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On Culture in a world-wide Information Society: from ‘Multimedia Access to Europe’s Cultural Heritage
to eCulture
Alfredo M. RonchiEC MEDICI Framework
Early attemptsSince the early days
of computing
libraries and other
memory institutions
experimented the
potential added value
offered by
computers.
Sometimes they act
as “Bad
Ambassadors”
Apple ][ - 1977
Turning point
• ’80 - Personal computers- Frank T. Cary
1984
1989 Virtual Reality Disclosure
• Monika Fleischmann – Wolfgang
Strauss ART+COM 1990 – Virtual
Metro Stop
• Ola Ødegård- - Telenor 1993 – Virtual
Viking Village
• Infobyte Rome 1993 – Basilica
Superiore Assisi
‘90 Cultural Entertainment / Edutainment
• Versailles 1685 (Cryo 1997) 300.000
copies sold
• Egypt 1156 BC Tomb of the pharaon
(Cryo 1997)
• Byzantine: The Betrayal (Discovery
channel Multimedia 1997)
• China the Forbidden City (Cryo 1998)
• Rome: Caesar’s Will (Montparnasse
Multimedia 2002)
• Versailles 2 (Cryo 2002)
Nineties
• Super Information Highways – Al Gore
• Information Society – Martin Bangemann
• 1975 Email represents 75% Internet traffic
• Network islands (bitnet, decnet, ….MsNet, AppleShare )
• ‘80 - Interconnetction TPC IP
Where the all thing started• 1989 March 1989 Tim Berners Lee, a physician, wrote the first report on a hypertext system facilitating information
sharing among different research groups.
• 1991 (6 August) the first http server is on line (Tim Berners-Lee & Robert Cailliau @ CERN)
• 1993 (30 April) web tech in public domain
• 1993 The first multi media browser Mosaic was born in 1993 at the University of Illinois (National Center for
Supercomputing Applications, NCSA) thanks to the work of Marc Andressen and Eric Bina The first “browsers”
implemented a simplified way to visit hypertextual links. Linking together pure texts.
• 1993 third World Wide Web Conference held in Darmstadt in 1993 saw the establishment of the general framework,
thanks to the active contributions from the local Technical University and Fraunhofer IGD (FhG IGD), and the
responsibility for management and future developments was assigned (under the acronym W3C) to the American
association (NCSA) and the French INRIA. In that period of time, at INRIA in Sophia Antipolis, one of the well
known researchers working on the Internet technology was Christian Huitema, he wrote a book recalling a famous
movie: Et Dieu créa l'Internet. Some other pioneers were: Jean-François Abramatic and Bebo White -
http://www.icann.org/en/groups/board/abramatic.htm // http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~bebo/
• Christian Hutema personal web site: http://huitema.net
The WEB revolution• Web Tech developed at CERN Geneva 1992/93 (Tim
Bernenrs- Lee, Marc Cailliau
• MOSAIC Browser: developed at National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign beginning in late 1992. NCSA
released the browser in 1993 (Marc Andreessen)
• A Bottom Up Revolution – the first time prosumers, user
driven development
• “The Internet represents one of the most successful
examples of the benefits of sustained investment and
commitment to research and development of information
infrastructure. Beginning with the early research in packet
switching, the government, industry and academia have
been partners in evolving and deploying this exciting new
technology.”
WWW & Culture Track
1995 - European Commission Pilot Projects
In February 1995, the European Commission organised the first meeting on the Information Society, in
Brussels. During the meeting, a list of eleven pilot projects was approved:
– • Global Inventory (of projects)
• Global Interoperability
• Cross-Cultural Education and Training
• Bibliotheca Universalis
• Multimedia Access to World Cultural Heritage
• Environment
• Global Emergency
• Government Online
• Global Healthcare
• Global Marketplace for SMEs
• Maritime Information Systems.
Multimedia Access to World Cultural Heritage
1995 - G7 Summit
June 1995, a worldwide G7 Summit was
held in Halifax, Canada.
The G7 Group approved and adopted the
above mentioned list of projects.
ISAD Conference 1996
• May 1996 - As a consequence, practical demonstrations followed during the ISAD Conference
(Information Society and Developing Countries) held in Midrand, South Africa.
• During this conference, four demo projects were selected, representing the four principal sections
identified by the project Multimedia Access to World Cultural Heritage (Pilot Project 5)
The four sections principally referred to the specific contents of museums and art galleries:
• 3D Acquisition (originally called Laser Camera), a laser camera presented by the National Research
Council, Ottawa;
• Filing, of the History of Science Museum in Florence;
• Visualisation of the Nefertari Tomb, prepared by Infobyte, Rome;
• “SUMS” Navigation, prepared by SUMS Corporation, Toronto.
1996 European Commission
• Focusing on European initiatives, the combined initiatives led to the birth of a new
framework of understanding. The reference document was largely a Declaration of
Intent that was initially signed by 240 museums and institutions. In this context,
there was the development of a likely organic approach to the use of multimedia
and more generally of ICT in the field of cultural heritage. The Memorandum of
Understanding for Multimedia Access to Europe’s Cultural Heritage, or more
simply the MoU, is usually considered to be the Act of Incorporation for the
“Information Company on European Cultural Heritage”.
eCulture Key SoftTech
• SGML Standard General Markup Language
• Web technology (in general)
• RDF Resurce Descriptor Format
• XML Extensible Markup Language
• Semantic Web
• Ontologies
• ….
eCulture: HardTech
• PCs
• Networks / Internet
• Remote sensing
• 2D / 3D scanners
• HiQ printers
• Hifi Displays
• Smart phones
• Tablets
• …..
As already summarized
• Computers have been around for about half a century and their
social effects have been described under many headings. Society is
changing under the influence of advanced information technology;
we face fundamental transformations in social organisation and
structure.
• Such a change is much more evident in the recent period of time.
This even because young citizens are changing and the change is not
smooth it’s a real discontinuity, young think different!
The experience
• Today, more than fifteen years after interactive virtual reality was first exploited, and more than
twenty years after the “explosion” of the Internet, a wide range of technologies are on the shelf, a
number of applications and services are available, so what is missing? What are the opportunities
and the threats?
• Many relevant players in both the museum and ICT communities invested time and resources into
creating pilot projects and applications ranging from 3-D reconstructions, image-based rendering, to
virtual museums. We are now in a position to consider whether such investments are effectively
useful and really do increase and promote knowledge of the arts, sciences and history, and whether
they satisfy users’ requirements. Do virtual museums really provide added value to end-users? Are
museums, content providers and users ready and willing to apply new technologies to cultural
heritage? In the twenty-first century, the Information Society era, does the nineteenth century’s
encyclopaedic approach to museums still survive? Do ICT tools really help content holders and/or
end-users?
Evolution or revolution ?
• As we have already stated, digital communication is the most recent link in a long
chain, which started with non-verbal communication and gestures, evolved into
languages, signs and writing, and then developed into printing, broadcasting and
other media and formats. Do we use digital communication in the best way? Just
how much are we really exploiting the potential offered by digital media? Is
multimedia simply the sum of different media, or is it more than this? Does virtual
reality merely refer to navigation through digital replicas of the real world?
Some early time ideas
• Exploration and discovery of archaeological sites
• Enabling visualisation of non more existent or accessible artefacts
• Contextualisation of artefacts and content
• Virtual walkthrough
• Digital originals devoted to everyday use, reference, etc
• Virtual restoration
• Educational purposes
• ….
The human capital: the digital native generation
• All these considerations are related to technologies and devices what about the “human capital”. Of course even users are
evolving, there are a number of capacity building initiatives, their own requirements and expectations are changing. New
opportunities offered by emerging technologies generate new behaviours and new services simply think about mobile phones
and emails. It is evident that a new way to use or “consume” services, information & news is coming to the fore.
• Technology is evolving toward a mature “calm” phase, “users” are overlapping more and more “citizens” and they consider
technology and eServices as an everyday commodity, to buy a ticket, to meet a medical doctor, to pay taxes, to access weather
forecast. The gap between eCitizens and digitally divided citizens did not disappear yet but is becoming smaller every day. In
the near future young generations will not figure out how their parents use to fulfil some tasks in the past. Museums will
exhibit phone booths, travel agencies, yellow pages, geographical maps, and fax machines and may be even laptops as
“relicts” from the pre-digital age.
Recent Generations
• It is a common understanding that recent generations represent a discontinuity if compared with the past ones. Such
discontinuity or if preferred singularity is recognised both by adults complaining because their children do not pay
attention or are getting bored by learning and by adults that discovered new skills and capabilities in young
generations.
• How do we identify a digital native? Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. Their brain seems
to be able to work in parallel to receive multiple inputs and react in real time even using different “channels”. This
of course applies from pupils to university students and more. So they prefer direct/random access to information
and content. Graphic and Video content are longer preferred than text. They use instant messaging and do not print
email. They use to look for support on line and use to belong to one or more communities (users, supporters,
owners,). This is a side effect of their special skills acquired in hours and hours of digital tasks.
• Young and kids are constantly feeding their own Facebook profiles or posting their own video clips on YouTube.
Sometimes Facebook and YouTube seem to be much more “(Social)life-mediators” than Internet commodities.
Young and kids are part of the digital community, they have a specific sense of belonging to the on line community.
Internet as a shared memory
Is it true that pupils refer to the Web as their own memory and basic knowledge? We may say basically “Yes” even if this
represents for many reasons a concern. Is information available on line quality proof? And more and more they
really think: why do I need to memorize when Napoleon did surrender at Waterloo if I can click on Wikipedia or
“google” it?
The potential “uniformity” and consistence of digital interfaces enabled, by the virtualisation of physical interfaces,
unleashed incredible potentials; the magic feature of “undo” empowered users. In the digital domain “undo” and
“redo” are the pillars of learning by doing. Virtual and enriched reality through different types of simulators
strengthened the “historical” approach of learning by doing.
These two pillars together with the de facto standardisation of interfaces and interaction enabled rapid application training and use. Nowadays
digital devices, and not only them, do not include users manuals, people use to learn by doing, only if they require special safety
instructions there is an instruction sheet within the box. Digital natives prefer games to “serious” work; they prefer edutainment
applications or serious games. E.g. IKEA furniture kits use to provide a very basic instruction sheet.
In his work The Design of Everyday Things, Donald H. Norman defines mapping as “the self-explicative shape or behaviour of an object”.
Mapping implies that “... you always know which control does what (in the book, I call this a ‘natural mapping’). When the designers
fail to provide a conceptual model, we will be forced to make up our own...”. Furthermore: “A good conceptual model can make the
difference between successful and erroneous operation of the many devices in our lives.” See Norman (1998).
The feeling
• The idea, but it is more than a feeling, is that in such a process digital natives lost some basic assets. Their own
“culture” seems to be much more a set of bi-dimensional “tiles” sometimes interconnected. Direct access to
information or even knowledge atoms may cause the lack of understanding of the whole rationale beyond including
logical relations and links. So it becomes very difficult to build up a mental model or to activate reflection in order
to evaluate and criticise what they learn. They miss the opportunity to elaborate what they learn by doing, their
experience.
• Learning and working at “warp speed” does not provide them the opportunity to “pause” and assimilate, reconsider,
amend or criticise what they are learning or doing. This is many times one of the basic drawbacks due to
technological enhancements. Since the introduction of fax messages the expectation for an immediate response was
the rule, emails, mobile phones, sms and instant messaging did the rest. So the evolution of the romantic fountain
pen hand-writer nowadays is playing a video game and at the same time Twitting and posting some content on
Facebook while chatting on the smart phone thanks to WhatsApp.
• The risk of misuse of such technologies and misinformation is probably higher than in the past. So it might happen
that we will watch an updated version of the movie “Wag the dog” in the near future.
