ABSTRACT
One of the major public health measures to manage and contain the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic was to engage in systematic contact tracing, which required gastronomy, community and sporting venues to keep patron registers. Stand-alone and web-based applications, developed by a range of private IT providers, soon replaced pen-and-paper lists. With the introduction of a uniform, state-wide, mandatory data collection system, these private applications became obsolete. Although only active for four months, these applications paved the way for the public acceptance of state-administered collection systems that allowed for an unprecedented, centralized tracking system of the movements of the entire population. This paper discusses the cultural significance of these applications as a game changer in the debate on civil liberties, and addresses the question of how the materiality, or lack thereof, of this digital heritage affects the management of ephemeral smartphone applications, and its preservation for future generations. © 2023 by the author.
ABSTRACT
In research and policies, the identification of trends as well as emerging topics and topics in decline is an important source of information for both academic and innovation management. Since at present policy analysis mostly employs qualitative research methods, the following article presents and assesses different approaches – trend analysis based on questionnaires, quantitative bibliometric surveys, the use of computer-linguistic approaches and machine learning and qualitative investigations. Against this backdrop, this article examines digital applications in cultural heritage and, in particular, built heritage via various investigative frameworks to identify topics of relevance and trendlines, mainly for European Union (EU)-based research and policies. Furthermore, this article exemplifies and assesses the specific opportunities and limitations of the different methodical approaches against the backdrop of data-driven vs. data-guided analytical frameworks. As its major findings, our study shows that both research and policies related to digital applications for cultural heritage are mainly driven by the availability of new technologies. Since policies focus on meta-topics such as digitisation, openness or automation, the research descriptors are more granular. In general, data-driven approaches are promising for identifying topics and trendlines and even predicting the development of near future trends. Conversely, qualitative approaches are able to answer "why” questions with regard to whether topics are emerging due to disruptive innovations or due to new terminologies or whether topics are becoming obsolete because they are common knowledge, as is the case for the term "internet”.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has undeniably affected museums' online content yet attempts to identify or understand sector trends have been hampered by a lack of data. This paper uses a representative sample of 315 U.K. museums to create a much-needed benchmark against which museum practitioners can evaluate and contextualise prior studies and their own experiences. Gathering data from museum websites and five social media platforms, this paper is one of the largest studies of its kind in the European museum sector and the first of such scale in the U.K. Beginning with an overview of social media adoption, the paper then investigates museums' use of YouTube to identify sector trends. Crucially, this paper demonstrates a scalable methodology that enables a broader analysis of European and North American museums using TripAdvisor. This method has applications beyond the heritage sector and is pertinent to the study of any public facing attraction. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ABSTRACT
As a result of the post-pandemic situation, enhancing digital heritage services has become one of the key issues for the recovery of tourism. Disruptive innovation in human–computer interaction technology has brought new opportunities for digitalization and intelligent transformation in the contemporary cultural tourism industry. Existing research on the adoption behavior of digital heritage services primarily focuses on users' assessments of behavior results. There is a considerable gap in research about the interaction and value co-creation between users and digital intelligence services and users' cognitive construction logic of digital heritage services. Following reciprocal determinism, we propose a conceptual model to deconstruct the detailed transmission path of interactive affordance and sensory affordance to digital heritage adoption. In Study 1, a lab experiment in an AI-assisted smart screen digital heritage service context revealed that interactive affordance and user adoption of digital heritage services were partially mediated by psychological distance. Findings from a between-subject online experiment in Study 2 confirmed that embodied cognition and psychological distance play a parallel intermediary role in the impact of sensory affordance on adoption. In Study 3, a lab experiment in a VR-based digital museum context further verified that information overload moderates the influence of embodied cognition on psychological distance. This research reveals the deep-bounded, rational decision-making logic of digital heritage service adoption and provides significant practical enlightenment for the optimization of the affordance experience.
ABSTRACT
This paper takes a landscape view of archives practice now operating in a sea of human digital behavior, interacting with computational systems embedded in real and virtual life, part of our complex global digital ecosystem driving cultural and social change. We envision a new computational archives framework, designed to be user-centric, in ways that integrate traditional archival practice into an overarching computational framework incorporating structured and unstructured data, computational tools, AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning), robotics, and automation intended to aid in management and public engagement with physical, digitized, and born-digital documents. Set in a networked environment of increasing computing power, this "more than human" system derives from the latest computing advances from NLP (natural language processing) and image recognition to artificial neural networks. We envision an archives system that is at once complex and integrated into a new inclusive and diverse cultural fabric. This paper covers general issues that have been accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, together with two institutional case studies.
ABSTRACT
With the COVID 19 pandemic forcing the majority of the world to stay indoors over the last year, demand for in home entertainment such as video games has grown immensely. While this has led to some incredibly positive outcomes for the gaming industry, namely profit and recognition, it has also uncovered some of the problems in the development and distribution of video games. In March and April of this year, the issue of game preservation made major headlines when Sony announced it would shut down the online store for its older PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable systems. This decision and the discourse it spawned inadvertently placed a spotlight on the problem of how companies can control the lifespan of digital media such as video games. As Taiwanese video games like Detention, Devotion, and Carto are finally pushing Taiwanese popular culture onto the world stage, it is of utmost importance to ensure we can preserve this kind of digital heritage for future generations to appreciate. Using case studies from research done while working with Taiwanese video games, this paper aims to explore the challenges that hinder the proper preservation of video games and other digital media. From this investigation, some of the major issues uncovered in preserving video games include digital rights management software, operating system fragmentation, firmware incompatibility, region locking, hardware obsolescence, and digital storefront availability. A final challenge unique to Taiwanese video game preservation, is related to politics, namely the influential power that Chinese netizens, companies, and the CCP itself have over Taiwanese game sales and distribution. Each of these issues affects preservation in a different way and different approaches are needed to find viable solutions. While it would be ideal that game developers and publishers would hold the biggest responsibility for solving these problems, many solutions end up coming from fan communities even though they have far fewer tools at their disposal. Throughout this paper many problems and solutions are discussed on a consumer-impacting level, while also highlighting how the technological friction caused by the entire process can alter one's experience of the game they want to play. This friction, which on the surface may merely seem inconvenient today, can actually have major ramifications for future researchers. By showcasing the entire process involved in getting several different Taiwanese video games running on modern devices, this paper demonstrates that not only are many of the problems plaguing digital media preservation avoidable, but also that these problems could be responsible for altering future players' access to the works. As the world continues to become more and more online and our digital media landscape continues to grow, it is of the utmost importance that more work needs to be done to ensure that the process for future digital media preservation be streamlined as soon as possible.
ABSTRACT
In the present article, we analyse the digital activity and behaviour of the European National Libraries and of their users on the most important social media, namely Facebook and Instagram, in a time window that covers the period before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. This activity was carried out within the framework of the Horizon 2020 European inDICEs project1 which aims to support libraries, museums and archives in developing digital strategies to experiment with engagement strategies driven by digital collections. The project is developing an Open Observatory, where GLAM professionals as well as creative industries, policy makers and researchers can find and analyse data on digital heritage accessibility and reuse, and explore case studies on novel value chains. In the article we present a specific use case based on National Libraries, which in the cultural heritage sector are among the most active institutions in digital services policies. Our aim is to understand how the Covid 19 pandemic has impacted the sector. After monitoring the National Libraries quantitative and qualitative level of digital activity in correlation with the forced wave of digitization led by the social-distancing policies, we have given a synthetic overview of the main findings, which regard, on one hand, a significant increase in online activities and followers of the social media pages in correspondence to the lockdown periods;on the other hand, we have observed passive participation of their users, with whom the institutions have shown they are unable to establish an active relationship, missing the chance to exploit the possibilities that the digital platforms can offer in terms of co-creation processes, digital community empowerment, development of new soft skills and shared knowledge resources. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has brought changes to most of the spheres of human lives. Tourism industry, one of these spheres, suffered in many cases. In order to stabilize the situation modern technologies, especially infocommunication technologies (ICT), are being used to overcome different kinds of problems that appeared due to pandemic. In this paper we consider current state of tourism industry, forecasts for its recovery and we overview modern technologies that are being used on particular examples in Montenegro and worldwide that help to overcome new problems caused by COVID-19, we also characterize the dependency between digitalization in tourism and state of economics that will help to predict evolution of modern technologies usage in tourism. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Digital 3D modelling and visualization technologies have been widely applied to support research in the humanities since the 1980s. Since technological backgrounds, project opportunities, and methodological considerations for application are widely discussed in the literature, one of the next tasks is to validate these techniques within a wider scientific community and establish them in the culture of academic disciplines. This article resulted from a postdoctoral thesis and is intended to provide a comprehensive overview on the use of digital 3D technologies in the humanities with regards to (1) scenarios, user communities, and epistemic challenges;(2) technologies, UX design, and workflows;and (3) framework conditions as legislation, infrastructures, and teaching programs. Although the results are of relevance for 3D modelling in all humanities disciplines, the focus of our studies is on modelling of past architectural and cultural landscape objects via interpretative 3D reconstruction methods.