Digital Applications for Cultural and Heritage Institutions
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Digital Applications for Cultural and Heritage Institutions

James Hemsley, Vito Cappellini, Gerd Stanke, James Hemsley, Vito Cappellini, Gerd Stanke

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eBook - ePub

Digital Applications for Cultural and Heritage Institutions

James Hemsley, Vito Cappellini, Gerd Stanke, James Hemsley, Vito Cappellini, Gerd Stanke

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About This Book

Electronic imaging and digital applications have brought numerous benefits for museums, galleries, archives and other organizations in the arts, culture and heritage sectors. Bringing together leading international practitioners from different disciplines, the EVA (Electronic Imaging and the Visual Arts) conferences help those working in the field to gain the most from developments in multimedia technology. This accessible volume collects recent papers from EVA conferences, covering case studies from the world's greatest institutions, as well as from some of the smallest and most innovative. Topics covered include virtual reconstruction of destroyed buildings, digital image archiving, 2D and 3D digitization projects, website evaluation, virtual archaeology, handheld interactive visitor support, exploiting digital cultural heritage and electronic aids for non-speaking people, as well as summaries of international research and technology development. The volume presents in convenient form the wealth of experience of a great variety of international specialists, allowing readers to further enhance the visitor experience of their collections.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351944144

Chapter 1
Introduction and International Overview

James Hemsley, Vito Cappellini and Gerd Stanke

Aims and Audiences

The first aim of this book is to provide a panorama of leading developments in the field of culture and information and communications technologies (ICT) at the beginning of the new millennium. The second is to show how these constitute a genuine international movement, since although the original basic technology is largely US in origin, its application, further development and refinement is widely diffused with other regions, especially Europe. Increasingly, China, Japan and Russia, for example, are also taking leading roles, due to their rich storehouses of cultural heritage – museums, libraries, archives, archaeological sites and other resources – as well as contemporary cultural creators, including the performing arts. The third is to indicate how the cultural sector itself is becoming recognized as an inspiring technology driver – not just a passive recipient area for the products and services of technological progress. The final key objective is to encourage the growing international cooperation in the intersection of culture and technology, which has been ‘pushed’ by the European Commission (EC) from the late 1980s. The EC’s R&D policies have firmly encouraged cross-border projects across the European Union and other participant countries: since the mid-1990s, broader partnership projects have been fostered, beginning with Canada. National, regional and local governments as well as major charitable organizations and international organizations such as UNESCO and the World Bank have also played an increasingly important role.
Our target readers are, firstly, non-technical professionals and managers in the cultural sector who are engaged in the application of new technologies and, in particular, those who are participating – or considering participating – in project work of such a challenging nature that it is actually leading scientists, engineers and technologists, as well as researchers in other fields such as psychology, to push the technology by inter-disciplinary cooperation. Therefore this book is not a technology guide, the emphasis being rather on trying to present a cross-section of new developments in a form which is readily understandable by non-specialists. However, it is hoped that it will also be of interest to those technical people who are engaged in such work and wish to gain an appreciation of this rapidly developing and changing field as a whole. In particular, we hope that it will be of value to those who, coming from one side or another of the ‘great divide’ between science and the arts and humanities, have made efforts to become ‘bi-cultural’. It has been well recognized for many years that, due to the remarkable growth of knowledge and consequent increasing specialization, the ideal Renaissance reach of Leonardo da Vinci remains far outside that of today’s experts. However, there are increasing numbers of those from both sides – represented by the authors of the papers in this work – who, inspired by da Vinci, are trying to at least appreciate the ‘other side’ and to reach across the divide and help create a kind of human bridge between those in the far reaches of the two worlds. This book recognizes their work and is also aimed at them, to encourage and support their efforts. We also hope that it will prove of interest to policy makers, including government and funding agencies.

The Book’s Structure

After this introductory section, Part 1 presents three papers which, from different viewpoints, indicate the strategic value and future potential of the multiplicative relationship: ‘culture x technology’. Mulrenin reports on the seminal work of one of the most far-reaching of a series of ‘roadmapping’ projects, DigiCULT, which was carried out by a pan-European team involving inputs from some 180 top people in the field and supported by the European Commission. This set out perspectives for the field, serving as an aid to subsequent directions and decision making. As a counterpoint, Taylor et al. from Canada show, by means of the story of their scientific work over a decade, how cultural heritage emerged from a ‘Cinderella before the ball’ position to act as a key driver in their pioneering 3D technology work. Then Brakker and Kujbyshev describe the impressive developments in Russia which, despite the economic problems, are rapidly closing the ‘gap’ with the West: this paper is in lieu of a series of Russian papers, as the proceedings from the EVA Moscow Conferences are available on the Web (at www.evarussia.ru) and therefore were not included in this book
Cooperative cross-border projects are considered in the Part 2: such initiatives have increasing importance – especially in the European Union – because they also cross sectoral boundaries. Two of the papers describe pan-European projects, both of which include not only the ‘old EU’ of 15 countries, but also partners from Eastern Europe. Cataccio et al. describe ArchTerra, a cooperation in the archaeological field between a set of typical players in the field. Krizova describes a contrasting project, CHIMER, in which schoolchildren are in the driving user role. The third paper in this group, by Griepentrog et al., shows how two teams in different continents can cooperate, not only in an advanced 3D technical application, but also in mutual stimulation to develop detailed reconstructions – an excellent example of in-depth cross-continental cooperation.
Archaeology and now also increasingly history are taking a major role in the ‘culture x technology’ scene at the beginning of the 21st century, contrasting sharply with 10 to 15 years earlier when art history and art galleries were the focus of attention; this change reflects the development of 3D technology. Part 3 begins with a paper by Krebs and Bruck on a German multi-faith homage to religious architecture and history, both Christian and Jewish. A Swiss team’s work on a remarkable ‘mountainscape’ model is presented next by Visnacova et al. The rich archaeological and technical resources of one of the smaller new EU countries, Latvia, are described in Snore’s paper about a virtual open air musuem. Then Suzan Hazan presents a virtual project at the Israel Museum on its most treasured objects, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and another on an Electronic Art Garden. The final paper in this section deals with both conservation and cultural tourism: Lowe et al. explain work on a high-quality, life-size 3D physical reconstruction (of a very important Egyptian tomb, that of Seti I), which has the dual objective of helping to preserve the original while also providing an attraction for cultural tourists.
Digital archiving is the focus of Part 4, beginning with a useful assessment of the state of the art in 2D digitization at the turn of the millennium by Rudolf Gschwind et al., based on specific practical work at various Swiss museums and libraries. A rare view of developments in the corporate sector is then provided by Wolfgang Mueller, reporting on a comprehensive project carried out for BMW archives. Work at Italy’s largest cultural heritage documentation centre, the ICCD in Rome, is now reaching new levels of sophistication with image-based approaches, building on decades of prior ICT work, as described by Maria Luisa Polichetti. This work is also notable for its application of results from a series of EC-supported R&D projects and even one Europe-Japan project.
Design, retrieval and protection is the broad scope of Part 5, which begins with an Anglo-American cooperative project (described by Ben Rubinstein and Holly Witchey) to develop methods and tools for repeated use by museum staff for temporary exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum. Art history university teaching and research has been a key target for image-based systems developers for over 15 years and an ambitious multi-institution German initiative is described by Sigrid Ruby and Ute Verstegen. Databases of monument images offer challenging difficulties in facilitating searching by users and Phil Carlisle’s paper provides innovative approaches. Historic gardens and landscapes were a ‘Cinderella’ area during the first decade of ‘culture x technology’ and thus John Counsell’s interesting paper on work to enable access and help conserve English and French gardens and landscapes is a valuable contribution to showing the wider applicability of imaging technology to our cultural and natural resources. Protection of intellectual property rights is a vexing and longstanding problem area and the two papers by Dimitrios Tsolis et al. and Jean Barda and Claude Rollin provide a picture of the situation in this area in which the problems are certainly not purely technological and financial, but also involve many complex legal and organizational issues.
The special needs of the disabled are the focus of Part 6, although it should be emphasized that making these part of an inclusive approach to accessibility issues in general is a very welcome move. Marcus Weisen first sets out the overall international scene by considering general policy issues and then Jonathan Bowen, the ‘father of virtual museums on the Web’, addresses the situation with regard to Web systems in particular. The remainder of this section consists of short papers prepared for a special workshop at EVA 2002 Berlin. There are two detailed papers on making the Web more accessible by Beate Schulte and Ulrike Peter and Brigitte Bornemann-Jeske, with a concluding case study on electronic aids for non-speaking people by Jochen Scherer. These kinds of efforts needs to be continued over many years, not just for the European Year of the Disabled (2003), if these disadvantaged sectors of our society are to gain the improved access to our cultural heritage that they deserve.
The last section of selected papers is on ‘Interactive Realities and Future Possibilities’, beginning with a paper by Malcolm Ferris on a prize-winning exhibition in which a series of innovative interactive exhibits provided enjoyment and education to many thousands of visitors. The theme of the ‘interactive museum’ is continued and extended in Alessandro Mecocci’s paper describing interactive museum rooms. The third paper, by Ciavarella and Paternò, puts the interactivity into the hands – literally – of the visitors with the use of hand-held devices, a trend which appears likely to continue. Stephen Brewster then describes the application of haptics to provide the sense of touch for users – a new dimension of empowerment, which also has important opportunities for the disabled. Finally, Anton Nijholt brings in another exciting new possibility: musician characters populating scenes with virtual actors, including displaying their emotional reactions.
The final section of the book is a discussion of future opportunities and challenges. As we look back on some twenty years of work on imaging and culture, the temptation to try to look forward another twenty is very strong. Although it is recognized that the only certain thing about such forecasts is that they will be wrong, we nonetheless offer some views on this and hope that this book will contribute to facing the challenges and problems, so helping in the realization of dreams.

The Background to ICT in the Cultural Sector across the European Union

In the UK, the use of information and communications technologies in the cultural sector can be traced back to the 1970s and before, with (in particular) its application for museum collections documentation reflected by the establishment of the precursor of the Museum Documentation Association, now known as the MDA, in Cambridge in the mid-1970s. The field of archaeology was also noted for its use of quantitative analysis and use of computing from an early stage. However, it was only when image capture and processing technologies began to emerge from their special fields of origin, such as the military, that the new technologies succeeded in the 1980s in making a major public as well as ‘back-room’ impact.
The field of public electronic imaging technology and cultural applications was inaugurated – unsurprisingly in one sense, since it followed previous pioneering efforts a century before the cinema – in France at the opening of the magnificent new Musèe d’Orsay in 1986, thanks to visionaries involved in the planning who dared to aim for an image-based visitor information system right from the start. Although sometimes criticized (although just in France itself it seems) for inevitable weaknesses, there can be little doubt that this established the first benchmark and acted as an inspiration for other museums and galleries internationally, with the National Gallery in London setting the next such benchmark with their ‘Microgallery’ in 1991. This ‘second-generation’ visitor information system, developed by a small innovative British multimedia company Cognitive Applications, was then taken up in the US, firstly by the San Diego Gallery of Art and then the National Gallery in Washington. Rapid diffusion of such systems then followed across the world, until their present ubiquitious nature.
In parallel with the first French visitor system developments, other work of a more academic nature was also taking off in various countries, as indicated for example by the formation of CHArt (Computers and the History of Art) in the mid- 1980s under the leadership of Professor William Vaughan at Birkbeck College, London University, who also created the first MA course in Art History and Computing. In addition R&D projects were being conceived by mixed-sector academia, museum and industrial teams in various European countries, with three such project consortia winning funding from the European Commission:
  • European Museum Network, EMN, working to develop systems for pan- European access to museum object images and information – well before the Web and even suitable telecommunication systems were available, but pointing the way for subsequent efforts.
  • NARCISSE, aimed primarily at CD-ROM development for conservation purposes, rather than public access, but also carrying out new digitization system development work.
  • VASARI, Visual Arts System for Archiving and Retrieval of Images (the acronym devised by Dr David Saunders of the National Gallery, London, as a clear homage to the famous Italian ‘Father of Art History’), for ultra-high- quality imaging direct from paintings
These three consortia, involving different sectors from a number of European countries including Italy and Spain, were led respectively by German, French and British organizations. Curiously they were funded by three different units at the EC, the two for Computing (ESPRIT) and Telecoms (RACE) operating from Brussels, and one from Luxemburg (IMPACT) for market-oriented applications. All three units operated within the second five-year European R&D Framework Programme and were later amalgamated in the 1990s, reflecting ‘convergence’. These three pioneering projects were funded by the EC despite a lack of recognition at that time of the cultural sector being an appropriate one for information and communications technologies R&D.
Thanks to strong EC interest as well as demand and political, media and professional public interest, these three projects were followed by hundreds more pan-European ones in the 1990s, involving not only R&D, but also by the EC’s RAPHAEL and Culture 2000 programmes of the Cultural and Education Directorates (also merged during the decade). There have been a considerable number involving the use of technology, such as the VIKING project, which produced a CD-ROM distributed free to schools in the partner countries, and was carried out by the National Museum of Denmark, the National Museum of Ireland and the National Museums of Scotland, the coordinating partner. For a helpful complete list of the partners and coordinators of the most recent IST projects see www.cordis.lu.
In the R&D area special mention should be made of the Telematics Applications Programme, TAP, which supported over 100 projects involving the development and experimental application of innovative technology for the library field. Of note was the absence of a similar special programme for museums or other areas such as archives: a more general cultural heritage R&D technology programme had been considered in the early 1990s, but was not followed through at the time due in part to concerns that this might lead to a ‘ghetto’ effect. Indeed it was judged by some observers that, by thus permitting museums (in particular) a free rein to participate in technology projects across the whole range of technologies in which R&D was being carried out, the museum community received a comparable amount of both EC Framework Programme funding and R&D effort in the early and mid-1990s as the libraries – not a normal budget division. The range of projects supported in the period up to 1997 by the European Commission was shown in two compendia, produced as part of the EVA Cluster projects (1996 and 1998), now unfortunately out of print, which provided summaries of some 100 EC projects across a variety of different programme areas which had been gradually coalescing during the mid- 1990s. It is the nature of high-tech R&D to be risky and so inevitably many of these were not as successful as had been hoped — for example, as the Internet and the Web burst onto the scene, work on other approaches was rendered obsolete. However, it is noteworthy that the cross-European team working relationships formed in them tended to be quite persistent and helped in subsequent successful projects: in others the research lines opened up by the more successful ones (such as the VASARI project) have been continued and applied by the resulting VASARI lab/centres in London, Florence and Munich as well as by other project partners, notably the Centre de recherche et restauration des musèes de France (C2RMF).
The mid-1990s were also characterized by am...

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