DELIVERABLE REPORTGrant&Agreement&270404& Cyprus&Institute& Public 6/52 contrastingly different! from! other! CH! disciplines that! are! based! on the! more! explicit,! consciousselection!and!collection!of!materialsand!information,!which!maybe!argued

Grant Agreement 270404 Cyprus Institute Public 1/52

DELIVERABLE REPORT

Document identifier: V-MUST.net – D 3.1b

Due Date of Delivery to EC End of Month

Actual Date of Delivery to EC 31/01/14

Document date: 01/03/14

Deliverable Title: Theory Design – Update on D3.1

Work package: WP 3

Lead Beneficiary: CREF-Cyl

Other Beneficiaries CIC

Authors: Susan Hazan, Sorin Hermon, Roberta Turra, Giorgio Pedrazzi, Marica Franchi, Mattias Wallergard

Document status: Final version

Document link: http://www.v-must.net/library/documents

Copyright notice: Copyright © V-MUST.net. For more information on V-MUST.net, its partners and contributors please see http://www.V-MUST.net/ The information contained in this document reflects only the author's views and the Community is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.


Executive Summary ............................................................................................... 3

RETHINKING THE MUSEUM .................................................................................... 3 I. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 3 II. BACKGROUND ............................................................................................................ 4 III. LINKED DATA AND INSTITUTIONAL COLLABORATION ................................................ 5 IV. THE AURATIC OBJECT AND WALTER BENJAMIN ......................................................... 6 V. SOCIAL NETWORKS AND WEB 2.0 – RE-‐SETTING COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP ............... 8 VI. COULD THE VM EXIST WITHOUT THE PHYSICAL MUSEUM? -‐A HUMAN SANCTUARY 11 VII. DOES THE VIRTUAL MUSEUM IN FACT "LIVE" THROUGH ITS PHYSICAL COUNTERPART? – THE SISTINE CHAPEL ........................................................................ 12 VIII. COULD THE VM HAVE A LIFE OF ITS OWN? – EUROPEANA 1989: WE MADE HISTORY .................................................................................................................................... 14 IX. CONCLUSIONS ......................................................................................................... 15

THE RESPONSIVE MUSEUM .................................................................................. 16 1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 16 2. THE ECOMUSEUM, NEW MUSEOLOGY, AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY ........................... 18 3. YOGA; THE ART OF TRANSFORMATION – BEFORE THE VISIT, THE VM AND THE MARKETING SCENARIO ................................................................................................ 22 3. COLLECTION WALL; THE ELECTRONIC DELIVERY THAT ACCOMPANIES THE VISITOR DURING THE VISIT ........................................................................................................ 24 4. ASK JACQUES LIPCHITZ A QUESTION; THE VM AS ENCOUNTERED AFTER THE VISIT THAT SERVES TO AUGMENT AND ENHANCE THE EXPERIENCE AND MAINTAIN THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE MUSEUM AND THE VISITOR ............................................ 26

ON DEFINING THE VIRTUAL MUSEUM .................................................................. 29 CENCEPTUALISING THE VIRTUAL MUSEUM .................................................................. 33 DRAWING ON THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MUSEUM; ENHANCING AND AUGMENTING THE MUSEUM EXPERIENCE ................................................................... 34 QUALITIES OF THE VM; PERSONALISATON, INTERACTIVITY AND RICHNESS OF CONTENT .................................................................................................................................... 34 PUBLIC ACCESS; KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS AND THE SYSTEMATIC, AND COHERENCT ORGANISATION OF THEIR DISPLAY ............................................................................... 35 LONG-‐TERM PRESERVATION AND COMITMENT TO PUBLIC ACCESS .............................. 36 DEFINING THE VM ........................................................................................................ 37


EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This document, Theory Design and Current Practice reflects on the theoretical research carried out over the previous two years that built upon the Report on Theory Design, delivered 03.2012. That Report in turn drew on the early investigations that produced the documents State of the Art on Virtual Museums in Europe and Outside Europe (Deliverable 2.3) developed by the Virtual Museum Transnational Project (V-‐MUST.NET) and delivered 30 September 2011. All reports evolved from the early research carried out by Work Package 2, which produced and delivered “House of Questions,” a research process that endeavoured to establish requirements and criteria analysis for the Virtual Museum domain. This Report builds on all the previous documents, and draws on all of the prior documents; processing and clarifying the research results that reports on the state of the art of Virtual Museums in Europe and beyond. The report now revisits the series of recommendations, as practical considerations towards conceptualizing, designing, and implementing a Virtual Museum (VM) from the previous documents which has now been reflected upon and revised accordingly. In the two years since the delivery of the previous report there has been much discussion as to the definition of the virtual museum and just as much discussion on the term itself. This report is divided into three sections:

1. RETHINKING THE MUSEUM 2. THE RESPONSIVE MUSEUM 3. ON DEFINING THE VIRTUAL MUSEUM

RETHINKING THE MUSEUM

The sectional summarizes the initial, theoretical work carried out by V-‐Must, a Network of Excellencei in in its efforts to rethink the concept of virtual museums (VM), in light of developing emerging digital technologies. The Network has been active in identifying, and mapping the tools and services that define and support VMs in the heritage sector. Drawing on a series of reports and publications prepared by the Network and reflects on the VM from several perspectives.

I. INTRODUCTION Revisiting Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionii we look at the implications for Virtual Museums (VM) at a time when life through screens accompanies us through much of our day. They not only drive us around our leisure time but also accompany us home, and not only follow us, but drive us around our social life. V-‐Must examined the ways in which the VM extends, amplifies or even replaces the physical museum in a digital environment -‐ the museum that perhaps once represented the last bastion of the veneered, physical object, substituted here by a mere digital surrogate; an empty, Baudrillard simulacra.iii When once the term ‘museum’ conjured the familiar


embodied gallery visit in the company of family or friends, the VM only needs a series of mouse clicks to propel us (on our own) from object to object, from gallery to gallery, from Museum to Museum. We considered what had been lost in the process, and what had been gained when museums became not only accessible to all (by a simple click), but also became relentlessly reproducible. Seeking criteria for the definition of VM we re-‐visited the relationship between the real object and its digital "surrogate”; between the Museum and the Virtual, and the distance between the two. Could one exist without the other; does one, in fact "live" through the other; or could the VM have a life of its own? Through a series of case studies we explored what happens when a digital model of the Sistine Chapel is effortlessly accessible to all, and will question whether its electronic essentiality stems from the fact that it is famous only because it represents an iconic object of World Heritage. What would happen if we were to remove the label "Cappella Sistina "? Would our digital replica still be as famous?

II. BACKGROUND This section reflects the prior work of the V-‐MUST project, which critically analyses both practice and theory in the cultural heritage (CH) sector, focusing on the state of the art of VMs in Europe and beyond. One of the Network’s goals was to propose an overview of the VM; based both on best practice, as well as to set out a series of recommendations; such as practical considerations towards conceptualizing, designing, and implementing a VM. The term VM has become as ubiquitous as to rend it almost redundant. It was therefore felt critical to define the VM for our work in order to be able to debate what is, and what is not relevant to this discussion. Once our terms of reference were clarified, at least to ourselves we were able to move on to discuss the VM in finer resolution; even though were acutely aware of how the term ‘Virtual Museum’ has in fact been used to describe a wide range of activities that are all somehow loosely concerned with this overarching concept. Both the VM that acts as the digital footprint of a physical museum, as well as those VMs that have no reference to material artefacts or physical places; rather deal with concepts and cultural creativity, all drawing on the strength of the term museum; as familiar to all of us as a bricks and mortar building that maintains material collections on behalf of the public. Questions of authority and authenticity inevitably emerge from these kinds of discussions, yet it wasn’t always clear who does have the authority; and possibly also the professional capability to author, produce, and maintain such projects. This report revisited the ICOM discussions on key conceptsiv where the terms digital or cyber exhibition are preferred to refer to these particular exhibitions that are accessed over the internet. We considered conceptualising a VM by imagining a cohesive, yet distributed set of tangible objects, and intangible concepts held together thematically by an overarching theme. The core of a VM could then be loosely described as a location of rich content – representing unique and precious items, works of art, or archaeological objects. Once objects could be viewed in sequence they served to classify their differences as well as their commonalities. The term VM therefore could then reflect different ways in which objects have been assembled, presented, and disseminated, both over electronic platforms and physical displays representing artistic expression, re-‐enacting a forgotten archaeological period, or magically conjuring up a historical setting. For our research, while acknowledging the physical Virtual Museum; perhaps as modelsv, dioramasvi or miniaturesvii, we prioritize


the digital display and the electronic VM. Often VMs are developed according to an educational agenda, and the pedagogical aspects of the VM need to be explored in order to establish what it is that they can support, and therefore are able to contribute to formal, and informal learning scenarios. When users seek information about the world around them they will probably be searching for them first and foremost online and/or using a smart phone. However, once the term 'museum' is stated, a sense of trust is invoked together with the impression that the content has been professionally collected, curated, and presented in the tradition of the museum opening up the potential for advantageous collaborations between cultural institutions that seamlessly deliver their content into the classroom, the home, or community venue.

III. LINKED DATA AND INSTITUTIONAL COLLABORATION The Semantic Web approach addresses the notion of multiplicity of knowledge claims by multiple coinciding ontologies (i.e. ’multiple overlapping truths’). Thus, it helps gaining a more comprehensive understanding on the nature of CH objects, by themselves embedding “multiple truths”. Taking advantage of current practice in the Semantic Web, new kinds of sophisticated developments and collaborations are now combining assets in novel and impressive ways. According to the British Museum’s site Semantic Web Endpointviii the ‘semantic’ element of the technology means that data is structured in such a way that allows the discovery of connections and relationship between data from different sources that would be difficult, if not impossible, to discover with traditional technologies. As there are currently 2,074,288 objects available in the British Museum’s online database with 766,576 with one or more images they argue when objects are associated with their semantic attribute this helps us improve our understanding, and knowledge of objects and events even further. From the above, it is clear that VM requires semantic definitions. However, these become clear once we fully understand what is (and what is not) a VM. Such semantic descriptions should capture the whole essence of VM, serving as the base of building ontologies for VM. Taking a step backward for a while we explored the analogy between archaeology and CH, as one of the main contributors to CH VMs. Not all institutions worldwide employ Semantic Web ontologies to facilitate intuitive searches on large data sets. Using information management trials on three Finnish sites, Saari Manor and the castles of Kajaani and Kuusisto, the authors discuss a series of case studies using a web based collaborative semantic wiki to store multiple types of archaeological and historical research dataix, effectively combining their diverse asserts into a single system accessible to various stakeholders of the data: excavating archaeologists, researchers, general public, CH administrators. Exploiting the potential of these advanced technologies – in this case a semantic, wiki-‐based system – new kinds of collaboration facilitate the harvesting and editing, of structured data where not only the authors, but more critically the data is distributed. Could this shared collaboration fulfil the criteria of a VM, even if not declared as such by the team? Data is essentially the core information sources used by archaeologists; the primary materials (e.g. finds and sites), which is also associated to scholarly literature and personal communication? The authors describe how the fully procedural nature of the information builds up as a result of archaeological excavations and surveys. A process that is


contrastingly different from other CH disciplines that are based on the more explicit, conscious selection and collection of materials and information, which may be argued, in this case, more resembles an archive than a museum. Over recent years we have also witnessed an exponential increase in tools facilitating technical and semantic interoperability, efforts in standardizing metadata, and new systems for encoding archives based on rendering explicit, implicit knowledgex. An uncontrolled development of ontologies, i.e. formalized and reusable knowledge based on entity, property and relationships, was followed by a recent phase dedicated to the realignment, or mapping, of different ontologies created in the meantime for CH. Efforts have been also directed towards the development of semantic repositories for digital (3D) data, a substantial component of VMsxi Work still has to be done however for better understanding the (perhaps sometimes subtle) difference between digital collections, online archives and virtual museumsxii. The V-‐Must research breaks down the different kinds of museums typographically, drawing on content, experiences, and interactions that are already available as VM's worldwide. VMs have emerged in many ways. Clearly the electronic art museum or art gallery provides a very different ontological experience than does a virtual walk through a simulated historical site; as does the questions posed by a science museum; or even the kinds of experiences that one might expect to encounter in an ethnographic museum. In much the same way that VM's may reflect a broad range of experiences – whether representing a bricks and mortar museum, physical site or an imagined collection – the following section discusses delivery rather than content; in spite of the fact that neither content nor delivery can be truly separated in a VM. Knowing where the end user can most benefit from the cultural content, designers and curators of VMs will need to decide where and how to deliver the experience. The various scenarios introduced in this section clarify the scope and scale at the point of delivery; all factors that affect the quality of experience that is delivered to end-‐users. The following section discusses what happens when the end-‐user encounters art works in a VM. Clearly the art; once experienced on a screen – often a tiny smartphone screen bears little resemblance to the original art work; neither in scale nor more crucially for its auratic presence.

IV. THE AURATIC OBJECT AND WALTER BENJAMIN Jesse Prinz and his team undertook a fascinating experiment: We told test subjects to imagine that the Mona Lisa was destroyed in a fire, but that there happened to be a perfect copy that even experts couldn’t tell from the original. If they could see just one or the other, would they rather see the ashes of the original Mona Lisa or a perfect duplicate? Eighty per cent of our respondents chose the ashes: apparently we disvalue copies and attribute almost magical significance to originals. (How wonder works, Jesse Prinz, June 21, 2013xiii). How do we account for this peculiar behaviour? How can we venerate ashes over the physical representation of a painting – once we have been told that it is merely replica? A glimpse of what is happening here may be explained by the idea of an auratic experience. For this we can look to the formative moment outlined in W. Benjamin’s 1937 essay 'The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction'xiv, in which he discusses the status of art, and its limitless reproduction through mechanical processes. The seminal essay has inspired


critics and theorists in many fields across the disciplines of visual culture, media studies, and cultural studies, and has informed their writings on photography, cinema, and artistic re-‐invigoration through mechanical reproduction. Benjamin argued that the mechanical process of reproduction liberates art, causing it to become detached from a parasitic dependence on ritual. According to Benjamin, the mechanically reproduced art, specifically photography and cinema, when once freed from its shell, may then be exponentially disseminated to new audiences. Clearly a line can be drawn here from the mechanically reproduced, to the digitally reproduced art, and the increasing ways that they, in their turn, may be disseminated even more aggressively across electronic networks. In the same way, according to Benjamin, that photography and cinema became detached from their ritual dependence; art born-‐digital is liberated, perhaps even more so, than that the mechanically produced art ever was. These kinds of artefacts are no longer tethered to a cinema screen, or gallery wall for their display, and may be circulated freely and unremittingly over the Internet, via mobile platforms, and across electronic networks. Benjamin also argued that when art has been mechanical reproduced, the copy is detached from the domain of tradition, and emancipated from its cult value. However, coupled with this detachment comes a challenge to the singular qualities of the original object, which, according to Benjamin, causes another kind of loss – the loss of ‘aura’. What has been forfeited here concerns the quality of the art object. Mechanical reproduction causes objects to lose their singularity, and with this loss their historical testimony is jeopardized. ‘Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element’ Benjamin claims: “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as changes in its ownership” (1992: 214xv). The mechanically reproduced object’s lost patina is significant for electronic reproduction. When mechanical copies may be seen as similar, the digital copy is identical to the source, and in essence, there is no original, and there is no copy. Benjamin’s ideas are critical for understanding the VM, in that it not only draws on the loss of the aura which has implications of the autonomous art born-‐digital, and by association the digital VM, but also in the understanding that both kinds of reproduction afford far more and wider channels of distribution. We therefore need to draw on both sides of the Benjamin equation; both the loss and the gain. Where the loss can be described as the loss of the aura, both for the mechanically reproduced, and the digitally produced VM, the gain for the digital artefact is evident in the exponentially increasing circulation of museum texts – 3D scenarios, images, narratives and simulations -‐ all now effortless disseminated across electronic networks that emerge from museums and other centres of CH. The profusion of these electronically driven applications and digital artefacts may be seen as a gain, in that they serve to extend the museum mission beyond the museum walls; often even replacing the museum for remote visitors as our discussion will suggest. To return to the loss that Benjamin describes, the loss of the aura, crucial to the object-‐orientated museum and implicit in the presentation of the artwork, is the idea that the museum acts as a stage to present the original object. But why is this originality or presumed lack of originality so critical to the museum experience? Andrea Witcomb draws on Benjamin and the logic operating in 19th-‐century museum practice. ‘This is the opposition,’


Witcomb argues, ‘between a copy and its original, an opposition which privileges the original as more important, more precious, than a copy’ xvi, xvii Witcomb describes how special attention was given to demonstrate the originality of an object and argues how ‘originality could no longer be taken for granted. It had to be constructed and guaranteed’. She describes how great care was taken not only to locate originality, but also to present the original through erecting a symbolic barrier that was set up ‘between viewer and artefact, between subject and object’. This physical and symbolic barrier, Witcomb argues, ‘served to signify the monetary value of the artefact, thus mixing the auratic with monetary values, aesthetics with commercial values’. In this way the visitor was assured that the objects encountered in the museum were valuable, in some way special, and possibly even exemplary, but certainly worthy of taking the time to make a special trip to a dedicated space that guarantees the engagement with the original. Where Benjamin referred to cinema and photography, V-‐Must highlights the VM, and our investigations are concerned with both the loss of the aura, as well as the new possibilities for distribution across electronic networks. Electronic networks of distribution allow both digital surrogates of the material artefact as well as new entities of the Museum born-‐digital to circulate freely, and, where notions of originality and singularity are not only impossible, but also in essence totally irrelevant. How can we connote a website original – when its singular pages essentially appear simultaneously everywhere? The goal of the digital museum is often not to replace the material object with an electronic surrogate, but instead, open up new possibilities to harness, and to enact reciprocal, user-‐driven scenarios, as well as furnishing new opportunities for the remote visitor to be able to interact with the physical museum. While the implementation of technology in the museum has been theorized through the rhetoric of the displacement of the treasure house, or as a privileging of information over the objectxviii (Fahy, 2001: 11), we can also look to a digital museum that neither replaces, nor prioritises traditional modes of collection and display, but offer new possibilities for novel scenarios, previously not possible.

V. SOCIAL NETWORKS AND WEB 2.0 – RE-SETTING COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP

A Virtual Museum, as standard museum practice does not always seek to displace or distract from the museum mission, to collect, display, and interpret the material collections for the visitor. Rather, it serves to enhance and extend the museum mandate in novel ways, and even open up new possibilities as the discussions above described. A typically museum will now not only have to invest in a comprehensive institutional website, but will also need to have a robust Web 2.0 presence (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). In addition, museums invest in apps over mobile platforms while developing electronic audio guides for visitors in the museum gallery. In contrast to the Web 1.0 broadcast model, Web 2.0 platforms locate the user – as prosumerxix centred, blurring the role of the producer and consumer who in turn produces, consumes, and mixes his own, and others’ micro-‐content. Peer-‐to-‐peer networking is here to stay; according to the Internet World Stats [14] in December 2012 there are more than 835 million Facebook users around the world so that a large percentage of online traffic moves across these sites, rather than stopping off in the deep silos of content that are located as searchable collections on institutional sites. With all these people talking directly


to each other, the reality is that museums are in danger of being by-‐passed unless they maintain their own presence on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social networking platforms that allow them to take part in the day-‐to-‐day, often minute-‐by-‐minute chatter of their online conversations. When individuals create their own content – including the kinds once associated with the museum profession – this could be seen as a direct assault on memory institutions, which previously maintained a monopoly of specialised content, as well as the responsibility of disseminating the knowledge related to their collections. Now everyone can be a curator, in just the same way as we are all photographers, musicians, writers and authors – online at least. Perhaps the most au courant of the Web 2.0 platforms is still the blog. They first appeared in 1997, becoming more visible since 2001, when service management platforms became available to all – and for free. As a hybrid between a diary and journalism on-‐line, characterised by chronological ordering of information, the blog phenomenon encompasses a horizontal network of bloggers known collectively as the blogosphere, recalling perhaps an electronic, and expediential iteration of Jürgen Habermas's public sphere of the previous centuryxx. Once personalised with graphics and layouts in a template, your blog allows you to publish stories, information, and opinions with total autonomy. Articles are linked to a theme (thread), in which readers can write their comments and leave messages for the author. Every article is numbered within the blog and can be specifically indicated through a permalink, pointing directly to a specific article. In some cases there can be a number of bloggers who write for the one blog – it is all seamlessly simple! Moving web publishing from the authority institution straight into your or my keyboard means that everyone now has both the capability to create anything – including their very own Virtual Museum. The question is then – who has the authority to author CH and launch it with great fanfare into the public domain? Not only is the method of delivery now available to all, but the traditional division between the memory institution and their public is also blurred. Novel forms of user-‐generated content are evolving within the museum itself. Social tagging, as a means to become pro-‐active, enables users to place "tags" into their blog post, photographs, videos, etc., facilitating new searches within the tagged content base that ‘belongs’ to the public rather the institution. Classification using social tagging is no longer based on a hierarchical order of the content, as we would expect in a typical VM, since the user can insert more than one key word. The more a tag is applied by a number of users, the more the term will increase in popularity and precision in categorization. Main search categories will therefore be created based on themes that are most frequently accessed and tagged by users. Categorization thus becomes "democratic", not imposed from above, but from below, and evolves spontaneously as more users tag content. The term folksonomyxxi coined by Thomas Vander Wal in 200313, derives from the words folk and taxonomy and has often been used in the context of the VM as a form of distributed classification, potentially to be shared by the whole community of users. Tags; as folksomonies, are not a priori structured into the controlled vocabularies such as those that created by institutions, rather denote categories and subcategories that the user according to his or her own associations. Making individual annotations to content bottom-‐up in this way means that user generated content (as tags) can shared by other users. One of the disadvantages of this however is the proliferation of variants for a term (synonymies, homonyms, single/plural use, small case/upper case, etc.), which essentially creates a series of unusable tags – often described as the long tail. To avoid these misnomers, clustering


techniques can be applied, where some elements are grouped together, so that different tags are treated as if they were one (e.g. Folksonomy, folksonomy or folksonomies). The folksonomy system is used when it isn't possible, or desirable to centrally manage classification, and where the public is welcome to participate in content classification. However, tags may be seen as highly personal, so much so that idiosyncratic expressions do not really help anyone else find content other than the original tagger. According to Wal, the value in this external tagging is derived from people using their own vocabulary and adding explicit meaning, which may come from inferred understanding of the information/object. People are not so much categorizing, as providing a means to connect items (placing hooks) to provide a way into their own expressive understanding. One of the first examples of tagging in a VM was the Steve Projectxxii, a collaboration of museum professionals and others who argued (according to their website) that social tagging might provide profound new ways to describe and access CH collections, and encourage visitor engagement with collection objects. Their activities include researching social tagging and museum collections; developing open source software tools for tagging collections, and managing tags; and engaging in discussion and outreach with members of the community who were interested in implementing social tagging for their own collections. In a discussion of the VM in a Web 2.0 world is not complete without at least a brief reference to other popular social networking sites such as Twitter, Yahoo-‐owned Flickr, Tumblr, and the surprisingly popular newcomer Pinterest. All of these platforms contribute the very dynamic social chatter of a connected world and VM’s clearly need to integrate these platforms into their delivery in order to maintain their visibility, and to be able to join in the conversation. The series of dialogues described in Civic Engagement: A Challenge to Museums, that took place between museums and communities across the US in 2002xxiii, challenged the museum in its relationship with its public. Drawing on these dialogues and the prolific literature on visitor research that has emerged from the museum profession over the last decade, the VM may actually provide the ideal opportunity to re-‐affirm the relationship to its visitors in response to the criticisms cited in the publication. The museums were described as “floating above the community,” and the idea that the museum’s positive self-‐image was not fully endorsed by the community was raised in these discussions. Questions about authorship and ownership were also broached, instigating a call to museums to present a variety of perspectives, rather than a singular, institutional voicexxiv. The new role of the VM and its relationship with the public more resembles the kinds of scenarios as played out in a Web 2.0 world rather in the traditional museum website. They open up new kinds of conversations that may be seen as both an affront to the traditional monopolistic control of CH institutions and, at the same time, for new opportunities for the same institutions to welcome a multi-‐voiced conversation around their collections and situated knowledge. The museums that were described in the dialogues as “floating above the community”, may now be able to re-‐set this bias and open up CH that belongs to the community, that is essentially authored by the community and can be enjoyed by the community in a true prosumer fashion.


We will now look at three case studies suggesting some of the many possibilities of the VM that illustrate the loss and the gain of the Benjamin aura as well as new kinds of symbiotic relationships where VMs serve to shift ownership of their CH collections and situated knowledge onto their public, creating new scenarios that have been jointly authored together by the museum, with their public. In addition, not only are issues of aura and ownership discussed below but more critically to what extent the physical museum plays a role once the content has been disseminated beyond the museum wall – or has even by-‐passed the museum altogether – what then?

VI. COULD THE VM EXIST WITHOUT THE PHYSICAL MUSEUM? -A HUMAN SANCTUARY

When the primary source of a VM is essentially a video (Fig. 1), and when that same original video was authored by a museum, does this kind of entity build upon the physicality of the museum, or is it simply experienced as an autonomous entity of its own, regardless of the memory institution that created it? These are perhaps questions that may vex the museum that has, through the professional honing of situated knowledge actually released that same knowledge well beyond the museum walls.

Fig. 1. Snapshot from the movie Videos are ideally suited both to the museum’s desire to retell their stories to their public, as well as the ideal media to share online. Viewing a video in its linear format propels the viewer through the storyline, while the video producer, in this case a museum curator can only hope that the message gets across accordingly, especially when the messages are complex, and demand a fair amount of concentration on behalf of the viewer. If only the viewer could find ways to get into the storyline and investigate the concepts behind the moving images, save them in meaningful ways, and later re-‐assemble them in new forms for their own agenda, then, perhaps that same knowledge could be better assimilated. This case study describes “A Human Sanctuary’ a project supported by a grant from the Dorot Foundation, that has created a web based, interactive, encyclopaedia of historical, and biblical knowledge, relating to the Essene community that once lived in Qumran, near the Dead Sea some two thousand years ago. The 20-‐minute feature film, researched and produced by the Israel Museum in Jerusalemxxvis screened in the auditorium on a regular basis inside the Museum campus, and serves as a persuasive context to situate the World-‐renowned Dead Sea Scrolls collection that is housed in a dedicated gallery space, The Shrine of the Book, located in he heart of the museum campus.


The film introduces us to two young men; one a novice living in the Qumran community, the other an apprentice priest from the Temple in Jerusalem who are more than curious to hear about each other’s lives. Without spoiling the plot for you, this offers the Museum Curator, Dr. Adolfo Roitman ample opportunities to set the scenes, both within the Qumran community, as well as in Jerusalem during Second Temple times. The narrative is complex, and is acted out on both locations. The storyline describes the daily life of the period that relates to historical, social, and religious aspects of their contrasting ways of life. The film depicts the protagonists’ inevitable meeting, and their dilemmas the viewer gets a glimpse into this historical period that even may resonate with his own, personal life dilemmas. The platform and tools developed [18] for the interactive encyclopaedia (Fig. 2) enable the user to view the film in its entirety as screened in the auditorium, track the plot through a series of annotations, integrate the segments through both annotations, and subject index and relate to the embedded prolific links, images, bibliography and glossary. These kinds of interactions offer the user ideal opportunities to integrate the movie at his or her own pace; watching, exploring, investigating, making associations, linking concepts, and saving segments, images and texts from the rich data repository for future use.

This case study serves to illustrate the autonomous nature of these kinds of video-‐driven VM’s, and while the Museum is clearly evoked as the author and producer of the content and data set it reveals, it is the user who has instantaneously become the owner, and new author of the platform.

VII. DOES THE VIRTUAL MUSEUM IN FACT "LIVE" THROUGH ITS PHYSICAL COUNTERPART? – THE SISTINE CHAPEL

The Sistine Chapel in the Vatican has become more than iconic over the years; serving as a must stop tourist attraction for all who flock to Italy and as focus for pilgrims from all over the world. Numerous print publications have been written on Chapel’s ceiling, painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512 -‐ a cornerstone works of High Renaissance art -‐ while countless movies have been produced in the breathtakingly, stunning space. The reality is, sadly, somewhat less inspirational when visitors are steered in a shoulder-‐to-‐shoulder herd through the Chapel, tethered to the color-‐coded umbrella, or flag of the tourist guide, who shuffles you in and out in less than 15 minutes. Of course that artwork is no less spectacular, but something of the wonder has been dulled by the relentless shuffle of feet and nudging of elbows that go on while you strain to enjoy the bedazzling art that surrounds you. Of course this is a must for all of us at least once in our lives, (as the example of the Mona Lisa ashes experiment seems to prove) but being able to appreciate the paintings, perhaps online, does give on a respite from the joggling crowds -‐ just enough to understand what it is we were looking at.


There are in fact impressive virtual reproductions online, even complete with appropriate liturgical music in the background such as the site developed by the Vatican Museum itself. Here we can ‘move’, and ‘pause’ at our own pace; take in the various narratives, and learn a little more about Michelangelo’s work. While this does not even compete with the original, it does offer something that is not possible in the real space – an opportunity for peaceful contemplation (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Snapshot from the project’s website What of course is missing is the sense of self in the physical space, but this too can be compensated for -‐ in part by 3D platforms that open up new ways for the visitor to experience some sense of immersionxxvi. Created in 2007 by undergraduate student, Steve Taylor, from The Department of Synthetic Reality: The Science and Applications of Virtual, Mixed, and Augmented Reality at Vassar College, NY, US, the Second Life Sistine Chapel invites avatars not only to enter into the ‘physical’ space but to actually to ‘fly up’ to the ceiling and inspect the angels at close rangexxvii. This is not only a single user experience, the visit can be shared with a friend –or if you would prefer with a crowd of bustling visitors that simultaneously transverse the space together – following their very own Second Life tourist guide with its very own miniature, color-‐coded flag. Since the mid 1990’s, when museums first moved into their electronic showcases on the Internet, museum professionals have been developing innovative ways to present and represent their collections to their public. A truly semantic web; one that grants deep access to information to the web, as this report has describes offers new in-‐roads to complex datasets, allowing us to make our own connections, intuitively and seamlessly. At the same times the Web is also becoming a space that is tempting our public into new kinds of synthetic worlds and it is the VM that is leading the way. The Sistine Chapel in this persistent world invites people – or at least their avatars – to move into and around buildings and across landscapes; all meticulously modelled in 3D. These sites do not follow the web page metaphor, rather are ordered as connected islands, where everyone can build their own home, sell their own wares in their very own shop, even construct an entire library or museum for other avatars; all built with free tools in the in-‐world environment. The potential for the museum community is tempting as they function as highly social spaces, whose 3D characteristics lends themselves far more readily to the museum experience than ever did the web-‐page metaphor of the World Wide Web. These are beautifully crafted virtual environments; spaces where people ‘meet’ as movement avatars, and interact in Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVE’s) exploring isometric, simulated galleries, wander around 3D museums, and visit persuasive historical reconstructions. Second Life is ‘a place’ where you can log in at your convenience; interact with others, in play and commerce, creativity and learning, and entertainment and exploration.


The question that begs to be asked here relates to the branding of these kinds of experiences. What would happen if we were to remove the label "Cappelle Sistina" or even the Vatican Museum? Would our digital replica, either on line or in world still be as famous? Would it still inspire people in the same way as long as they were aware of the original chapel that stands in all its glory in the Vatican located much, much more than a click away?

VIII. COULD THE VM HAVE A LIFE OF ITS OWN? – EUROPEANA 1989: WE MADE HISTORY

Local history museums tend to house a range of objects that at first glance don’t appear to have significant monetary value, and probably exist in the basement of your home and mine. Brought together in sequential presentations however, these often banal objects serve to punctuate local stories with the physical evidence that serves to tell the real story, and produce, in this way, a convincing historical narrative with a visual imperative. Elevated to museum status and spotlight in the gallery, however, these kinds of benign objects take on new qualities when mobilised in the gallery. According to Michel Foucault, xxviii social space has been moving towards de-‐sacralisation since the time of Galileo when he describes a hierarchy of sacred and profane spaces. In order to fulfil this desire for the sacred, contemporary society seeks to define spaces, separate from mundane, everyday living. Foucault describes these spaces as utopias, as spaces having no real place, as fundamentally and essentially unreal; although acting as an analogy with the real space of society. According to Foucault, every civilization creates real places, actual places that serve to stage experiences and consequently sets them aside for extraordinary action. The liminal spaces, that Foucault calls heterotopias, while based in objective reality, act as the mirror that reflects. While this reflected space may be concrete, in that it exists in a real location, it's social function, at the same time serves to provide society with an abstract locale. A derivation of the heterotopian space, according to Foucault are the heterochronias of time that accumulates indefinitely -‐ for example, museums and libraries. What happens when we re-‐create history outside of the museum? Without the separation from our lived-‐on mundane spaces that the museum setting affords? This third case study, Europeana 1989: We Made History is an ambitious, pan-‐European project that accumulates resources from the community, by the community, and presents them in a novel form of VM without actually calling itself a VM but certainly promises to be much more than a singular museum ever could.

Fig. 4. Europeana snapshots.


According to their website, in 2014, the world will celebrate the 25th anniversary of an extraordinary year -‐ 1989 -‐ when walls crumbled and the people of Europe were united again. The Europeana 1989 project asks people from every country involved to digitise their own stories, photos, videos and sound recordings of 1989. The result will be a fascinating archive for present and future generations that can be explored for learning, personal interest and research work. Europeana 1989 is collaboration between eleven partner institutions, Historypin and the Europeana Foundationxxix. The Europeana 1989 project, in fact promises to be far more ambitious that any single museum or group of museums has undertaken on such a scale. Launched by the European Commission in November 2008, Europe’s flagship project Europeana (www.europeana.eu), Europe's digital library, museum and archive has collected and opened up access to over 30 million digitised objects, from libraries, archives, audio visual archives and museums. It currently brings together more than 2,200 collaborating institutions and its website is accessible in 29 European languagesxxx. Europeana invites people from all over the world to discover the collections for themselves, and to explore the cultural and intellectual heritage of Europe through a simple search engine and virtual exhibitions. This project, similar to several other, both led by Europeana (albeit on a smaller scale) and many other institutions argues that the way history is recorded isn’t just about what museums and institutions think is important, it’s about what real people lived through and experienced. To this ambitious goal, the public is invited to contribute their own stories, pictures, films or other items relating to the events of1989 in Central and Eastern Europe, to add them to the online collection, and share them with the world. The invitation to let us take you on a journey through the Fall of the Iron Curtain, see it from all sides and draw your own conclusions is a call to not only learn about this memorable moment but a call to action to actively re-‐write history through personalised micro-‐histories, and a multitude of voices. Europeana 1989 project kicked off on 8 June, 2013 in Warsaw and you can share the first results on the project website -‐www.europeana1989.eu

IX. CONCLUSIONS Through this three, brief case studies, we hope that we have illustrated the kinds of experiences that the VM now opens up for the end-‐user; shifting the point of entrance of the personal narrative away from the physical museum to the home, the office, or the school; inviting new visitors into dialog with the museum, and thus to become connected in much the same way they already do over Facebook with their friends over their mobile screens. Once connected, remote visitors may find a way to make the unfamiliar familiar, and where they may discover that -‐ with a single click -‐ they have already been initiated into the museum that no longer floats above them. Through electronic connectivity, remote visitors may also discover a place for co-‐created and reciprocal activities, as these case studies indicate and realize that the museum values their knowledge, experiences and expertise as much as it does their own and is aware that they too have something of value to contribute. The kinds of innovative scenarios that are now enacted in the VM open up innovative avenues of connectivity between the museum and their audiences and when the VM is


conceptualised as augmentations of the museum mandate (rather than as a distraction from traditional practice or as actively displacing the material object) they can be implemented with confidence to extend the museum mission of originality, accuracy and above all integrity.

THE RESPONSIVE MUSEUM

This section will look at the responsive screen – where not only is the screen dynamically re-‐sizing itself for the numerous platformsxxxi – In-‐house large screens, PC, mobile, and tablet -‐ but will more critically consider the response of the user/visitor who will be encountering the Museum before, and after the visit as well as during the actual visit. What kinds of implications will this have on the visit and visitor, and how can the Museum prepare for these different kinds of scenarios? Through a series of three case studies we attempt to define the VM as we re-‐visit the core concept of the museum ethos as it reaches out to meet its visitor. Introducing the visitor to the exhibition, even before the physical visit – in an exceptionally well-‐honed marketing scenario we will discuss the virtual bear hug – where the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington wraps its electronic arms around the future visitor to the exhibition Yoga: The Art of Transformation. The deluge of visitor/museum scenarios, including promoting the show over numerous social networks and enticing invitations to ‘use’ the exhibition in novel ways aims to introduce the visitors to the exhibition which opened October 19, 2013-‐ well before the red ribbon was cut. The second case study describes an engaging scenario of electronic delivery that accompanies the visitor during the visit and describes the CMA CollectionWall, a 40-‐foot multi-‐touch MicroTile Collection Wall that dramatically visualizes all the works currently on view in CMA’s permanent collection galleries, plus some that are in storage— over 3,800 works of art. The third VM scenario, Ask Jacques Lipchitz a Question, authored by the Israel Museum, Jerusalem can be enjoyed after the visit and serves, in a novel way to augment and enhance the experience and maintain the connection between the Museum and the visitor opening up opportunities to ‘meet the artist’ and ‘hear his voice’ – even after his own death.

1. INTRODUCTION

The expression ‘responsive design’ is a term that we are hearing about more and more, but how does this relate to websites and in what ways can this concept possibly be connected to museums? Architects and engineers are experimenting with motion sensors that respond to the presence of the people moving within the environment; adjusting, for example, the room’s temperature and triggering pre-‐synched systems to prompt ambient lighting. This approach to physical spaces is now referred to as responsive architecturexxxii where embedded systems sense presence, and motion and prompt the environment to adjust in return. Physical spaces essentially enter into conversation with the people who occupy them, and responding in real time and accommodating them accordingly. In a networked world, other kinds of systems need to develop different responsive solutions to deliver rich content to arrange of platforms (large screens, pc’s, mobile phones, tablets, etc.). These systems also react in real time; applying the same kind of responsive principle


to optimize the viewing experience – easy reading and navigation with a minimum of re-‐sizing, panning, and scrolling – across a wide range of screen-‐sizes (from desktop computer monitors, to tablets, to mobile phones). This approach assures efficient delivery of content to all users, whatever their choice of platform. This section takes this approach one step further and explores what kinds of conversations are possible once the museum engages with audiences to enable not only to provide access to exhibitions, collections, events and educational activities, it essentially facilitates public conversation around issues that concern the Museum. The responsive design approach, therefore, when applied to the Museum, serves to foster dialogue between the Museum and its visitors; inspiring the public to join in the exchange and encourages truly reciprocal conversations. This section discusses the virtual museum (VM) that opens up new possibilities to harness, and to enact reciprocal, user-‐driven scenarios, as well as furnishing new opportunities for the remote visitor to be able to interact with the physical museum in novel ways. To explore the VM in the context of the responsive museum, we will also reflect on the practice of new museology; not as a specific turning point in the history of museums, but rather as a marker of the on-‐going, re-‐evaluation of the museum in relationship with its audiences.xxxiii New Museology at times has implied a radical re-‐organisation of museum agendas, such as a move from an elitist, undemocratic space towards a more democratic space, the prioritising of the visitor rather than the object, or the reclaiming, or re-‐territorising of the museum as a space that could be owned by the community.xxxiv At the same time, a similar expectation of ‘newness’ is implicit in the term ‘new media’ when applied in the context of the museum, however, both terms have been so often repeated that they are at risk of becoming redundant and need to be re-‐appraised before applying them to the responsive museum. While the move from 'old' to 'new' media describes a modification of the technological platform, rather than a radical change in content – from traditional print distribution and terrestrial television, to webcasting, podcasting and electronic peer to peer communications over the Internet – the term 'new museology' is invoked to suggest changes in institutional ideologies. While this report uses both of the terms to suggests a break from the corresponding 'old' agendas, it also questions whether the idea of ‘newness’ inherent in both of these expressions simply represents a modification of the platform of delivery, rather than a radicalisation of content, ideology or institutional agendas. I will argue that new media iterations of museum agendas, in fact, often deliver applications that represent electronic versions of the old practices, and, with these applications the underlying ideologies of the inherited legacies are replicated and consequently re-‐distributed. The use of the terms that invoke the illusion of ‘newness’, therefore, may set up false expectations, especially when electronic environments are perceived as a panacea for archaic and inefficient systems. In a presentation on e-‐government and the Information Society, Paul Timmers, Head of the Unit for E-‐Government in the European Commission, Directorate-‐General Information Society, argued that, while those who develop these initiatives, as well as those who will be using them, expect innovation, the emergence of new skills, and organizational implementation through the uptake of ICTs, are often based on, and essentially replicate, the old systems with all their inherent problems.xxxv According to Timmers, in reproducing legacy systems, albeit in an electronic configuration, environments that articulated legislative practices – paying a fine or taxes online, renewing a passport or driver’s licence, etc. – that were cumbersome and outdated in their underlying assumptions, are often driven by the same organizational principles when transposed online.


2. THE ECOMUSEUM, NEW MUSEOLOGY, AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY

Both the national and the universal museum have their own stories to tell, and each prioritises their collections and exhibitions accordingly with these agendas in mind. The theory and practice of the new museologists built on the ecomuseum, which emphasised a community–driven agenda, where the public was encouraged to take on an active role, and where a plurality of voices, rather than the single authoritarian voice could be heard. This section introduces new museology and its prioritising of cultural diversity, which, in contrast to the universal or national museum, actively encourages visitor participation, and visibly welcomes contributions from the community. The museum is located within the reach of the community, and as each museum conceptualises 'its community' in a specific ways these different perspectives inevitably determine the kinds of visit the public will experience when they visit. Whether the visit is purely educational or for pleasure, visitors will meet the institutional narrative, and whether the visitor complies or not with this narrative, determines whether he or she feels included or excluded from the experience. Describing the tools and processes by which concepts such as the 'museum' become self-‐legitimating, Irit Rogoff (1994: 232) [1] argues: ‘the museum as a complex amalgam of ideological intentions operating through strategies of pleasure and gratifications, is equally the site of the production of cultural identities. Through numerous and varied practices cultural exclusions are reproduced and cultural “otherness” is constituted’. The display of meta-‐narratives and micro-‐narratives of cultural heritage in the gallery make the divisions of sub-‐cultures and para-‐cultures highly visible, therefore legitimising some kinds of cultural affiliation, while presenting other kinds of cultural practice as exotic or alien. When ‘normative’ displays of ‘our’ heritage, or ‘our’ shared memory, refer only to some members of society, not all visitors will necessarily concur with this message. Visitors who comply with the story line will readily engage with the narrative; alternatively, the exhibition message may be read in opposition, while at other times visitors may simply react indifferently. While exclusion is often (although not exclusively) constructed as a derogatory or subordinate position, museum narratives often set up binary opposites to create cultural specificity, whether they are historical, ethnic, or geographicalxxxvi Karp (1991: 375) [2] referred to ‘exoticizing’ and ‘assimilating’ strategies that produce different kinds of responses to describe the different options open to the museum and these micro-‐narratives come together to construct the meta-‐narrative that visitors encounter when they come into the museum. As visitors enter the gallery, they do so with their own pre-‐figured, cultural empathies and alliances. See Doering’s [3] (1999: 8) discussion on entrance narratives, or the internal story line. At times, the visitors embrace the narrative, while at others times the narrative is read against the grain, resulting in alienation and a sense of cultural exclusion.xxxvii Much effort goes into promoting social inclusion in the museum (see, for example, the Group for Large Local Authority Museums, GLLAM Report, 2000, and the DCMS Department of Culture, Media and Science toolkit), and many museums’ educational activities are now sensitive to the possibilities that some people may feel excluded.xxxviii The examples in this report look at the narratives produced by the museum of the new museologists; those museums that choose to create true conversations through new media.


We will consider the ways that these kinds of museums produce community-‐driven scenarios and will consider how these VMs mediate their messages to act as a site of production of cultural identity, with an agenda that promotes social inclusion. While clearly we are discussing the kinds of experiences that are aligned to the Web 2.0 Museum, a term coined by Nino Simon in her popular blog and seminal publicationxxxix, the historical process of the new museologist conceptually prefaced the digital interaction of a community driven museum. The ecomuseum was introduced in the late 1970’s and early 80’s in France in a bid to reaffirm a sense of community through critique of the object-‐orientated model of the museum. According to Poulet (1994: 71) [4], the term was forged in 1971, during the ninth meeting of ICOM in Grenoble, when ‘the idea of heritage [patrimoine] linked to specific communities and localities had begun to interest the French Ministry of the Environment and high officials in charge of the nation’s physical resources’. The ecomuseum, Poulet argues, ‘spawned a distinctive conception of identity, according to which the preservation of culture was a kind of social responsibility’ (ibid.). The community of Le Creusot-‐Montceau-‐les-‐Mines, Poulet explains, was created in 1974 by Marcel Evard in collaboration with Rivière. Four distinct fields of activity were envisioned by the founders: remembrance; understanding [la connaissance]; a joint management and development of the locale by the inhabitants and a team of scientists; and finally artistic creation (arts retreats; creative arts projects linked to local industry and technology) (1994: 71-‐72). Community-‐orientation and the active participation by the community as actors and even authors of the shared projects drove these kinds of moves. When inaugurating the Fresnes Ecomuseum in 1978, in a suburb of Paris, Georges Henri Rivière, the first Director of ICOM, outlined the underlying principles by which a community could view itself as ‘an ecomuseum,' describing the ecomuseum as:

An instrument conceived, fashioned and operated jointly by a public authority and a local population. It is a mirror in which the local population views itself to discover its own image, in which it seeks an explanation of the territory to which it is attached and of the populations which have preceded it, through the discontinuity or continuity of generations.

(Rivière 1978; quoted in Delarge 2001)xl The ecomuseum encouraged local cooperation and the pro-‐active contributions of the community that determined exhibition strategies and educational agendas. Collaboration between Fresnes town, for example, and the community included several projects: a celebration that marked the local prison's centenary, and the presentation of Rassemblance, an exhibition that dealt with immigration. Rassemblance offered an opportunity for members of the immigrant population of Fresnes to portray one hundred years of immigration to France, gathering the photographic information that illustrated their own stories and their own heritage from their home surroundings (ibid.:). The idea of ‘a new museology’ arrived in the UK at the end of the 1980’s soon after the ecomuseum had appeared in France when, in the UK, the museum community faced a crisis at a time when funding was becoming scarce and when museums were concerned with having lost their direction.xli The publication, The New Museology, edited by Peter Vergo (1989), included nine authors who introduced a series of radical challenges to the old view of a museum, calling for a reform of traditional museology, with a move towards community action. Andrea Witcomb (2003) [6], an Australian-‐based, self-‐declared, new museologist describes ‘New Museology’ explaining that ‘one of the ways in which contemporary


museums attempt to challenge dominant views of the museum as site of power relations is to invoke and encourage new relations between museum and communities’. Witcomb suggests resolving the tensions through innovative curatorial practice, so that ‘one way of avoiding romantic notions of community, while also recognizing that museums are engaged in dialogue, would be to think of museums themselves as communities’ [original italics] (2003: 79). She argues this is demonstrated through her own curatorial practice at the Fremantle History Museum in Western Australia in a case study, Travelers and Immigrants. As a curator, Witcomb (ibid.: 86) declares that she wanted the exhibition ‘to be attentive to the problem of "voice" […] and to reflect the meanings Portuguese-‐Australian people themselves gave to the objects as symbols of their own migrant experience’. Attention to voice and authorship that depicts and structures community narratives could now be reshuffled in the light of emerging technologies where VMs could present opportunities for voices to emerge from grass roots communities, perhaps for the first time. One of the first expressions of these kinds of platforms was Moving Here the online stories of Caribbean, Irish, Jewish and South Asian people who left their homelands to move to England over the previous 200 years which was one of the earliest examples of a new museological approach that was attentive to voices from the community and supported by new media; enabling new kinds of synergies to develop.xlii The online interface not only disseminated the archived histories from 30 museums across the UK in novel ways, but also offered opportunities for remote visitors to contribute their own micro-‐histories to the London community and their shared memory. Reaching out to the community in this way had its own historical antecedents, and represented a new chapter in the continuing evolution of the modern museum. Clifford has described museums as ‘contact zones,' as a discursive space where ‘aspirations of both dominant and subaltern populations can be articulated through this structure, along with the material interests of nation and national tourism’ (Clifford 1997: 218) [7]. Clifford borrows the term 'contact zones’ from Mary Louise Pratt, who in her book Imperial Eyes: Travel and Transculturation, defines the ‘contact zone’ as ‘the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’ (Pratt 1992: 6-‐7, quoted in Clifford 1997: 192). For Clifford, however, the idea of a contact zone

can be extended to include cultural relations within the same state, region, or city – in the centers rather than the frontiers of nations and empires. The distances at issue here are more social than geographic. For most inhabitants of a poor neighborhood, located perhaps just blocks or a short bus ride from a fine-‐arts museum, the museum might as well be on another continent.

(Clifford 1997: 204) Clifford’s account of museums as contact zones 'argues for a democratic politic that would challenge the hierarchical valuing of different places of crossing. It argues for a decentralization and circulation of collections in a multiple public sphere, an expansion of the range of things that can happen in museums and museum-‐like settings’ (ibid.: 214). While Clifford’s discussions are set in the basement of the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon, where curators meet with Tlingit tribal elders to discuss the Northwest Coast Indian Collection, the ensuing interaction that focused on custodial responsibilities to the clan’s cultural heritage has implications for museum collections around the world. Clifford argues,


‘the objects of the Rasmussen collection, however fairly or freely bought and sold, could never be entirely possessed by the museum. They were sites of a historical negotiation, occasions for ongoing contact’ (ibid.: 194). Clifford’s contact zones represent democratic spaces which draw attention to custodial responsibilities and relationships of reciprocity between the museum and the communities they serve, and where the community-‐driven agendas and potential resources are distributed rather than fixed in the hierarchical structures of the conventional museum. While most collections, held in custodial responsibility by museums on behalf of the community, would not be as spiritually imbued as those negotiated by the Tlingit tribal objects from the Northwest Coast Indian Collection in the Portland Museum of Art, all objects that are owned by the museum are in fact owned by the community and may be understood as sites of crossing. Thinking about the museum as community clearly demands a radical adjustment to traditional museum practice. According to Bennett,

much of the language of community might imply a critique of the more abstract relationships of government or of a state. What stands behind the ecomuseum are the activities of government which, in establishing such museum and training their staff, developing new principles for the exhibition of cultural materials and a host of related tinkering with practical arrangements […] equips it to be able to develop itself as a community […].

(1998: 202) [8] When community action is amplified in the ways suggested by the ecomuseum, the new museologists and Clifford’s contact zones, it could serve to reverse the traditional role of curator and visitor, transferring agency from the museum back into the community, and set up new synergies of co-‐production. While not actually redistributing the artefacts themselves, thinking about the VM as a contact zone suggests that these kinds of co-‐coordinated, online activities could offer new opportunities to share the knowledge, histories, and interpretations of objects. The ubiquitous electronic networks connect centre to periphery even when the distance is only a bus ride away, enabling opportunities for discourse and essentially replacing the producer/consumer model of the museum/visitor relationship with new co-‐productions of resources driven horizontally across the networks. The innovative nature of these networks, however, may be deceiving, especially when they serve to perpetuate the legacy of the past. When VMs simply replicate entrenched ideologies, the technological innovation is predicated on archaic principles, and their emancipatory potential is forfeited. Employing new media in the museum, therefore, must be seen as complex and ambiguous, and in describing these enabling technologies, V-‐Must identifies both those VMs that illustrate the emancipation of the rigid taxonomies of the traditional museum, as well as those that simply enable the museum to re-‐enact out-‐dated positions. The role of V-‐Must is not to critique either of these approaches, rather to identify and map out the different narratives the VMs encapsulate. To conclude with Clifford’s utopian vision of the museum as contact zone, he argues:

within broad limits, a museum can accommodate different systems of accumulation and circulation, secrecy and communication, aesthetic, spiritual, and economic value. How its “public” or “community” is defined, what individual, group, vision, or ideology it celebrates, how it interprets the phenomena it presents, how long it remains in place, how rapidly it changes, – all these are negotiable.

(Clifford 1997: 217-‐218).


V-‐Must’s arguments for a VM are speculative and not prescriptive; we can only retrospectively describe the dynamics and ideologies of this space that is perceived. We would of course prescribe an uncompromisingly democratic space that encompasses plurality and embraces cultural diversity if we perceived our role to influence things in any way, we still wouldn’t ignore the reality where some VMs still clearly remain locked in fossilised legacies that still do not open their doors to everyone. To end on a more optimistic note, however, we would argue that the trend is towards a greater openness, and without wishing to sound visionary or futuristic, we sense that museums, in a post Web 2.0 world are working towards a more open approach, in some cases actively integrating the micro-‐histories of their public into the meta-‐narratives of national histories, and accommodating broader audiences who come to the museum with their own agendas. Terms like the ‘digital divide’ has been replaced with ideas of social inclusion, and agendas developed to enhance cultural diversity and pluralism are gathering ground. To evaluate the role of VMs in this progression, the following examples represent how some experiences reiterate the legacy ideologies of the traditional museum, while at the same time other platforms have opened up unique opportunities for open discussion and an opportunity to welcome all voices from communities across all contact zones. The following section will discuss three scenarios of the VM; each in their own way describing the relationship between the museum and the visitors; each one highlighting the progression from physical visit to virtual and the different kinds of opportunities that they afford the user/visitor. Whether they represent the truly democratising approach that the New Museologist advocated or not, these kinds of scenarios do offer the potential for re-‐shuffling the cards from a traditional museum approach to one that is more in tandem with the Web 2.0 world.

3. YOGA; THE ART OF TRANSFORMATION – BEFORE THE VISIT, THE VM AND THE MARKETING SCENARIO

Visitors to the exhibition Yoga: The Art of Transformation that opened at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington October 19, 2013 may well have heard of it months in advance. Launching the exhibition across the Smithsonian’s Blog, via their E-‐newsletter, Twitter, YouTube Channel or over Facebook, the Museum had ample time up ahead to spread the Yoga vibes to potential audiences. Introducing the visitor to the exhibition and inviting them to ‘use’ the exhibition in novel ways served not only to introduce the visitors to the exhibition, but also to become directly involved in promoting it. Crowdsourcing the museum audience in this way amplified the exhibitions’ message and served to draw in potential visitors to the exhibition. The term 'crowd sourcing' is used in connection with a whole range of online activities, and generally describes the ways in which the public -‐ that is you and I -‐ are harnessed by others to do their work them. This is a dynamic give and take relationship where it seems that some are giving while others take. Crowd sourcing sets up all sorts of novel power relationships: in some scenarios individuals act out of pure altruism (doubtful); with others it seems that there is one side gaining more than the others (usually by those who are doing the outsourcing), while in yet other scenarios there are those who are prepared to be resources for their own-‐altruistic pleasure. As they say -‐ it’s complicated! (Hazan 2011) Jeff Howexliii was the first person to use the term when he describes the concept of crowdsourcing in Wired Magazine as how smart people find ways to tap the latent talent of the crowd.


The cozy invitation to ‘Get Involved with Yoga’ included invitations to the numerous events, symposia, workshops, and gallery tours, performances, demonstrations, festivals and family activities planned around the exhibition – fairly standard procedure for museums these days. But what made this call to action outstanding was the warm embrace of not only the museum visitors but the entire yoga community. ‘Thank you so much for your interest in Yoga: The Art of Transformation, the world’s first exhibition of yogic art’ the museum intoned, ‘we are honored that so many people in the community have contacted the Freer|Sackler, wanting to get involved’. In addition to the social network promotion, the curatoral staff distributed videos, slideshows and even printable posters to pin up in their own yoga studio, in coffee shops, schools, or other gathering places so that the community could share a little of the magic of ‘the world’s first exhibition on yogic art’ at the Smithsonian in Washington.

Screenshot: The Art of Transformation website, Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Museum, Washington, <http://www.asia.si.edu/support/yoga/default.asp> But the call to action – and community embrace didn’t end here, the museum also outlined a number of ways in which individuals and organizations could participate, including sponsoring a program, promoting the exhibition online, and dedicating a yoga class to supporting the show. Visitors were invited to look over the opportunities offered, complete the online form to let them know how you would like to become part of yoga history. Here was an invitation to crowdfund the exhibition that included works of Indian art, including


temple sculptures of tantric goddesses, film clips of early twentieth-‐century yogis, and colorful manuscripts of ascetics journeying across the countryside In order to assist the Museum to ‘trace yoga’s central tenets and profound meanings over 2,000 years’ the museum launched their crowdfunding campaign, aimed at the yoga crowd to ‘donate now’ to enrich their understanding of yoga and Indian culture. For a mere $25 visitors could support ‘Serenity’ for $65 they could ‘Help create tranquil galleries’. The ‘Power’ donation of $65 ‘brings yoga classes to the museum’. For $150 you receive your share of “Bliss by sharing of concerts, workshops & festivals. $500, that is if you are feeling particular enlightened, brings you ‘Transformation’ which ‘Turns knowledge into books’ with opportunities to donate $1,000 to choose ‘Flight’ which promises to Transport yoginis across the world. At the time of writing this report (one week before the opening), the Museum had already raised $176,415.00 towards their goal of $200,000.00 and if they reached all their other crowdsourced goals in the same way, they were well position to open up their doors to welcome their very first visitor. Through a simple search on Kickstarterxliv, there are currently 260 Museum projects, including some that are already fully funded including CUBIST, a desktop game that builds a ‘grand and inspiring’ new Modern Art Museumxlv including its interior sculptures or “installations.” Out of cubes, or more precisely, dice! CUBIST was 160% funded, with $16,007 pledged with 236 backers.

3. COLLECTION WALL; THE ELECTRONIC DELIVERY THAT ACCOMPANIES THE VISITOR DURING THE VISIT

While some museums offer the traditional small screen gallery guide, either on mobile devices offered by the museum for the duration of the visit or over BYODs, which stands for “Bring Your Own Device,” content follows the visitor as he or she moves around the gallery or exhibition. Other museums use different sizes of screens or responsive tables located on the gallery floor that call up collections or present a virtual tour at the visitor’s call. The second case study briefly describes an engaging scenario of electronic delivery, opened on January 21, 2013 that accompanies the visitor during the visit to Gallery One, the 13,000-‐square-‐foot atrium at the Cleveland Museum of Art, (CMA) Collection Wallxlvi that vividly visualizes all the works currently on view in CMA’s permanent collection galleries, as well as those that are held behind the scenes in storage including altogether, over 3,800 works of art displays with more than 23 million pixels to play with. According to the Museum’s websitexlvii

the Collection Wall is the largest multi-‐touch screen in the United States—a 40-‐foot, interactive, microtile wall featuring over 3500 works of art from the permanent collection, most of which are on view in the galleries. The display changes every 40 seconds, grouping works by theme and type, such as time period, materials and techniques, as well as 32 curated views of the collection.

Pitched essentially as an orientation experience, the interface facilitates discovery and


dialogue both with the collections and with other visitors, allowing them to download existing tours, or create their own tours which they can then take out into the galleries on iPads. The Collection Wall in this way serves to personalise the visit, and allows visitors to appropriate the objects and works of art; connecting with objects in ways that are bespoke and therefor meaningful for them.

Cleveland Museum of Art, (CMA) Collection Wall For those who can’t make up their mind they can spend a little time at the wall and wait for it to change its curated view, and to discover a one of the groupings of objects from the collection, organized around curated themes like “Love and Lust,” “Funerary Art,” and “Dance and Music.” Collections have also been organised by medium or geographical region, all called up on the fly from the CMA’s digital asset management system. The museum describes this experience as a:

huge interactive tool [that] allows visitors to see the permanent collection as a living organism, changing depending on the prism through which you view it. The Collection Wall further functions as a giant group and individual touchscreen interactive, and allows visitors to touch the objects represented on the wall to make discoveries. Visitors follow their curiosity through a visual interface that links each artwork to a series of associated artworks, giving visitors the opportunity to browse and explore relationships from object to object.

Alexander, Barton, and Goeser, 2013 [10]

Having made their selection, visitors save their favourites onto their iPad by placing their device on one of eight docking stations, which identify an iPad by detecting an RFID chip on the back of its case. Visitors can download it for free to their iPads, or pre-‐loaded iPad 4′s are available to rent on location for a nominal fee of five dollars. In addition, the visitor’s favoriting, and sharing activity explains the museum, creates metrics that enable museum staff to understand what artworks visitors are engaging with, creating a feedback loop with the museum. Once out and about in the gallery with their bespoke tour uploaded to their personal device, visitors can use on of the three additional functions as described by staff at the CMA:

The “Near You Now” function allows visitors to browse and find digital interpretation of works of art they like based on proximity. Content is designed in short segments of audio and video, allowing visitors to choose what they want rather than committing to a long, linear narrative. Visitors can hear from curators,


educators, and community members to discover the continuing traditions that bring art to life. The “Tours” function allows visitors to have a more structured experience in the galleries, taking a tour curated for the block of time they have available. They can walk through the galleries with CMA’s director to discover his favourites, or they can follow a theme that carves a focused path through the museum’s galleries. The two hundred most recently saved Visitor-‐created tours are also available. The “Scan” function uses image recognition to allow visitors to scan two-‐dimensional art objects to trigger texts or videos to pop up on the iPad screen. The immediate delivery of this additional interpretive content enables visitors to delve more deeply into the app to learn more about a work of art

In this scenario it is difficult to separate whether it is the screen that is responding to the visitor or the visitor to the screen, but what is clear here, is the symbiotic accommodation of the museum to its audience, and the potential for optimising the visit, and, in doing so empowering the visitor to take on an active role that is tailor made to him or her during the gallery tour.

4. ASK JACQUES LIPCHITZ A QUESTION; THE VM AS ENCOUNTERED AFTER THE VISIT THAT SERVES TO AUGMENT AND ENHANCE THE EXPERIENCE AND MAINTAIN THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE MUSEUM AND THE VISITOR

The third VM scenario, Ask Jacques Lipchitz a Questionxlviii authored by the Israel Museum, Jerusalemxlix and developed by STARC, at the Cyprus Institute is an experience that can be enjoyed after the visit. Recalling the Lipschitz works explored during the Museum visit, the platform serves, in a novel way to augment and enhance the experience and maintain the connection between the Museum and the visitor though opening up a unique opportunity to ‘meet the artist’ and ‘hear his voice’ – even after his own death.


Screenshot: Ask Jacques Lipchitz a Question, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem Jacques Lipchitz (August 22, 1891 -‐ May 16, 1973) was interviewed by Bruce Bassett during the summers of 1970-‐1972, at Villa Bosio in Pieve di Camaiore, Italy. Over this web-‐based platform, visitors are invited to hold a conversation with Jacques Lipchitz by asking question, searching through his ideas, or by following term tags and then listening to his video clips as he answers your specific query. A pioneering artist of the 20th century, Chaim Jacob Lipchitz (1891-‐1973) was born in Druskininkai, Lithuania. In 1909 Lipchitz moved to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-‐Arts and at the Académie Julian, and also attended drawing classes at the Académie Colarossi. Whilst in Paris he became acquainted with Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and Juan Gris. Lipchitz frequented museums and became deeply interested in ancient and non-‐western art, and began collecting various artefacts. Following the Nazi occupation of Paris, Lipchitz escaped to New York, where he continued to sculpt until his death. He is buried in Har Hamenuhot, Jerusalem. In addition to the project’s online presence, the platform is on permanent exhibition in the Lipschitz Gallery in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem and Lipchitz Exhibition at Museum of Palazzo Pretorio, Prato. Maintaining the connection between the museum and its audience essentially means building a long-‐term relationship. In this way the VM can provide ideal opportunities to strengthen their links. Whether the actual visit inspires visitors to return and learn more, these kinds of platforms to create long-‐term connections and augment the physical visit with


echoes of the art and artworks and in this case with the artist’s own voice lingering on – even after his own death

5. CONCLUSION One of the main challenges of the VM in the context of new museology -‐ resonating with the debate of the "new archaeology" of the 70's -‐ is the breaking down of the barriers of agreeable narratives and romantic stories about the past. In the context of archaeological research, researchers are now engaged in "hard core" sciences in order to reveal the past including chemical analyses, physical investigations, statistical methods, etc. The museum still displays artifacts along traditional trajectories – canonical narratives, chronicling the historical past in pre-‐determined meta-‐narratives yes the VM offers new opportunities to reset these paradigms. VM is not (only) about innovative technologies -‐ actually the main challenge lies in daring to dream -‐ daring to dream that museums are more that collections of objects, charged with ideological charge (cultural, elitist, intellectual, richness, prestige, etc.) by the willingness of curators, museum directors or politicians promoting culture; virtual museums can, and should be, true cognitive technologies, platforms of situate learning environments, (cyber) social spaces of interaction, where people meet and learn from each other, through the experience of each other and through interaction with each other in a new iteration of Clifford’s “contact zones”. Being digital, VM can link the Chinese citizen with the Swedish or the South-‐African with the Russian -‐ the voice of everyone has equal power and intensity, and it’s up to the visitor, and perhaps its duty, to contribute its knowledge to the "global" experience of VM.


ON DEFINING THE VIRTUAL MUSEUM

After a series of workshops, and intense online discussion we are beginning to formulate a definition for the VM. Towards this goal, a seminar was held 22 – 25 January 2013 in the Cyprus Institute, Innovative Approaches for Sharing Cultural Heritage Knowledge -‐ Virtual Museums, Europeana and Digital Libraries, to sift the ideologies and specific terms that could express the notion of a VM. In the session on Terminologies narratives and digital storytelling a series of terms were culled from the various definitions of the Virtual Museum – see “Card Sorting Report” and the eleven terms that appeared in all three lists assembled by the participants: Accessible, Collections, Communicate, Preservation, Cultural, Education, Digital creation, Heritage, Interpret, Interactivity, and Research seemed to describe the essence of a VM. As the group concluded we all felt that this seemed to indicate the key criteria for the future definition of the term ‘Virtual Museum’ and conceptual framework to forming the future definition of a VM. However, there was still a long way to go. Martin Doerr, Center for Cultural Informatics Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas set the stage for the discussion on theorising the VM as he introduced CIDOC CRM, a conceptual reference model, and an ISO standard for the integration of cultural Information. According to their official website: The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) provides definitions and a formal structure for describing the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation. The CIDOC CRM is described as promoting a shared understanding of cultural heritage information by providing a common and extensible semantic framework that any cultural heritage information can be mapped to. It is intended to be a common language for domain experts and implementers to formulate requirements for information systems and to serve as a guide for good practice of conceptual modeling. In this way, it can provide the "semantic glue" needed to mediate between different sources of cultural heritage information, such as that published by museums, libraries, and archives. The CIDOC CRM is the culmination of over 10 years work by the CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group and CIDOC CRM SIG, which are working groups of CIDOC. Since 9/12/2006 it is official standard ISO 21127:2006l. At the Cyprus seminar, Doerr described metadata challenges for VM’s and suggested that the requirements should include:

• A topological model of the virtual exhibition • A presentation of objects in historical context, • Including ownership, provenance, authenticity, evidence, relevance • Narratives and guided tours • Preservation?

Doerr's presentation demonstrated the representation of historical context in a database technology (triple store) with the use of CIDOC-‐CRM and how it directs narratives and guided tours that can be built sequentially. Referring to cultural diversity and data standards Doerr explained how cultural information is more than a domain and can be


visualised in several ways including:

• Collection description (art, archeology, natural history….) • Archives and literature (records, treaties, letters, artful works..) • Administration, preservation, conservation of material heritage • Science and scholarship – investigation, interpretation • Presentation – exhibition making, teaching and publication

However, he explained, to make a documentation-‐standard, each aspect needs its methods, forms, communication means and its data overlap, especially for entities that do not necessarily fit into one schema. The understanding lives from relationships, he argued, but how to express them was more complex. He recommended the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model; in collaboration with the International Council of Museums that fact formulates a workable ontology built upon 86 classes and 137 properties for culture. This reference model essentially has the capacity to explain hundreds of (meta) data formats and has been recognized as an international standard since 2006 -‐ ISO 21127:2006. Ideally it serves as an intellectual guide to create schemata, formats, profiles, as well as a language for analysis of existing sources for integration/mediation. By “Identify elements with common meaning” it is able to transport formats for data integration / migration / Internet. Doerr explained the roles of the CIDOC CRM as capturing the underlying semantics of relevant documentation structures in a formal ontology that he described as:

• Ontologies are formalized knowledge (TEXTS!): clearly defined concepts and relationships about possible states of affairs in a domain

• Ontologies can be approximated by DATA STRUCTURES (RDF!...) to enable data exchange, data integration, access, query mediation etc.

• Data structures can be interpreted and transformed into sets of atomic statements by ontologies – intellectually or in RDF encoding.

• Good ontologies can be extended without reducing interoperability. “Extensible ontologies of relationships” provide shared explanations rather than restriction to a common data structure, to answer research questions.

Combining these ontologies, Doerr argued, essentially represent a radical abstraction of a wide range of specialized databases to the basic relationships and open sets of terminologies (which appear as data). Reflecting on terminologies and thesauri he suggested how types (categories) of entities, characteristic for associations with detailed processes in society or nature should be associated with commonly accepted “terms” (names) and organized in semantic hierarchies (thesauri) of generalization and specialization (overlap & confusion with ontologies!!). Explaining this none too simple point, he described these associations as related by categorical, not factual associations (i.e. how “shoemakers make shoes”). But what is that exemplifies a ‘good’ terminology, Doerr explained how a good terminology should contain thousands to millions of terms as in terms that appear as data in information systems. Terms, he argued, are dynamic tools of research that infer contextual characteristics (function from form etc) of things, people, processes, and events. Describing ontologies (of relationships) describe the meaning of statements in


the hundreds he noted that upper ontologies should be standardized while lower terminologies should be individual. Doerr described the three-‐level knowledge management principle of the CRM as covering acquisition (can be motivated by the CRM), managing sequence and order, completeness, constraints to guide, and control data entry. With ergonomic, case-‐specific language, optimized to specialist needs often working on series of analogous items, as well as low interoperability needs (with the capability to be mapped!). Referring to presentation, and story-‐telling in a VM he argued how this too can be based on CRM where the exploration of context, paths, analogies orthogonal to data acquisition and be presented in order, allow for digestion, deduction and induction

CASE STUDY: UN-‐SUPERVISED EVALUATION OF VIRTUAL MUSEUMS: THE UPPÅKRA APP In order to clarify for ourselves the role of the users in the definition of a VM we ran a focussed evaluation project which we present here as a case study. Although a single study should be viewed as idiosyncratic, the results were so persuasive; that we have decided to employ this methodology across the Network in the future. By repeating tis kind of evaluation across the network with other VM’s we look forward to collecting more robust interpretation results and to cull further interpretative data. Uppåkra is northern Europe's largest, richest and longest lasting Iron Age cityli. Following extensive excavations, an app was developedlii in order to share the latest news unveiling at the remote Iron Age city Uppåkra; northern Europe's largest archaeological site. The app took users on a fantastic journey through time, straight into the archaeology site to discover for themselves how the religious complex had been uncovered where more than 30,000 gold, silver and bronze objects has already been found. On-‐going updates were made available through the Dig Diary, inviting people to follow the archaeologists' work during the summer dig season, allowing users to ‘virtually’ navigate the site, noting when demonstrations and events were taking place. In addition to the data made available over


the app, unfolding news was shared in real-‐time via Facebook and Twitter. The research aims of this project were numerous, and included:

• How to define a virtual museum • How to evaluate apps related to cultural heritage museums • What is the impact of context / cultural background of visitors on their evaluation • How to measure “noise” in a digital communication product

What was interesting for us was the discrepancy between the producers’ intentions and the user’s experience. The app was designed from an end-‐user perspective; geared towards teenagers, who the producers felt would be more familiar with this kind of media. The app was designed according to a “Hollywood” movie; the scenes were set as a typical game genre. The music was chosen to give users a sense of power and importance; for example, when the augmented reality opens users hear a drum roll inviting them to explore inside the temple. The voice over describes what the user sees -‐ a drinking ritual where the female character offers the user a drink. Music is used again to blend the male choir with the female voice. Minimal information was provided, basically on how to use the app’s ear phones, how to hold device with both hands and noted the optimal distance from marker. The results were insightful with many people claiming to have mixed feelings about the animation. It seems that when interviewed, most people did not like the narration or even appreciated the content and many people said that they did not like the augmented reality. In spite of this critique, a full two-‐thirds of those interviewed said that they responded generally positively towards the application. The main discrepancy emerged when difference users were interviewed from both the local, Swedish-‐speaking community, and others – in this case from Cyprus. Users from Cyprus reported:

It is impressive. However, I didn’t find the synchronisation of the narration and the visual part very good. I couldn’t understand the part about the drinking ritual because I was visually concentrating on the house. The person with the glass appeared much later. I was concentrating a lot on the visual part and I think this had a negative effect on how much attention I paid to the narration. After the visual was completed I felt I had to watch it from the beginning to really understand what it was about.

Users from Sweden reported very differently on their experience:

It was a very good idea to do 3D models to show people what things looked like. But I believe that it should be more interactive & less talking. Maybe there should be something to click to get information. So it is not a big paragraph of talking in one shot. If possible to keep the environment when viewing the house it may make it more realistic/believable.

Each reviewer was sent a written text, from which evaluation criteria and their values were extracted. In our analysis of the results we recorded how qualitative comments were ranked according to positive and negative with the main groups decided upon reflecting on the most addressed topics by reviewers. Almost 40% of the interviewed (N=7), regardless their


background, complained that the Augmented Reality distracted them from following the narrative. In addition a full quarter of the interviewed noted that they would have liked to have seen more informative content, and a quarter of the interviewed suggesting improving the synchronisation of the 3D with the narration. Preliminary results of those interviewed from Cyprus claimed to have mixed feelings regarding the animation many of them stating that they did not like the narration. However they did appreciate the content but did not like the augmented reality. Again a full, two-‐thirds of those interviewed, in spite of their criticism recorded a general positive attitude towards the application. Further evaluation was carried out to compare young “science” and “humanities” researchers, where those who came from science detailed almost as twice as many criteria in their reviews, when compared with humanities students (62 opposed to 38). For example, they cited more criteria regarding the augmented reality gave more importance to the narration and criticised it in greater detail. Our research indicated that while they disliked the content as a group, compared to humanities, who were less, decisive they liked and disliked the aspects of augmented reality equally. Both groups evaluated the app’s animation similarly. In measuring the “noise” factor, not one of the reviewers felt that the app was suitable for “teenagers”. Most reviewers did not pay much attention to music, with three generically appreciating the music, without, however noting its assigned role in the app. We felt that this kind of approach offered good insights into how “new kinds of virtual museums” are used, in this case an app for mobile devices. Asking people to “review” apps gave them a sense of responsibility and allowed them to trust in their own judgement, which, we sensed led to a very detailed review. We felt that evaluating a VM based on free text produced a richer response that would have, had we used a closed questionnaire, which often becomes misleading; often cuing the user into specific responses. Additionally the level of education of those interviewed revealed substantial differences in the subjects of interest of each group. Clearly further work needs to be undertaken; with Swedish participants evaluated in a similar way in order to ascertain the relevance of “place of evaluation” (museum, archaeological site, etc.) as well as the impact of the cultural background of interviewed (comparison between Swedish and Cypriot evaluations) and will extend these kinds of evaluations to other mobile apps across the V-‐Must Network

CENCEPTUALISING THE VIRTUAL MUSEUM One of the ways to conceptualise and define the virtual museum is to draw a straight line from the physical museum to its digital counterpart. In this way we felt that we could identify what it is that the two entities share in common, as well as to be able to sift out what it is that defines the virtual. Only then were we able to consider what it means for a museum that has no counterpart in the physical world, yet emulates the characteristics of a museum – albeit – as a Museum without wallsliii. Beyond the V-‐must Network there has been much discussion in academia and practice as to the definition of the virtual museum, and just as much debate on the term itself. The term Virtual Museum is still used to describe many different kinds of online entities that have


become far more complex with the multiple terms that are now in common use. The V-‐Must Network has been focusing on theorizing, and defining the Virtual Museum (VM) and now proposes that VM’s are usually, but not exclusively delivered electronically when they may be denoted as online museums, hypermuseum, digital museum, cyber museums, or web museums (see Wikipedia article on Virtual Museumsliv). Therefore we have since revised our own definition of the Virtual Museum that gradually evolved out of the workshops, public debates, and intense online discussion. Our terms of reference were clarified as we drilled down into the concepts and functionality of VM’s in more detail; and reflected on the basic components of the VM as explored in our early research.

DRAWING ON THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MUSEUM; ENHANCING AND AUGMENTING THE MUSEUM EXPERIENCE

The term Virtual Museum, in fact, been used to describe a wide range of activities that are all somehow loosely concerned with this overarching concept. Both the VM that acts as the digital footprint of a physical museum, as well as those VM’s that have no reference to the physical world; all draw on the strengths of the term museum. In practice the VM has become as familiar to the public as the bricks and mortar building has, as trustworthy custodians of collections in a permanent (online) location orchestrated for the display of the collections together with direct access to their embedded knowledge systems that are available to all 24/7. Essentially, the core function of a VM can be loosely described as a location of rich content – often reflecting unique and precious objects or works of art – collections that have been assembled and displayed, yet in contrast to their physical counterparts, once liberated from their materiality are poised to open up new potential for novel kinds of experiences. A Virtual Museum can tell a story; it can inspire you to tell your own story; it can take you to places that no longer exist, or help you gather objects that are meaningful to you. This section reflects on the collections have been assembled, presented, and disseminated over electronic platforms; representing artistic expression, re-‐enacting a forgotten archaeological period, or creating a historical setting that come together in a cohesive whole to distinguish what it means to be VM.

QUALITIES OF THE VM; PERSONALISATON, INTERACTIVITY AND RICHNESS OF CONTENT

The expression ‘responsive design’ is a term that we are hearing about more and more, and we argue that this concept directly relates to the very essence of VM’s and the ways that they can respond to their audiences through digital platforms. Architects and engineers are experimenting with motion sensors that respond to the presence of the people moving within the environment; adjusting, for example, the room’s temperature and triggering pre-‐synched systems to prompt ambient lighting. This approach to physical spaces is now referred to as responsive architecturelv where embedded systems sense presence, and motion and prompt the environment to adjust in return. Physical spaces essentially enter into conversation with the people who occupy them, responding to them in real time and accommodating them accordingly.


In a networked world, other kinds of systems need to develop different responsive solutions to deliver rich content to arrange of platforms (large screens, pc’s, mobile phones, tablets, etc.). These systems also react in real time; applying the same kind of responsive principle to optimize the viewing experience – easy reading and navigation with a minimum of re-‐sizing, panning, and scrolling – across a wide range of screen-‐sizes (from desktop computer monitors, to tablets, to mobile phones). This approach assures efficient delivery of content to all users, whatever their choice of platform. The V-‐Must Network draws on the responsive approach to explore the kinds of interactions that are now possible as the VM engages with their audiences. The responsive approach, when applied to the Museum, not only represents direct access to rich content; exhibitions, collections, events and educational activities, but also means provoking a response from the museum to facilitate conversation and novel kinds of engagement in ways not previously possible in the physical gallery. To explore the VM in the context of the responsive museum, we draw on the practice of new museology; not as a specific turning point in the history of museums, but rather as a marker of the on-‐going, re-‐evaluation of the museum in relationship with its audiences.lvi New Museology at times has implied a radical re-‐organisation of museum agendas, such as a move from an elitist, undemocratic space towards a more democratic space, the prioritising of the visitor rather than the object, or the reclaiming, or re-‐territorising of the museum as a space that could be owned by the community.lvii We argue that VM offers golden opportunities to break from the corresponding 'old' agendas, with the potential to modify traditional ideologies or institutional agendas through new platforms of delivery to enable the inclusion of new voices joining in the conversation, and new level of engagement and immersion located beyond the museum wall. Once granted access to the rich collections, visitors may personalise their experience, actively re-‐use the content for their own goals and discover spaces to contribute their own content to join into the conversation. We argue, therefore that the virtual museum (VM) in fact opens up new possibilities to harness, and to enact reciprocal, user-‐driven scenarios, as well as setting up new opportunities for the remote visitor to be able to interact with the physical, or non-‐physical museum in novel ways. The premise of response therefore, represents one of the underlying principles that determines the essentiality of a VM.

PUBLIC ACCESS; KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS AND THE SYSTEMATIC, AND COHERENCT ORGANISATION OF THEIR DISPLAY

As we argue above, when the material object -‐ artwork or archaeological artifact -‐ is confronted in the physical gallery it is described by the institutional voice that is often both opaque and totalising. In reading the narratives we are assured that this is THE story. How could such a persuasive history possibly be seen as less than irrevocable, especially when such impressive physical evidence punctuates it? However, when the museum narrative is located online, this knowledge base represents one resource amongst many, and in a knowledge society, these histories may now be read as but one of the myriad histories, now available over the (global) internet. We may, of course, choose in the end to collate our knowledge from more than one source, and move from site to site, collecting units of


fragmented knowledge as a bricoleur from museums, libraries and the media; indiscriminately gathering information where ever we find it. In contrast, however, to harvesting resources from generic sites, once the term ‘museum’ is evoked, users sense that the content discovered there would be authentic and reliable. In whatever mode we travel electronic highways, when encountering the VM, we are confident that we will discover rich thematic content that has been refined through practiced curatorship, and burnished for professional display. The Semantic Web approach addresses the notion of multiplicity of resources by associating multiple coinciding ontologies (i.e. ’multiple overlapping truths’)lviii. This methodology grants a more comprehensive approach to reflect on the multicultural nature of cultural heritage (CH) objects, which often already have “multiple truthslix a priori embedded within them.” Taking advantage of Semantic Web associations, new kinds of sophisticated developments and collaborations are now combining assets in novel and impressive ways. According to the British Museum’s site Semantic Web Endpoint, the ‘semantic’ element of the technology means that data is structured in such a way that allows the discovery of connections and relationship between data from different sources that would be difficult, if not impossible, to discover with traditional technologies. As there are currently 2,074,288 objects available in the British Museum’s online database with 766,576 with one or more images they argue when objects are associated with their semantic attribute this helps us improve our understanding, and knowledge of objects and events even further. Clearly, the VM can function more effectively when it is driven by semantic articulation, however, these ontologies are not yet employed by institutions worldwide, but, as the field develops, users will be able to conduct intuitive searches on large data sets to retrieve meaningful results. Over recent years we have witnessed an exponential increase in tools facilitating technical and semantic interoperability, efforts in standardizing metadata, and new systems for encoding archives based on rendering implicit knowledge explicitlx. In the early days of the VM, an uncontrolled development of ontologies, i.e. a formalized and reusable knowledge based on entity, property and relationships, was followed by a recent phase; now dedicated to the realignment, or mapping, of emergent ontologies, specifically created over recent years for the CH sector. Efforts have been also directed towards the development of semantic repositories for digital (3D) data, a substantial component of VMslxi and the totalizing, and often immersive experience of ‘entering into’ a CH space. Work still has to be done however for better understanding the (perhaps sometimes subtle) difference between digital collections, online archives and virtual museumslxii, lxiii. The V-‐Must research breaks down the different kinds of museums typographically, drawing on content, experiences, and interactions that are already available as VM's worldwide in order to define not just the term VM, but the whole field of virtual museology.

LONG-TERM PRESERVATION AND COMITMENT TO PUBLIC ACCESS

The Internet now offers a full range of subject/object positions for the remote visitor, and, as Livingstone and Lievrouwlxiv remind us, the term ‘audience’ can be understood to mean many different kinds of engagement: 'playing computer games, surfing the web, searching databases, responding to e-‐mail, visiting a chat room, shopping online, and so on. Etymologically, the term "audience" only satisfactorily covers the activities of listening and watching’ (2002: 10-‐11). As Livingstone and Lievrouw note, in the same way that the


Internet has redefined the role of the audience in the context of television viewing, the role of the museum visitor has now been extended to include a wide range of kinds of interaction with the online museum. VMs have emerged in many ways. When interacting with an art museum electronically, the visitor will have a different set of expectations than they would when they take a virtual walk through a simulated historical site. When replying to questions posed by a science museum, or exploring scenarios developed by curators from ethnographic museum users will be engaged in subtly different ways. The V-‐Must research sets out the different kinds of museums typographically, drawing on content, experiences, and interactions that are played out in VM's worldwide. The term ‘culture’ can be interpreted in different ways and may be mobilized for different agendas. Drawing on the UNESCO treaty, the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, which, according to the UNESCO portal, ‘seeks to encourage the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity’lxv. Taking over the stewardship of cultural and natural heritage on behalf of society, the museum then assumes full responsibilities to collect, conserve and display culture, and to make it available and accessible to the public as exhibitionslxvi. Accessibility is key here, and we argue that the VM is committed to intellectual accessibility in exactly the same way that the physical museum translates these abstract ideas into action when the cultures of exhibition are projected in the gallery as thematic narratives. The traditional museum organises the narratives into thematic order through a scholarly interpretation of the physical objects, and, as these narratives develop so the taxonomic ordering of knowledge emerges. The VM then replicates, or re-‐formulates these narratives, providing additional layering of engagement, interaction and accessibility; now made possible through digital response. As reflected in these practices it is clear that custodial responsibility to the online collection or interaction with the narrative demands an equally professional management of the virtual artifacts, as do the material objects in order to ensure their safekeeping for future generations. This, we argue represents an additional function of the VM and is encapsulated in the very notion of a VM and essentially defines its validity and veracity.

DEFINING THE VM As we have argued above, the VM can perform as the digital footprint of a physical museum, or can act independently. We will now argue that the core notion of the term ‘museum’ is intrinsically driven by the authoritative status as bestowed by ICOM in its definition of a museum, including their obligation to develop and maintain discrete (virtual) areas that present the collection for display to grant public access to them. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) defines the museum, as follows:

A museum is a non-‐profit making, permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of people and their environment. ICOM Statutes, adopted by the Eleventh General Assembly of ICOM, Copenhagen, 14 June

1974lxvii


In this way, the museum affirms its institutional mission not only to collect and conserve collections, but also to display them, and in doing so expresses its obligations to facilitating study, education and enjoyment of the material collection. The ICOM definition fundamentally acknowledges the material collection as the core of the mission, and recognises how the museum, in contrast to the world of television, theatre and advertising, prioritises the tangible artefact. However, in addition to the material artefact, the museum is also defined as a space that communicates its messages to its audience, and, in this bid to impart the museum message, it overlaps with other media and traditional communication apparatuses in many ways. Over the last decade, the museum has evolved to broaden its professional mandate, and is beginning to welcome a wider-‐ranging spectrum of museum practices into the institutional mission. The departure from ‘tangibility’ as the exclusive rationale of the object-‐driven museum is reflected in debates over the last decade in the museum community, where the introduction of ‘intangibility’ is indicative of the expanding museum mission. A UNESCO meeting held in March 2001 adopted the provisional definition of intangible cultural heritage and endorsed the concept of ‘learned processes’ as a vital component of the [intangible] museum. Giovanni Pinna, Chairman of ICOM-‐Italy, and Member of the ICOM Executive Council defined the intangible museum as:

Peoples’ learned processes along with the knowledge, skills and creativity that inform and are developed by them, the products they create, and the resources, spaces and other aspects of social and natural context necessary to their sustainability; these processes provide living communities with a sense of continuity with previous generations and are important to cultural identity, as well as to the safeguarding of cultural diversity and the creativity of humanity (Pinna 2003: 3)lxviii.

The auxiliary or supporting texts, which had been incidental to the primary object, were now being promoted by ICOM as primary texts, and museum professionals were encouraged to integrate them accordingly into museum practice. Intangible expressions, however, demanded the introduction of new disciplines for collecting and display, and three categories of intangible cultural heritage were set out to describe their parameters. In spite of this statement, the implications of these processes were still somewhat ambiguous and demanded further explanation and additional professional support. The new concepts of intangibility were instituted into the museum community in several ways. ICOM celebrates International Museum Day on May 18 every year. The theme selected by the Advisory Committee for 2004, as well as the theme for the 2004 triennial conference, was intangible heritage, acknowledging that although the concept of heritage has been dominated by its tangible embodiments, intangible heritage is no less a vital ingredient of every civilisation (Pinna 2003: 3). The term ‘intangible’ in the museum context required more than a little explanation, even before the idea of digital creativity was to be grafted onto the (already complex) idea of intangibility. These principles presented new challenges for museums and museum practitioners, and, in addition to the guidelines set out in the special ICOM News: Museums and Intangible Heritage, 2003, the ICOM General Conference in Seoul, which took place in the autumn of 2004, specifically focused on intangibility. Intangibility was not a novel concept for ethnographic or anthropological museums, but the prioritisation of intangible elements was


a significant action. The innovation actively encouraged the display of intangible elements. However, how they were to be displayed was another question. It fell to the museums themselves to preserve the ‘traces’ of the performances and they took over responsibility for documenting all kinds of performed intangible heritage such as oral history, folk life, religious ceremonies, and storytelling. The link between living heritage and documentation, therefore, was forged by the following amendment to the definition of the museum, where digital processes soon became the preferred modality for documentation. In the July of 2001, the 20th General Assembly of ICOM association amended the statutes (as quoted above) in Barcelona, Spain, to include in the museum definition:

Cultural centres and other entities that facilitate the preservation, continuation and management of tangible or intangible heritage resources (living heritage and digital creative activity). (ICOM Statutes amended by the 20th General Assembly of ICOM, Barcelona, Spain, 6 July

2001, clause viii).

For our research, combining the idea of digital creativity with the core notion of ‘the museum’ was critical, as it provided us with a institutional foundation to set the stage to formally acknowledge the integrity of the VM for the museum community. Bringing together the different threads of our research as described above, and after much discussion, we would like to share with you – for the first time – our proposed definition of the Virtual Museum.

A virtual museum is a digital entity that draws on the characteristics of a museum, in order to complement, enhance, or augment the museum experience through personalization, interactivity, and richness of content. Virtual museums can perform as the digital footprint of a physical museum, or can act independently, while maintaining the authoritative status as bestowed by ICOM in its definition of a museum. In tandem with the ICOM mission of a physical museum, the virtual museum is also committed to public access; to both the knowledge systems imbedded in the collections and the systematic, and coherent organization of their display, as well as to their long-‐term preservation.

V-‐Must Thematic Network, March 2014 We look forward to continuing discussion in the future, because, as our field develops, this necessitates future theorising and further reflection on the core notion of the Virtual Museum, while acknowledging the fluidity of our unfolding, yet speedily developing professional sector.


i http://www.v-‐must.net/library/publications ii Benjamin, W., L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction méchanisée, in “Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung” vol. V, pp. 40–68, 1936. iii Baudrillard, J., “Simulacra and Simulation”, Ann Arbor: University Of Michigan Press, 2000. iv http://icom.museum/professional-‐standards/key-‐concepts-‐of-‐museology/ v See for example the 50:1 scale model of Jerusalem during the Second Temple Period, http://www.english.imjnet.org.il/page_1382 vi See for example Yale Peabody Museum’s dioramas, in their Museum of Natural History, http://peabody.yale.edu/exhibits/dioramas vii See for example The Toy & Miniature Museum of Kansas City, http://www.toyandminiaturemuseum.org/miniatures.aspx viii http://blog.britishmuseum.org/2011/09/16/the-‐british-‐museum-‐has-‐created-‐a-‐semantic-‐web-‐endpoint/ ix http://www.istohuvila.se/files/Huvila2011.pdf xhttp://bpfe.eclap.eu/eclap/axmedis/4/464/00000-‐464c4239-‐95b1-‐4725-‐9bb2-‐58b6f8c6b359/2/~saved-‐on-‐db464c4239-‐95b1-‐4725-‐9bb2-‐ 58b6f8c6b359.pdf xi Serna, S. P., Schmedt, H., Ritz, M., Stork, A., Interactive Semantic Enrichment of 3D Cultural Heritage Collections., “VAST: International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Intelligent Cultural Heritage” The Eurographics Association, pp. 33-‐40, 2012. xii Geser, G., & Niccolucci, F., Virtual museums, digital reference collections and e-‐science environments, “Uncommon Culture”, vol. 3(5/6), pp. 12-‐37, 2013. xiii http://www.aeonmagazine.com/oceanic-‐feeling/why-‐wonder-‐is-‐the-‐most-‐human-‐of-‐all-‐emotions xiv Benjamin, W. (1992) 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,' in Illuminations, London: Fontana. xv Witcomb, A., Re-‐Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum, Routledge: London, 2003, pp.106. xvi Witcomb, A., Re-‐Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum, Routledge: London, 2003, pp.106. xvii Kopytoff, I., ‘The cultural biography of things’ in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things, Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xviii Fahy, A., “New Technologies for Museum Communication,” in E. Hooper-‐Greenhill (ed.) Museum: Media: Message, Routledge: London, 2001. xix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosumer xx Habermas, J., The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge: Polity, 1999. xxi http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html 13 http://www.vanderwal.net/ xxii http://www.steve.museum/ xxiii Mastering Civic Engagement: A Challenge to Museums, American Association of Museums, 2002 xxiv Hazan S., A crisis of authority: old lamps for new, in Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine (eds.) ’Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage’, Massachusets: MIT Press, 2006. xxv The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, http://www.imj.org.il xxvi http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/


xxvii http://secondlife.com/destination/sistine-‐chapel xxviii Foucault. M. “Michel Foucault: Aesthetics: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-‐1984”, Vol. 2 J. D. Foubion (ed. ), London: Penguin, 1994. xxix http://www.europeana1989.eu/en/ xxx www.europeana1989.eu xxxii <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_architecture> xxxiii According to Patrick Boylan, the term ‘new museology’ was first introduced in the United States in 1958 by Mills and Grove in their contribution to S. De Borghegyi's book The Modern Museum and the Community. From compilation of museum definitions: Patrick Boylan, City University. <xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/.../Defining+Museums+and+Galleries.doc >. xxxiv See, for example the various projects and agendas described in Hauenschild (1988). xxxv The symposium was held at the Internet Committee Meeting, Israel Knesset (Parliament), Jerusalem, January 18, 2005. xxxvi See, for example, Frantz Fanon’s (1967) description of how the category "white" is dependent for its stability on its negation of "black" where Fanon’s binary Self/Other of the colonized and colonizer is projected onto the racially determined category of Black. xxxvii See Comolli and Narboni on reading against the grain in cinematic reading (1977), and Stuart Hall’s model of mass communication which stressed active interpretation within the relevant codes of encoding and decoding (1999: 123-‐38). xxxviii Libraries, Museums, Galleries and Archives for All: Co-‐operating Across the Sectors to Tackle Social Exclusion, January 2001, <http://books.google.co.il/books/about/Libraries_Museums_Galleries_and_Archives.html?id=3zKNYgEACAAJ&redir_esc=y> xxxix http://museumtwo.blogspot.co.il/ xl ICOM News, Volume 54 -‐ 2001 N°1 <http://www.chin.gc.ca/Applications_URL/icom/managing_change.html>. xli See, for example, the research project and publication, Art-‐Who Needs It? The Audience for Community Arts, by Lewis, Morley, Southwood (1986) which attempted to find out whether the GLC's 1981-‐1986 programme to reach those groups traditionally excluded from the arts actually succeeded in broadening the base of arts provision in London. The authors concluded that in order for the arts and leisure activities to attract new audiences outside of the traditional white, middle class, highly educated elite public who traditionally benefited the public spending on the arts, councils needed to utilise and experiment with their existing cultural assets more imaginatively, by, for instance, holding town or city wide festivals, tempered with a marketing approach. xlii Moving Here, 200 Years of Migration to England, <http://www.movinghere.org.uk>. xliii http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html xlivhttp://www.kickstarter.com/projects/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&term=museum xlvhttp://www.kickstarter.com/projects/167427101/cubist-‐build-‐an-‐inspiring-‐new-‐art-‐museumwith-‐dice?ref=search xlvi http://www.clevelandart.org/gallery-‐one/collection-‐wall xlvii http://www.clevelandart.org/gallery-‐one/collection-‐wall xlviii http://www.imj.org.il/lipchitz xlix Digitization for the IMJ presentation of the conversations: Mr. Hanno D. Mott, New York for the family of Jacques Lipchitz. Interviewer and video producer -‐ Bruce W. Bassett, 1971-‐2002. With the assistance of the Computer and Information Systems Department © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem


l http://www.cidoc-‐crm.org/ li http://www.uppakra.se/uppakra-‐app/ lii https://itunes.apple.com/il/app/uppakra/id439003670?mt=8 [2] Museum without walls, André Malraux, Doubleday, 1967 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_museum (Last accessed 20.04.14) [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_architecture, (Last accessed 20.04.14) [5] According to Patrick Boylan, the term ‘new museology’ was first introduced in the United States in 1958 by Mills and Grove in their contribution to S. De Borghegyi's book The Modern Museum and the Community. From compilation of museum definitions: Patrick Boylan, City University. [6] See, for example the various projects and agendas described in Hauenschild (1988). [7] Maedche, A., Motik, B., Stojanovic, L., Managing multiple and distributed ontologies on the Semantic Web. The VLDB Journal—The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases, 12(4), pp. 286-‐302, 2003 [8] Hermon, S., Nikodem, J., Perlingieri, C., Deconstructing the VR-‐data transparency, quantified uncertainty and reliability of 3D models. In Proceedings of the 7th International conference on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Intelligent Cultural Heritage pp. 123-‐129, 2006. [9] The Open Data Semantics and the (re)use of Open Information in Cultural Heritage, Achille Felicetti(1) , Andrea D’Andrea(2), Franco Niccolucci(3) http://bpfe.eclap.eu/eclap/axmedis/4/464/00000464c423995b147259bb258b6f8c6b359/2/~saved-‐on-‐db-‐464c4239-‐95b1-‐4725-‐9bb2-‐58b6f8c6b359.pdf (Last accessed 20.04.14) [10] Serna, S. P., Schmedt, H., Ritz, M., Stork, A., Interactive Semantic Enrichment of 3D Cultural Heritage Collections., “VAST: International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Intelligent Cultural Heritage” The Eurographics Association, pp. 33-‐40, 2012. [11] Geser, G., & Niccolucci, F., Virtual museums, digital reference collections and e-‐science environments, “Uncommon Culture”, vol. 3(5/6), pp. 12-‐37, 2013. [12] Geser, G., & Niccolucci, F., Virtual museums, digital reference collections and e-‐science environments, “Uncommon Culture”, vol. 3(5/6), pp. 315-‐327, 2013. lxiv Flew, T. and S. McElhinney (2002) ‘Globalization and the structure of new media industries' in S. Livingstone and L. Lievrouw (eds.), Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, London: Sage. [14] http://whc.unesco.org/en/about/ (Last accessed 20.04.14). [15] For a series of critical essays on social agency of the museum, see Museums, Society, Inequality, edited by Richard Sandell, Routledge, 2002. [16] ICOM – definition of the museum, http://icom.museum/who-‐we-‐are/the-‐vision/museum-‐definition.html, (Last accessed 20.03.14). [17] Pinna, G. (2003) Intangible heritage in Museums in ICOM News, Museums and Intangible Heritage, Vol. 56, No. 4, 2003. Newsletter of the International Council of Museums, Paris.


RESOURCES

[2] Baudrillard, J., “Simulacra and Simulation”, Ann Arbor: University Of Michigan Press, 2000. [3] Maedche, A., Motik, B., Stojanovic, L., Managing multiple and distributed ontologies on the Semantic Web. The VLDB Journal—The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases, 12(4), pp. 286-‐302, 2003. [4] Hermon, S., Nikodem, J., Perlingieri, C., Deconstructing the VR-‐data transparency, quantified uncertainty and reliability of 3D models. In Proceedings of the 7th International conference on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Intelligent Cultural Heritage pp. 123-‐129, 2006. [5] http://www.istohuvila.se/files/Huvila2011.pdf [6]http://bpfe.eclap.eu/eclap/axmedis/4/464/00000-‐464c4239-‐95b1-‐47259bb2-‐58b6f8c6b359/2/~saved-‐on-‐db-‐464c4239-‐95b1-‐4725-‐9bb258b6f8c6b359.pdf [7] Serna, S. P., Schmedt, H., Ritz, M., Stork, A., Interactive Semantic Enrichment of 3D Cultural Heritage Collections., “VAST: International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Intelligent Cultural Heritage” The Eurographics Association, pp. 33-‐40, 2012. [8] Geser, G., & Niccolucci, F., Virtual museums, digital reference collections and e-‐science environments, “Uncommon Culture”, vol. 3(5/6), pp. 12-‐37, 2013. [9] Stalmann, K., Wegener, D., Doerr, M., Hill, H. J., Friesen, N., Semantic-‐based retrieval of cultural heritage multimedia objects, “International Journal of Semantic Computing”, vol. 6(03), pp. 315-‐327., 2012. [10] Witcomb, A., Re-‐Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum, Routledge: London, 2003, pp.106. [11] Kopytoff, I., ‘The cultural biography of things’ in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things, Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [12] Fahy, A., “New Technologies for Museum Communication,” in E. Hooper-‐Greenhill (ed.) Museum: Media: Message, Routledge: London, 2001. [13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosumer [14] http://www.internetworldstats.com/facebook.htm [15] Habermas, J., The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge: Polity, 1999. [16] Hazan S., A crisis of authority: old lamps for new, in Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine (eds.) ’Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage’, Massachusets: MIT Press, 2006. [17] The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, http://www.imj.org.il [18] Damnjanovic, U., Hermon, S., Connecting information as navigation paths for exploring digital video collections, in M. Dellepiane, F. Niccolucci, S. Pena Serna, H. Rushmeier, L. Van Gool (Eds.), The 12th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage VAST , The Eurographics Association pp. 21–24. [19] Damnjanovic, U., Hermon, S., “Generating content for digital libraries using an interactive content management system”, In Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, Springer: Berlin, pp. 474-‐479, 2012.


[20] Foucault. M. “Michel Foucault: Aesthetics: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-‐1984”, Vol. 2 J. D. Foubion (ed. ), Lond Report prepared by CINECA on existing tools that can be adapted for virtual museum content management systems

ANNEX 1

WissKi evaluation

OVERVIEW

WissKI System (http://wiss-ki.eu/)lxviii is an open source Virtual Research Environment and Content Management System for Cultural Heritage. It promotes semantic enrichment of data on the basis of OWL / RDF using the ontology CIDOC CRM / ISO21127. The data is rendered in a Wikipedia-like fashion, combining textual, visual and structured information (info boxes) for a documented object on one page. Likewise, data can be acquired using field–based forms and semi–automatically annotated free text, resembling the most common traditional modes of documentation in the cultural heritage domain. This retains a user–friendly visualization while at the same time providing detailed RDF triple data for automatic processing and data exchange. The WissKI System is completely web-based and implemented as a modular extension of the very popular open source content management system (CMS) Drupal, which already ships with hundreds of features like user management, blogs, etc. For storing the semantically enriched data, WissKI integrated the RDF triple store ARC2. The extensions are open source and can be downloaded from https://github.com/WissKI. The system can be easily deployed and maintained on a standard web stack configuration, being completely based on PHP and MySQL.

The system supports two ways of creating content: input data through a web form or aggregation of data from free text (parsing of natural language and creation of instances of concepts). The data structure is implemented on semantic web


technologies (ontologies), to provide the maximum of flexibility to data memorization. WissKI is a wiki-based software system, that supports scientific communication, semantic content analysis based on ontologies and it is a platform that provide the knowledge management of data.

CINECA INSTALLATION AND FUNCTIONALITY TESTING

Cineca tested this system to understand its application in mapping activity and in digital object storage. The installation of WissKI at Cineca required some interactions with the authors because not all the modules available on the github repository were ready to be used. At the end the system was installed and available at http://wisski.test.cineca.it/ . The installed modules are:

• Ontology load module: Wisski has a light interface to upload the ontology on the project. The base ontology loaded is Cidoc-crm but the system can support any other ontology

• Sparql Endpoint: to query the data in the triple-store • Access Point: WissKi provide to access to other rdf-store in several systems

to query semantic data • Pathbuilder: sets of "semantic patterns". A paths consisting of a concept of

the given ontology connected via a property to another concept of the given ontology which itself can be connected via a property to another concept and so on. It’s like a mapping editor tool.

• Vocabulary Control: to set the vocabularies to annotate with the semantic editor

• TextProc: for automatic text analysis and ontological modeling of text through NLP techniques

• Semantic Editor enables the graphical text editor to make semantic annotations


• GraphViz: a tool to visualize rdf triple • Find: a find function on the semantic data stored in the system

The key feature of WissKI is the introduction of so-called ontology paths (with theWissKI Pathbuilder API module), often recurring modeling patterns with a specific meaning. By defining and grouping such patterns, the complexity can be boiled down to— from the user’s perspective — sets of key-value pairs for each category of the domain, like museum objects, persons or places. These sets are used in WissKI for data input, presentation and querying and allow the balancing act between compact and human-understandable data rendering and deep semantic modeling. For example, Cineca tested this functionality creating a path for a small subset of STARC collection metadata

This is an example of how paths are created


These paths automatically generate the form for data entry in an easy way.

Data will be stored as RDF triples according to the path definitions. The system will detect and display possible references to controlled vocabulary entries (like persons, places or objects) and automatically link them appropriately, eventually building a knowledge graph. Existing mapping file can be exported from or load in the system knowledge graph. WissKI allows writing free text and annotating occurrences of named entities like persons, places and calendar dates and relations between the entities. WissKI assists the user by presenting annotation proposals based on an automatic text analysis. This is another way to input data in the system. Data presentation and querying Like Wikis, WissKI preferably presents data on web pages, each describing one object or topic of discourse. This naturally goes together with traditional object-centered CH documentation. Each page may contain free text, images and structured information boxes. The structured information is compiled from data in the triple store according to the defined ontology paths. Furthermore, the system provides alternative visualizations of the triple data like triple tables and several interactive graph representations. Here, the user may “look behind the ontology paths” and explore the full depth of the triple data. Whenever possible, mentions of other object instances in the text or structured information will be rendered as web links pointing to the linked object.


Apart from following the links on the web pages, WissKI allows three ways of searching the local data pool. First, one can browse listings of object instances sorted by predefined categories. Second, the system provides a search form similar to those of library search facilities.

The system implements a full-featured SPARQL endpoint for advanced user queries or automatic processing.


CONCLUSION

The WissKI has many features that fit the aims of V-Must project (ontology based navigation, integrated CRM CIDOC ontology, easy data entry from web, semantic queries). The major drawbacks concern the flexibility of the system especially in path builder module (not all the potential relations of CRM CIDOC can be implemented). Moreover procedures for massive data entry must be written from scratch. The triple store ARC2 is not in the list of large triple storeslxviii, even if a support for Sesame has been made available after our evaluation. The system is based on old versions of Drupal and PHP and there are some problems in installation and maintenance. The last release is dated at 28 June 2012.

OTHER SNAPSHOTS OF WISSKI MODULES

Ontology Load Module

Vocabulary control


Example of setting of mapping terms vocabulary to SKOS

Example of USE Visualization of the instance “Leonardo da Vinci”


Simply interface to create/modify values of an instance

The rdf-triple of the above instance entered


Path visualization of the value entered

A piece of RDF/XML created in ARC2: <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://wisski.test.cineca.it/content/ecrm_E21_Person0006"> <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://erlangen-crm.org/120111/E21_Person"/> <ns0:P98i_was_born rdf:resource="http://wisski.test.cineca.it/content/ecrm_E67_Birth0021"/> <ns0:P1_is_identified_by rdf:resource="http://wisski.test.cineca.it/content/ecrm_E82_Actor_Appellation0007"/> </rdf:Description> <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://wisski.test.cineca.it/content/ecrm_E82_Actor_Appellation0007"> <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://erlangen-crm.org/120111/E82_Actor_Appellation"/> <ns0:P3_has_note rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string">Leonardo da Vinci</ns0:P3_has_note> </rdf:Description>

Documents

DELIVERABLE REPORTGrant&Agreement&270404& Cyprus&Institute& Public 6/52 contrastingly different! from! other! CH! disciplines that! are! based! on the! more! explicit,! consciousselection!and!collection!of!materialsand!information,!which!maybe!argued