inevitably find themselves entrenched, underscoring the central importance of an inclusive integrative museum model between physical and digital reality.

Las Salas de Prensa Virtual como herramientas de Relaciones Públicas para la comunicación con los medios en Cuba. Un estado de la cuestión / Virtual Press Room as Public Relations tool for communication with media in Cuba. A state of affairs

Public Relations have found in digital platforms an ideal device to build contact and interactivity with corporation's audiences. Within the field, new possibilities emerge to address the issue of generating interactivity with communication media, which has always been a core activity of Public Relations offices. Over the last decade, the Cuban institutional and communicative scenario has witnessed an upsurge of Press Cabinets and Communication Offices, which are expanding their traditional functions mainly due to digitization and hypermedia convergence. Thus, new resources like Virtual Press Rooms aim to assist corporations in their quest to build interactive channels for contact with media and citizenship, to manage information flows with journalists and to promote the dialogue with the stakeholders. These tools are considered a natural evolvement of the traditional routines of communication offices to enhance interactive channels and nurtured relationships with press officers. Many researchers have pointed out the relevant role of Virtual Press Rooms as substitutes for common PR strategies like press kit and mailing. This research analyzes the integration of Virtual Press Rooms within the main organism of Cuban state’s central administration. This research has been carried out using a quantitative content analysis, based on a categorical system validated by the Bitartez Group of the Basque University System for developing similar researches in the field. The study assesses the common features of Virtual Press Rooms in Cuban corporations and its adaptation to Cuban journalistic and communicative landscape. The results of the study show that Cuban Online Press Rooms perform as a container for files and corporate content, while exalting a documentary function. In many cases, the informative role is prioritized, while the contents designed for media are relegated to less visible spaces within the website. Even though they improve the access to relevant and quality information that facilitates journalistic practices, they still lack of a better approach to nurture the interactions between journalists and corporate sources. The whole analysis shows that Cuban corporations do not take full advantage of digital capabilities to nurture the information flows and the interactions between the organization and their stakeholders. Whether it is suitable to assess that Cuban communication`s practices are, indeed, in a process of transition to the digital landscape, it is still relevant to find out if the limitations exposed in the previous paragraphs obey to some strategical and political-ideological conditioning factors.

Adaptation to the Risks of Digitalization: New Survival Trends for States in a Multipolar World

The purpose is to study the new survival trends for states in a multipolar world, determine the successfulness of adaptation to the digitalization of different growth poles, and develop the applied recommendations to improve the practice of adaptation to the risks of digitalization of these growth poles. Design/methodology/approach. The authors use the methods of economic statistics: variation analysis, trend analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis. Findings. The commonness of strategies of adaptation to the risks of digitalization for different poles of the world economy is substantiated, and two universal mechanisms—talent management and development of science—are found. The originality of this research is due to the consideration of digitalization from a new view—from the positions of setting states at the brink of survival due to the aggressive digital competition and high complexity of ensuring global competition in a quickly changing digital landscape. The uniqueness of this research is due to taking into account the specific features in a multipolar world. The practical implementation of the offered recommendations opens future perspectives for more successful survival trends in a multipolar world and the improvement of their adaptation to risks digitalization by 69.91% in G7 countries (on average) and by 88.40% in BRICS countries (on average).

Museums and Digital Culture: From Reality to Digitality in the Age of Covid-19

Museums increasingly recognize the need to address advances in digital culture which impact the expectations and needs of their audiences. Museum collections of real objects need to be presented both on their own premises and digitally online, especially as social media becomes more and more influential in people’s everyday lives. We investigate these challenges magnified by advances in digital and computational media and culture looking particularly at recent and relevant reports on changes in the ways museums interact with the public. We find that the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated many of the changes driving museum transformation. We believe that museums must be more prepared than ever to adapt to unabated technological advances set in the midst of cultural and social revolution, now intrinsic to the digital landscape in which museums are inevitably connected and participating across the global digital ecosystem where they inevitably find themselves entrenched.

Visualizing a New Sustainable World: Toward the Next Generation of Virtual Reality in the Built Environment

What is the future of virtual reality (VR) in the built environment? As work becomes increasingly distributed across remote and hybrid forms of organizing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a need to rethink how we use the set of collaborative technologies to move toward a sustainable world. We propose a new vision of VR as a discipline-agnostic platform for an interdisciplinary integration of the allied design, social, and environmental disciplines to address emerging challenges across the building sectors. We build this contribution through the following steps. First, we contextualize VR technologies within the changing digital landscape and underlying tensions in the built environment practices. Second, we characterize the difficulties that have arisen in using them to address challenges, illustrating our argument with leading examples. Third, we conceptualize VR configurations and explore underlying assumptions for their use across disciplinary scenarios. Fourth, we propose a vision of VR as a discipline-agnostic platform that can support built environment users in visualizing preferred futures. We conclude by providing directions for research and practice.

Researching Digital Sociality

Digital technologies have become deeply implicated in and constitutive of contemporary social life. They are reshaping who we are and how we associate with one another, and are profoundly reconfiguring social relations, processes, and practices in a host of social spheres, particularly education. With Covid-19 further entrenching this implication and accelerating those changes, we are forced to rethink what research is and how it is done. This article presents a step towards researching a changing sociality using social media. Drawing on fieldwork on the digital transformation of Egyptian education, it argues that and showcases how WhatsApp can be systematically used as a qualitative data collection instrument to examine educational change. This article also situates WhatsApp research within digital ethnographic traditions, unpacks emergent methodological challenges and ethical quandaries, and presents potential ways to manage them. In so doing, it problematizes extant methodological categories (such as participation), entrenched dichotomies (such as private/public space), and epistemological questions (such as research temporality). Using a unique case from the Global South at an exceptional time of (educational) change, this article can help researchers as they think about their questions, design their research, conduct their fieldwork, and maneuver an elusive digital landscape. It informs broader methodological discussions within digital sociology and anthropology (of education), digital ethnography, and social media research. It also informs research in other domains like healthcare, geographies beyond the Global South, and platforms with similar affordances like Telegram.

Political Parties in India, Preferring a Well-Resourced and Well-Organized Social Media Net Working for the End-Results in General Elections

Social Media, in the present era of electronic revolution has become the means and end of all communication as such the democracies are wondering if social media can be a valid indicator to predict election end-results. Keeping in view the demand and surge in the use of social media like Face Book, Twitter etc. the present exploration work towards the scrutiny whether the social media had any consequence on the 2014 General Elections end-results. A huge number of social media whispers for 120 days from 5th January to 5th March, 2014 of sufficient political parties in India have been considered for the present exploration. It clearly speaks that, social media whispers, occupied paramount importance on the end-results of General Elections 2014. Keywords: Political campaigns, Web technologies, Advertising, Internet, Digital Landscape, Social media tool, Mass communication

Teaching of Remote Sensing Technology for Landscape Architecture in the Context of Spatial Information Technology

The research of digital landscape architecture springs up in recent years. The emerging digital technology provides a rational and objective method to mine and quantify the endogenous laws of landscape architecture. Remote sensing (RS) technology has become a new growth point in the current research and design of landscape spatial information. To develop the professional teaching of landscape architecture, it is important to fully integrate the RS technology into the teaching system of spatial information technology, carry out systematic spatial information quantification and research-based teaching of landscape architecture, and collaboratively promote the teaching of landscape architecture design. This paper firstly analyzes the integration and application potential of RS technology into landscape architecture. Considering the demand and trend of information-based teaching of landscape architecture, the authors integrated the relevant technologies into an RS teaching platform for landscape architecture, and summarized an application model of RS technology in the teaching of landscape architecture theories and practices. Moreover, a landscape spatial information chain, which is question-oriented, task-driven, and exploration-based, was constructed to promote the synergistic development between the students’ research and practice ability under spatial information integration.