Of course it is possible!
http://math.nist.gov/~SRessler/x3dom/revealjs/index.xhtml#/
and I quite like the 3D posed human (made in Daz 3D I guess?)
.. and have a look at X3D
Category Archives: digital heritage
Interactive Fiction, Cultural Tourism, Archaeology and Gaming
Interactive Fiction
Over 4-5 April I attended the Interactive Pasts conference in Leiden, the Netherlands. It was organised by Archaeology PhD students, and they also created a gamified kickstarter project to get the funding required for an open access book publication of the proceedings. If you missed the conference (which was also on twitch), the presentations are on YouTube.
How does this relate to Interactive Fiction? Tara Copplestone and Angus Mol ran a workshop in the last session on interactive fiction.
Figure 1: #TIPC Interactive Pasts Conference Summary-Erik and Lennie photo by Tara Copplestone
Four of us (myself, Lennart Linde, Catherine Flick, B. Tyr Fothergill) used Twine (Mac version 1.42, PC is version 2.0), to develop the beginnings of an Interactive Fiction (IF) game, called A Career In Ruins, which is an archaeology conference simulator, where the student or junior researcher has to attempt to maximise their reputation while maintaining other important functions (such as phone battery and regular toilet breaks) without missing important sessions.
FIGURE 2: IF PROTOTYPE DEVELOPED WITH TWINE 1.4.2-A CAREER IN RUINS
Like many in the digital humanities, I was a fan of Steve Jackson Adventure Books in the 1980s (yes I was young then) and I had developed my own interactive fiction/D n D game on a 1628 byte CASIO FX-702P Programmable Calculator (around 1982?) I was very keen on expanding my knowledge of what these interactive writing tools can do.
Firstly there is a wide range of these tools: Google Docs.
Secondly, open source HTML-based TWINE and application INFORM are perhaps two of the most widely known tools (and TWINE is perhaps best to start with for beginners), but Squiffy (Mac, PC, Linux) looks most to interesting to me, and I was happy to discover that Adobe’s Phone Gap Application can port the Squiffy interactive fiction / games to mobile phones. I think HTML is a big advantage over those formats that require readers to download a specialised executable and HTML 5 also has other possibilities such as extending to JavaScript (three.JS, Angular.js Node.js or WebGL exported UNITY etc.). There are a variety of ways to create the 3D model for JavaScript and there are good tutorials online, the main challenge is how to incorporate 3D with interactive fiction.
There have even been IF-isometric driving games! The other possible advantages of the JavaScript that I mentioned are that they can offer videos, panoramas, and possibly 3D models.
About 10-15 years ago a program called RealViz allowed you to create 3D layers to panoramas, allowing movies and 3D objects to co-exist (would love to refind the Embarcadero example). Some exciting work and examples was done (via Shockwave 3D) with the imagemodeler but RealViz was bought out by Adobe and no longer exists. I don’t know of a comparable software application today.
However, using the above software I mentioned, I think we can link interactive fiction, panoramas, 3D models, and possibly even 3D panoramas with JavaScripted riddles (there are similar existing applications, like Pannellum).
It would be even more interesting to create these interactive-fiction panoramas for the new head mounted displays like the HTC Vive.
FIGURE 3: HTC VIVE, DEMO, LETS MAKE GAMES, PERTH
The possibilities for creative writing and also for archaeological story-making and cultural tourism really interests me and with European partners I hope we can propose a summer workshop. Possibly we would propose two workshops, one for creative writers and cultural tourism (using people’s own holiday snaps and other media, or drawing from digital archives of local heritage) and a second for archaeologists to create interactive fiction/fact/riddles/hypotheses. The first might combine lectures on Nordic Noir and its influence on cultural tourism. If the workshops actually take place, I think they would probably be in Denmark or Greece, or both. Best to start working on the proposal, then!
UPDATE: Inklewriter also looks promising according to this post of its use in a Choose Your Own Witchcraft Trial course.
Cultural Presence
I have written quite a bit about the above in virtual heritage and this terms has since shown itself in quite a few papers (Flynn, Tyler-Jones, Tost et al.) but now I feel compelled to state
- I wrote about cultural presence because it and social presence seem conflated in ISPR telepresence/presence literature and
- UNESCO’s terms of culture and cultural heritage did not seem linked to the aims and results of many virtual heritage projects and
- Culture and Society are not the same, and I wrote about that in the latest MIT Presence journal.
- Archaeology and heritage sites don’t all have cultural presence that we could or should always try to simulate in digital heritage projects.
- Cultural presence isn’t the sole criterion for virtual heritage but it is interesting when thinking about simulated designed places (and why virtual heritage and otherwise historic places seem so shallow compared to real places).
- I should update my thoughts on this so people won’t think I believe cultural presence is the be-all and end-all!
Virtual Heritage Article free to download until 21 April 2016
Elsevier have kindly let me and others download the below article from the Journal Entertainment Computing, (Volume 14, May 2016, Pages 67–74) up until 21 April 2016. From 22 April it will be behind the Elsevier paywall again.
http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Se406gYiZRYG4
No sign up or registration is needed – just click and read!
Title: Entertaining The Similarities & Distinctions Between Serious Games & Virtual Heritage Projects
Abstract:
This article summarizes past definitions of entertainment, serious games and virtual heritage in order to discuss whether virtual heritage has particular problems not directly addressed by conventional serious games. For virtual heritage, typical game-style entertainment poses particular ethical problems, especially around the simulation of historic violence and the possible trivialization of culturally sensitive and significant material. While virtual heritage can be considered to share some features of serious games, there are significantly different emphases on objectives. Despite these distinctions, virtual heritage projects could still meet serious games-style objectives while entertaining participants.
Post-doctoral contract offer : Collaborative mapping and geovisualisation of spatio-historical data sets
The MAP research unit offers a post-doctoral position for a period of 12 months starting on June 1st 2016. The position profile is related to the field of geovisualisation, but in an application to spatio-historical data sets, and in the context of a citizen science exploratory project.
The MAP unit, funded by CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and by the French Ministry for Culture, conducts interdisciplinary research activities focusing on the integration of computer science methodologies, formalisms and tools to applications fields like heritage architecture, history and archaeology, spatio-temporal dynamics (www.map.cnrs.fr).
The team is in charge of an exploratory research programme entitled Territographie (www.map.cnrs.fr/territographie), a programme the aim of which is to weigh the potential impact of the citizen science approach in the study of the so-called minor heritage (i.e. collections encompassing tools for agriculture, old occupations, unlisted edifices, etc.).
The team wishes to develop and test a customizable collaborative mapping solution, intended for use in collecting information as well as in browsing/selecting information.
You will find attached two PDF documents (one in French, one in English) presenting the details of the offer : context , mission, skills required , conditions, application procedures.
Contact:
Livio De Luca
Directeur de Recherche au CNRS
Directeur de l’UMR CNRS/MCC MAP _ Modèles et simulations pour l’Architecture et le Patrimoine
http://www.map.cnrs.fr
Email: livio.deluca
archaeology publishers mostly in the area of digital archaeology and video games
I have been given a deadline of February 3 to source funding for a flight to the Netherlands to the “Interactive Pasts” Value conference 4-5 April 2016. They said they hope to publish an edited book from the conference and I asked them if they had heard of the below publishers (although they probably have their own) so I added the below links. Hope this is of use to someone. Happy to add links to publishers that I have missed.
- Berghahn Books heritage series: http://www.berghahnbooks.com/series.php?pg=expl_heri
- Ashgate *now Taylor & Francis Digital Humanities series: http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=5097&series_id=416&calcTitle=1
- Cotsen University Press http://escholarship.org/uc/cioa (http://www.ioa.ucla.edu/press/online-catalog OR http://escholarship.org/uc/search?entity=cioa_ciap) their open access hybrid collection is interesting.
- Oxford archaeology books http://www.oxbowbooks.com/oxbow/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?publisher=Oxford%20Archaeology (https://global.oup.com/academic/category/arts-and-humanities/archaeology/?cc=au&lang=en&) or handbooks (https://global.oup.com/academic/content/series/o/oxford-handbooks-in-archaeology-oharch/?cc=au&lang=en&)
- Cambridge Archaeology books
- http://www.cambridge.org/au/academic/subjects/archaeology/
- Archaeopress (http://www.archaeopress.com/ArchaeopressShop/Public/defaultAll.asp?list=Categories) but where is their digital series?!
- University of Michigan https://www.press.umich.edu/about “Commitment to Digital Scholarship”: http://www.digitalculture.org/
- MIT Press Playful Thinking series (on games but could be interested in archaeology + computer games) https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/playful-thinking-series
Historical traps and tricks-are there any?
Could historical traps and tricks be used in game designs to encourage thinking about other cultures and create an engaging games?
I raised the below question on twitter (partially to see if twitter was good at answering):
Were any of the traps and tricks in any Indiana Jones movies actually historically plausible and authentic/accurate?
Well I found some interesting answers at
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cm11z/is_there_any_history_basis_for_the_traps_in_tombs/
And one example (Qin Shi Huang) seemed plausible:
The Secret Tomb of China’s 1st Emperor: Will We Ever See Inside?
Buried deep under a hill in central China, surrounded by an underground moat of poisonous mercury, lies an entombed emperor who’s been undisturbed for more than two millennia.The tomb holds the secrets of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who died on Sept. 10, 210 B.C., after conquering six warring states to create the first unified nation of China.
http://www.giantbomb.com/qin-tomb-of-the-middle-kingdom/3030-12977/
And there was a game, Qin: Tomb of the Middle Kingdom, which leverages this idea! Not sure I can find and play it (I tried some years ago) but perhaps a working copy is still out there somewhere.
There are still vimeo and youtube videos online.
NB it was very interesting to read of mercury being buried with a tomb, as they have recently found liquid mercury at Teotihuacán:
Liquid mercury found under Mexican pyramid could lead to king’s tomb. Researcher reports ‘large quantities’ of the substance under ruins of Teotihuacan in discovery that could shed light on city’s mysterious leaders.
Virtual Heritage vs Gamification. Fight!
I shared on twitter a concern I had about the apparently uncritical acceptance (and especially increasing acceptance) of gamification.
I say apparently as perhaps authors of various publications do have a critical appreciation of the risks and connotations of gamification, but they don’t always share it.
Even though I touched on this in Critical Gaming, I need some percolation time for this but something for me to think about as to my immediate reaction and aversion to this (uncritical use of) gamification is that
- Gamification ‘sounds’ to my ears like a trivialization of heritage. In my own research if you tell someone a digital archaeology simulation is a game they have less trouble navigating and performing tasks in the simulation but they take less care and have less respect for the cultural significance, authenticity and accuracy of that simulation.
- Plus there seems to be a hidden or invisible formula: non-games, add gamification fairy dust,….games!
- For if you search for richer and more defensible definitions of gamification it seems to me these definitions are getting harder and harder to separate from games per se.
- Gamification implies there is a simple conversion over to games and it is a binary relationship, there are games or non-games. We need a term that implies some but not all aspects of games have been applied/incorporated/added. Ludification? Unfortunately no, it has a dangerous related meaning! Perhaps something that reflects a Paideia/Ludus scale? Playful learning or play-based learning seems to be the closest fit for me so far..
Luckily I am not alone, thanks to Trevor Owens directing me to his Meanification article and to Shawn Graham for his Gamification article. Gotta love academification.
#cfp the ‘Interactive Pasts’ conference
http://www.valueproject.nl/media/introducing-the-interactive-pasts-conference/ …
This conference will explore the intersections of archaeology and video games. Its aim is to bring scholars and students from archaeology, history, heritage and museum studies together with game developers and designers. The program will allow for both in-depth treatment of the topic in the form of presentations, open discussion, as well as skill transference and the establishment of new ties between academia and the creative industry.
Due: January 31st 2016.
Abstracts: max. 200 words.
Date: 4-5 April 2016
Location: Leiden The Netherlands
Proposed keynote for INAH talk, December 4 Mexico
The Red Tematica de Tecnologías Digitales para la Difusión del Patrimonio Cultural (Research Network on Digital Technologies for the Dissemination of Cultural Heritage) invited me to Mexico City on December 4 for their conference Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Interaction Design), I was asked to talk about the following:
We expect you to deliver a 45 minutes presentation, followed by 15 mins questions. It would be great if you can focus on your concept of interactive history and virtual reality, serious games, etc. The audience is composed by cultural heritage professionals (archaeologists, curators, museum personnel, librarians, etc.).
Does my below abstract sound like it is answering the above? I am not too sure:
Virtual Heritage Projects versus Digital Heritage Infrastructure
In this talk I provide my definition and perspective on Virtual Heritage and an overview of its major problems: obsolete, unreliable or overly expensive technology, a critical lack of evaluation studies, restricted interaction, low-impact pedagogical outcomes and limited community involvement. Despite two decades of research and advancing technological sophistication, the same problems are still evident. This suggests a more serious underlying issue: virtual heritage lacks a scholarly ecology, an overall system and community that provide feedback, management and scalability to virtual heritage research.
For example, in the call for the recent http://www.digitalheritage2015.org/ conference call (“The largest international scientific event on digital heritage”), evaluation is not a central issue, listed under Computer Graphics and Interaction, not under Analysis and Interpretation. And where is the focus on the user experience or examples of long-term infrastructure with feedback from the community and not just from IT professionals? Neither archaeologist nor technology expert is necessarily trained in user experience design. The projects described in papers are too often inaccessible and even less frequently preserved and the needs of the projected audience are seldom effectively evaluated.
As an antidote I will present some reflective ideas and methods, plus case studies that resolve or promise to help resolve some if not all of these issues. One way to address the importance of virtual heritage is to redefine it. I suggest virtual heritage is the attempt to convey not just the appearance but also the meaning and significance of cultural artefacts and the associated social agency that designed and used them, through the use of interactive and immersive digital media. As it has been a focus of my research I will also cover the usefulness but also danger of applying game-based design and game-based learning ideas to the development and preservation of Virtual Heritage.
upcoming article for MIT Presence (2015? 2016?)
This article may provoke some responses..
Title:
Defining Cultural Agents for Virtual Heritage EnvironmentsFor:
Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments-Special Issue on “Immersive and Living Virtual Heritage: Agents and Enhanced Environments”Keywords:
Cultural agents, virtual heritage, computational archaeology, visualization, virtual environments, immersion.Abstract
This article describes the primary ways in which intelligent agents have been employed in virtual heritage projects and explains how the special requirements of virtual heritage environments necessitate the development of cultural agents. How do we distinguish between social agents and cultural agents? Can cultural agents meet these specific heritage objectives?Introduction
As the call to papers for this special issue has noted, “Most heritage applications lacked a sense of immersion in terms of ‘livingness’, life, behaviour and intelligent agents in the virtual environments, and there has not been any progression in such developments since a decade ago. This criticism of “lifeless” and “sterile” digital environments (and virtual heritage environments in particular) is shared by various scholars (Papagiannakis et al., 2002; Roussou, 2008) but a simple directive to ‘populate’ a virtual environment with intelligent agents masquerading as walk-on characters will not necessarily communicate cultural significance (Bogdanovych, Rodriguez, Simoff, & Cohen, 2009). And communicating cultural significance is an objective of virtual heritage environments even if it is not a requirement of all virtual environments.…
Summary
Virtual heritage environments have special needs that create more criteria than those required by mainstream digital environments and too many agent-virtual heritage projects have not communicated the significance and value of the heritage content) due to their focus on perfecting the technology. In their attempt to create more engagement, virtual environment researchers and designers have conflated social presence with cultural presence (Champion, 2005, 2011; Flynn, 2007). A solution is to develop agents who help interpret cultural cues and transmit to the human participant a sense of situated cultural presence and an awareness through place-specific and time-specific interaction of the cultural local significance of the simulated sites, artefacts and events. Such agents would be cultural agents, not merely social agents, as they would convey accummulated and place-specific cultural knowledge that would outlast or extend beyond their own individual ‘lives’
.
Virtual Heritage Metadata
Metadata
Are there recent advancements and agreements in the design use and sharing of metadata for Virtual Heritage? Recent modifications of CIDOC-CRM and Dublin Core particularly for 3D Heritage Models would be appreciated. CARARE version 2 is pubically available and there are various papers on the topic but I have not found any large-scale agreement and deployment of any scheme that focuses on 3D Virtual Heritage.
Because in 2007 and 2011, Laia Tost and I suggested virtual heritage projects should be based on: care, accuracy, sensitivity, effective and inspirational pedagogical features, is collaborative and evaluation-orientated. Extrapolating from these aims, I suggest the following features are desirable for designing 3D virtual heritage models or developing an infrastructure that can support virtual heritage models for the purpose of classroom teaching and public dissemination:
- Data accuracy: the level of accuracy and type of data capture method should be associated with the model, as well as the geographical location.
- Format limitations: any known limitations or required conditions due to the digital format or way in which the data was created, should also be associated with the model.
- Provenance: the record of ownership and scholarship and community input should be recorded and accessible (the source and the ownership rights).
- Community protocols: social, cultural and institutional protocols that guide who accesses the sourced cultural heritage and how that should affect the transmission, distribution and dissemination of the digitally simulated model.
- Authenticity: the known, extrapolated, omitted, simplified and imagined areas and components of the model should be identified in some form of thematic (and preferably standardised) schema.
- Cultural presence: models should aim towards explaining the cultural significance of the original site, and give an impression of the situated cultural value of the place as experienced by the original inhabitants.
- Evaluation Data: these aims should be clearly explained and any evaluation data of participants should be linked to (or otherwise associated with) the models.
- Purpose: the generic ways in which original creators and shareholders intended the models could be edited or otherwise modified should be described.
The first three considerations (and possibly all of the others, especially 5: Authenticity) require the careful and appropriate use of metadata.As Wise and Miller (1997) have noted, metadata (‘data about data’), allows users to be informed without having to access the entire body of data, it helps us find information and it helps us to group and link ‘bodies of information’ together. In 2008, Addison proposed the following virtual heritage metadata:
| Type | # | Data Encoding/Format |
| What | i. | HeritageID (a superset of existing WorldHeritageID) |
| Ii. | Title/brief description | |
| Iii | Heritage Type/Classification (e.g.: cultural: archaeological …) | |
| iv. | Heritage Time Period (e.g.: geologic or historic time) | |
| v. | Heritage Time Span | |
| Why | vi. | Purpose (reason recorded/produced) |
| How | vii. | Recording Device Parameters (type, sample rate, precision …) |
| viii. | Secondary Device(s) (data manipulation) | |
| ix. | Environmental conditions | |
| Whom | x. | Submitter and Date of Submission |
| xi. | Rights given/withheld | |
| xii. | Author/Copyright Holder | |
| xiii. | Sponsor/Funder/Client | |
| When | xiv. | Date (of recording, manipulation) |
| Where | xv. | Location (Latitude/Longitude + compass direction if applicable) |
References
ADDISON, A. 2008. The Vanishing Virtual. In: KALAY, Y. E., KVAN, T. & AFFLECK, J. (eds.) New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage. Oxon UK: Routledge.
BENNETT, M. J. 2015. Presentation on Evaluating the Creation and Preservation Challenges of Photogrammetry-based 3D Models.
KULASEKARAN, S., TRELOGAN, J., ESTEVA, M. & JOHNSON, M. Metadata integration for an archaeology collection architecture. Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, 2014. Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, 53-63.
REINHARD, A. 2013. Publishing Archaeological Linked Open Data: From Steampunk to Sustainability [Online]. Available: http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/reinhard/ [Accessed 23 7].
TOST, L. P. & CHAMPION, E. 2011. Evaluating Presence in Cultural Heritage Projects. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 18, 83-102.
WISE, A. & MILLER, P. 1997. WHY METADATA MATTERS IN ARCHAEOLOGY. Internet Archaeology, Online.
Join the CAA! Call for candidates for four open CAA committee posts
I have only ever reviewed for CAA but the papers I have reviewed have been consistently better than for other heritage conferences and I respect the work of the people behind CAA. I highly recommend the organisation.
I love the CAA and I thoroughly enjoy being able to give something back to this community by being CAA secretary. If you think this is a great community and are keen to be involved, consider applying for one of the open positions!
Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) invites CAA members to apply for one of four open committee posts: outreach officer, treasurer, publication officer, bursary and student/low income officer. The current treasurer and publication officer will stand down at CAA2016 in Oslo, the outreach and the bursary and student/low income officers are two new posts. Candidates must be CAA members and applications by all CAA members will be considered. CAA encourages in particular applications from female or non-European CAA members. The tasks associated with these posts are given below. Candidates must express an interest in the posts before 29 February 2016 by sending a motivational statement…
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potential paper in Forum on Video Games and Archaeology
Title: Serious Games and Virtual Heritage Have Let Archaeology Down
Wandering around museums or visiting art galleries and school fairs a relatively impartial observer might notice the paucity of interactive historical exhibitions. In particular there is a disconnect between serious games masquerading as entertainment and the aims and motivations of archaeology. Surely this is resolved by virtual heritage projects, interactive virtual learning environments? After all we have therapy games, flight simulators, online role-playing games, even games involving archaeological site inspections (Lara Croft:Tomb raider). Unfortunately we have few successful case studies that are shareable, robust, and clearly delivering learning outcomes.
Theoretical Issues for Game-based Virtual Heritage
Another book chapter published
Theoretical Issues for Game-based Virtual Heritage
Abstract:
This paper critiques essential features in prominent theories of serious games, and compares them to interaction features of commercial computer games that could be used for history and heritage-based learning in order to develop heuristics that may help future the specific requirements of serious game design for interactive history and digital heritage.
Champion, E. (2015). Theoretical Issues for Game-based Virtual Heritage. In M. Ebner, K. Erenli, R. Malaka, J. Pirker & A. E. Walsh (Eds.), Immersive Education (Vol. 486, pp. 125-136): Springer International Publishing.
It gives the reader an idea of my upcoming book:
The Egyptian Oracle Project: Ancient Ceremony in Augmented Reality (Bloomsbury Egyptology)
Strange, authors don’t have a copy yet, and it says the book will be available from July 30 but my library already has a copy. Anyway, I wrote an introductory chapter on virtual heritage and the other chapters will be of interest to Egyptologists, Classicists, AI researchers, puppeteers, and of course Virtual Heritage designers..
http://www.amazon.com/The-Egyptian-Oracle-Project-Bloomsbury/dp/1474234151
For more than 2,000 years, between 1500 BCE and 600 CE, the Egyptian processional oracle was one of the main points of contact between temple-based religion and the general population. In a public ceremony, a god would indicate its will or answer questions through the movements of a portable cult statue borne by priests or important members of the community.
The Egyptian Oracle Project is an interactive performance that adapts this ceremony to serve as the basis for a mixed-reality educational experience for children and young adults, using both virtual reality and live performance. The scene is set in a virtual Egyptian temple projected onto a wall. An oracle led by a high priest avatar (controlled by a live human puppeteer) is brought into the presence of a live audience, who act in the role of the Egyptian populace. Through the mediation of an actress, the audience interacts with the avatar, recreating the event.
The series of carefully focused essays in this book provides vital background to this path-breaking project in three sections. After a brief introduction to educational theatre and virtual reality, the first section describes the ancient ceremony and its development, along with cross-cultural connections. Then the development of the script and its performance in the context of mixed-reality and educational theatre are examined. The final set of essays describes the virtual temple setting in more detail and explores the wider implications of this project for virtual heritage.
visiting Sydney in June…
Tuesday 23 June (Perth, not actually Sydney but I want to feel sorry for myself as it will be at 7AM) 90 minute talk to NEH people in the USA because the 35 hour flight and 2 hour transit is for a younger braver person!
- Friday 26 Digital Humanities Pedagogy invited talk (abstract already posted), I think COFA campus, Paddington..URL?
- Saturday-Sunday 27-28 June New Zealand (because it is there)
- Monday 29 June DIGRAA UNSW Sydney
- Tuesday 30 June not sure, the event changed on me!
- Wednesday-Thursday 1-2 July DH2015-Digital Humanities 2015 University of Western Sydney
- Friday 3 July back to Perth in time for Senior Leaders Forum
digital heritage models
Digital Archaeology and virtual heritage are not exactly equivalent but I have not seen a paper putting forward a clear definition and relationship. Perhaps that is why a Digital Heritage conference could be attended by archaeologists, archivists, museum experience people, interaction designers, programmers, scanning experts, librarians or museum people. Seldom are they all together, let alone in the same sessions.
If UNESCO and related organizations wish to preserve digital cultural heritage they will have to clearly distinguish between CAD model repositories and online web models (one can have both in one but is it too much of a compromise?)
Another issue is that charters developed for digital heritage, UNESCO digital heritage charter, London Charter, Seville Principles, Burra charter, ICOMOS Venice charter, are read but not used in the creation and storage of most projects.
My solution would be to build a template that is both a heuristics and an information collector that would be used to create suitable meta-tags and classification, based on a hybrid practical implementation of the charters as a query form that helps relate models to ontologies and to other digital collections.
The fictional use of reality
The above could be the title of my next writing on virtual heritage..
Over their lifetime should every academic write at least one thing that threatens their very career? Just a (Wittgensteinian?) thought!
In digital heritage there is a great deal of talk about authenticity and how to maintain it. What if that approach is completely mistaken?
Ok I think I have the start of a very controversial journal article but writing the article may be easier than finding the appropriate journal to publish it in..
Ear Zow Digital