Towards Tangible Cultural Heritage Experiences—Enriching VR-based Object Inspection with Haptic Feedback

VR/AR technology is a key enabler for new ways of immersively experiencing cultural heritage artifacts based on their virtual counterparts obtained from a digitization process. In this article, we focus on enriching VR-based object inspection by additional haptic feedback, thereby creating tangible cultural heritage experiences. For this purpose, we present an approach for interactive and collaborative VR-based object inspection and annotation. Our system supports high-quality 3D models with accurate reflectance characteristics while additionally providing haptic feedback regarding shape features of the object based on a 3D printed replica. The digital object model in terms of a printable representation of the geometry as well as reflectance characteristics are stored in a compact and streamable representation on a central server, which streams the data to remotely connected users/clients. The latter can jointly perform an interactive inspection of the object in VR with additional haptic feedback through the 3D printed replica. Evaluations regarding system performance, visual quality of the considered models, as well as insights from a user study indicate an improved interaction, assessment, and experience of the considered objects.

Building Cultural Heritage Reference Collections from Social Media through Pooling Strategies: The Case of 2020’s Tensions Over Race and Heritage

Social networks constitute a valuable source for documenting heritage constitution processes or obtaining a real-time snapshot of a cultural heritage research topic. Many heritage researchers use social networks as a social thermometer to study these processes, creating, for this purpose, collections that constitute born-digital archives potentially reusable, searchable, and of interest to other researchers or citizens. However, retrieval and archiving techniques used in social networks within heritage studies are still semi-manual, being a time-consuming task and hindering the reproducibility, evaluation, and open-up of the collections created. By combining Information Retrieval strategies with emerging archival techniques, some of these weaknesses can be left behind. Specifically, pooling is a well-known Information Retrieval method to extract a sample of documents from an entire document set (posts in case of social network’s information), obtaining the most complete and unbiased set of relevant documents on a given topic. Using this approach, researchers could create a reference collection while avoiding annotating the entire corpus of documents or posts retrieved. This is especially useful in social media due to the large number of topics treated by the same user or in the same thread or post. We present a platform for applying pooling strategies combined with expert judgment to create cultural heritage reference collections from social networks in a customisable, reproducible, documented, and shareable way. The platform is validated by building a reference collection from a social network about the recent attacks on patrimonial entities motivated by anti-racist protests. This reference collection and the results obtained from its preliminary study are available for use. This real application has allowed us to validate the platform and the pooling strategies for creating reference collections in heritage studies from social networks.

Batik in Malaysia and Indonesia: A collaboration for reconciling issues of cultural heritage

Conflict claims for the cultural heritage of batik between Indonesia and Malaysia have created tensions between the people of these two countries. The Indonesian and Malaysian governments have never involved academics and arts education institutions in resolving such conflict claims, yet, these communities can play a significant role in post-conflict reconciliation efforts. This article describes a conflict reconciliation method initiated by academics, artists and art educators through a collaborative art project between art higher education institutions in Malaysia and Indonesia. Ways in which collaborations within and across the art and education communities may address the understanding and reconciliation of issues related to cultural heritage conflict are explored.

Representation of Socio-historical Context to Support the Authoring and Presentation of Multimodal Narratives: The Mingei Online Platform

In this article, the Mingei Online Platform is presented as an authoring platform for the representation of social and historic context encompassing a focal topic of interest. The proposed representation is employed in the contextualised presentation of a given topic, through documented narratives that support its presentation to diverse audiences. Using the obtained representation, the documentation and digital preservation of social and historical dimensions of Cultural Heritage are demonstrated. The implementation follows the Human-Centred Design approach and has been conducted under an iterative design and evaluation approach involving both usability and domain experts.

Intangible Cultural Heritage in Tourism: Research Review and Investigation of Future Agenda

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) can be a valuable tourism resource for both government and local communities. However, the complex definition and the massive and fragmented nature of ICH data make it hard to review and conclude research trends and future directions of ICH tourism. In this study, 85 keywords extracted from ICH definitions are input in the Web of Science database before collecting papers indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index, the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, and the Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Social Science and Humanities. Later, a systematic literature review of 418 ICH tourism studies from 76 countries published between 2000 and 2021 were conducted based on three groups of questions. The findings mainly illustrated that: (1) Currently research in ICH tourism is mainly composed of three themes: resource planning and sustainability, the impact of tourism development, and tourist behavior and destination marketing; (2) topics related to food tourism, sacred knowledge, traditional management systems, traditional management systems, legends, and myths can achieve high impact; (3) in the last five years, scholars have reduced using the official full name of ICH in tourism studies, while the category of “social practices, rituals and festive events” has become a hot topic since 2010; (4) ecotourism, culinary tourism, festival tourism, and religious tourism are the most discussed in ICH tourism research, and they will still be intensive topics in near future; (5) future directions in ICH tourism research are resultant of three vectors: place making, technology, and environment. The results present a comprehensive picture of current popular ICH topics and predict future directions in the field of ICH tourism. The systematic review of literature can help contribute to both theoretical construction, heritage preservation, and tourism practices.

The Heritage Given: Cultural Landscape and Heritage of the Vistula Delta Mennonites as Perceived by the Contemporary Residents of the Region

All tangible and intangible elements of cultural heritage that the past has conceded to local communities create unique landscapes shaped by tightly connected anthropogenic and natural factors. This heritage is a keystone of local identity which plays a significant role in politics, economic development, society and world view. In some regions, such as in the Vistula delta in Poland, the cultural heritage has been created by consecutive groups of settlers who represented different values, beliefs and ways of life. On the one hand, such a rich heritage may be perceived as a valuable asset and become a landmark or tourism product of a region. On the other hand, it may be perceived as alien and unwanted by contemporary residents, especially when they are not descendants of the former communities. The main objective of the study presented herein is to analyse how the residents of the Vistula delta region, called Żuławy Wiślane, perceive and use cultural heritage of the Mennonites, representing the most extraordinary group of settlers who used to live in the region. The analysis covers original data gathered during survey research in the period of 2017–2018 under the project Miniatura I “Perception and usage of cultural heritage of the Vistula delta Mennonites” financed by the National Science Centre in Poland.

Application of Biology to Cultural Heritage

This Special Issue of the Applied Sciences, entitled “Application of Biology to Cultural Heritage” aimed to cover all the latest outstanding progress of biological and biochemical methods developed and applied to cultural heritage [...]