Academic literature on the topic 'Digital humanities, art history, cultural heritage'

The development of Information Technology and Digital Humanities has brought numerous significant changes to the Cultural Heritage domain. The Digital Humanities has become a dynamic and fertile research field, and new projects and opportunities are constantly flourishing. The BYZART project perfectly fits this context. This project is coordinated by the Department of History and Cultures of the University of Bologna, embracing a wide consortium of partners from Bulgaria, Greece and Italy. It aims at enhancing Byzantine and Post-Byzantine artistic and cultural heritage within the Europeana platform. This project will enrich the existing Europeanacollections with about 75,000 new cultural and artistic multimedia objects relevant to Byzantine history and culture, including collections of digitized photos, video and audio content, and 3-D surveys and reconstructions. We have also established a liaison between the new materials and Byzantine-related content already existing on Europeana. The archival material collected and digitized by the BYZART consortium is of the greatest cultural and art-historical importance, but until now, it has not been properly evaluated or published. For this reason, BYZART aims to guarantee the preservation and evaluation of significant cultural heritage objects from a wide range of contexts, while also making them accessible to scholarly and general audiences alike.

Cultural heritage is at the heart of Russia’s war on Ukraine, still underway five months after the invasion on February 24, 2022. Statements from the Kremlin indicate that the fundamental goal of Putin’s regime is to undermine and eliminate the distinct and distinctive Ukrainian national identity, culture, and language – three concepts that are manifested through cultural heritage. During a war with such an agenda, internationally recognized frameworks such as the 1954 Hague Convention can be subverted, turning the blue shield symbol meant to protect cultural property into a target. While practices codified by the Hague Convention provide both opportunities and challenges for physical cultural heritage in this war, the biggest challenge for preserving digital cultural heritage is the lack of precedent. Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO, sucho.org) began on March 1, 2022, as an emergency response effort organized by three digital humanities practitioners, and quickly grew to over 1,300 volunteers. In this brief essay, the three co-founders – Anna Kijas, Sebastian Majstorovic, and Quinn Dombrowski – reflect on the first five months of SUCHO, the differences between physical and digital cultural heritage, the urgency of preserving digital cultural heritage during a war, and the importance of these materials for the future of art history.

The Digital Humanities have challenged all disciplines of Art History to engage with new interdisciplinary methodologies, learn new tools, and reevaluate their role within academia. In consequence, art historians occupy a new position in relation to the object of study. Museums have been equally transformed. The possibilities of creating virtual realities for lost/inaccessible monuments poses a new relationship between viewer and object in gallery spaces. Digital Humanities interventions in museums even allow us to preserve the memory of endangered global heritage sites that cease to exist or are inaccessible (celebrated examples including the lost Great Arch of Palmyra reconstructed with a 3D printer). Curatorial practices are now trending towards a sensorial and experiential approach. Is the role of Digital Humanities, in academic as well in museum settings, to “reveal” the object itself, through an empirical display of existing material, or to “reconstruct” something of the original experience of the object to engage spectators? Can we propose a reconciliation between these two “poles”? The Sixth International Day of Doctoral Studies promoted by RAHN aims to investigate the role of Digital Humanities by fostering a dialogue between the protection of cultural heritage sites, museology, the history of art, and the digitalization of Big Data.

In this paper, we analyze some of the platforms and technologies that influence the manner in which we interact and experience historical sites and heritage. Acknowledging that history is a constructed narration of the past, this paper demonstrates how contemporary technologies have agency in reconstructing histories in the present via digital platforms. By comparing online platforms for digital heritage production like Google Heritage with Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) platforms, we demonstrate how digital heritage may undergo a process recontextualization or decontextualization from its originating settings. We also show that digital heritage’s reconstruction of history is done through the act of remediation: by turning actual remnants of the past into digital models or by replacing such remnants with virtual representation that are globally accessible, something new is created and alternative stories can be told. Within that, we consider some of the ethical issues that are raised by the migration of historical narratives into digital platforms, as we point towards a growing tendency in which history and its production can be subjected to major data companies.

Abstract Although the digital humanities have traditionally been conceived as a text-based discipline, both digital visualization techniques as well as visual analysis are increasingly used for research in various humanities disciplines. Since there are several overlaps in epistemic cultures of visually oriented and digitally supported research in art and architectural history studies, museology, and archaeology, as well as cultural heritage, we introduce ‘visual digital humanities’ as novel ‘umbrella’ term to cover research approaches in the digital humanities that are dependent on both consuming and producing pictorial, rather than textual, information to answer their humanities research questions. This article aims to determine this particular field of research in terms of (1) research topics, (2) disciplinary standards, and (3) a scholarly culture as well as (4) researchers’ habits and backgrounds. This study is intended to highlight a scope of phenomena and aspects of relevance. Information is gathered by interviews with researchers at London universities and workshops held in Germany and Sweden.

The penetration of ICT in the management and study of material culture and the emergence of digital cultural repositories and linked cultural data in particular are expected to enable new paths in humanities research and new approaches to cultural heritage. Success is contingent upon securing information trustworthiness, long-term preservation, and the ability to re-use, re-combine and re-interpret digital content. In this perspective, we review the use in the cultural heritage domain of digital curation and curation-aware repository systems; achieving semantic interoperability through ontologies; explicitly addressing contextual issues of cultural heritage and humanities information; and the services of digital research infrastructures. The last two decades have witnessed an increasing penetration of ICT in the management and study of material culture, as well as in the Humanities at large. From collections management, to object documentation and domain modelling, to supporting the creative synthesis and re-interpretation of data, significant progress has been achieved in the development of relevant knowledge structures and software tools. As a consequence of this progress, digital repositories are being created that aim at serving as digital cultural memories, while a process of convergence among the different kinds of memory institutions, i.e., museums, archives, and libraries, in what concerns their information functions is already evolving. Yet the advantages offered by information management technology, mass storage, copying, and the ease of searching and quantitative analysis, are not enough to ensure the usefulness of those digital cultural memories unless information trustworthiness, long-term preservation, and the ability to re-use, re-combine and re-interpret digital content are ensured. Furthermore, the widely encountered need for integrating heterogeneous information becomes all the more pressing in the case of cultural heritage due to the specific traits of information in this domain. In view of the above fundamental requirements, in this presentation we briefly review the leveraging power of certain practices and approaches in realizing the potential of digital cultural memories. In particular, we review the use of digital curation and curation-aware repository systems; achieving semantic interoperability through ontologies; explicitly addressing contextual issues of cultural heritage and humanities information; and the services of digital research infrastructures. Digital curation is an interdisciplinary field of enquiry and practice, which brings together disciplinary traditions and practices from computer science, information science, and disciplines practicing collections-based or data-intensive research, such as history of art, archaeology, biology, space and earth sciences, and application areas 38 such as e-science repositories, organizational records management, and memory institutions (Constantopoulos and Dallas 2008). Digital curation aims at ensuring adequate representation of and long-term access to digital information as its context of use changes, and at mitigating the risk of repositories becoming “data mortuaries”. To this end a lifecycle approach to the representation of curated information objects is adopted; event-centric representations are used to capture information “life events”; the class of agents involved is extended to include knowledge producers and communicators in addition to information custodians; and context-specificity is explicitly addressed. Cultural heritage information comprises representations of actual cultural objects (texts, artefacts, historical records, etc.), their histories, agents (persons and organizations) operating on such objects, and their relationships. It also includes interpretations of and opinions about such objects. The recording of this knowledge is characterized by disciplinary diversity, representational complexity and heterogeneity, historical orientation, and textual bias. These characteristics of information are in line with the character of humanities research: hermeneutic and intertextual, rather than experimental; narrative, rather than formal; idiographic rather than nomothetic; and, conformant to a realist rather than positivist account of episteme (Dallas 1999). The primary use of this information has been to support knowledge-based access, while now it is gradually also being targeted at various synthetic and creative uses. A rich semantic structure, including subsumption, meronymic, temporal, spatial, and various other semantic relations, is inherent to cultural information. Complexity is compounded by terminological inconsistency, subjectivity, multiplicity of interpretation and missing information. From an information lifecycle perspective, digital curation involves a number of distinct processes: appraisal; ingesting; classification, indexing and cataloguing; knowledge enhancement; presentation, publication and dissemination; user experience; repository management; and preservation. These processes rely on three supporting processes, namely, goal and usage modelling, domain modelling and authority management. These processes effectively capture the context of digital curation and produce valuable resources which can themselves be seen as curated digital assets (Constantopoulos and Dallas 2008; Constantopoulos et al. 2009). The field of cultural information presents itself as a privileged domain for digital curation. There is a relatively long history of developing library systems and museum systems, along with recent intense activity on interoperable, semantically rich cultural information systems, boosted by two important developments: the emergence of the CIDOC CRM (ISO 21127) 1 standard ontology for cultural documentation; and the movement for convergence of museum, library and archive systems, one manifestation of which is the CIDOC CRM compatible FRBR-oo model 2 . Advances such as those outlined above allow addressing old research questions in new ways, as well as putting new questions that were very hard or impossible to tackle without the means of digital technologies. Significant enablers towards this direc- 1 http://www.cidoc-crm.org/ 2 http://www.cidoc-crm.org/frbr_inro.html 39 tion are the so-called digital research infrastructures, which bear the promise of facilitating research through sharing tools and data. Several trends can be identified in the development of research infrastructures, which follow two main approaches: a) The normative approach, whereby normalized collections of data and tools are developed as common resources and managed centrally by the infrastructure. b) The regulative approach, whereby resources reside with individual organizations willing to contribute them, under specific terms, to the community. A set of interoperability conditions and mechanisms provide a regulatory function that lies at the heart of the infrastructure. Both approaches are being pursued in all disciplines, but the mix differs: in hard sciences building common normalized infrastructures appears to be a necessity, with a complementary, yet significant role to be played by a network of interoperable, disparate sources. In the humanities, on the other hand, long scholarly traditions have produced a formidable variety of information collections and formats, mostly offering interpreted, rather than raw material for publication and sharing. These conditions favour the development of regulated networks of interoperable sources, with centralized, normative infrastructures in a complementary capacity. By way of example, a recent such infrastructure is DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ 3 , one of the national constituents of DARIAH-EU 4 , the Europe-wide digital infrastructure in the arts and humanities. DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ is a hybrid -virtual distributed infrastructure, bringing together the strengths and capacities of leading research, academic, and collection custodian institutions through a carefully defined, lightweight layer of services, tools and activities complementing, rather than attempting to replicate, prior investments and capabilities. Arts and humanities data and content resources are as a rule thematically organized, widely distributed, under the custodianship and curation of diverse institutions, including government agencies and departments, public and private museums, archives and special libraries, as well as academic and research units, associations, research projects, and other actors, and displaying a diverse degree of digitization. The mission of the infrastructure is then to provide the research communities with effective, comprehensive and sustainable capability to discover, access, integrate, analyze, process, curate and disseminate arts and humanities data and information resources, through a concerted plan of virtual services and tools, and hybrid (combined virtual and physical) activities, integrating and running on top of existing primary information systems and leveraging integration and synergies with DARIAH- EU and other related infrastructures and aggregators (e.g. ARIADNE 5 , CARARE 6 , LoCloud 7 ). In its first stage of development, the DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ Research Infrastructure has offered the following groups of services: 3 http://www.dyas-net.gr/ 4 http://www.dariah.eu/ 5 http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/ 6 http://www.carare.eu/ 7 http://www.locloud.eu/ 40 • Data sharing : comprehensive registries of digital resources; • Supporting the development of digital resources : tools and best practice guidelines for the development of digital resources; • Capacity building: workshops and training activities; and • Digital Humanities Observatory : evidence-based research on digital humanities, monitoring, outreach and dissemination activities. Key factor in the development of DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ, ARIADNE, CARARE and LoCloud resources alike has been a curation-oriented aggregator, the Metadata and Object Repository - MORe 8 (Gavrilis, Angelis & Dallas 2013; Gavrilis et al. 2013). This system supports the aggregation of metadata from multiple sources (OAI-PMH, Archive, SIP, Omeka, MINT) and heterogeneous systems in a single repository, the creation of unified indexes of normalized and enriched metadata, the creation of RDF databases, and the publication of aggregated records to multiple recipients (OAI- PMH, Archive, Elastic Search, RDF Stores). It enables the dynamic definition of validation and enrichment plans, supported by a number of micro-services, as well as the measurement of metadata quality. MORe can incorporate any XML/RDF metadata schema and can support several intermediate schemas in parallel. Its architecture is based on micro-services, a software development model according to which a complex application is composed of small, independent services communicating via a language-agnostic API, thus being highly reusable. MORe currently maintains access to 30 SKOS-encoded thesauri, totaling several hundred thousands of terms, as well as to copies of the Geo-names and Perio.do services, thus offering information enrichment on the basis of a wide array of sources. Metadata enrichment is a process of automatic generation of metadata through the linking of metadata elements with data sources and/or vocabularies. The enrichment process increases the volume of metadata, but it also considerably enhances their precision, therefore their quality. Performing metadata aggregation and enrichment carries several benefits: increase of repository / site traffic, better retrieval precision, concentration of indexes in one system, better performance of user services. To date MORe is used by 110 content provider institutions, and accommodates 23 different metadata schemas and about 20,800,000 records. The advent of digital infrastructures for arts and humanities research calls for a deeper understanding of how humanists work with digital resources, tools and services as they engage with different aspects of research activity: from capturing, encoding, and publishing scholarly data to analyzing, visualizing, interpreting and communicating data and research argumentation to co-workers and readers. Digitally enabled scholarly work and the integration of digital content, tools and methods present not only commonalities but also differences across disciplines, methodological traditions, and communities of researchers. A significant challenge in providing integrated access to disparate digital humanities resources and, more broadly, in supporting digitally-enabled humanities research, lies in empirically capturing the context of use of digital content, methods and tools. 8 http://more.dcu.gr/ 41 Several attempts have been made to develop a conceptual framework for DH in practice. In 2008, the AHRC ICT Methods Network 9 developed a taxonomy of digital methods in the arts and humanities. This was the basis for the classification of over 200 digital humanities projects funded by the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Council in the online resource arts-humanities.net, as well as for the subsequent Digital Humanities at Oxford 10 taxonomy. Other initiatives to build a taxonomy of Digital Humanities include TADIRAH 11 and DH Commons 12 . From 2011 to 2015 the Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities 13 (NeDiMAH) ran over 40 activities structured around key methodological areas in the humanities (digital representations of space and time; visualisation; linked data; creating and using large scale corpora; and creating editions). Through these activities, NeDiMAH gathered a snapshot of the practice of digital humanities in Europe, and the impact of digital methods on research. A key output of NeDiMAH is NeMO 14 : the NeDiMAH Ontology of Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities . This ontology of digital methods in the humanities has been built as a framework for understanding not just the use of digital methods, but also their relationship to digital content and tools. The development of an ontology, rather than a taxonomy, stands in recognition of the complexity of the digital humanities landscape, the interdisciplinarity of the field, and the dependencies that impact the use of digital methods in research. NeMO provides a conceptual framework capable of representing scholarly work in the humanities, addressing aspects of intentionality and capturing the diverse associations between research actors and their goals, activities undertaken, methods employed, resources and tools used, and outputs produced, with the aim of obtaining semantically rich structured representations of scholarly work (Angelis et al 2015; Hughes, Constantopoulos & Dallas 2016). It is grounded on earlier empirical research through semi-structured interviews with scholars from across Europe, which focused on analysing their research practices and capturing the resulting information requirements for research infrastructures (Benardou, Constantopoulos & Dallas 2013). The relevance of NeMO to the DH community was validated in a series of workshops through use cases contributed by researchers. A variety of complex associative queries articulated by researchers and encoded in SPARQL, demonstrated the potential of NeMO as an effective mechanism for information extraction and reasoning with regard to the use of digital resources in scholarly work and as a knowledge base schema for documenting scholarly practices. In a recent workshop in DH2016, researchers created their own NeMO-based descriptions of projects with an easy to use tool (Constantopoulos et al 2016). 9 http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/index.html 10 https://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/people-projects 11 http://tadirah.dariah.eu/vocab/index.php 12 http://dhcommons.org/ 13 http://nedimah.eu/ 14 http://nemo.dcu.gr/ 42 Knowledge bases documenting scholarly practice through NeMO can be useful to researchers by (a) helping them find information on earlier work relevant for their own research; (b) supporting goal-oriented organization of research work; (c) facilitating the discovery of new paths with regard to resources, tools and methods; and, (d) promoting networking among researchers with common interests. In addition research groups can get support for better project planning by explicitly exposing links between goals, actors, activities, methods, resources and tools, as well as assistance for discovering methodological trends, future directions and promising research ideas. Funding agencies, on the other hand, could benefit from the kind of systematic documentation and comparative overview of project work enabled by the ontology.

This article explores the potential that community-led digital engagement with heritage holds for stimulating active citizenship through taking responsibility for shared cultural heritage and for fostering long-lasting relationships between local community heritage groups and national museums. Through the lens of a pilot project titled Science Museum: Community-in-Residence, we discovered that – despite working with community groups that were already loyal to and enjoyed existing working ties with the Science Museum in London, United Kingdom – this undertaking proved challenging owing to a range of structural and logistical issues even before the application of digital devices and tools had been considered. These challenges notwithstanding, the pilot found that the creation of time and space for face-to-face dialogue and interactions between the Science Museum and the participating community heritage groups helped to establish the parameters within which digital co-curation can effectively occur. This, in turn, informed the development of a digital prototype with huge potential to enable remote, virtual connectivity to, and interactivity with, conversations about shared heritage. The ultimate goal was twofold: (a) to help facilitate collaborative sense-making of our shared past and (b) to aid the building of sustainable institutional and community/public working ties around emerging affinities, agendas and research questions in relation to public history and heritage.

This article focuses on the 2013–2016 exhibitions in Moscow Manege which were later transformed into a network of entertainment centres (“historical parks”) Russia––my (hi)story. The exhibitions are built on multimedia technologies and include no authentic artefacts/museum objects. There is a growing network of such centres all over Russia, all organized in a similar manner, appealing to the visitor’s emotions and creating a relation of affect through the unravelling of a nationalistic historical narrative. Claimed to present “the objective picture of the Russian history” the exhibitions are following the recent developments in Russian cultural policies and history curricula. By analysing narratives presented at the “historical park” exhibitions, in policy documents and in media, this article follows the changes in public attitude towards history, which heritage is perceived as ‘difficult’ and ‘contested’ and how the digital representations influence these perceptions. Based on this analysis I argue that the reduction of the museum mechanism to only digital and multimedia form can bring along very serious issues in different political contexts. Russian historical parks enterprise, which combines the methods of fostering patriotism by the means of historical narrative templates both from the 19th and the 20th centuries, enhanced with the 21st-century technology in a form of “multimedia museums,” is only one of such examples.

Moriori culture is one of the most researched in the Pacific, and yet perhaps one of the least well understood. Until the last 30 or so years, history had consigned the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands near New Zealand to being defined as extinct and almost landless. Today Moriori are in a spirit of revival and reconnection with their identity and culture. Through the gift of the Traditional Knowledge Revival Pathways (TKRP) software system, laser scanning of rākau momori (tree carvings), and involvement in the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage (IPinCH) Project, Moriori are developing an extensive database of cultural landscapes, elder stories, traditional practices and digital records of taonga. The next stage of this research will involve development of an intranet guide to taonga Moriori (ancestral artefacts) in overseas collections. Here we explore the methods and technology that Moriori have been using to assist in the process of preserving taonga for present and future generations to enjoy.

The Geography of Art International Scientific Conference has a long history. Geography of Art began in 1994 and was originally conceived as a purely publishing project. In 2009, the first conference was held under the auspices of the Likhachev Russian Research Institute for Cultural and Natural Heritage and its director Yuri A. Vedenin. The topics at the conferences are traditionally very diverse, but the “protagonist” of all discussions, debates, and subsequent collections is invariably space, in all its guises, and its interaction with culture. The original subjects such as the geography of art schools and traditions and the placement of artifacts on the earth’s surface have over time been supplemented by conceptual questions of the construction of spatial images in painting, literature, and cinema. Over the past few years, the conference has been organized by the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of RAS, the Russian Academy of Arts, GITR Film and Television School, and the Russian State University for the Humanities. In 2021, for the first time, the conference was arranged in a hybrid format: some sessions were held in person at the Russian Academy of Arts and GITR, while some discussions were convened online. This made it possible to significantly expand the geography of our participants. An important topic was brought up—the possibility of generating images of space and transforming the spatial picture of the world by different types of art, including screen art, creating new meanings of places and regions. A separate section was devoted to the concepts of space and the corresponding images in digital media, cinematography and photography. The section discussed the peculiarities of national cinematography from the point of view of forming the country’s image, which can play a significant role in intercultural communication, and regional images created with the help of photography and IT-technology as an attractor in the formation of recreational flows. Among other things, the conference covered the specifics of space perception in the era of digitalization, the creation of representations, and spectacularity. A separate topic was the construction of narrative topoi within the framework of different versions of screen adaptations of the same work. All discussions complemented each other in creating a three-dimensional picture of spatial images by means of digital and screen arts, generating a modified reality supplemented by photo and film visualizations.

Digital technology has changed the nature of how humans live as a society with lives orbiting a digital core of internet, smartphones, social media etc. There is now not only a physical world but a digital one too. This far-reaching transformation also applies to cultural institutions to digitize their activities, a result of responding to the expectations of a contemporary audience. The aim of this study is to examine the digitization of art- and cultural heritage in a digital world. The essay examines the digital activities of the Swedish National Museum of fine art that has developed before, during and as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is done through visual analysis and the theoretic framework of postphenomenology and social semiotics. The study finds that cultural heritage can be digitized in many different ways but that the digitization can’t replace the physical encounter with an artwork. Yet it can constitute new ways and perspectives on how to experience, see and discuss traditional works of art. Digitization of cultural heritage can therefore work to enhance its general interest, disseminate and influence an increase in availability of knowledge about cultural heritage and art history.

This thesis examines the relationship between mass tourism and heritage tourism in the construction and perpetuation of histories and identities of local stakeholders on Roatàn Island, Honduras. I explore how identity is constructed by and through the tourism industry, and how much of the agency in forming identity and telling cultural stories resides in the hands of key stakeholders involved in the development of tourism on the island. Local cultural stories that focus on the people who live and have lived on the island for centuries are becoming increasingly silenced by a more commoditized, tourism driven, picture of life on Roatàn. Here, I examine how this silencing takes place, what its effects are on tourism and development, and consider what elements of the tourism industry have contributed to this silencing. On Roatàn, the issue of identity as interpreted through museums has become increasingly contested, as the tourism industry now controls the presentation of cultural and archaeological history of the island. This control influences how tourists visiting Roatàn interpret the past and present the heritage of local groups.

The present study examines the spatial relationship between archaeological sites on the island of Roatán, Honduras and their topographical and biophysical location, as well as how these relationships are and continue to be impacted by the island's current socioeconomic context. Despite several studies and explorations conducted on the island's history, archaeology, and geography since the early twentieth century, little is known of its place and role within the larger cultural and socioeconomic spheres of interaction in this region: Mesoamerica and the Intermediate Area. Previous archaeological research has shown that hilltops on Roatán were chosen in prehispanic times for the location of the largest and most prominent sites, and several hypotheses have been put forward to explain the unique location of these sites. Despite the island's potential for addressing questions regarding the culture and history of this poorly understood region of Honduras, Roatán's status as Honduras' top tourist destination has resulted in the altering of its landscape in irreversible ways, including the destruction of archaeological sites. Given this unique situation, site preservation and the study of settlement patterns on Roatán are intricately related, and they both need to be carried out simultaneously if research into the past of this island is to continue, since without immediate site preservation what little we can learn on prehispanic settlement patterns might be lost. Using data compiled from previous archaeological research on Roatán, as well as data acquired through pedestrian survey carried out during the 2009 season of the University of South Florida (USF)'s Project Roatán, I have developed a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) geodatabase in order to provide a broader perspective on both prehispanic and modern settlement patterns. An analysis of site locations with regards to their topography shows that the majority of sites recorded on Roatán are in fact located on hilltops, an observation which, when complemented with other archaeological and ethnohistoric data from northeast Honduras, suggests a possible ritual importance of these spaces. An analysis of current settlement and urban growth patterns shows the degree to which development has encroached upon previously untouched areas of the island, which has impacted an increasing number of archaeological sites. I analyze the various factors and agents that have resulted in this situation, and highlight the need to carry out archaeological research that has heritage management and site preservation as one of its core priorities. These efforts must address the various components that define the management of archaeological heritage in Roatán and Honduras, including local socioeconomic context, national and international policy and law, as well as the various stakeholders with vested interests in cultural heritage. Due to the lack of adequate structures for managing and preserving archaeological resources on Roatán, I argue that approaches such as community participation and increased engagement from the part of researchers outside of Honduras' heritage management sphere are adequate and realistic short-term solutions to the pressing issue of protecting archaeological sites constantly in danger of being affected or destroyed.

Denna studie undersöker förekomsten av kulturarv rörande menstruation i svenska museisamlingar samt i vilka samband de har deltagit i utställningar eller på annat sätt exponerats för allmänheten. Undersökningen ämnar även ta reda på om tabu relaterat till menstruation påverkat insamlingen och exponeringen av de såkallade ”menstruationsföremålen”. Det empiriska materialet utgörs av en enkätundersökning utskickad till vad som kan sägas vara det allmänna museiväsendet i Sverige bestående av centralmuseum, regionala museum, kommunala museum, stadsmuseum samt ytterligare tre kulturhistoriska museum med en svarsfrekvens på 85,4% då 81 av 96 museum har deltagit. Studien visar att 50,6% av museerna har menstruationsföremål i samlingarna och att majoriteten av dessa hade cirka 1-5 stycken sådana och att den absolut vanligast förekommande föremålskategorin var menstruationsskydd. 64,8% av museer med menstruationsföremål i samlingarna hade exponerat dessa för allmänheten, oftast bara ett fåtal föremål och det vanligast förekommande utställningsformatet var tillfälliga utställningar. Majoriteten av menstruationsföremålen har förvärvats åren 1951-2021. Huruvida menstruationstabut har påverkat förekomsten av kulturarv rörande menstruation i svenska museum är svårt att utröna baserat på denna studie. Däremot kan tabut ha påverkat vilken sorts föremål som finns i museernas samlingar då det mesta materialet utgörs av menstruationsskydd vars uppgift att kontrollera mensflödet kan spegla samhällets förhållande till menstruation som ofta utgörs av skamkänslor inför ämnet.
This study examines the existence of cultural heritage concerning menstruation in Swedish museum collections and in which contexts they have participated in exhibitions or been otherwise exposed to the public. The study also intends to find out whether taboos related to menstruation have affected the collection and exposure of the so-called "menstrual items". The empirical material consists of a survey sent to what can be said to be the general museum system in Sweden consisting of central museum, regional museum, municipal museum, city museum and three other cultural history museums with a response rate of 85.4% as 81 of 96 museums have participated. The study shows that 50.6% of the museums have menstrual items in the collections and that the majority of these museums had approximately 1-5 of such items. The most common item category was menstrual protection. 64.8% of museums with menstrual objects in the collections had exposed these to the public, usually only a few objects and the most common exhibition format was temporary exhibitions. The majority of menstrual items have been acquired in the years 1951-2021. Whether menstrual taboos have affected the existence of cultural heritage concerning menstruation in Swedish museums is difficult to ascertain based on this study. On the other hand, taboos may have affected the type of objects in museums' collections, as most of the material consists of menstrual protection, the task of which is to control the flow of menstruation, which may reflect society's relationship to menstruation, which often consists of feelings of shame about the subject.

In 1987, computer programmer and linguist Larry Wall authored the general-purpose, high-level, interpreted, dynamic Unix scripting language, Perl. Borrowing features from C and awk, Perl was originally intended as a scripting language for text-processing. However, with the rising popularity of the Internet and the advent of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web (Web), in the 1990s, Perl soon became the glue-language for the Internet, due in large part to its relationship to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). Perl was the go-to language for on the fly program writing and coding, gaining accolades from the likes of publisher Tim O’Reilly and hackers alike. Perl became a favorite language of amateur Web users, whom net artist Olia Lialina calls barbarians, or the indigenous. These users authored everything from database scripts to social spaces like chatrooms and bulletin boards. Perl, while largely ignored today, played a fundamental role in facilitating those social spaces and interactions of Web 1.0, or what I refer to as a Perl-net. Thus, Perl informed today’s more ubiquitous digital culture, referred to as Web 2.0, and the social web. This project examines Perl’s origin which is predicated on postmodern theories, such as deconstructionism and multiculturalism. Perl’s formal features are differentiated from those of others, like Java. In order to defend Perl’s status as an inherently cultural online tool, this project also analyzes many instances of cultural artifacts: script programs, chatrooms, code poetry, webpages, and net art. This cultural analysis is guided by the work of contemporary media archaeologists: Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka. Lastly, the present state of digital culture is analyzed in an effort to re-consider the Perl scripting language as a relevant, critical computer language, capable of aiding in deprogramming the contemporary user.

Dans cette thèse, j'ai montré les processus de négociation identitaire, les discours hégémoniques et les structures du sentiment qui opèrent au sein des expositions qui traitent le multiculturalisme et le métissage. J'ai étudié des expositions produites par des musées nationaux en France et aux États-Unis. Mes études de cas ont été développées au Musée National d'Art Mexicain de Chicago et au Musée du quai Branly à Paris entre 2006 et 2009. Mon analyse montre les processus qui interviennent dans la mise en scène d'un discours muséal complexe. L'étude place au centre de ses hypothèses trois dimensions initiales qui participent à la construction du sens dans les expositions : a) la production du sens, b) la circulation ou distribution du sens et c) la réalisation ou appropriation du sens. Dans la première partie de ma thèse, j'ai exploré les catégories de "sens et signification" à partir d'une approche philosophique. J'ai discuté la généalogie de ces notions avant de développer une approche culturaliste, notamment à partir de la théorie d'Antonio Gramsci, de Stuart Hall et de Raymond Williams, pour qui la signification n'est pas une donnée en soi mais une construction qui se développe à partir des luttes sociales, politiques et symboliques qui cherchent à contrôler les représentations et les croyances. Cette compréhension de la culture, en tant qu'espace de lutte d'interprétations, a ouvert la voie aux analyses de pouvoir et de discours au sein de l'univers muséal. J'ai développé les définitions de culture, occident, hégémonie, idéologies, intellectuelles et structures de sentiment afin de définir le cadre conceptuel qui sert de base théorique pour mes études de cas. Ensuite, j'ai présenté une étude minutieuse sur les origines et le développement des musées, du patrimoine et de la nation. Enfin, j'ai montré les débats contemporains en études culturelles des musées, les approches critiques et anthropologiques et l'importance de développer des études de cas concrètes à partir de cette discipline. La deuxième partie de la thèse présente la méthodologie employée ainsi que les études de cas. J'ai souligné l'importance de la transdisciplinarité comme méthode privilégiée pour l'analyse ainsi que les méthodologies employées pour l'étude des expositions : l'observation à l'intérieur et à l'extérieur du musée, la saisie des témoignages et des entretiens, l'usage des questionnaires et des formulaires. La sélection des musées et des expositions a été réalisée en fonction de la thématique des expositions et pas en fonction des collections ou des objets exposés. J'ai cherché à analyser des musées qui entretenaient un rapport hégémonique avec les sujets de l'exposition. Ceci afin de questionner les transferts culturels, les identités contemporaines en tension ou en conflit, et la cohabitation symbolique des sentiments d'appartenance. Aux États-Unis, j'ai analysé les expositions du Musée National d'Art Mexicain (NMMA) de Chicago. Les expositions étudiées furent : "La Mexicanidad" et "La présence de l'Afrique au Mexique". À Paris, j'ai analysé l'exposition Planète métisse produite par le Musée du quai Branly (MQB). Afin de comprendre la construction du sens des expositions, j'ai interrogé la communauté de production (directeurs, commissaires, comités et collectifs qui ont participé), la médiation et les messages à partir des artistes ou à partir de la propre mise en scène des objets d'exposition. Enfin, j'ai travaillé auprès d'une communauté d'interprètes afin de privilégier une analyse des discours en contexte et pas une méthode purement spéculative. Le résultat de mes analyses montre que les musées étudiés disposent des spécialistes qui légitiment scientifiquement la mise en scène discursive d'expositions, et que la fabrication ou production des sujets d'expositions est liée à des conjonctures politiques particulières. En effet, ces musées ont produit des expositions "engagées" en défendant une dimension culturelle et anthropologique. Avec ce geste, ils transformaient la muséographie classique de l'institution muséale. Par exemple, le NMMA de Chicago n'a pas seulement exposé des objets d'art. Il a sans nul doute proposé un discours de répercussion politique afin de démonter les frontières de race et d'ethnicité. À Paris, le MQB a exposé l'historicité du métissage planétaire. De cette manière, l'exposition interrogeait les discours sur l'identité nationale française, et contribuait au débat autour de la stigmatisation de la migration contemporaine. J'ai démontré, que la façon de sélectionner, d'identifier, de différencier, de hiérarchiser et d'exposer les objets, reflète des nouvelles pratiques culturelles, parfois innovatrices et même post-coloniales. Finalement, l'analyse sur le regard de la communauté des interprètes a fourni les résultats les plus originaux de ma recherche. J'ai montré que quand le visiteur parcourt l'exposition, il établit un accord plus ou moins harmonieux entre lui et le discours de l'institution. Si le visiteur "interroge" le sens de l'exposition, il le fait à partir des structures du sentiment qui dévoilent les identités ou liens d'appartenances des individus. En effet, dans mes études de cas, les expositions abordaient de manière explicite les problématiques concernant les différences culturelles et les identités. Cela amenait le visiteur à se situer à partir d'une circonstance individuelle précise, soit par rapport à sa nationalité, son origine, son genre ou son appartenance à une culture.

Claims of customization and control by socio-technical industries are altering the role of consumer and producer. These narratives are often misleading attempts to engage consumers with new forms of technology. By addressing capitalist intent, material, and the reproduction limits of 3-D printed objects’, I observe the aspirational promise of becoming a producer of my own belongings through new networks of production. I am interested in gaining a better understanding of the data consumed that perpetuates hyper-consumptive tendencies for new technological apparatuses. My role as a designer focuses on the resolution of not only the surface of the object through 3-D printing, but the social implications to acknowledge consequential conditions of new forms of consumer technology.

Cette thèse concerne la labellisation de cinq opéras de région, en France, entre 1996 et 2006 : l'Opéra National de Lorraine, l'Opéra National de Montpellier, l'Opéra National de Lyon, l'Opéra National de Bordeaux, et l'Opéra National du Rhin. L'étude porte sur une forme qui englobe obligatoirement d'autres formes artistiques quasi autonomes et professionnalisées (orchestre, ballet, choeur) et sur les changements en cours dans l'économie de ces organisations traditionnellement sous tutelle municipale repositionnées au coeur d'une gouvernance multiscalaire et mises au défi de faire croître leur visibilité et celle de leur activité. Nous nous intéressons dans ce cadre à ce sur quoi reposent les stratégies de renouvellement développées par ces organisations culturelles, sédimentées et conventionnelles, prises entre le politique et le marché, dans un cadre particulier à la France où l'État se reconnaît comme garant de la qualité. Pour conduire l'étude, nous utilisons la labellisation comme marqueur de ces changements et comme dispositif participant à l'instrumentation de ces opéras dans un marché restreint. Ce qui se voit, c'est une ouverture organisée, selon un mode de fonctionnement par projets et selon un mode de diversification réfléchie de leur activité à un niveau de complexité jamais égalé, sous la pression de l'envahissement de la sphère culturelle par les logiques marchandes et médiatiques. Cette instrumentation est réalisée par le déploiement de dispositifs de jugement dans une économie des singularités dans laquelle le théâtre d'opéra est amené à chercher lui-même à asseoir sa continuité. Sont discutées les stratégies développées quant à l'incertitude inhérente à la création artistique et à la dépendance financière et les effets du dispositif opéra national qui donne lieu à un " remplissement " stratégique perpétuel (Michel Foucault), du fait de la remobilisation du dispositif dans la gestion des effets secondaires qu'il a lui-même induit, et dans la dynamique duquel le pouvoir, la visibilité et la légitimité occupent une place centrale. Notre démarche inductive et pluridisciplinaire et la posture critique adoptée conduisent à l'élaboration d'une étude donnant une grande place à l'indétermination des rapports et des humains, dans une ontologie constructiviste modérée. Le sujet singulier qu'est l'organisation d'un théâtre d'opéra en France, les raisons de ces choix et la méthodologie appliquée sont présentés pour éclairer le lecteur dans sa rencontre avec un milieu d'ordinaire fermé. Enfin, la conclusion retrace certains liens et pointe des aspects à creuser dans une recherche ultérieure afin de comprendre ce que donne à voir, sur le présent et l'avenir des Opéras de région en France, l'attribution par le ministère de la Culture et de la Communication d'un label de " qualité ".

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic developments must be framed within the post-Internet sphere.

The Publication is following the yearly Editions of EVA FLORENCE. The State of Art is presented regarding the Application of Technologies (in particular of digital type) to Cultural Heritage. The more recent results of the Researches in the considered Area are presented. Information Technologies of interest for Culture Heritage are presented: multimedia systems, data-bases, data protection, access to digital content, Virtual Galleries. Particular reference is reserved to digital images (Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts), regarding Cultural Institutions (Museums, Libraries, Palace - Monuments, Archaeological Sites). The International Conference includes the following Sessions: Strategic Issues; New Sciences and Culture Developments and Applications; New Technical Developments & Applications; Museums - Virtual Galleries and Related Initiatives; Art and Humanities Ecosystem & Applications; Access to the Culture Information. Two Workshops regard: Innovation and Enterprise; the Cloud Systems connected to the Culture (eCulture Cloud) in the Smart Cities context. The more recent results of the Researches at national and international are reported in the Area of Technologies and Culture Heritage, also with experimental demonstrations of developed Activities.

The Publication is following the yearly Editions of EVA FLORENCE. The State of Art is presented regarding the Application of Technologies (in particular of digital type) to Cultural Heritage. The more recent results of the Researches in the considered Area are presented. Information Technologies of interest for Culture Heritage are presented: multimedia systems, data-bases, data protection, access to digital content, Virtual Galleries. Particular reference is reserved to digital images (Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts), regarding Cultural Institutions (Museums, Libraries, Palace - Monuments, Archaeological Sites). The International Conference includes the following Sessions: Strategic Issues; New Sciences and Culture Developments and Applications; New Technical Developments & Applications; Museums - Virtual Galleries and Related Initiatives; Art and Humanities Ecosystem & Applications; Access to the Culture Information. Two Workshops regard: Innovation and Enterprise; the Cloud Systems connected to the Culture (eCulture Cloud) in the Smart Cities context. The more recent results of the Researches at national and international are reported in the Area of Technologies and Culture Heritage, also with experimental demonstrations of developed Activities.

Virtual heritage has been explained as virtual reality applied to cultural heritage, but this definition only scratches the surface of the fascinating applications, tools and challenges of this fast-changing interdisciplinary field. This book provides an accessible but concise edited coverage of the main topics, tools and issues in virtual heritage. Leading international scholars have provided chapters to explain current issues in accuracy and precision; challenges in adopting advanced animation techniques; shows how archaeological learning can be developed in Minecraft; they propose mixed reality is conceptual rather than just technical; they explore how useful Linked Open Data can be for art history; explain how accessible photogrammetry can be but also ethical and practical issues for applying at scale; provide insight into how to provide interaction in museums involving the wider public; and describe issues in evaluating virtual heritage projects not often addressed even in scholarly papers. The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in museum studies, digital archaeology, heritage studies, architectural history and modelling, virtual environments.

The collection of the contributions of the 13th Heidelberger Kunstrechtstag deals under the general theme „Looted Art and Restitution“ with fundamental issues of restitution law, the protection of cultural property, art law and art procedural law as well as provenance research. Topics of this year: The art collector and the art law; Provenance – History and perspectives of a new paradigm in humanities and cultural studies; Works of art in the crosshair of the persecution of the Jews in the National Socialism; Why a “Restatement of Restitiution for Nazi-Confiscated Art?“ on the example of escape goods; Intellectual property for traditional knowledge, traditional cultural forms of expressions and indigenous resources between post- and neocolonialism; Intellectual property and traditional art; Cultural assets from colonial times and restitution; The Bangwa Queen – Artifact or heritage? With contributions by Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Erik Jayme, LL.M. (Berkeley); Prof. Dr. Christoph Zuschlag; Jun.-Prof. Dr. des. Ulrike Saß; Prof. Dr. Matthias Weller, Mag.rer.publ. und Anne Dewey; Prof. Dr. Thomas Dreier, M.C.J. (New York), Prof. Dr. Andreas Rahmatian; Dr. Karolina Kuprecht and Prof. Dr. Evelien Campfens

AbstractWith the growing interest in digital humanities, the methodology of digital art history is in some respects lagging behind the trend. Given the prospects of the new digital image analysis, computer vision, and visualization methods, a number of questions have arisen as to how exactly the new digital methods can and should be applied to art history. Furthermore, when trying to apply these digital methods to the analysis of Russian art, one encounters a whole new set of questions and challenges. In this chapter, I examine current and potential applications of digital methods to the analysis of Soviet political cartoons published in Pravda during the “Great Patriotic War,” 1941–1945, as well as the study of Russian art history more generally. I especially examine how the combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of political cartoons enables a deeper understanding that illustrates cultural, historical, and political developments over time.

The recovery of the history of humanity goes through the comprehension of ancient testimonies handed down to us in artistic representations. The innovative tool par excellence is the technologies. Smarticon is an Italian patent for method in charge of studying historical analysis (originated from the morphology of the concept), of examining the phenomenology analysis (which results in the typology and exceeds it) and to the comparative research (which allows to arrive at the hermeneutics ). The comprehension of the transitory meaning of each event is entrusted to the historian who, by recomposing the phenomena, is also able to codify the comparative meanings.

This chapter simultaneously traces the history of early Coptic and Syriac public digital humanities projects and reassesses the history of what is usually considered the “founding moment” in digital humanities, Roberto Busa’s computational work on Thomas Aquinas. It argues that each of these endeavors should be considered comparable acts of cultural heritage preservation focused on computational or digital examinations of a community’s canonical cultural heritage. The primary differences between Busa’s work and early Coptic and Syriac computational research are not methodology but issues of canon and resources.

This chapter focuses on the development of digital humanities (DH) in Taiwan. A bibliographic methodology was adopted where the scholarly publications in DH were collected and their bibliographic information retrieved and analyzed. Both co-authorship and article similarity networks were generated so social network analysis can be used to characterize the development of the field. The preliminary results show that in the earlier stage of DH in Taiwan more emphasis has been put on the construction and modeling of the cultural heritage databases; the later period has witnessed a wide variety of efforts to apply computational means within different branches in humanities, most noticeably history, Buddhists, and literary studies. The Computer Science, Library and Information Science, Geography, and History are the major driving forces for DH in Taiwan. The strong presence of Buddhists study is unique because of the strong influence of Buddhism on the Taiwanese.

Detroit’s popular music-making legacy has remained a foundation for the city’s symbolic identity throughout the twentieth century and into the present. For over a century music production in Detroit has been part of a thriving local industry and global enterprise, with different genres and styles of music measuring the city’s changing composition over the years (Holt and Wergin 2014). The sounds emerging from the city, coupled with its built environment and physical landscape, tell the stories of a creative, shapeshifting industrial and post-industrial centre defined by melodies, artists, and sounds that are distinctly Detroit—The Hucklebuck, Martha and the Vandellas, Cybortron. Attention to the assemblages of buildings, landscapes, people, and the soulful sounds associated with them reveal the underlying power of the city’s creative accomplishments to unite disparate communities, call attention to issues affecting urban well-being, and preserve memories of Detroit’s rich musical heritage. In its expansive repertoire of recording history and in its vast contemporary terrain of decay and ruination, Detroit’s musical heritage holds tremendous potential for archaeological research and cultural heritage initiatives. Through creative documentation platforms and dissemination practices contemporary archaeological approaches are particularly well suited for engaging place-based and thematic heritage discourses about Detroit and other post-industrial cities. This chapter presents the ‘Making Music in Detroit’ project, a contemporary archaeology and digital storytelling exercise focused on popular music assemblages and their placemaking power in Detroit, a city that is simultaneously defined and encumbered by the traumatic and festering post-industrial wounds of poverty, mismanagement, and ruination. In a series of twenty-four videos and web texts, ‘Making Music in Detroit’ illustrates how archaeologists might use digital storytelling to involve music-making places and their physical remains (some ruined, others intact) in communicating present-day senses of place as they relate to urban histories of creativity. These stories are part of a substantially broader and more formal multidisciplinary digital humanities effort to map Detroit’s transformations over the course of the past century, as it transitioned first from a thriving, wealthy, and innovative centre of manufacturing industries to an epicentre of post-industrial struggle, and more recently, from a bankrupt city into a stage for selective, privatized, and creative revitalization efforts (Ethnic Layers of Detroit project 2016; on creative cities, see White and Seidenberg, Chapter 1).

Considered repositories of objects(Cuno 2009), museums have been analysed through the object-oriented policies they mainly focus on. Three main purposes are often mentioned: preservation, dissemination of knowledge and access to tradition. Beyond these informative and cultural-laden functions, museums have also been labeled as theatres of power, the emphasis lying on nation-oriented policies. According to Michael F. Brown (2009: 148), the outcome of this moral standing of the nation-state is a mobilizing public sentiment in favour of the state power. We consider that the constant flow of national and international exhibitions or events that could be hosted in museums has a twofold consequence: on the one hand, a cultural dynamics due to the permanent contact with unknown objects, and on the other hand, some visibility strategies in order to attract visitors. This latter effect actually embodies a shift within the perception of museums from entities of knowledge towards leisure environments. Within this context where the concept of edutainment(Eschach 2007) seems to prevail in the non-formal way of acquiring new knowledge, contemporary virtual museums display visual information without regard to geographic location (Dahmen, Sarraf, 2009). They play ?a central role in making culture accessible to the mass audience(Carrazzino, Bergamasco 2010) by using new technologies and novel interaction paradigms. Our study will aim at analyzing the way in which civilization was e-framed in the virtual project ?A History of the World in 100 Objects, run by BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum in 2010. The British Museum won the 2011 Art Fund Prize for this innovative platform whose main content was created by the contributors (the museums and the members of the public). The chairman of the panel of judges, Michael Portillo, noted that the judges were impressed that the project used digital media in ground-breaking and novel ways to interact with audiences. The two theoretical frameworks used in our analysis are framing theories and critical discourse analysis. ?Schemata of interpretation? (Goffman 1974), frames are used by individuals to make sense of information or an occurrence, providing principles for the organization of social reality? (Hertog & McLeod 2001). Considered cultural structures with central ideas and more peripheral concepts and a set of relations that vary in strength and kind among them? (Hertog, McLeod 2001, p.141), frames rely on the selection of some aspects of a perceived reality which are made more salient in a communicating text or e-text. We will interpret this virtual museum as a hypertext which ?makes possible the assembly, retrieval, display and manipulation? (Kok 2004) of objects belonging to different cultures. The structural analysis of the virtual museum as a hypertext will focus on three orders of abstraction (Kok 2004): item, lexia, and cluster. Dividing civilization into 20 periods of time, from making us human (2,000,000 - 9000 BC) up to the world of our making (1914 - 2010 AD), the creators of the digital museum used 100 objects to make sense of the cultural realities which dominated our civilization. The History of the World in 100 Objects used images of these objects which can be considered ?as ideological and as power-laden as word (Jewitt 2008). Closely related to identities, ideologies embed those elements which provide a group legitimation, identification and cohesion. In our analysis of the 100 virtual objects framing e-civilization we will use the six categories which supply the structure of ideologies in the critical discourse analysis framework (van Dijk 2000: 69): membership, activities, goals, values/norms, position (group-relations), resources. The research questions will focus on the content of this digital museum: (1) the types of objects belonging to the 20 periods of e-civilization; (2) the salience of countries of origin for the 100 objects; (3) the salience of social practices framed in the non-formal teaching of e-civilization/culture; and on the visitors? response: (1) the types of attitudes expressed in the forum comments; (2) the types of messages visitors decoded from the analysis of the objects; (3) the (creative) value of such e-resources. References Brown, M.F. (2009). Exhibiting indigenous heritage in the age of cultural property. J.Cuno (Ed.). Whose culture? The promise of museums and the debate over antiquities (pp. 145-164), Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Carrazzino, M., Bergamasco, M. (2010). Beyond virtual museums: Experiencing immersive virtual reality in real museums. Journal of Cultural Heritage, 11, 452-458. Cuno, J. (2009) (Ed.). Whose culture? The promise of museums and the debate over antiquities (pp. 145-164), Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Dahmen, N. S., & Sarraf, S. (2009, May 22). Edward Hopper goes to the net: Media aesthetics and visitor analytics of an online art museum exhibition. Visual Communication Studies, Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Chicago, IL. Eshach, H. (2007). Bridging in-school and out-of-school learning: formal, non-formal, and informal education . Journal of Science Education and Technology, 16 (2), 171-190. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hertog, J.K., & McLeod, D. M. (2001). A multiperspectival approach to framing analysis: A field guide. In S.D. Reese, O.H. Gandy, & A.E. Grant (Eds.), Framing public life: Perspective on media and our understanding of the social world (pp. 139-162). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Jewitt, C. (2008). Multimodality and literacy in school classrooms. Review of Research in Education, 32 (1), 241-267. Kok, K.C.A. (2004). Multisemiotic mediation in hypetext. In Kay L. O?Halloren (Ed.), Multimodal discourse analysis. Systemic functional perspectives (pp. 131-159), London: Continuum. van Dijk, T. A. (2000). Ideology ? a multidisciplinary approach. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage.

In 2020, I created a body of work that paid attention to the concerns of body image representation of the gay male. The work was shown in a local exhibition in Auckland, called ‘Bear Bodies in Motion’, and it aimed as a critique on the anxieties of body image, especially in the gay bear subculture where there are considerable levels of stigma and shaming of bigger male bodies – made more profound towards bodies of colour. In an attempt at subversion, the creative work, portrayed the bigger body as energetic and aesthetically potent. It combined photography with digital painting and the result was an expression of body acceptance and authorship. Thematically, the image of the gay bear builds on a rich history of homo-oriented art. It plays on the tapestry of the gay identity which determines how it is being represented, negotiated and remixed continually in the gay mainstream. Discourse emanating from gay communities of colour, speaks of attempts to remove colonised attitudes, and in reimagining their heritage and sexual identities authentically. This artistic body of work sought to add to the dialogue that surrounds issues of race, queerness and ‘otherness’. The subsequent conversations which followed the exhibition, unpacked concerns of cultural identity, masculinity and belonging – in which seem to be heavily burdened by western-influenced and racialised notions of performativity. Through research, and taking in the ephemera that surrounds the discourse of the colonised body image, I begun to create work that seeks to further add to the discourse. This heavily illustrated paper reflects on the creative process in the art making of ‘Bear Bodies in Motion’. The methodology underpinning this artistic body of work is ‘reflection-in-action’, and it draws inspiration from research in the ‘lived experience’. Additionally it also consider its move from traditional mediums to the consideration of technology as a platform for storytelling, from the print medium to digital spaces – in this instance, the inclusion of Augmented Reality (AR). With this extension, AR provides the viewer the opportunity to take a more active role in reading the text. The experience moves the work into a more participatory space, where the narrative becomes more palpable and appreciated. The making journey is outlined from conceptual stage to the finalised artistic work from my personal lens who is both artist-maker and design practitioner. This paper also discusses the challenges and conflicts in creating a body of work of this nature. Especially of concern is its need for sensitivity in the representation of non-euro cultures – with greater emphasis given to the consideration for its homosexual themes, and to the identities of my participants as they were from the community itself. This paper also includes my reflections and personal insights in how this approach to a practice-led research has contributed to my own learning and teaching approach. Being an educator myself, this process has given me greater empathy and understanding in the student journey within today’s higher education environment.