Tag Archives: Cultural Presence

Cultural Presence Session proposed for CAA2022 Oxford

Academic, Announcements, archaeology, Conference, Digital Humanities, Symposium, ,

Associate Professor Elaine Sullivan will propose a session on cultural presence (based on my writing in Critical Gaming) but also on wider issues of virtual heritage, for CAA2022, Oxford, 8-11 August (physically and virtually). It was approved for CAA2020 Oxford but the conference was postponed due to COVID, and she will need to reapply. However, if you are interested please contact her via her University of California-Santa Cruz Faculty page.

Details of her session S26 (specific details may be changed for 2022) are at https://2020.caaconference.org/sessions/ (N.B. I updated my definition of Cultural Presence in the journal article Culturally Significant Presence in Single-player Computer Games (JOCCH 2020).

Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (XR) technologies are increasingly incorporated into university classrooms and public education in the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums). The potential to use these technologies to engage students and the public with archaeological knowledge (such as site reconstructions, artefacts, or re-imagining the activities of past peoples) is exciting, but
these forms of representation, including the use of individual headsets, tablets, and personal mobile phones, come with particular challenges.

In his book Critical Gaming (2015), (free PDF) Erik Champion argued that virtual realities should express ‘cultural presence,’ the meaning and significance of a time, place, or object to people of the past.

Hyper-reality, photogrammetry, and ever-increasing levels of ‘accuracy’ in 3D models do not inherently convey aspects of cultural significance and meaning, and many VR/AR/XR experiences fall dramatically short of the goal of expressing the importance of past places and things to their original communities.

Emphasis on technological and (especially) hardware innovation often deflects attention from critically engaging with questions of meaning-making. This panel asks those creating or intensely using Archaeology VR/AR/XR to focus NOT on software, hardware, or the latest technical innovations, but on how we as archaeologists
can better design, create, or curate experiences that inspire and educate students and the public on the cultural importance of archaeological spaces, objects or themes.

What are successful techniques to aid a visitor to better understand the original context of an object now placed in a (often far off) museum or gallery? How can university instructors incorporate the (problematically individual) headset or mobile experiences into pedagogy to provide meaningful and active student learning? How can complex data be usefully layered or curated so that multiple types of museum visitors or classes could find it informative and emotionally resonant? How can we turn these increasingly popular technologies into serious spaces of cultural learning and curiosity, moving beyond the initial ‘wow’ factor?


Format
Instead of traditional 20 minute talks, we request that participants present 8-10 minutes in depth on one VR/AR/XR experience they have designed and/or utilized in a university or GLAM setting (not a general review of multiple types of work).

We ask participants to present and explain aspects of design and interaction and their intent in that experience; or, if the content was not designed by the presenter, how content was
incorporated, curated, or enhanced for the classroom or GLAM experience. Specifically, we ask presenters to think thoughtfully and critically about how we might collectively learn to use these technologies in more informed ways, including: What types of interactions with
students or the public have shown promise, and how might we build on those successes?

What practices have not worked, and how might we learn from our failures? What particular aspects of archaeological and cultural heritage knowledge are best emphasized in the VR/AR/XR experience? What is key to re-using content created by others, including content created by non-archaeologists?

Not actually published yet, but accepted

Academic, archaeology, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, game, heritage, Journal, publication, serious games, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, , , , ,

I’m very happy that my rather large article “Culturally Significant Presence
In Single-Player Computer Games” has been accepted for the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage. This is despite its 12,587 words covering 4 major games, and attempting to be more conceptual and provocative than normal in a traditional ACM IT-oriented journal..

Very good reviewers too, actually. They made me work hard. I think my abstract is a bit over JOCCH length so that may change but at moment it is:

Cultural presence is a term that researchers have used to explain and evaluate cultural learning in virtual heritage projects, but less frequently in video games. Given the increasing importance of video games to cultural heritage, this paper investigates explanations of cultural presence that could be communicated by games, especially concerning UNESCO and ICOMOS definitions of cultural significance. The aim is to determine if cultural presence can be communicated via video games and across a range of game genres.

Observations derived from game prototyping workshops for history and heritage were incorporated to help develop a teachable list of desirable game elements. To distinguish itself from the vagueness surrounding theories of cultural presence, a theory of culturally significant presence is proposed. Culturally significant presence requires three components: culturally significant artifacts and practices; an overarching framework of a singular, identifiable cultural viewpoint; and awareness by the participant of both the culturally significant and the overarching cultural framework and perspective (which gives cultural heritage sites, artifacts and practices their cultural significance and relational value).

As awareness of cultural presence requires time to reflect upon, single-player games were chosen that were not completely dependent on time-based challenges. Another criterion was cultural heritage content, the games must simulate aspects of cultural heritage and history, communicate a specific cultural framework, or explore and reconstruct a past culture. Four games were chosen that simulate a culture, explain archaeological methods, portray indigenous intangible heritage, or explain historical-based ecosystems of the past based on educational guidelines. The games are Assassin’s Creed: Origins (and its Discovery Tour); Heaven’s Vault; Never Alone; and a Ph.D. game project: Saxon. Their genres could be described as first-person shooter/open world/virtual tour; dialogue-based puzzle game; 2D platform game; and turn-based strategy game.

The aim is not to evaluate the entire range of interactive and immersive virtual environments and games, but to examine the applicability and relevance of the new theory, and to ascertain whether the four games provided useful feedback on the concept and usefulness of culturally significant presence. A more clearly demarcated theory of cultural presence may not only help focus evaluation studies but also encourage game developers to modify or allow the modification of commercial games for classroom teaching of digital heritage. Game content, core gameplay, secondary gameplay, and game mechanics could be modified to engagingly compel players to consider cultural heritage values and perspectives that are not their own.

Cultural Presence (a dangerous answer to an unclear question)

archaeology, virtual heritage, ,

Yes I know I wrote about this topic (although not in my latest book in any great detail) but it the term isn’t my ultimatum to archaeology and heritage studies: use and measure cultural presence or else!

To start with, I said in my PhD thesis and in the related book Playing With The Past (pp12-14), that it was distinct from Social Presence:

“Cultural Presence versus Social Presence..The first problem is what elements of a cultural place are missing from virtual environments. Merely creating a reconstruction of a cultural site does not mean that one is creating a platform for understanding and transmitting locally specific cultural knowledge. We need to understand what distinguishes a cultural site from another site; we need to understand the features of place as a site of cultural learning.”

I also wrote:

“The intended audience that could most benefit from the theoretical part of this research are those who either communicate historical perceptions via digital media, or those who wish for more prescriptive (rather than descriptive) notions of ‘place’ and ‘cultural presence’. The case study of Palenque that I will mention may also interest those designers interested in improving engagement via interactive elements”

Chapters 2 and 3 then try to explain space versus place in a virtual heritage project and cultural presence as being distinct from social presence.

Now, 5-10 years later, I think I will have to retrace and bury some of the assertions and answer some of the questions that refuse to die because of this concept.

In a nutshell,

  • My term cultural presence was to attempt to wrestle away from social presence key terms and meanings that could be evaluated for historians and social scientists.
  • The term cultural presence was an umbrella concept (and my evaluations suggested it was most effective to be evaluated via a series of questions and tasks, there was no one evaluation method for it).
  • Cultural presence is of particular interest and use where we have clear ideas (and cultural traces and signs etc) of a culture that passed away. It is much more suitable for recent cultures with historic material and intangible heritage than it is for situations where we only have traces of settlement but without a rich cultural tapestry for interpretation. The Mayan temple-city of Palenque, Mexico has left us plenty of interesting if sometimes conflicting cultural clues, Neolithic cities, not so much.
  • In the last year (and even last week) I still meet archaeologists and curators who have not seen a need to distinguish between culture and society. I gave some arguments for why I do this in the article Defining Cultural Agents for Virtual Heritage Environments but I need to revisit this issue and deal with once and for all.

Cultural Presence

archaeology, digital heritage, heritage, virtual heritage

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!

Evaluating presence in cultural heritage projects

virtual heritage, , , ,

Dr Laia Tost and I have had our Presence 2007 paper accepted for the International Journal of Heritage Studies. The paper is entitled “Evaluating Presence in Cultural Heritage Projects” and we discuss the importance of Cultural Presence as a goal and in terms of how it can or even should relate to virtual heritage projects (we discuss three we were associated with). The paper has gone through various reviews and reincarnations since the conference paper for Presence 2007.

The abstract is below:

This paper surveys current notions of Social and Cultural presence as they may help the evaluation of cultural heritage projects. We argue that cultural heritage requires specialized evaluation, as key issues both connect and separate the aims of Presence researchers and cultural heritage experts. To support this argument, three case studies of virtual heritage evaluations are summarized, and recommendations made as to how experimental design and evaluation may be improved for future projects.