Rivista "IBC" XXVII, 2019, 4
Dossier: Heritage explorations across Europe
musei e beni culturali, dossier /
Heritage in the digital making
This work package explores the impact of digital archives and digital cultural heritage on those that engage with it, particularly in terms of their expression and the construction of individual and collective identities. The implications of digitization and online dissemination of archival and heritage material need to be analyzed and evaluated, the contexts understood, and consequences accounted for. Researchers in this theme are therefore evaluating, adopting and developing methodologies for identifying individual and collective impacts of engagement with digital archives and mechanisms in heritage outreach. They are carrying out research in several different but interrelated areas: examining engagement with digital archives and cultural heritage amongst diverse communities in different European locations and the questions of identity that emerge (Hannah Smyth, William Illsley); exploring the politics of digital cultural heritage and the impact of digital archive exhibitions (Carlotta Capurro); and utilizing the technique of emotional mapping to think about how emotional spatial information might be used in heritage practices (Nevena Marković).
Spatializing emotions, making place
NevenaMarković
The research explores ‘Emotional Cartography’ (Nold 2009), an additional concept in cartography, by looking at mapping practices and meanings, the correlation between emotional, thus cultural and social, spatial, and digital. Building on ‘Emotional Geography’ (Davidson, Bondi & Smith 2007 ), and understanding maps as an accumulation of multi-layered stories, the research rethinks Emotional Cartography as an allegory in terms of representation and semantics, both (carto)graphic and cognitive. How do emotions shape places, and how emotions are shaped by and within places, in a relation between and among people and places? How do emotional regimes relate to and affect heritage practices? How emotional mapping techniques can be applied to understand, sense and map-out subjective emotions? The research addresses these questions as it traces mapping approaches to hidden layers of places, imbued with memories, emotionality and temporality. Drawing on the dataset – the Corpus of Emotional Cartographies - it reflects on the state of practice of this emerging field: first, methods and techniques of mapping process, representation, interpretation; and second, the semantics and fluidity of terms and conceptions identified in the dataset and listed in the “Emotional Mapping Lexicon”. Ultimately, by sensing and mapping the spatial politics of emotions, using ethnographic methods such as walking methodologies, “Emotional Mapping” is tested as a tool for reflexive (spatial) thinking in heritage, as a part of a deeper understanding of mapping as a practice, research method, and metaphor.
Digital archives and articulating identity
HannahSmyth
The research lies at the nexus of digital archives, heritage and commemoration. It is focusing on the digital presence of this Decade of Centenaries in Ireland, the period 2012-2023 during which the centenaries of several moments of national and international significance are being commemorated via the cultural arm of the Irish state. A wave of digitization projects has characterized these centenaries and a critical heritage lens is applied to these commemorative digital archives within this state-led national identity project. Of interest are the themes of identity and gender particularly around the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, as well as the social media response to this centenary. To this end, several institutional and digital archives case studies and social media data analysis have been conducted. These case studies demonstrate the lifecycle of a digital archive collection, the complex relationship between digitization, ‘democratization’ and access, and the role of commemorative digital archives in both supporting and challenging national narratives and in strengthening heritage-institutional as much as individual and collective identities. These findings will be contextualized by textual analysis of online public discourse around the 2016 centenary using digital humanities methods. Underpinned by critical feminist discourse, the aim is to situate and understand these digital archives and public responses to the centenary within their historical and contemporary social reality (Thylstrup 2018).
Heritage in the Digital Making
William Illsley
The research’s focus is the analysis of digital encounters with the historic environment. To identify the varying capacities for heritage transmission, as a first aspect, the research comprehensively assessed the role of development-led archaeological databases (or Historic Environment Records - HERs) (Illsley 2019). Commonplace internationally, these databases are often the primary source of information ahead of archaeological excavation. It is also often assumed, as they are largely free to access, that they play a role in heritage distribution. The analysis challenges these assumptions, particularly from a sociological perspective; positing that the performative aspects of heritage delivery does not function to the same degree for a universal audience. Moreover, to compare aspects of digitality, a case study focusing on the creation and display of a virtual reconstruction of the 17th century city of Gothenburg is underway. As the focal point of a secondment at GöteborgsStadsmuseum, this is a reading of the concept of time travel (Petersson & Holtorf 2017); the embryonic capacity of digitality in the city’s heritage making process, and the potential for the re-presentation of public narratives. The research will conclude by tracing the relationship between urban space and narrative representation of the city in modern and postmodern literature. Temporally, these periods coincide with the advance of post-industrial urbanity, as well as the rise of the moving image. As a means of encountering the urban landscape, these depictions will be read as analogues to the contemporary developments of 3D visualization and spatial representation.
Curating Digital Heritage
CarlottaCapurro
The research focuses on the impact of the digital turn on heritage institutions, analyzing both the human and the technology agencies on the digitization process (Cameron 2018). The project investigates how different actors collaborate in the construction of collections that include digital heritage, exploring their roles and their mutual responsibilities. The research also analyses how digital infrastructures are imposing a new layer of meaning on cultural heritage, and how this is in turn affecting the way digital heritage is generated, used and perceived (Thylstrupp 2019). The lifecycle of digital cultural heritage items is investigated, from their creation to their cataloguing and their use within exhibitions, to determine the technological and ethical assumptions at the base of the digital strategies and their implications for museums' audiences. Many studies have analyzed how brick-and-mortar museums have developed their policy of collecting, ordering and presenting their material (Bennett
et al. 2017).
On the contrary, work still has to be done on the curatorial processes for virtual collections, where digital heritage has become part of the exhibition.
The central case study is Europeana, the European platform for digital cultural heritage. Launched in 2008, Europeana aggregates over 57.6 million digital objects from about 4000 institutions, representing the most extensive digital cultural project and driver of digitization in Europe. Europeana is analyzed combining ethnographic fieldwork, digital humanities methods and critical discourse analysis, to delineate its role in orienting European digital heritage politics.
Conclusion
As a progressively prevalent and quotidian concept, digitality increasingly demands both immediacy and intellection. To reflect this, these researches imply a range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies needed for both creating digital archive and cultural heritage resources and evaluating their use and impact in digital ethnography and anthropology. By determining how we as heritage actors manipulate digitality to alter recognized practices, we in return aim to gain an understanding of how digitality changes us as both beneficiaries of and participants in the communication and transmission of cultural heritage. Critically, this approach will also reflect upon the role of digitality as a mediator between institution and user and how the users may influence praxis via their digital footprint.
References & Additional Reading
Bennett, T., Cameron, F., Dias, N., Dibley, B., Harrison, R., Jacknis, I. & McCarthy, C. 2017, Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums and Liberal Government, Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Cameron, F. 2018, Posthuman Museum Practices in Braidotti , R. & Hlavajova, M. (eds.), Posthuman Glossary , Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 349-352.
Davidson, J., Bondi, L. and Smith, M. 2007, Emotional geographies, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing.
Illsley, W. 2019, Problematizing the Historic Environment Record: Comments on persistent issues in England and Sweden , “Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites”, n. 21, pp. 113-134.
Nold, C. (ed.) 2009, Emotional cartography: technologies of the self. London: Space Studios.
Petersson, B., Holtorf, C. 2017, The Archaeology of Time Travel: Experiencing the past in the 21st Century, Oxford: ArchaeoPress Publishing Ltd.
Thylstrup, N.B. 2019, The Politics of Mass Digitisation, Cambridge and London: MIT Press.
“Emotional Mapping” as the most frequent term used within the analyzed mapping projects.
Word Cloud from a small sample of Twitter data collected from March 2016 during the commemorations of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, generated using Voyant Tools (https://voyant-tools.org/). The Twitter 'Full Archive' (historical Tweets) was queried using Python and facilitated through the Twitter Developers Premium API.
A curated view of digitally reconstructed historic urban landscape of Gothenburg. The choices and politics of its presentation and design will be placed under academic scrutiny as part of the case study and secondment with Göteborgs Stadsmuseum.
Europeana Migration, Collection Day in Brussel. During 2018, Europeana ran the Migration project, with the aim of creating an online collection about migration to, from and within Europe. The project also involved a series of Collection Days hosted by cultural institutions around Europe, where people could share an object and their stories about migration.
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