Tag Archives: Culture

Recent news and update

Academic, Announcements, Digital Humanities, Grant, publication, , , ,

I am working on a new grant, on a 22+ year old idea that was never implemented!

And I have mentioned the grants below, if not the chapters published this month, but just as a roundup (and I have to do this for my current university) here is a summary.

2024      ARC Discovery DP250104625: Champion, E., Kotarba, A., Greenop, K., & Gibbs, M. (2025). A Gamified 3D Cultural Heritage Platform for Archaeology and Architecture. Australia. $520,686. 3 years.

  • A Gamified 3D Cultural Heritage Platform for Archaeology and Architecture. Few research infrastructures support engaging and useful 3D heritage content for both archaeology and architecture. A user-focused, experiential immersive environment with AI content creation will be developed and evaluated. Audience and international expert feedback will create a flexible feature list. Workshops with museums and galleries will test the prototype’s usefulness for communication and preservation. The system will allow groups to explore 3D models in conjectural and imaginative contexts and pose counterfactual arguments. The project will also consider how to convey levels of authenticity and uncertainty. Outputs will be a website with open-source tools and data, publications, a conference and a demonstration as an exhibition.
  • National Interest Test Statement:Examples of 3D heritage content showcasing archaeology and architecture are rare, limiting opportunities for the Australian public to engage with culture and history. To address this gap, the project will develop a gamified 3D cultural heritage platform to make archaeological and architectural heritage accessible and interactive. Technologies including artificial intelligence and 3D interactive modelling will create immersive, educational experiences that engage the public with historical narratives. This platform will deliver multiple benefits. Economically, the cultural tourism sector will be enhanced by enriching visitor engagement with innovative storytelling and exhibition tools. Socially, Australia’s national identity and civic pride will be strengthened by making cultural heritage more accessible and engaging. Environmentally, the digitalisation approach will protect archaeological sites and built heritage, preserving these critical and non-renewable assets for future generations. The project will collaborate with cultural and educational institutions to maximise outcomes beyond academia, promoting the platform’s use in public education programs and exhibitions. Targeted workshops and a website with open-source tools will facilitate its adoption, contributing significantly to national and cultural discourse. Aligning with broader national interests, this project positions the platform as a pioneer in digital cultural preservation and educational innovation.

2024      ARC LIEF Grant LE250100051: “The Australian Emulation Network Phase 2 – Extending the Reach.” Awarded to Prof Melanie Swalwell; Prof Sarah Teasley; Dr Helen Stuckey; Dr Stephanie Harkin; Prof Sean Cubitt; Dr Kirsten Day; A/Prof Peter Raisbeck; A/Prof Erik Champion; Prof Simon Biggs; Dr Margaret Borschke; A/Prof Elizabeth Tait; Dr Caroline Wilson-Barnao; Dr Kim Machan; Dr Ashley Robertson; Mr Adam Bell. $544,947. 2 years.

  • The Australian Emulation Network Phase 2 – Extending the Reach. This project aims to extend the reach of the Australian Emulation Network, conserving born digital artefacts and making them accessible for research purposes. High value collections from university archives and the GLAM sector requiring legacy computer environments will be targeted. The project expects to generate new knowledge across media arts, design, and architecture. Expected outcomes include stabilising and providing researchers with emulated access to born digital cultural artefacts, sharing legacy computer environments across the network, and expanding the Australian software preservation Community of Practice, building skills in preserving and emulating digital cultural artefacts across an expanded set of domains and institutions.
  • National Interest Test Statement:The project aims to extend national emulation infrastructure, more than doubling the size of the existing Australian Emulation Network by adding 22 new institutional nodes. This addresses the national challenge of preserving and accessing Australia’s born digital heritage. Born digital heritage faces several forms of obsolescence. Consequently, much born digital material has not been collected, is inaccessible because of its reliance on legacy computing environments, and at risk of loss. The project will provide the tools and skillsets required so that professionals in the university and Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museum (GLAM) sectors have confidence in collecting, preserving and emulating complex digital artefacts. Securing digital heritage materials and making these available to the researchers who need access to them promises to deliver new knowledge in the inter-related fields of digital art, design, and creative practice, delivering research with social and cultural benefits. Making emulation infrastructure available to more national and state institutions will improve access to digital collections in keeping with the national cultural policy, and ensure that the benefits extend well beyond academia to the wider public. This investment will ensure a sustainable, resilient network that can address the needs of diverse collections across the nation, including in regional areas.

BOOK CHAPTERS

Champion, E. (2024). Caught Between a Rock and a Ludic Place: Geography for Non-geographers via Games. In: Morawski, M., Wolff-Seidel, S. (eds) Gaming and Geography. Key Challenges in Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42260-7_3

Champion, E. (2025: in press). On his roles as Professor and Research Fellow. In V. Hui, R. Scavnicky, & T. Estrina (Eds.), Architecture and Videogames: Intersecting Worlds. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Architecture-and-Videogames-Intersecting-Worlds/Hui-Scavnicky-Estrina/p/book/9781032528854  

Intangible heritage

digital heritage, , ,

Intangible and tangible heritage are two sides of the same coin, perhaps. It has been a great step forward for UNESCO to add the concept of intangible heritage, but I can’t help but feel heritage is the relationship between the two. How can digital heritage help re-span this gap?

NB isn’t “cultural heritage” saying the same thing twice? Oh yes, there is industrial heritage, but as soon as it becomes heritage it achieves some form of cultural status…

Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums [GLAM]-focussed Games and Gamification

Academic, Announcements, augmented reality, book chapter, heritage, serious games, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, , , ,

New book chapter out! Sorry, not open access.

Champion, E., & Emery, S. (2024). Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums [GLAM]-focussed Games and Gamification. In J. Nichols & B. Mehra (Eds.), Data Curation and Information Systems Design from Australasia: Implications for Cataloguing of Vernacular Knowledge in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (Vol. 54, pp. 67-83). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0065-283020240000054006.

Engaging with digital heritage requires understanding not only to comprehend what is simulated but also the reasons leading to its creation and curation, and how to ensure both the digital media and the significance of the cultural heritage it portrays are passed on effectively, meaningfully, and appropriately. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization defines ‘digital heritage’ to comprise of computer-based materials of enduring value some of which require active preservation strategies to maintain them for years to come.

With the proliferation of digital technologies and digital media, computer games have increasingly been seen as not only depicters of cultural heritage and platforms for virtual heritage scholarship and dissemination but also as digital cultural artefacts worthy of preservation. In this chapter, we examine how games (both digital and non-digital) can communicate cultural heritage in a galleries, libraries, archives, and museums [GLAM] setting. We also consider how they can and have been used to explore, communicate, and preserve heritage and, in particular, Indigenous heritage. Despite their apparently transient and ephemeral nature, especially compared to conventional media such as books, we argue computer games can be incorporated into active preservation approaches to digital heritage. Indeed, they may be of value to cultural heritage that needs to be not only viewed but also viscerally experienced or otherwise performed.

“Rethinking Virtual Places: Dwelling, Culture, Care” book to publishers

3D and game editors, augmented reality, Book, Digital Humanities, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation, , , , , , ,

I have sent this off to Indiana University Press Spatial Humanities Series. There have been 3 reviews, by 2 reviewers, and probably there will be a fourth (internal?) one. And i would love to know how to automatically convert Chicago 17 Author-Date reference style to Chicago 17 Footnotes (but I don’t think it exists). Hopefully it will be published early 2021.

Chapter summaries currently read as:

Chapter One explores the innovation and wilder inventions of early virtual environments and computer games. Have these developments, along with the increasing popularity of science fiction, promulgated fertile concepts of virtual places? I will suggest they have not.

Chapter Two explores the early development of virtual worlds, and game-worlds. Despite the hype of early virtual worlds, they, along with virtual museums (Huhtamo 2010), have seldom managed to capture and retain worthwhile visitor numbers (Styliani et al. 2009). What were the main features and attractions of virtual museums? Why have they gone in and out of fashion and have they actually been of any benefit to real-world museums? I will specifically look at how they use or change the use of space, and which if any place affordances were used in their design. I will then look briefly at the changing commercial and community virtual worlds that were developed, grew and fell during the last two decades.

Chapter Three discusses the representation-orientated and essentialist nature of major architectural theories. The second half of this chapter describes related design tools and asks a question of the training of architects for designing virtual places. If architects are not trained in usability and interaction design principles, how can they design engaging and profound interaction in these virtual worlds? Are traditional devices and technologies for designing, experiencing, and reflecting on place in danger of being lost in this digital era?

Chapter Four summarizes relevant philosophical exploration of real places and extrapolates them to virtual places and to notions of cyberspace. Related concepts discussed include the notion of VR as control, realism, authenticity and presence.

Chapter Five overviews a few key recent developments in neuroscience and how they may help our understanding of how people experience, store and recollect place-related experiences. Can these discoveries help our design of virtual places? Do philosophical explanations of memory and place (Ihde 2002, Tavanti and Lind 2001) reflect recent discoveries in scientific experiments (Farovik et al. 2015)? Can science help us better design virtual places (Johnson 2013, Moore 2005)? Do they explain how people navigate and orient themselves in virtual places (Cockburn 2004, Zimring and Dalton 2003)? The second part of Chapter Five discusses the importance of affordances and the confusion surrounding them.

Understanding game mechanics is of great relevance to virtual place designers, Chapter Six summarizes conflicting definitions of game mechanics and an explanation of different types of game mechanics suited to differing design purposes. This chapter also briefly discusses gamification.

Chapter Seven asks “Do Serious Gamers Learn from Place?” We could summarize this concern in the following three questions: do we know if learning has taken place, if it has taken place effectively, and if the knowledge that resulted from the learning is transferable? In contrast to James Gee (Gee 2003) I do not believe that all games are good games, and that all games are therefore good learning environments but in I will discuss procedural rhetoric and whether serious games help people engage with pedagogical objectives of humanities subjects.

Chapter Eight focuses on the relationship of culture to place. This chapter revisits definitions of culture, explores how culture can be communicated and understood in virtual places (transmissions), and determines whether there are specific requirements with virtual worlds. I also discuss the importance of roles, rituals and agents. In order to measure how closely culture can be observed, appreciated or understood through virtual environments, I have suggested that cultural presence be defined as the feeling of being in the presence of a similar or distinctly different cultural belief system (Champion 2011).

Chapter Nine explores evaluation methods (both traditional and recent), which address the complicated problem of understanding how people evaluate places, and whether this knowledge can be directly applied to the evaluation of virtual places. How do they get around the problem of the newness of virtual reality or the subjectivity/objectivity debates surrounding immersion and presence? Are they inspired by related but highly theoretical fields such as phenomenology, or has philosophy in general been left behind in the practical evaluation of place?

Chapter 10  discusses the emerging platforms and related tools that claim to help distribute, store and preserve virtual places Understanding the significance of the latest research is not enough, we also need to understand the significance and issues of the software, hardware and platforms that can be used for the design and experience of virtual places. There is an increasing trend to the more accessible, portable and component-based, does this mean we are on the brink of Convergent Cultures? In particular, I suggest that virtual heritage has focused more on communication than on preservation. We cannot afford to have our digital heritage disappearing faster than the real heritage or the sites it seeks to ‘preserve’ otherwise all of our technological advances, creative interpretations, visualizations and efforts will have been in vain.

CFP: Personal and Ubiquitous Computing

augmented reality, cfp, Conference, digital heritage, heritage, Journal, publication, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, , , , ,

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (Springer Science)

Special Issue on Virtual and Mixed Reality in Culture and Heritage:

Details:

This special issue solicits research related to Virtual and Mixed Reality in Culture and
Heritage. Authors are encouraged to submit articles presenting original and
innovative studies that address new challenges and implications and explore the
potential of immersive technologies in museums, galleries, heritage sites and
art/cultural institutions.

Guest Editors:
Damianos Gavalas, University of the Aegean, Greece dgavalas@aegean.gr
Stella Sylaiou, Hellenic Open University, Greece, sylaiou@gmail.com
Vlasios Kasapakis, University of the Aegean, Greece, v.kasapakis@aegean.gr
Elena Dzardanova, University of the Aegean, Greece, lena@aegean.gr

Important Dates:
Submission: July 31, 2019
1st round notification: Sept 30, 2019
Revision deadline: Nov 15, 2019
Final notification: Dec 31, 2019
Expected publication: 4nd Q 2020

CTIS Symposium Shenzhen China 30 November 2014: The Convergence of Culture and Technology in the Age of Mobile Internet

Conference, CTIS, Shenzhen, Symposium, , ,

I presented the below paper (and too many slides) at CTIS Symposium: The Convergence of Culture and Technology in the Age of Mobile Internet.

It was very interesting to see developing cultural media companies in China, and well done Halfback Studios for your partnerships going into this market!
Anyway, here is a taster of the paper I wrote.

Abstract:

The computer paradigm is giving way to the mobile Internet paradigm (Gartner; Lunden; Anthony). Always on, always connected, always linked, always beeping, and always being triggered. Increased mobility suggests lighter and yet more powerful devices, greater contextualization and improved personalization. So what are the implications for cultural experiences in digital worlds?

Unfortunately, in my area of research, virtual heritage (games and virtual reality applied in the services of cultural heritage), the development of technology for the transmission of cultural knowledge in a virtual world is arguably still at a primitive stage. Ideally, digital cultural innovation in this field develops in parallel with technological innovation but projects and commercial applications so far show either a lack of technical flexibility or a paucity of rich cultural interaction and thematic appropriateness. Despite this dour criticism, my paper will put forward a suggestion for how a creative and explorative fusion of new media, the mobile internet, and the entertainment industry could offer new and exciting but so far unrealized opportunities for virtual heritage both in terms of the public and in terms of the classroom.

  1. Convergence Culture

The book Convergence Culture, by Henry Jenkins (Jenkins) is well-written and relevant to our discussion yet some of the arguments are hard to pin down. I believe he makes these provocative claims:

  • Fan Culture is equivalent to Collective Intelligence.
  • Mainstream popular media is a good example of participatory media.
  • There will be no one Black Box through which all media will have to flow.
  • Old media does not die.

The term Convergence Culture is confusing. In Jenkins’ introduction (2) and his glossary (282) convergence is:

“A word that describes technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes in the ways media circulates within our culture…the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, the search for new structures of media financing… the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kind of entertainment experiences they want.”

Yet Convergence Culture is introduced as (283): “A shift in the logic by which culture operates, emphasizing the flow of content across media channels.” And even more surprisingly, divergence is (284): “part of the same process of media change” as convergence (at least according to de Sola Pool). So does cultural convergence actually just mean the tides and shift of media changes? Part of the confusion can be traced to Jenkins continually weaving trends and sub-definitions of Convergence Culture (and convergence per se) throughout the book.

Most importantly, Jenkins avoids discussing the importance of technological change in Convergence Culture because he is more interested in Fan Culture and the media industry, but this is a fundamental point of Ithiel de Sola Pool’s Technologies of Freedom. It was de Sola Pool who Jenkins (10) labels “the prophet of media convergence” because the former spoke about the “convergence of modes”, the increasing trend for media content to travel on non-proprietary and non-technologically required channels. In other words (10): “’…the one-to-one relationship that used to exist between a medium and its use is eroding.’” It is true that de Sola Pool argued that the media should become less dependent on the medium, but de Sola Pool still thought certain types of technology (dispersed, accessible, decentralized) were required for the freedom that he seeks. Likewise, Lévy argued for technological innovation (Lévy 39-55).

Jenkins also quotes Gitelman (Gitelman 7) who defines media as “socially realised structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols.” So although de Sota Pool, Lévy and Gitelman, are cited for their observations on technology, they do not seem to have persuaded Jenkins about the importance of technology, culture, or the associated cultural protocols. This is in part because Jenkins wishes to refute the technocentric evangelism of Negroponte and others. He agrees that digitalization was important, but not that it is inevitable or even stable (11). Given Jenkins’ downplaying of technology, I suggest Jenkins is really talking about Lévy’s “convergence of modes” for transmedia audiences and their relationship to each other and to the media industries. So while the book title is simple and clear, it is not accurate, it does not express clearly the intention of the book’s actual focus on transmedia audiences. And the role and nature of culture itself is never clearly defined, which is a problematic issue I will return to later in this essay.