The e-Culture symposium held for the second time in Salzburg represents the annual gathering of leading thinkers brought
together by the e-Culture Group of Salzburg Research1, to undertake specific themes in the area of research and technology development for the cultural heritage application field. The symposium took place at the foothills of Salzburg’s Mönchsberg.
Key notes speeches, presentations and workshops looked at how cultural institutions can better plan, manage and finance digitisation projects, and add value to their communities by creating
digital cultural experiences.
Visions of e-Culture
But what will be the face of digital culture in the future? Key note speaker Marc Federman, the Chief Strategist of the McLuhan
Programme in Culture and Technology of the University of Toronto2, provided the audience a fascinating and philosophical insight into his vision for the future of cultural experiences, a vision that he describes as the “ephemeral artefact”.
In Federman’s vision, we are not merely spectators, or consumers of cultural artefacts, we are actually the creators. Today’s networked media, he argues, allows each one of us to actively participate in the creation of cultural ‘expressions’ which we perceive simultaneously and with immediate ‘proximity’.
Gail Durbin, the head of the Victoria and Albert’s On-Line Museum3, provided examples of how partly this vision is already taking place. She believes that true added value can only be created if some power is handed to the visitor. The Victoria and Albert Museum has explored a variety of ways on how to place the user in the centre of engaging cultural experiences and ways to make the visitor the actual creator of cultural artefacts. One example is the project, ‘A Modern Icon’4 where the museum had acquired the chair of the famous Christine Keeler photograph, which became a classic sixties icon. Using a replica of this chair as a motif, people were invited to present themselves for a portrait. The resulting photographs are now part of the museum’s collection.
Having learned about the move from digitisation to cultural experiences, symposium moderator John Pereira, Salzburg Research’s manager of the DigiCULT project5, opened a new session that presented promising new technologies, interfaces and actual applications to enable these experiences.
New technologies for e-Culture experiences
The Semantic Web is one of these promising technologies, according to Ziva Ben-Porat from Tel Aviv University6 and Wernher
Behrendt from Salzburg Research. They proposed a roadmap
towards semantically enabled e-Learning spaces for cultural heritage content. Drawing on the results of the CULTOS project7, their presentation focused on the need to build productivity tools for authoring in the Semantic Web environment, and the infrastructure for sharing such standardised, ontology-based content.
To further the development towards semantic-based systems, Alexander Wahler from NIWA Web Solutions8 highlighted the importance of providing innovative entry points to cultural
content, such as, location based services that support nomadic
e-Culture users. Bernhard Angerer from the Vienna based non-profit organisation Polygon presented thecrystalweb9, a virtual museum sponsored by the renowned Austrian company Swarovski.
The Salzburg Research e-Culture symposium provided the
audience a rich and fascinating view on the transition from digitisation to e-Culture experiences. It presented emerging technologies and showcased applications that are moving towards the e-Culture vision. All presentations will be made available for download from the symposium web site; http://eculture.salzburgresearch.at/
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