M. Ioannides, D. Baker, A. Agapiou, & P. Siegkas (Eds.), 3D Research Challenges in Cultural Heritage V: Paradata, Metadata and Data in Digitisation. Springer Nature Switzerland. Open Access. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-78590-0
I have a chapter in there.
Champion, E. (2025). Usable, Useful, Reviewable and Reusable Metadata. In M. Ioannides, D. Baker, A. Agapiou, & P. Siegkas (Eds.), 3D Research Challenges in Cultural Heritage V: Paradata, Metadata and Data in Digitisation (pp. 176-183). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78590-0_15. Open Access.
Digital Heritage Congress is the big meta-conference of the digital heritage/virtual heritage field. I have been to the first one in Marseille (2013) and reviewed for others.
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.
#CFP three-day DiGRA Australia Game Studies conference 5th – 7th of February, 2025, University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia. Abstracts due 4 October. Theme: “Communities of Practice and Play”. Free registration.
The explosion in the development and communication of digital humanities has seen fascinating digital visualisation projects. Some focus on slavery and massacre, such as the Monroe and Florence Work Today website, (Monroe & Florence Work Unknown), a database and mapping platform of lynching in America, Slave voyages visualized by SLADE magazine (Kahn and Bouie 2015) and in Australia the Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia 1788-1930 map, Australia. (Allam and Evershed 2019; Ryan 2019). Some focus on outright horror, others use digital technology to convey contestation and issues of ambiguity. Despite the growth and spread of these digital humanities visualisation projects, parallel and accessible examples in immersive virtual heritage are harder to find. Over the last three decades, immersive technologies (especially as “new” media) have embraced digital heritage to create showstopping instant experiences, but existing, durable examples of virtual heritage (virtual reality applied to cultural heritage) are relatively rare, and examples of difficult heritage far rarer. To review and address this gap, I will summarize dilemmas in present research on immersion, presence and immersivity; cover recent developments in virtual, augmented and mixed reality technology. Then, inspired by UNESCO charters, indigenous manifestos and ethical design principles in digital humanities, (Hepworth and Church 2018), I will attempt to formulate a theoretical framework with criteria and guidelines to help immersive environment designers address the depiction or evocation of difficult pasts.
I should note a potential conflict of interest. I am a keynote, but looks like they haven’t yet used my sent bio! Anyway, hope to see you there, happy to receive links and news about big GLAM data viz and immersive and game-like experiences!
Yes the venue is very close (walking distance I think) to that site…
Edit image from conference site, not my own. I’ll add attribution when I find the details.
I was invited to this Symposium last month in Seoul, the 16 May talks were great, the hotel and heritage tour were very impressive, and I hope the conference proceedings will be published.
I was invited to present online my thoughts on paradata and metadata in digital heritage today, a free webinar run by the UNESCO chair of digital cultural heritage staring 2PM Central European Time. More details are here. Talks are 10-15 minutes each…
14:00-14:10 Harry Verwayen DG. Europeana Foundation. NL Opening remarks 14:10-14:20 Marinos Ioannides, et al UNESCO Chair on DCH at Cyprus University of Technology. CY Paradata, Metadata & Data for a digital #MemoryTwin 14:20-14:35 Isto Huvila Invited KEYNOTE Uppsala University. SE Datafication of archaeological archiving and the preservation of what? 14:35-14:50 Luisa Ammirati, et al UNOSAT/UNITAR. CH, UNESCO WHC, FR Paradata and metadata in an immersive digital heritage experience 14:50-15:05 Erik Champion University of South Australia. AU Usable, Useful, Reviewable and Reusable Metadata 15:05-15:20 Carla Schroer, et al Cultural Heritage Imaging (CHI). US Building Reliable and Reusable Complex Digital Representations: The Digital Lab Notebook 15:20-15:35 Daniel Pletinckx Visual Dimension bvba. BE 3D Heritage is Heritage, we should treat it as such 15.35-15:50 Tony Cassar, et al Heritage Malta. MT Challenges of 3D Digitisation of Cultural Heritage 15:50-16:05 Shuyi Yin, et al Columbia University. US Blockchain Technology for Enhanced Documentation and Management of Built Heritage in Historic Cities 16:20-16:35 Jean-Baptiste Barreau Archéologie des Amériques (ArchAm), CNRS. FR Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of an Egyptian Saqiya: A Computational Approach to Preserving Cultural Heritage and Water Management Systems 16:35-16:50 Antoine Isaac, et al Europeana Foundation. NL Making the Europeana Data Model a better fit for documentation of 3D objects 16:50-17:05 Raffaella Brumana, et al Politecnico di Milano. IT HBIM quality information model to manage surveying, stratigraphic units and transformations into paradata. The mausoleum of Cecilia Metella and the Castrum Caetani 17:05-17:30 Discussion Session & Closing Remarks
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…
Assassin’s Creed‹ in the Classroom History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark? HAS been published by De Gruyter, on 18 December. Thanks to my co-editor Dr Juan Hiriart, and our authors.
The eCHOing project is inviting you to a lunch lecture, join us for an exciting event that explores the fascinating world of visitor experiences in the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums). Photo: gunnerus.no NTNU UB
TUESDAY17 OCTOBER Hands-on Game Design Workshop, TRONDHEIM NORWAY, 09:30-14:30
Join us for an exciting event that explores the fascinating world of visitor experiences in the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums).
Whether you’re a student curator, librarian, archivist, or museum enthusiast, this event is a must-attend to stay ahead in the ever-evolving GLAM landscape.
In this half-day workshop Erik Champion will help small groups of 4 brainstorm (“ideate”) ideas to create engaging games using a simplified working definition of computer games, and with the help of physical items. Although these game ideas could eventually become digital games, escape rooms, augmented or mixed reality projects, this introductory workshop will concentrate on creating and testing physical (analogue) demos and simple prototypes. Although Erik’s focus has been on history and heritage games, this workshop will be open to other types of games, but particularly on those where players can learn beyond the game, and where the game is a series of engaging challenges. You may bring your own idea for a game, or develop a game idea on the day in a group. No programming necessary.
Work in interdisciplinary groups with real life problems
Be an agent of change as your ideas will help professionals reach a wider audience for their cultural institutions!
Learn the fundamentals of serious games and why so many fail.
Discover how paper prototyping in groups can help you quickly create engaging game ideas.
Short bio for NTNU workshop
Erik Champion tutors game jam projects in South Australia at UniSA, and has hosted game design workshops in Australia, Italy, Poland, the United States, Qatar, and Finland, and co-hosted remotely a game design workshop with school children in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) with Dr Juan Hiriart. He is currently working on research projects with Tencent Games and Ubisoft. He wrote Playing With The Past: Into The Future (Springer 2022), and edited the open access book Virtual Heritage: A Guide (Routledge, 2021) and has written books on the intersection between video games and cultural heritage. He has honorary appointments at Curtin, UWA, and ANU and was recently a visiting professor at the University of Jyvāskylā, Finland, a partner of the Centre of Excellence in Game Studies (https://coe-gamecult.org/).
Skills required: none.
The eCHOing project is an EU-funded programme that aims to foster collaboration through open innovation between universities and 29 cultural institutions in five European countries. Don’t miss out on this unique opportunity to gain valuable insights from our invited gaming guru and writer of the book PLAYING WITH THE PAST.
WEDNESDAY18 October MediaCity, Salford University, MANCHESTER, ENGLAND, UK, 15:00-19.00
This talk will examine how key challenges in digital heritage involving 3D models could be brought to life and re-opened to interpretation by game design, and how game-like interaction could also help increase the richness and immersive qualities of XR (extended reality) and virtual tourism. Can 3D models, the scholarly information surrounding them, and the involvement of the public be brought closer together? And can we harness the speed and complexity of new technologies to ensure both the data and our understanding of that data can be recorded, interpreted, and shared more fairly, openly, and democratically?
Reflective Experiences with Immersive Heritage (Difficult Digital Heritage)
Despite the growth and spread of digital humanities visualisation projects, parallel and accessible examples in immersive virtual heritage are harder to find. Over the last three decades, immersive technologies (especially as “new” media) have embraced digital heritage to create spectacular experiences, but existing and durable examples of virtual heritage (virtual reality applied to cultural heritage) are relatively rare, while examples of difficult heritage far rarer. In this talk I will summarize relevant dilemmas in presence research, and recent developments in virtual heritage, reflect on some difficult lessons learnt, and offer some recommendations as to how we could address the depiction or evocation of difficult pasts in the near future.
BIO
Erik Champion is an Enterprise Fellow at UniSA, Emeritus Professor at Curtin University, Honorary Research Fellow at UWA, and Honorary Research Professor at ANU. He has published books and papers on serious games and game mods, virtual heritage, virtual world phenomenology, digital humanities infrastructures, and architectural history.
Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space
will be released tomorrow by MIT Press.
Dr Juan Hiriart and I have a chapter in it:
Workshopping Board Games for Space Place and Culture.
Full reference:
E. Champion and J. Hiriart. Workshopping Board Games for Space Place and Culture. In: Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space, edited by C. Randl and D. M. Lasansky. MIT Press 2023. ISBN: 9780262047838.
This research project investigates the potential of 360-panorama tours to improve the situated and contextual interpretation, virtual visitation, and spatial understanding of recorded or simulated built heritage sites. Our chosen case study was the Subiaco Hotel, a significant heritage building designed by Summerhayes Architecture, which we documented using 360-degree photographs and linked with other media to create an interactive 360-panorama tour. Today, 360-degree panorama tours such as Google Street View enable the virtual exploration of heritage sites and historic buildings. They demonstrate limited interaction and immersion across a range of platforms and devices, without the requirement of expensive virtual reality headsets, but typically do not integrate other media to leverage spatially richer ways to communicate the historical developments of architectural interiors and exteriors. The primary goals of this study were to establish a comprehensive step-by-step workflow for creating an interactive tour of a significant heritage site, demonstrate how other media such as text, videos, and 3D models can be linked, gather feedback from cultural heritage professionals, and offer future research directions and development guidelines. Apart from detailing an optimized workflow for developing interactive 360-degree virtual tours for heritage buildings, we also offer guidelines for optimal panoramic tour creation and implementation.
CITE: Rahaman, H.; Champion, E.; McMeekin, D. Outside Inn: Exploring the Heritage of a Historic Hotel through 360-Panoramas. Heritage2023, 6, 4380-4410. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage6050232
Champion, E., & Hiriart, J. (Eds.). (2023: accepted). Assassin’s Creed in the Classroom: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark? De Gruyter: Video games and the Humanities series.
It looks like the “Assassin’s Creed in the Classroom: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark?” edited book is close to the contract stage, and hopefully will be published by the end of the year…what sort of cover image do you suggest? For De Gruyter’s “Video Games and the Humanities” series (must suit their theme colour):
Exploring Historical Australian Expeditions with Time-Layered Cultural Maps
The Australian Time Layered Cultural Map platform was created to help digital humanities scholars investigate how online geospatial tools could provide exemplars to their humanities colleagues on how historical collections and cultural data could be extended and re-examined with geospatial tools. The project discussed here investigated how Recogito/TMT could effectively extract spatial and temporal data from pure text-based historical information and generate time-layered interactive maps of that spatio-temporal data using accessible and user-friendly software. The target audience was humanities scholars relatively new to geospatial technologies and relevant programming systems. The interactive maps were created with two free, open-source web applications and one commercial GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping application. The relative pros and cons of each application are discussed. This paper also investigates simple workflows for extracting spatiotemporal data into RDF (Resource Description Framework) format to be used as Linked Open Data.
Since the turn of this century (and even earlier), a plethora of projects have arisen to promise us bold new interactive adventures and immersive travel into the past with digital environments (using mixed, virtual or augmented reality, as well as computer games). In Playing with the Past: Into the Future Erik Champion surveys past attempts to communicate history and heritage through virtual environments and suggests new technology and creative ideas for more engaging and educational games and virtual learning environments.
This second edition builds on and updates the first edition with new game discussions, surveys, design frameworks, and theories on how cultural heritage could be experienced in digital worlds, via museums, mobile phones, or the Metaverse. Recent games and learning environments are reviewed, with provocative discussion of new and emerging promises and challenges.
“Over the years, the CIPA Symposium has been an important international crossroad for a wide community of researchers, professionals, and site managers interested in documenting, understanding, and preserving cultural heritage. CIPA was jointly founded in 1968 by ICOMOS (International Council of Monuments and Sites) and ISPRS (International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing) to facilitate the transfer of technology from the measurement sciences into the heritage documentation and recording disciplines. Since then, the biennial symposia have enabled an ever-growing community to meet, debate, network, and get up-to-date. After the very sad and long period that forced us to stay separated, we will meet again in person during CIPA2023 in Florence, from 25-30 June 2023.”
Authors of selected papers will have the opportunity to present their work during the Symposium as long or short presentations.
Proceedings will collect all the papers that have passed a peer-review process in the ISPRS Archives and Annals.
Selected contributors will be invited to submit an extended version of their papers to Special Issues of Journals linked to the Conference (e.g. Applied Geomatics, Ananke, Sensors, Virtual Archaeology Review – list to be updated).
Champion, E., & Hiriart, J. (2023: In press). Workshopping Board Games for Space Place and Culture. In C. Randl & D. M. Lasansky (Eds.), Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space. MIT Press. 08/2023.
Champion, E. M. (2023: In press). Digital Heritage Ethics. In A. Pantazatos, T. Ireland, J. Schofield, & R. Zhang (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Ethics. Routledge.
Champion, E., & Emery, S. (2023: Pending). Gamification of Cultural Heritage as a resource for the GLAM sector. In J. Nichols & B. Mehra (Eds.), Data Curation and Information Systems Design from Australasia: Implications for Cataloguing of Indigenous Knowledge in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. Routledge.
Champion, E. (2022: In press). Not Quite Virtual: Techné between Text and World. In B. Mauer & A. Salter (Eds.), Reimagining the Humanities. Parlor Press.
Conference paper
Champion, E., & McCallum, S. (2022, 20-23 November 2022). Game Design Prototyping Workshop: Brainstorming and Designing Collaborative and Creative Game Prototypes with Immersive SurfacesACM ISS 2022, Wellington, New Zealand. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3532104.3571472
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