How Digitization is Empowering Vietnamese Cultural Professionals to Preserve, Present, and Promote Art and Culture Online: Navigating Challenges whilst Harnessing Opportunities to Create a Digital Culture

The ability to publish and provide access to cultural resources via free, open source digital platforms is empowering Vietnamese cultural professionals to promote their culture to local and international audiences. Digitization projects now include the use of 3D, VR, and AR digital technologies for the purpose of being published on digital platforms. This is creating an emergent digital culture in Vietnam, with an increasing amount of available resources online. Digitization projects are now used to preserve cultural heritage as well as to present and promote contemporary art and culture. This reflects a change in practices amongst cultural professionals in Hanoi, in terms of how digital technologies are used and the value placed on making cultural resources publicly accessible online. However, as new content, knowledge, and voices are able to participate in the online discourse on art and culture, the question remains as to whether this digital transition is creating greater equality and inclusion in the cultural sector or if it is exacerbating already existing forms of digital cultural colonialism. This paper presents findings from 50 interviews with cultural professionals working in the cultural sector in Hanoi about their digitization projects and digital work practices, the developments in digitization in Hanoi’s cultural sector over the past five years, how cultural professionals are utilizing the opportunities afforded by digital technologies for cultural preservation and promotion, as well as the challenges they face in carrying out digitization projects.

Co-Constructing Digital Archiving Practices for Community Heritage Preservation in Egypt and Iraq

We document cultural heritage to preserve cultural heritage, to ensure its survival by pushing back against the entropic forces of forgetting and neglect. These entropic forces are particularly acute for intangible cultural heritage preserved in digital form and produced in fragile and conflict-affected settings. And whilst professionals from across the “memory” professions have responded to these challenges, based on our experience of development work with young people in Egypt and Iraq, they have done so in ways that are ill-suited to the worldviews, cultural practices, educational experience and learning models of those outside centres of archival power. This paper describes the delivery of “digital archiving” workshops, training, support and resources developed by an interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral collective of academics, practitioners, community leaders and community participants. Working at the intersection of development studies, heritage management and digital preservation, this paper argues that cultural heritage practices are enriched by foregrounding particular place-based and contingent activities that productively peel back the provincialism of the canons of enlightenment memory work.

Preliminary Evaluation of the Terrestrial Laser Scanning Survey of the Subterranean Structures at Hagia Sophia

This article presents the preliminary evaluation of the first terrestrial laser scan survey on the subterranean structures of Hagia Sophia, which was built in the Late Antique Era in Istanbul. The project which was carried out in 2020, aimed to study the underground network of Hagia Sophia which consists of ventilation channels, wells, and other spatial units of various sizes, serving various functions (e.g. a passage, hypogeum, and cellar). This project allowed for a visualization of units that have a total length of approximately 936 m. According to our observations, this infrastructure provided water supply, drainage, and air circulation. The cloud point data derived from the scanning provided us with a plan overlapping with the ground floor, and multiple cross-sections which present the relationship of the different layers with each other. To this end, the survey helps understand the different underground layers, as well as their relations with the superstructures. These relations enabled us to discuss on the atriums of the Theodosian Hagia Sophia and Justinian’s Hagia Sophia. Finally, we could determine the points where the debris and mud has blocked or restricted air circulation in the channels.

Aspects of the Long-Term Preservation of Digitized Catalogue Data: Analysis of the Databases of Integrated Collection Management Systems

During this research, the catalogues of more than 200 libraries and museums of Hungary and its neighboring countries were examined. The authors calculated the amount and the size of the metadata and of the full content records in the databases of their collection management systems, as well as the size and the type of the full content data and the size of the databases. By analyzing the results, the goal was to answer the following three questions: (1) Can any significant difference be established between the results according to country, nationality, or type of institution?; (2) How large is a metadata record or a full content record?; (3) Is it possible to establish a methodology for selecting a representative sample of institutions to facilitate further research? For planning the costs of data management, the size of the databases, the number of metadata records, and the variability of metadata and media records shall all be considered. A distinction should be made between the indispensable “primary” data to be preserved for a long time, and the “secondary” data units which are derived from the primary data. It is investigated in this article how to establish the size of primary data in the databases of collection management systems.

Preserving History for the Persistent Legacy of Our School: A Youth-Led Participatory Heritage Project

This in-process project report describes a critical youth-led participatory heritage project that seeks to document, preserve, and make digitally accessible oral histories, archives, and artifacts of an urban, predominantly African American high school with a rich history and legacy. As a long-standing community institution, the narratives emerging from this high school are intricately connected with the larger story of the city of Philadelphia. This article uses an equity-based lens to demonstrate how youth-led participatory heritage can contribute to youth empowerment, critical consciousness development, and critical digital literacies. Implications for schools and communities experiencing gentrification, displacement, and community change are provided, including how participatory heritage with youth can utilize collaborative, asset-based efforts to foster change that allows youth and communities to have agency over their individual and collective stories, community history and legacy, and their futures.

Acoustics as Tangible Heritage: Re-embodying the Sensory Heritage in the Boundless Reign of Sight

This conceptual study discusses cultural and historic sounds as tangible heritage by focusing on preservation practices for both soundscape and individual sound sources besides the acoustical fingerprints of the spaces. Although the intangible cultural heritage concept has opened a new room into the sensory objects, the formal approaches to sensory heritage are still missing and ambiguous. This study dwells on why we should classify culturally significant sensory objects as tangible heritage assets in terms of heritage, sensory semiotics, and acoustics. The digitalization methods to preserve and reconstruct acoustic heritage along with their measurable and computable nature were discussed as well.