The Routledge International Handbook Of New Digital Practices In Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums And Heritage Sites 1138581291, 9781138581296, 0429015291, 9780429015298

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The Routledge International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage Sites

The Routledge International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage Sites presents a fascinating picture of the ways in which today’s cultural institutions are undergoing a transformation through innovative applications of digital technology. With a strong focus on digital design practice, the volume captures the vital discourse between curators, exhibition designers, historians, heritage practitioners, technologists and interaction designers from around the world. Contributors interrogate how their projects are extending the traditional reach and engagement of institutions through digital designs that reconfigure the interplay between collections, public knowledge and civic society. Bringing together the experiences of some of today’s most innovative cultural institutions and thinkers, the Handbook provides refreshingly new ideas and directions for the exciting digital challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. As such, it should be essential reading for academics, students, designers and professionals interested in the production of culture in the post-digital age. Hannah Lewi is a Professor in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne. She has broad research interests in architecture history, heritage, conservation and new media. Wally Smith is an Associate Professor in Human-Computer Interaction in the Melbourne School of Engineering at the University of Melbourne. His research investigates the design and use of new digital technologies and their broader social foundations and implications. Recent projects are in the areas of health informatics, digital heritage and artificial intelligence. Dirk vom Lehn is Reader in Organisational Sociology at the King’s Business School, King’s College London, and member of the Work, Interaction and Technology Research Group (WIT). His research is primarily concerned with the ways in which people explore, respond to and make sense of exhibits and exhibitions. Steven Cooke is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Heritage and course director for the Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies Programme at Deakin University, Melbourne. He is a cultural and historical geographer with interests in heritage, memory and identity.

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The Routledge International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage Sites

Edited by Hannah Lewi, Wally Smith, Dirk vom Lehn and Steven Cooke

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Hannah Lewi, Wally Smith, Dirk vom Lehn and Steven Cooke; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Hannah Lewi, Wally Smith, Dirk vom Lehn and Steven Cooke to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-58129-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-50676-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

Contents

List of contributors

ix

Introduction Hannah Lewi, Wally Smith, Steven Cooke and Dirk vom Lehn

1

Framing interviews

13

1

Interview with Seb Chan Seb Chan, Hannah Lewi and Wally Smith

15

2

Interview with Dave Patten David Patten, Dirk vom Lehn and Wally Smith

23

3

Interview with Rory Hyde Rory Hyde, Dirk vom Lehn and Wally Smith

35

4

Interview with Keir Winesmith Keir Winesmith, Hannah Lewi and Wally Smith

42

PART I

The emerging global digital GLAM sector 5

6

53

Theorising heritage collection digitisations in global computational infrastructures Fiona R. Cameron

55

The networked image: the flight of cultural authority and the multiple times and spaces of the art museum Andrew Dewdney

68

7

The distributed museum is already here: it’s just not very evenly distributed Ed Rodley

81

8

Speculative collections and the emancipatory library Bethany Nowviskie

92

v

Contents

9 Digital heritage profile in China’s museums: an evaluation of digital technology adoption in cultural heritage institutions Andrew White and Eugene Ch’ng 10 Hacking heritage: understanding the limits of online access Tim Sherratt 11 From planned oblivion to digital exposition: the digital museum of Afro-Brazilian heritage Livio Sansone 12 Shared digital experiences supporting collaborative meaning-making at heritage sites Sara Perry, Maria Roussou, Sophia S. Mirashrafi, Akrivi Katifori and Sierra McKinney

103 116

131

143

PART II

Animating the archive

157

13 Neither a beginning nor an end: applying an ethics of care to digital archival collections Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor

159

14 Digital archives in Africa and the Endangered Archives Programme Graeme Counsel

169

15 The Alan Vaughan-Richards archive: recovering tropical modernism in Lagos Ola Uduku

178

16 Museum crowdsourcing—detecting the limits: eMunch.no and the digitisation of letters addressed to Edvard Munch Joanna Iranowska

188

17 Digital and hybrid archives: a case study of the William J. Mitchell collection Thomas Kvan, Peter Neish and Naomi Mullumby

199

18 Preserving Chinese shadow puppetry culture through digitisation Tin-Kai Chen 19 Be engaged: facilitating creative re-use at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision Gregory Markus, Maarten Brinkerink and Brigitte Jansen 20 Cultural antinomies, creative complicities: Agan Harahap’s digital hoaxes Alexandra Moschovi and Alexander Supartono

vi

210

219 227

Contents

PART III

Designing engaged experience

241

21 On virtual auras: the cultural heritage object in the age of 3D digital reproduction John Hindmarch, Melissa Terras and Stuart Robson

243

22 Configuring slow technology through social and embodied interaction: making time for reflection in augmented reality museum experiences with young visitors Areti Galani and Rachel Clarke

257

23 Exhibition design and professional theories: the development of an astronomy exhibition Dirk vom Lehn, Kate Sang, Richard Glassborow and Louise King

270

24 Meeting the challenge of the immoveable: experiencing Mogao Grottoes Cave 45 with immersive technology Jeffrey Levin, Robert Checchi, Lori Wong, Garson Yu and Edwin Baker

283

25 Immersive engagement: designing and testing a virtual Indian Residential School exhibition Adam Muller

296

26 Hemispheres: transdisciplinary architectures and museum–university collaboration Sarah Kenderdine

305

27 Human-centred design in digital media Indigo Hanlee

319

28 Unlocking the glass case Peter Higgins

326

29 The law of feeling: experiments in a Yolngu museology Paul Gurrumuruwuy and Jennifer Deger

335

30 Henry VR: designing affect-oriented virtual reality exhibitions for art museums Andrew Yip, Paula Dredge, Anne Gerard-Austin and Simon Ives

345

31 Websites as a publishing platform Tim Jones and David Simpson

353

32 From shelf to web: first reflections on the O’Donnell marginalia project Julia S. Kuehns

358

33 Interpreting the future Tony Holzner

367

vii

Contents

PART IV

Locating in place

373

34 What could have Bean?: a digital construction of Charles Bean’s Australian War Memorial Anthea Gunn

375

35 Succession: a generative approach to digital collections Mitchell Whitelaw

389

36 Rephotography and the situating of then-and-now Hannah Lewi and Andrew Murray

397

37 Hospicio Cabañas: seeing World Heritage through Google’s eyes Cristina Garduño Freeman

410

38 The experience of using digital walking tours to explore urban histories Wally Smith, Dirk vom Lehn, Hannah Lewi, Dora Constantinidis and Katie Best

424

39 Traces—Olion: creating a bilingual ‘subtlemob’ for National Museum Wales Sara Huws, Alison John and Jenny Kidd

441

40 Investigating ‘ordinary’ landscapes: using visual research methods to understand heritage digital technologies and sense of place Steven Cooke and Dora Constantinidis

450

41 Massive digital community archives in Colombia: an international partnership towards peace Diego Merizalde and Jon Voss

463

42 Mapping an archive of emotions: place, memory and the affective histories of Perth’s riverscape Alicia Marchant

471

Afterword – Andrea Witcomb

484

Index

488

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Contributors

is an award-winning filmmaker, screenwriter and graphic designer. A New Yorker by birth, he is an Angeleno by circumstance and a Parisian in spirit. Edwin is an art director at yU+co in Hollywood, where he works on creating title sequences for film and television, as well as multimedia projects and experiential design.

Edwin Baker

Katie Best is a lecturer, consultant and trainer in the fields of management and leadership.

She works with a number of universities, including the London School of Economics. Her research and professional interests include the cultural and creative industries, workplace interaction, leadership and strategy. Her work has appeared in Organization Studies, Human Relations, Annals of Tourism Research and a number of edited books. Maarten Brinkerink is Public Participation and Innovative Access Expert in the Knowledge and Innovation Department at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. He coordinates the institute’s input in (inter)national research projects. He contributes to the strategic policy of Sound and Vision and strengthens the broader heritage sector through initiatives such as Open Cultuur Data and the Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed. His expertise includes copyright, crowdsourcing and the reuse of digital heritage. He gained extensive experience through the mass digitization project Images for the Future and other international collaborative research projects. Fiona R. Cameron is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, visiting Professor at the Department for Studies of Social Change and Culture, Linkoping University and alumni Research Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center and Deutsches Museum joint research initiative for the environmental humanities. Before entering academia, Fiona was a curator and museum director. She has been the recipient of seven Australian Research Council grants and international grants in Germany, Sweden, New Zealand, Norway, Brazil and Canada. Fiona researches on museums and their agencies in contemporary societies notably climate change. She has played a leading role in the development of the subfield of digital cultural heritage studies prompting reform in theory and practice to embrace digital data. Cameron has published 80 articles and books on these topics with leading publishers Duke University Press, MIT Press and Routledge. Michelle Caswell is Associate Professor of Archival Studies in the Department of Informa-

tion Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and the co-founder of the South Asian American Digital Archive; an online repository that documents and provides access to the diverse stories of South Asian Americans. She is the author of Archiving the ix

Contributors

Unspeakable: Silence, Agency, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014) and more than two dozen peer-reviewed articles on archives and social justice. Seb Chan is currently the Chief Experience Officer at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne, and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Media and Communications, in College of Design and Social Context at RMIT, Melbourne. He has been a leader in digital curation for several years, winning many awards for his work and holding several key roles in the GLAM sector, including Director of Digital & Emerging Media at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, Head of Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Robert Checchi is the Director of Museum and Special Projects at yU+co, specialising in digital experiences for education and non-profit institutions. Before joining yU+c,o, Robert was an award-winning senior designer at the J. Paul Getty Museum, where he led the design of such renowned exhibitions as Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Sculpture: Invention and Invention, Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road and Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas. Tin-Kai Chen is an Associate Professor at Shu-Te University. He has been working in the

field of Chinese Puppetry Culture and Social Computing for several years. He is interested in the theory and principles of designing and implementing new digital technologies to help regional and local economic development and to support cultural heritage in ways that benefit the community. His most recent projects are in the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI) and digital humanities, digital archives, Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC), virtual reality (VR) and creative computing between people and computers. Eugene Ch’ng is a Professor and founder and Director of the NVIDIA Joint-Lab on Mixed Reality at the University of Nottingham’s China campus, and co-editor-in-chief for MIT Press’s Presence journal. He graduated with a PhD from the Electronics, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Birmingham in 2007. He also serves on numerous computational sciences and digital heritage conference committees. He is partner and co-investigator on numerous grants related to cultural heritage supported by The Leverhulme Trust, the ERC, AHRC, Zhejiang Science and Technology, and the recently awarded Silk Road heritage database crowdsourcing project. Marika Cifor is Assistant Professor of Information Science in the School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at Indiana University, Bloomington. She earned her doctorate in Information Studies as well as graduate certificates in Gender Studies and the Digital Humanities from UCLA. Her research on archives, affect, LGBTQ studies and digital cultures has been published in Archival Science, Archivaria, Archives and Records, Australian Feminist Studies, InterActions, Library Trends, The Public Historian, The American Archivist and Transgender Studies Quarterly. Rachel Clarke is a Research Fellow in the School of Design and Centre for International

Development at Northumbria University. She is an interdisciplinary design researcher focusing on socially engaged approaches to understanding the role of technology for sharing cultural content across diverse constituents, as applied to heritage contexts, third-sector organisations, social innovation and smart cities. Previously as a researcher at Open Lab, x

Contributors

Newcastle University on the Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy (SiDE) and MyPlace projects, she explored the role of material ‘her’ stories for developing digital kitmaking infrastructures for migrant women’s heritage volunteering in North East England. Dora Constantinidis completed a PhD at the University of Athens in Geographical Information Systems for Archaeological and Cultural Heritage Research. She was a multi-awardwinning teacher and lecturer in the field of IT at the University of Melbourne, Monash University and the RMIT University. Dora was working as a Research Fellow on a project investigating citizen heritage at the University of Melbourne when sadly she passed away in early 2018. Steven Cooke is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Course Director for the Cultural

Heritage and Museum Studies Programme at Deakin University, Melbourne. He is a cultural and historical geographer with interests in heritage, memory and identity, particularly the memorial landscapes of war and genocide and urban development. Between 2002 and 2011, he worked in the heritage sector including the Melbourne Maritime Museum and the Shrine of Remembrance. He is a member of Australia ICOMOS’s National Scientific Committee on Fortifications and Military History, and an honorary research fellow in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Winchester. Graeme Counsel is a Lecturer in Ethnomusicology and Cultural Studies at the University of

Melbourne. His research interests include West African music and the music of transatlantic cultures, the preservation of intangible cultural heritage, and cultural policy. His digital archive projects in Africa were recognised by the Palme Académique en Or, the Republic of Guinea’s highest academic honour, which he received from the Ministère de la Culture, Arts et Loisirs. Jennifer Deger is one of the co-founders of Miyarrka Media, an arts collective based in the

Yolngu community of Gapuwiyak in Australia’s Northern Territory. She works as Research Leader at The Cairns Institute and College of Arts, Society and Education, James Cook University. Her ongoing collaboration with Paul Gurrumuruwuy has been supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship Grant. Andrew Dewdney is a Professor at London South Bank University whose current research focuses upon intersections of art, media and technology. He was the principal investigator of a major national Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project in collaboration with Tate Britain, entitled Tate Encounters: Britishness and Visual Cultures (2007–2010). In 2014 he collaborated with the Tate and the Royal College of Art looking at cultural value and the digital in the museum. He is an advisory board member for the peer-reviewed journals Photographies and Philosophy of Photography. He has written, presented and published widely within media and communications and museology. Paula Dredge is Head of Paintings Conservation at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She has published widely on the materials and techniques used by artists and scientific techniques used to analyse paintings. She undertook her PhD in conservation at the University of Melbourne on the subject of Sidney Nolan’s use of house paint and is the author of the forthcoming title, Sidney Nolan: The Artist’s Materials, to be published by the Getty Conservation Institute. xi

Contributors

Areti Galani is a Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture, Heritage, at Newcastle University, specialising in digital heritage. Dr Galani explores the potential of critical design approaches in heritage contexts through the design, development and evaluation of digital interactive applications and installations for museums and heritage sites. Dr Galani has published in both Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and heritage-related peer-reviewed journals and volumes. She co-edited the special issue on Evaluation of Digital Cultural Resources in the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (2019). She is the chief editor and author of the volume European Heritage, Dialogue and Digital Practices (Routledge, 2019). Cristina Garduño Freeman is an academic in the fields of heritage, architecture and digital

media. She received the International Visual Sociology Association Rieger Award for an Outstanding Doctoral Thesis in 2014 and published the book Participatory Culture and the Social Value of an Architectural Icon: Sydney Opera House (Routledge) in 2017. She has been a visiting scholar at both Columbia University, New York and at the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico where she developed collaborative research in the hispanophone discourse of heritage. She has published research widely in leading international heritage journals. Prior to entering academia she practiced as a multidisciplinary designer. Anne Gerard-Austin is Assistant Curator at the Department of European Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She is the curator of the exhibition Henry VR and was assistant curator of Intensely Dutch at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Gerard-Austin holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Sydney and a Master of Art History from the École du Louvre. She publishes on both European and Australian art histories, with a focus on Australian expatriate artists in France. Richard Glassborow is a museum interpretation and design consultant. He has worked directly with client teams, with exhibition design teams, and with specialist manufacturing companies, technology specialists and artists. He has worked on many prestigious and awardwinning projects including front-end analytical and strategic thinking, content and concept development, scheme and detailed design, and production. His particular speciality is in interactive and hands-on interpretation and exhibits. Richard is an Honorary Lecturer in Museum and Site Interpretation at University College London (UCL). Anthea Gunn is Senior Curator of Art at the Australian War Memorial. She completed a PhD in art history on Imitation Realism and Australian Art in 2010 at the Australian National University. She has worked as a social history curator at the National Museum of Australia (2008–2013) and has published in the Journal of Australian Studies, the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Museum and Eyeline among others. She has worked on exhibitions including the Landmarks gallery and Glorious Days: Australia 1913 at the NMA and was lead curator of the online exhibition Art of Nation. Paul Gurrumuruwuy is one of the co-founders of Miyarrka Media, an arts collective based

in the Yolngu community of Gapuwiyak in Australia’s Northern Territory. Gurrumuruwuy currently works as a senior ranger and a Director of Laynhapuy Homelands Aboriginal Corporation. His ongoing collaboration with Jennifer Deger has been supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship Grant.

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Indigo Hanlee is Creative Director at Lightwell, a media design studio based in Sydney. She

holds a Bachelor in Design and Bachelor in International Studies from the University of Technology Sydney, and a Masters in Design Futures from RMIT, Melbourne. Hanlee has developed work for museums and cultural institutions across Australia, including the Australian Museum, Shrine of Remembrance, Anzac Memorial Hyde Park, City of Sydney, Central Land Council and the State Library of NSW. With a focus on concept development, human-centred design and new technologies, her projects explore how digital media can be used to create meaningful visitor experiences for public spaces. Peter Higgins trained at the Architectural Association School of Architecture and has worked as a designer for the BBC and in London’s West End theatres. In 1992, he formed Land Design Studio, which has built a reputation in integrating architecture, narrative design and communication media for museums, science centres, visitor attractions and commercial environments. He has worked with the Museum Studies Department at Leicester University, and at Central St Martins, where he is Visiting Professor and helped develop the Master of Narrative Environments. In 2009, he was awarded the Royal Designer for Industry title. John Hindmarch graduated from Cambridge University in 1995 with a degree in Philosophy and holds Master’s degrees from UCL in Electronic Publishing and Virtual Environments, Imaging and Visualisation. He completed his Engineering Doctorate, on 3D Digitisation in Cultural Heritage Institutions, at UCL in 2015. He has lectured on UCL’s Digital Humanities programme and is currently a research associate in the Department of Archaeology, Heritage Science and Art History at the Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg, Germany. Tony Holzner is Creative Director and co-founder of Art Processors where he specialises in the design of large-scale interactive technology projects for cultural sector organisations. He led the Museum of Old and New Art’s ground-breaking ‘The O’ project—the digital museum guide and location-based content delivery system designed to replace traditional artwork wall labels. He combines creative thinking with expertise in user-experience design and interactive technologies. Sara Huws is a technologist and facilitator based at Cardiff University Libraries in Wales.

She is co-founder of East End Women’s Museum, London’s first museum dedicated to the history of women and girls. Rory Hyde is a designer, curator and writer based in London. His work is focused on new forms of design practice for the public good and redefining the role of today’s designer. He is Curator of Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Design Advocate for the Mayor of London. He was co-curator (with Mariana Pestana) of The Future Starts Here exhibition, which was running at the time of his interview. Joanna Iranowska is a museologist, especially interested in how digital tools can keep museum collections up to date for the young generation. She has experience of working with digitisation of collections and conducting crowdsourcing projects. She holds a PhD from the University of Oslo, Norway (2019). Her doctoral research Multiplying Munch: New Digital Practices in the Munch Museum explored the digitisation of museum objects in art museums.

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Simon Ives is a Paintings Conservator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He gained a Master of Fine Art Conservation, specialising in easel paintings at the University of Northumbria in 1994. He has worked at the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He also has a Master’s Degree in painting and is completing a degree in fine art education. He has written articles on artists’ materials and techniques for a range of publications and is interested in innovative digital presentation of conservation analysis in the gallery. Brigitte Jansen is a project leader at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and

freelance graphic designer. Her work at Sound and Vision focuses on new presentation forms of digital heritage and creative reuse by artists. She believes in the importance of opening up collections so new generations can create and experiment with heritage. Alison John is producer at yello brick, a creative agency making immersive experiences through digital platforms and live events. In the past, yello brick has made an epic urban adventure game in the streets of Cardiff, a site-specific storytelling application for cycle routes in Wales and an online interactive event for new opera audiences. Alison is also coproducer of playARK Festival and was director of ARK LAB, a company that created projects for social good. She is recognised as one of a cohort of digital producers practicing in Wales by Watershed, National Theatre Wales and Arts Council of Wales. Tim Jones is the Librarian and Archivist at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū . He is also the joint editor of the Gallery website and has a particular interest in unifying the presentation of both the gallery’s art collection and legacy library resources online. His background is in public librarianship, with qualifications from the Universities of London and York. Akrivi Katifori is a Senior Researcher in the areas of user-centered design and evaluation with a focus on digital libraries, virtual museums and mobile digital storytelling for cultural heritage at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She holds a PhD degree in Computer Science (‘An intelligent system for managing historical archive documents’). Sarah Kenderdine is Professor of Digital Museology at the École polytechnique fédérale de

Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, where she has built the new laboratory Experimental Museology (eM+). eM+ explores the convergence of aesthetic practice, visual analytics and cultural data and is focused at the forefront of interactive and immersive experiences for galleries, libraries, archives and museums for which she has received a number of prestigious awards. Since 2017 she has also been Director and Lead Curator of EPFL’s new art/science initiative, ArtLab, located in a seminal Kengo Kumar building. Sarah sits on a number of advisory boards including the Royal Commission for Al Ula, Swiss National Bank Museum and DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and the Humanities). Jenny Kidd is a Reader in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University.

Her research interests are at the intersections of museums, heritage and new media studies. Jenny is a managing editor of open-access journal Museum and Society, author of Critical Encounters with Immersive Storytelling (with Dr Alke Gröppel-Wegener, Routledge), Museums in

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the New Mediascape (2014, Routledge) and co-editor of Challenging History in the Museum (2014, Routledge) and Performing Heritage (2011, Manchester University Press). Louise King leads multi-disciplinary teams in the creation and realisation of complex pro-

grammes of work that integrate user experience, digital content, technology innovation and interaction with interior and spatial design; from content-rich interpretive exhibitions and digital apps, to brand environments and interactive installations. She has been working with global brands and businesses where she created and delivered beautiful and crafted experiences and environments that people use, enjoy and engage with, and that delight clients. In the past she worked for major marketing and advertising companies as well as for the Natural History Museum and the National Maritime Museum in London. Julia S. Kuehns is a Research Liaison Librarian at the University of Melbourne, where she

works primarily with researchers in the humanities, arts and social sciences. She holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow. Her doctoral research explored the textual transmission and manuscript tradition of an early modern Irish death tale, Oidheadh Con Culainn. Thomas Kvan, formerly Pro Vice Chancellor (Campus and Global Developments) and Dean of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, is internationally recognised for his pioneering work in design, digital environments and design management. He is the founding director of the Learning Environments Applied Research Network, delivering multi-disciplinary research on learning spaces and architecture, and is also founding director of the Australian Urban Research Information Network, which has developed a national digital infrastructure to support urban research; both are hosted at the University of Melbourne. He has over 190 publications in academic, professional and popular channels. He worked with Bill Mitchell from 1977 onwards in several roles and co-authored one book with Bill. Jeffrey Levin manages newsletter and communications activities at the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI). As a GCI consultant in 1991, he began his tenure as editor of the GCI’s periodical, now called Conservation Perspectives, and continues to serve in that capacity. He also scripted the GCI video Nefertari: The Search for Eternal Life and edited the GCI publication, Picture L.A. In 1995, he joined GCI’s regular staff, and currently oversees the institute’s broad range of communications activities, including video. A member of the Cave Temples of Dunhuang exhibition team, he focused on the exhibition’s media components. Hannah Lewi is a Professor in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the

University of Melbourne. She has broad research interests in architecture history, heritage, conservation and new media. She has published widely in many international and national book collections and journals, and has recently co-edited a new anthology of papers drawn from the Journal of Architecture. She was the historical advisor for the Australian Venice Architecture Biennale, 2016 on ‘The Pool’. She has co-edited the books Community: Building Modern Australia (UNSW Press, 2010) and Australia Modern: Architecture, Landscape and Design (Thames & Hudson, 2019). She is Vice-Chair of Docomomo Australia. Alicia Marchant is a historian and archivist based at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100–1800, at the University of Western Australia and the State Library and Archive Service of Tasmania. Her work focuses on the histories of xv

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emotions and heritage, river histories, concepts of place, cartography and dark tourism. She is the editor of the recently published Historicising Heritage and Emotions: The Affective Histories of Blood, Stone and Land (Routledge, 2019). Gregory Markus is a project leader at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. He

created and runs the institute’s RE:VIVE initiative, specifically focused on connecting the worlds of electronic music and cultural heritage developing new, simple and creative methods to present collections and increase awareness and re-use of open, digitised heritage collections. RE:VIVE has produced works from acclaimed producers such as Lakker, Roly Porter, Bas Mooy, Ash Koosha and Clap! Clap! and has forged partnerships with organisations and festivals like Red Bull Music Academy, Dekmantel, Rewire and SAE Institute. Sierra McKinney is pursuing an MSc in Digital Heritage at the University of York exploring

her research interests regarding the use of digital technologies to create accessible and emotive heritage education. She is currently a researcher for the EMOTIVE Project developing digital educational experiences for the archaeological site of Çatalhöyük. Diego Merizalde studied business administration in Bogota and has a Master’s in Public

Policy from the London School of Economics and the Paris Institute of Political Studies. Diego was the director of the project ‘ICT in Public Libraries’, which originated from a grant given to the Ministry of Culture of Colombia by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He has also been a consultant for Deloitte, Professor of Economics at the Colegio de Estudios Superiores de Administración in Bogota and has conducted investigations for institutions such as the International Labour Organization. Sophia S. Mirashrafi has an MSc in Digital Heritage from the University of York, with

a background in history and archaeology. She is currently the Digital Innovation Intern at Historic Environment Scotland, focusing on how technology and digital tools can be used to tell new stories about the past. Alexandra Moschovi is a Reader and programme leader of MA Photography at the Univer-

sity of Sunderland. She is an academic scholar, art critic and curator seeking to situate photographic practices within broader art historical, museological and visual culture debates. Moschovi has published widely on the currency of the ‘networked image’; the interface of photography, the museum and the archive; and Greek and Southeast Asian photography. She co-authored the book Greece through Photographs (Melissa Publishing, 2007/9) and coedited the anthology The Versatile Image: Photography, Digital Technologies and the Internet (Leuven University Press, 2013). Adam Muller is Professor and Director of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Manitoba, Canada. His research centres on the representation of genocide, human rights and atrocity. He is the co-editor of The Idea of a Human Rights Museum (2015), and in 2014 he curated and wrote the catalogue for Photrocity, an exhibition of previously unknown Soviet wartime atrocity photographs. He is a research associate at the Mauro Centre for Peace and Justice Studies, and a Senior Research Fellow with the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Defence and Security Studies. He is also the former First Vice-President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and a current member of the association’s advisory board.

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Naomi Mullumby is the Architecture, Building and Planning librarian at the University of Melbourne. She has worked on the digitisation of key collections including the William J. Mitchell archive. Andrew Murray is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, with research interest in modern Australian architecture and heritage. He has been a research associate on a number of Australian Research Council funded projects including assistance with the creation of the PastPort app, and assisted in coordinating the original DigitalGLAM symposium event. Peter Neish is the Research Data Curator, digital scholarship at the University of Mel-

bourne. He works in partnership with researchers on a wide range of data management projects. He has interests in data management training, planning and data forensics. The university’s data forensics lab, which Peter leads, won the 2016 VALA Award. Peter has previously worked at the Victorian Parliamentary Library and the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, using his background as a researcher and computer scientist to make databases and information more available, standards-based and linked. He has contributed to national and international data initiatives and transfer standards. Bethany Nowviskie is Dean of Libraries and Professor of English at James Madison Univer-

sity. She formerly directed the Digital Library Federation and served as Research Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia, where she was the founding director of the UVa Library Scholars’ Lab. A long-time digital humanities practitioner, Nowviskie is a past President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and former CLIR Distinguished Presidential Fellow. David Patten is Head of New Media at the Science Museum, London, where his role includes managing all aspects of new media from conceptual design, prototyping and production to project managing external developers and production companies. He has a background in electronics and computer science, and has worked at the Science Museum for over 30 years, developing exhibitions and leading development teams including the technical systems for the Science Museum’s Wellcome Wing and Dana Centre, which opened in 2000 and 2004 respectively. Recent work includes Web Lab, the multi-award-winning collaboration with Google and Engineering Your Future, an interactive exhibition for teenagers on engineering. Sara Perry is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Heritage Management at the University of York

and a lead on the EU-funded EMOTIVE Project. She has directed heritage interpretation programmes at archaeological sites around the world, e.g., at Çatalhöyük in Turkey, Memphis, the capital of Ancient Egypt and Pangani in Tanzania. Stuart Robson is a Professor and Head of the UCL Department of Civil, Environmental &

Geomatic Engineering and leads the 3DImpact Research Group at UCL. His research focuses on the science, capability and application of photogrammetric image networks and sequences. His work encompasses many industrial partnerships including collaborations with the National Physical Laboratory, Airbus, NASA and the UK Atomic Energy Authority while his work in dgital heritage includes projects with the Tate, the Courtauld Institute,

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the Science Museum, the British Museum, English Heritage and the Institute of Archaeology. Ed Rodley is the Associate Director of Integrated Media at the Peabody Essex Museum

(PEM) in Salem, MA, where he manages a wide range of media projects, with an emphasis on temporary exhibitions and the reinterpretation and reinstallation of PEM’s collections. The incorporation of emerging technologies into museum practice has been a strong theme throughout his career in the museum sector. Rodley is a passionate believer in the potential of digital technologies to create a more open, democratic world. His recent publications include ‘Humanizing the Digital: Unproceedings from the 2018 MCN Conference’ and ‘CODE|WORDS: Technology and Theory in the Museum’. He writes about museum issues at his blog, Thinking about Museums and is one of the hosts of AAM’s Museopunks podcast. Maria Roussou is an Assistant Professor in Interactive Systems at the University of Athens. Previously, she co-directed makebelieve, an experience design and consulting company in Greece focusing on interactive exhibits and digital content for culture and education. She also established and directed the Virtual Reality Department at the Foundation of the Hellenic World in Athens. Kate Sang is a Professor of Gender and Employment Studies at Heriot Watt University.

Located in the Intercultural Research Centre, her research interests include disability and gender in employment, academic labour and gender in the creative industries including architecture and performing arts. Sang’s research is informed by feminist theory and disability studies, with a particular concern in how gendered inequalities are (re)produced in the workplace. More recently Sang has developed an interest in disability and environmental issues, in particular single-use plastics. Livio Sansone is a Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).

He received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam (1992). He is currently the head of the Factory of Ideas Program – an advanced international course in ethnic and African studies – and coordinates the Digital Museum of African and Afro-Brazilian Heritage. He has published extensively on youth culture, ethnicity, inequalities, international transit of ideas of race and antiracism, anthropology and colonialism, and globalisation with research based in the Europe, Suriname, Brazil and Africa. Tim Sherratt is an Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra. He is a historian and hacker who researches the possibilities and politics of digital cultural collections. Tim has worked across the cultural heritage sector and has been developing online resources relating to libraries, archives, museums and history since 1993. His creations include QueryPic, the GLAM Workbench and The Real Face of White Australia. David Simpson is a publisher and editor specialising in the fine arts. He began his career making books and magazines for the National Galleries of Scotland, before relocating to New Zealand in 2008 to work as web/publications coordinator at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū . He is responsible for the continued development of the gallery’s multi-award-winning website and magazine.

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Wally Smith is an Associate Professor in Human-Computer Interaction in the Melbourne

School of Engineering at the University of Melbourne. His research investigates the design and use of new digital technologies and their broader social foundations and implications. Recent projects are in the areas of health informatics, digital heritage and artificial intelligence. His work appears in leading international publications including the ACM’s Computer Human Interaction conference (CHI), and journals such as Social Studies of Science, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Australian Historical Studies. Alexander Supartono is a photography historian and curator specialising in colonial photography. He obtained a PhD in History of Photography from the University of St Andrews. He lectures on photographic theories and histories at Edinburgh Napier University and is an associate curator at Noorderlicht Photography in the Netherlands. Recent curatorial projects include The Postcolonial Photostudio (2012–2017) and From Singapore with Nature (2018). Presently, he is working on the research project Photographic Modernism in 19th-century South and Southeast Asia. Melissa Terras is the Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh’s

College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, which she joined in October 2017, leading digital aspects of research within CAHSS at Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the arts, humanities, and wider cultural heritage and information environment that would otherwise be impossible. She is an Honorary Professor of Digital Humanities in UCL Department of Information Studies, where she was employed from 2003–2017, and Honorary Professor in UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, which she directed from 2012–2017. Ola Uduku is a Professor in Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture. Prior to

this she was Reader in Architecture, and Dean International for Africa, at Edinburgh University. Her research specialisms are in the history of educational architecture in Africa, and contemporary issues related to social infrastructure provision for minority urban communities. She is currently developing postgraduate research and teaching links in architecture urbanism, heritage and conservation between West African architecture schools and North West England. She has published in the areas of African Architecture, African Diaspora Studies, Gated Communities and environmental design teaching pedagogies. Dirk vom Lehn is Reader in Organisational Sociology at the King’s Business School, King’s

College London, and member of the Work, Interaction & Technology Research Group (WIT). His research is primarily concerned with the ways in which people explore, respond to and make sense of exhibits and exhibitions and with how their interpretation and experience of exhibits arises in and through interaction with other people. He has a particular interest in how people use interpretation resources like labels, mobile and stationary systems as well as interactive exhibits and installations in cooperation with others. Jon Voss is the Director of Shift (US) and Strategic Partnerships Director for Historypin,

where more than 4,000 cultural heritage organisations are working to strengthen communities through intergenerational and intercultural story-sharing and local history. Jon cofounded the International Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives & Museum Summit in 2011 to help build an open ecosystem of historical data. In 2016, he co-founded the Cultural

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Heritage and Social Change Summit to bring together cultural heritage professionals to address issues of cultural equity in our collective narrative of history. Andrew White is a Professor of Creative Industries & Digital Media, and recently the Head

of the School of International Communications, at the University of Nottingham’s China campus. He is also the Director of the AHRC Centre for Digital Copyright and IP Research in China. He has published his research in the form of journal articles, book chapters, newspaper articles and a single-authored monograph Digital Media & Society: Transforming Economics, Politics and Social Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); a Portuguese translation of this book, Midia Digital e Sociedade, was published in 2016. Mitchell Whitelaw is an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at the Australian National University. He is an academic and practitioner with interests in digital art, design and culture, especially generative systems, data visualisation and digital cultural collections. His work has appeared in journals including Leonardo, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Fibreculture and Senses and Society. His current work spans materiality, data and culture, with a practical focus on creating ‘generous interfaces’ for digital and environmental heritage. He has worked with institutions including the State Library of NSW, the National Archives and the National Gallery of Australia, developing innovative interfaces to their digital collections. Keir Winesmith is currently CTO at Old Ways, New and Professor in Art & Design at the

University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia. When his interview was recorded he was the Director of Digital Experience at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he founded the museum’s R&D group SFMOMA Lab. Over the last 15 years he has led and collaborated on award-winning digital and cultural projects in Australia, Europe and the US, and in 2018 was named in Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business for his work in this area. With Suse Anderson, he is the co-author of The Digital Future of Museums (Routledge, forthcoming). Andrea Witcomb is a Professor of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin Univer-

sity in Melbourne. She is the author of Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (Routledge, 2003) and the co-author of From the Barracks to the Burrup: The National Trust in Western Australia (University of NSW Press, 2010). Her co-edited books include South Pacific Museums: An Experiment in Culture (Monash e-press, 2006) and Museum Theory, volume 1 of the International Handbooks of Museum Studies (Wiley and Sons, 2015). Her research interests include the role of multimedia in producing affect and staging cross-cultural encounters in museums and heritage sites. Lori Wong is a conservator at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles. Her work

focuses on improving approaches and strategies for protecting and conserving cultural heritage sites. She is a graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art and holds an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In 2019, she was awarded a Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome. Her current research focuses on replicas and how replication can shift our understanding and relationship to the original object and affect conceptions and practices of preservation and conservation. Andrew Yip is a Research Fellow at the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at the University of New South Wales, Aus. His research focuses on the applications for xx

Contributors

experimental visualisation and immersive environments to art history, design and the GLAM sector, for which he designs VR exhibition installations. He holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Sydney and has worked at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Yip publishes broadly in contemporary art and Australian art history and his installations have been exhibited at state and regional museums. Garson Yu is a designer and multimedia artist, and the founder and creative director of yU

+co. Since 1998, yU+co has created over 150 film and television title sequences, earning an Emmy award and multiple nominations. In 2006, he opened yU+co[lab] in Hong Kong, specialising in new media, interactive and experiential design. A native of Hong Kong, Garson holds a Master of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from the Yale School of Art and is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale, Switzerland. His multimedia installations include an exhibition at Pier 57, New York, and yearly projection mapping performances for Los Angeles’s New Year’s Eve celebrations at Grand Park.

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Introduction Hannah Lewi, Wally Smith, Steven Cooke and Dirk vom Lehn

This international handbook brings together a broad mix of scholars and practitioners whose work contributes to the new digital practices that are continuing to grow and take shape in galleries, libraries, archives, museums and heritage sites around the world today. A decade or so ago, several collections of pioneering work in the new field of digital heritage appeared (e.g., Cameron and Kenderdine, 2007; Din and Hecht, 2007; Kalay, Kvan and Affleck, 2007; Marty and Burton Jones, 2007; Parry, 2010), all premised on the need to connect diverse areas of thinking and practice, because it did ‘not exist in one single place’ (Parry, 2010, p. 4). We believe, as evidenced by other recent publications (e.g., Giannini and Bown, 2019; Parry, Page and Moseley, 2018), that this need for multi-disciplinary collected works persists and is likely to continue, driven partly by new and unexpected turns in the digital revolution and its unnerving reach into our everyday lives (Greenfield, 2017). Within this still expanding field, the present volume is somewhat unusual in its pursuit of perspectives for the whole GLAM sector, a term we adopt with others to suggest a collective mission across galleries, libraries, archives and museums, and to which we add heritage sites. In addressing this broad target of GLAM, the distinctive focus of this volume is on new digital practices that are taking shape and taking hold across the sector, with less emphasis on institutional settings and management concerns. By digital practices, we mean the patterns of thinking and working with data, information, and digital artefacts and infrastructures, that exist in a shifting landscape of ever-changing job profiles and career pathways. It follows that the chapter authors are drawn from both the academy and from cultural sector institutions, including many collaborative contributions, and the handbook deliberately intersperses long chapters, shorter case studies and transcripts of interviews from the cuttingedge of practice. As a consequence, some chapters present scholarly accounts framed within a literature of relevant research, while others offer first-hand accounts of the authors’ own digital design projects, their motivations, purpose and value. We believe that this mix captures the energising discourse that is currently ongoing between scholars, practitioners and designers in this rapidly evolving and mutating field. The early impetus for this volume grew from a highly successful DigitalGLAM Symposium held at the University of Melbourne in 2016.1 Inspired by the enthusiasm and energy of that event, we set out to identify international and multi-disciplinary work that, in various 1

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ways, critically examines how the design and deployment of digital media and technologies have become an integral part of new thinking in the GLAM sector. Contributors have been specifically invited for this volume and asked to interrogate how their design projects and research programmes are extending the traditional reach and engagement of cultural institutions, through digital techniques. Although broad in its intent and its geographical and cross-disciplinary reach, the handbook coheres around common and longstanding challenges facing GLAM and heritage institutions, concerning how they continue to house significant collections and engage with various publics through new modes of accessing, re-making and experiencing artefacts and artworks and places of significance (Anderson, 2004; Dudley et al, 2016; Macdonald and Leahy, 2015; Murphy, 2016; Preziosi and Farago, 2004). Digital tools and techniques, of course, cannot side-step these challenges. Steve Woolgar’s third rule of virtuality holds true: ‘Virtual technologies supplement rather than substitute for real activites’ (Woolgar, 2002, p.16). Yet skillfully deployed, new digital techniques are re-casting and reconfiguring the bigger picture in subtle and potentially significant ways. And in this re-casting, new questions are raised that are further problematized and explored in the chapters of this volume. What are the implications for the way collections are organized and maintained, and for the way they are navigated and projected to audiences and places beyond the reach of traditional institutions? What techniques can we use to better understand and evaluate the impact of digital innovations and their patterns of use by various audiences? How might we understand the new digitally mediated relationship between expert knowledge, curatorial practice and the citizenry? And, how are these new technologies shaping the very identity of modern cultural institutions and their place in society? Some commentators argue that we have entered a post-digital age in which virtual technologies have become naturalized and have receded into an expected infrastructure of information, mobility and connectedness. Yet in our view, as borne out by the chapters of this volume, digital developments are still characterized by disconcerting uncertainties about the way forward, and they demand design processes that are fluid, emerging, chaotic and speculative. As Sarah Kenderdine remarks, ‘in relation to distributed and virtual technologies, many issues of audience participation and evaluation remain unsolved’ (CSIRO Innovation Study, 2014). Another broad observation about the current state of play in this field, also demonstrated by the chapters that follow, is that the GLAM sector is not simply another place to apply new technologies emanating from Silicon Valley. Rather, we suggest offers unique insights into the wider challenges of the digital revolution. As governments and citizens are currently questioning the moral and ethical frameworks that underpin social media, big data, artificial intelligence and the like, the digital practices of the GLAM sector stand out as being strongly grounded in a recognizably human and profound mission. For example, the sector has long embraced the importance of combining the real and the virtual, and not succumbed to the illusions of digital replacement, or at least it has learned to be cautious. Working under tight resource constraints and shifting governmental and marketing agendas, its digital practitioners have developed methodologies and tactics that continue to provoke and re-imagine not simply user experience in the moment, but the social, civic, historical and cultural contexts of those users. The handbook has been conceived from an international standpoint to encompass an expansive reach including authors working in China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Guinea, Nigeria, Turkey, 2

Introduction

Norway, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Although discourse in the digital sphere typically goes hand-in-hand with the debates and dreams of globalization, we join with others in noting the persistence of various digital divides. So while we are very pleased to be able to present works across six continents, we recognize the unevenness of contributions and the concentration of material from the western world’s epicentres of GLAM and heritage institutions. To orientate the strong practice focus of the volume, it opens with four interviews between the editors and leading international practitioners and thinkers associated with four world-leading institutions: Seb Chan from the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne; Keir Winesmith from (at the time of interview) San Francisco MOMA; Dave Patten from the Science Museum, London; and Rory Hyde from the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. These edited and annotated interviews provide reflections on the following themes: the current and future potentials of the digital and its influence on wider institutional practices and directions; new ways of engaging with audiences; personal insights into the curation of exhibitions that foreground the digital; the interface between the physical and material presence of these institutions and their collections and predictions about what the global GLAM sector might look like in years to come, and how to prepare future graduates for working in the field of digital cultural production. We have organized the following 38 chapters of the volume into four parts. In Part 1, The Emerging Global Digital GLAM Sector, leading thinkers examine the influence of new digital practices on the GLAM sector as a whole, exploring implications for the nature of existing cultural institutions and new collaborations and cross-overs that will increasingly taking shape over coming years. The next two parts address two long-standing and central concerns of the sector, reinforcing the comments above that the digital does not somehow magic away fundamental objectives. Part 2, Animating the Archive, reflects the enduring importance of ‘the collection’, and its chapters present new digital projects that seek to bring collected works to life through various digital means, including greater accessibility and new tools and techniques for exploration. Part 3, Designing Engaged Experience, reflects the long-standing centrality of exhibitions, and contains chapters that report a range of new digital techniques to create immersive or otherwise engaging and informed experiences for public visitors. The chapters in the final part of the volume, Part 4, Locating in Place, move away from traditional GLAM activities, and describe digital projects that attempt to create visitor experiences that are strongly situated in specific places, outside the walls of the institution. To conclude the volume, Andrea Witcomb (Professor of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, Deakin University, and author of ReImagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum, Routledge 2003 and volume editor of Museum Theory, Volume 1 of The International Handbook of Museum Studies, Wiley 2015) presents an afterword that draws together some key the themes arising in the handbook’s chapters.

Part I: the emerging global digital GLAM sector The first part of the handbook establishes some key themes, positions and frames of references for the rest of the book. The chapters presented here all explore, through different contexts and settings, how digital practices are shifting the way GLAM institutions are working both together and apart in an increasingly complex global cultural sector. They

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interrogate how the digital is facilitating and enabling cross-sector collaborations in new and exciting ways, yet is sometimes also reinforcing other national and cultural boundaries. Fiona Cameron’s chapter ‘Theorising heritage collection digitisations in global computational infrastructures’ lays down foundations for re-thinking important theoretical concepts that resonate throughout the handbook collection. Cameron presents an argument that she has been refining for over a decade, and which interrogates the assumed intractable binaries of the material and immaterial; the real and the virtual and so on. As many of the other chapters concur, these distinctions between the digital and the analogue or the real and the copy serve less and less useful functions in the way we conceptualize cultural production and heritage now and into the future. Rather, Cameron sees the physical artefact and the digitized reproduction as closely related siblings or modalities. She points towards the productiveness of embracing the ambiguities that digitization and complex global digital networks and ecologies are presenting. This re-framing is important for global GLAM and heritage sectors as they prosecute organizational agendas that will increasingly entail the intermingling of the digital and the non-digital in all facets of their organizations and their collections. Andrew Dewdney also rejects familiar binaries in favour of a far more nuanced rendering of the post-digital condition. He further develops key conceptual frames for re-thinking the relations between cultural production and technology, by positing that culture is increasingly technical and technologized and that, in turn, technology can no longer be distinguished from the cultural. The observations presented in his chapter ‘The networked image: the flight of cultural authority and the multiple times and spaces of the art museum’ which has resulted from a rich collaborative study of and with the Tate Museum in the UK, has broad implications for understanding GLAM-sector institutions in terms of their organizational motivations, and their temporal cycles of production. The chapter focuses particularly on the Tate Modern, London, and its most recent extension, the Blavatnik Building. Dewdney encourages us to think of the digital not merely as the enabler of the digitization of collections, but as producing a new currency of cultural circulation that is a complex and dynamic assemblage of digital capture, data storage, computational orders and social communication practices. International GLAM-sector organizations are evidently, and even at the most elite level, still frankly struggling with the burden of keeping up with the ever-increasing expectations of hyper-digital production, and ways of reaching new users and audiences. The theme of the post-digital museum in the 21st century is further explored by Ed Rodley’s chapter ‘The distributed museum is already here: it’s just not very evenly distributed’. Building on Nancy Proctor’s formative thinking on the distributed museum, Rodley explores a museum structure that is more rhizomatic in outlook, and thus without clear definitions of delivery of culture from the centre to the periphery and from the museum custodians to the visitor. He summarizes the impact of digital technologies on the distributed museum as allowing for more open accessibility; reconceptualizing the institution as a network of communities and actors; and creating a place-based experience of the cultural institution that is mobile. Rodley then presents five very useful ways of thinking about digital dialectics. From these discussions he offers a toolkit that can make sense of the radical and immanent future of the museum but also, equally, other GLAM-sector institutions and practices. Moving beyond museums and looking more specifically at libraries, we are extremely pleased to be able to include in the handbook an edited version of the keynote lecture presented by Bethany Nowviskie on ‘Speculative collections and the emancipatory library’, first delivered at Harvard University in 2016. Nowviskie asks important questions that haunt the future of the cultural heritage sector through her experience in public libraries in the 4

Introduction

US. She asks how the full potential of library collections might be liberated to multiple, imaginative and creative trajectories, and how online collections may be opened to speculative access and use. By way of specificity, Nowviskie develops a critique of Afrotourism as a focus for this questioning, and asks for the meaningful promotion of collaboration across sectors, international territories and disciplines in order to further productive speculation. Following these theoretically challenging chapters, four other chapters in Part One explore the emerging global digital sector through different international contexts in China, Australia, Brazil and Greece. Andrew White and Eugene Ch’ng discuss the uptake of digital technology in China’s museums and cultural heritage institutions through a close analysis of technological currency and adoption, questioning their value-add to the current museumgoing experience in China. They suggest that digital uptake (both augmented and virtual reality) is motivated by the desire to disseminate museum collections through digitization to a wider audience, to find new ways of conserving material and to provide the impetus for innovative thinking about that material through exhibition and organizational cultural strategies. They ask how the introduction of new technologies into cultural and heritage institutions can be seen as part of broader and current tactics in promoting the information society and creative economy in China. In his chapter ‘Hacking heritage: understanding the limits of online access’, Tim Sherratt further interrogates the meaning and limitations of openness and access in terms of digital storage and retrieval in online cultural collections. Through his depth of experience in working with the Australian digital platform Trove, Sherratt describes how the cultural sector might exploit digital hacking tools to creative and constructive ends in pushing the limits and controls of online information access. Turning to Brazil, Livio Sansone provides a fascinating account of the inception of a digital cultural museum in his chapter ‘From planned oblivion to digital exposition: the digital museum of Afro-Brazilian heritage’. The project, initiated in 1998 in Rio de Janeiro, seeks to acknowledge and build on the memory of African art and culture in Brazil through fostering international collaborations and archival scholarship. This ongoing endeavour aims to create a repository for digital donations and repatriation. Sansone also discusses the fundamental challenges facing global digital museum initiatives, their future viability and success in negotiating with such varied international sources of public and private artefacts, collections and memories. Sara Perry and colleagues explore a different set of challenges in another collaborative project that has crossed both digital and physical international borders. In their chapter ‘Shared digital experiences supporting collaborative meaning-making at heritage sites’, they reflect on the power of shared story-telling while visiting heritage places. Extending from previous foundational research about the museum as a particular kind of social space, the authors extend this work to consider group experiences of significant archaeological and historical sites in Turkey, augmented by the creation of a mobile app that guides through 3D visualizations and encourage interaction with other visitors in different ways. Their findings are positive in terms of the under-explored possibilities for the development of meaningful and social digital heritage experiences.

Part II: animating the archive The chapters in Part II outline the challenges and opportunities of the digital for archives and archival practice, exploring issues such as creative re-use, digitization and ethical engagement with users and other stakeholders. Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor address the practical and ethical shift that a feminist ethics of care brings to the process of digital archiving. They use two case studies to explore the ongoing ethical relationship between 5

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creators, subjects, users and communities. The first case study on the documentation of Islamophobia by the South Asian American Digital Archive illustrates the importance of trust, privacy and empathy when working with communities who are the target of symbolic actual violence. The second case study examines the digitization of the work of artists living with HIV and AIDS. They argue a feminist ethics approach to digitization calls for culturally situated, mutually dependent, ongoing relationships between all stakeholders of digital archival projects. In his chapter, Graeme Counsel explores the economic and ethical contexts of archiving in sub-Saharan Africa. Archives represent a developing sector of the cultural economy and are recognized as central to sustainable development. However, the connections between colonialism and historic archival practice, illustrated by the international exhibitions in the 19th and early 20th centuries which constructed African as the ‘primitive other’ cast a long shadow. Post-independence, GLAM institutions were developed to celebrate national identities through art and culture but were often based on now-outmoded European models of collection, organization and display. Counsel reports on three projects funded by the Endangered Archives Programme to preserve, archive and digitize the National Sound Archives of the Republic of Guinea to situate them as centres for research, innovation and interaction. Many hold important collections that are under-used. New guidelines related to, among other things, use, access and copyright have been developed which have helped to invigorate these collections into new interactive spaces which are programmed for local communities. Ola Uduku reports on the project to digitize the Alan Vaughan Richards Archive in Lagos, Nigeria. Richards was an influential architect in Lagos until his death in 1989 and his works included houses and university and industrial buildings. He was also instrumental in raising the profile of architectural heritage and conservation in Nigeria. The chapter discusses the challenges of architectural drawing conservation and digitization in Africa; the context and development of an exhibition in Edinburgh, and explores the issues involved in engaging with wider non-western cultural contextual and pragmatic concerns. Online participation and engagement with wider publics is the focus of Joanna Iranowska’s chapter on a project related to the Edvard Munch collection at Oslo’s Munch Museum that aimed to digitize, transcribe and code the artist’s letters, literary works, notes and diaries. Given the scale of the collection and the limited resources of the museum, project leaders decided to crowdsource the proofreading and encoding of one part of the collection consisting of nearly 6,000 letters. However, the project attracted fewer volunteers than expected and did not meet the initial goals. Iranowska uses Actor Network Theory (ANT) to analyse the process and illustrate the limitations of engaging volunteers and involving the public. Thomas Kvan, Peter Neish and Naomi Mullumby address more practical issues of digitizing the ‘hybrid archives’ of the William J. Mitchell collection at the University of Melbourne. Mitchell was a defining figure in the emergence of computer-aided design and went on to become a pre-eminent urban theorist exploring the potential of the digital world for the built environment. The detailed case study explores the significant challenges in identifying received materials, in accessing often rapidly archaic formats, and in evaluating their conservation in their purposeful forms as well as native digital forms. It describes the collection and the forensic work done to make it available as a resource for the study of Mitchell’s life and contribution to architectural design. Also detailing complex conservation processes is Tin-Kai Chen’s chapter in which he describes the work he has carried out with others at the Kaohsing Museum of Shadow Puppet in Taiwan to conserve and bring back to life an archive of video-tapes and other records of the dying art of shadow puppetry. He describes the detailed methodology to digitize, record and preserve these precious materials and to 6

Introduction

bring them back to life though interactive touchscreen displays for a series of successful exhibitions. The idea that repurposing or remixing heritage materials in an artistic way might create new ways of cultural understanding is explored in the work of Gregory Markus, Maarten Brinkerink and Brigitte Jansen. They report on two projects, Open Media Art (OMA) (2016) and RE:VIVE (2015), initiated by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, which explicitly positioned GLAM institutions as co-producers of new works. They argue that such institutions should acknowledge the importance of actively engaging with local creative communities to ensure a more productive collaboration. Also exploring the complexities of creative re-use of materials, Alexandra Moschovi and Alexander Supartono critically examine Indonesian artist Agan Harahap’s digital hoaxes. Harahap uses strategies of appropriation, digital manipulation, allegory and irony to make unexpected visual and contextual interventions in popular and archival imagery, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, the public and the private, and asking viewers to think twice about the veracity of online imagery. They explore how Harahap’s creative re-purposing of networked photographs and online interactivity may open new channels and networks for the critical re-evaluation of mainstream culture and subcultures, identity politics, history and power structures.

Part III: designing engaged experiences The third part of this handbook opens with six research chapters that investigate the process of exhibition design and its relationship to the audience as well as how digital technologies are deployed to create experiences that engage visitors in novel ways. John Hindmarch, Melissa Terras and Stuart Robson explore if digitized objects can have an aura like authentic objects. They argue, based on their study of the Shipping Gallery at the Science Museum in London, that 3D-scanned objects can exhibit affectual power if presented in a suitable way and contextualized by virtue of information that accompanies it. Areti Galani and Rachel Clarke’s chapter, ‘Configuring slow technology through social and embodied interaction’ discusses the results from a research-through-design study of people’s engagement with a digital interactive installation. They explore how space is dialogically re-imagined by visitors and museum facilitators and slow technology supports, or challenges, the embodied engagement with the exhibition environment. Based on their research Galani and Clarke argue that slow technology can engender reflective and empathetic responses to museum content. They propose that the research-through-design study allowed them to reconceptualize augmented reality as a means of engendering rich embodied and contextually relevant interactions between people and enhance their experience of museums. A different approach to the design of exhibits is presented by Dirk vom Lehn, Kate Sang, Richard Glassborow and Louise King’s chapter ‘Exhibition design and professional theories’. The authors explore the development of an interactive gallery from its inception through to its deployment in an observatory. They consider how the design team used a generic concept of the relationship between audience, exhibition content and its interpretation to develop an exhibition for an ‘imagined audience’ whose composition, knowledge and interests as well as actions are drawn from visitor research. In ‘Meeting the challenge of the immoveable’, Jeffrey Levin, Robert Checchi, Lori Wong, Garson Yu and Edwin Baker use the case of the Buddhist cave temple located at China’s Mogao Grottoes to show how immersive technology can be deployed to enable the experience of an immoveable site. The authors demonstrate how digital technology can be successfully deployed in a larger 7

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exhibition to facilitate an engaging experience of a remote location without distracting from the experience of authentic objects displayed in the museum. Turning to a very different global context, Adam Muller’s chapter discusses the Embodying Empathy project conducted in Canada which explores the history of Indigenous Indian residential schools. The project used a virtual environment to connect to the dark history of these institutions, and explored how the creation of virtual environments might promote empathetic awareness and opportunities for reconciliation with contemporary audiences. In her chapter, Sarah Kenderdine discusses the DomeLab, a hemispherical projection that creates immersive visualization through digital media, as an extraordinary initiative which has forged a successful partnership between multiple international research and GLAM institutions. She characterizes the DomeLab as an exemplar of the productive reintroduction of experimentation and research into the museum sector. The chapter describes case studies using the DomeLab in Mumbai and Indigenous Australia. The six research chapters are followed by five short discussions of exhibition design projects from the designers’ point of view. In ‘Human-centred design in digital media’ Indigo Hanlee explores the relationship between exhibition design, technology and the visitor experience by discussing the work of the Sydney-based studio Lightwell. Her chapter highlights that the opportunities offered by digital technology need to be balanced with the rest of the exhibition and with an eye towards the visitors’ experience. Peter Higgins continues the discussion of the opportunities offered by digital technologies in ‘Unlocking the glass case’. He draws on his experience in interpretation to develop design principles for the use of digital technology to enable experience of protected and remote objects. He explains the concepts and ideas he and his team use to bring static objects to life through the unobtrusive deployment of digital technology. In ‘The law of feeling: experiments in a Yolngu museology’, Paul Gurrumuruwuy and Jennifer Deger discuss an approach to exhibition design that uses technology to create ‘dhäkayŋanawuy rom’, a social aesthetics that aims to transform visitors’ relationships with the museum and with each other. The authors describe how through their approach people are drawn to examine objects and they are encouraged to focus and inspect them and to share their emotional responses with each other. Gurrumuruwuy and Deger end their chapter by motivating museum practitioners to adopt this approach for the design of their own exhibitions and thus enrich all of our lives. Andrew Yip, Paula Dredge, Anne Gerard-Austin, and Simon Ives examine the exhibition Henry VR, held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Their chapter presents the production and display of the exhibition as an illuminating example of how virtual reality technology is embedded within an exhibition to provide visitors with an engaging experience. The subsequent two chapters move away from museum exhibitions and into the online world. Tim Jones and David Simpson discuss how the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in New Zealand broadened the scope of their online offering after devastating earthquakes in 2010. While originally the website focused only on the gallery’s collection, after the earthquake the homepage was explored as a ‘library of ideas’. Jones and Simpson describe the radical transformation of the website to one that is presented like a magazine and brings together the wide range of written and visual content regularly produced by gallery staff. And in her chapter, ‘From shelf to web: first reflections on the O’Donnell marginalia project’, Julia S. Kuehns discusses how the open source web-publishing platform Omeka has helped her and her team to undertake the O’Donnell Marginalia Project through which an online space was created for the contextualized discovery of the marginalia and annotations made by Melbourne’s foremost Gaelic scholar Nicholas Michael 8

Introduction

O’Donnell. The online material complements the scholarly work of those interested in O’Donnell’s work and thus supports scholarly conversation around Irish history in Melbourne and Australia. The final discussion piece by Tony Holzner, ‘Interpreting the future’, explores the opportunities that novel technologies offer GLAM institutions to create value for people. The author’s discussion refers to recent developments in the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania. At MONA conventional labels have been replaced by novel human-computer interfaces, primarily Mixed Reality systems that promise to deliver increased access to collections and superior visitor experiences. The result is an exhibition that largely removes curatorial interpretation and puts in its place an entirely visitor-centric approach to exhibition design.

Part IV: locating in place This final part of the handbook explores how digital technologies and techniques are becoming entangled in our relationship with place. The unique way we experience place has always figured in the appeal of traditional GLAM institutions. Their monumental buildings provide special places to visit, and house artefacts, artworks and records that can re-kindle our imagination of distant and exotic places. At the same time, through new mobilities and connectedness, the digital is bringing new modes of engagement in places far removed from traditional GLAM settings. The chapters in this section explore how various digital innovations are reconfiguring the way GLAM and heritage institutions are changing our experience of place. The section opens with three chapters that explore how the digital can transform exhibitions that project new understandings of place. Anthea Gunn describes the creation of Art of Nation, an online exhibition of WWI paintings at the Australian War Memorial. Especially fascinating is the dual aim to show modern visitors not only the war art but also the place of the galleries as they were intended though never realised. Gunn traces how the design of the online exhibition captures and projects an earlier commemorative intention to connect the returned war veterans and bereaved families and friends to the very distant places of the battlefields of Europe. Next, Mitchell Whitelaw presents his project ‘Succession’ which uses digitally generated randomness and serendipity to re-imagine the industrial and postindustrial landscape of Newcastle in the northeast of England. Whitelaw’s account reveals the emerging potential of generative techniques, taking image fragments from a variety of online sources and recombining them into new composites that offer new readings and responses to place. Continuing the examination of novel digital combinations, Hannah Lewi and Andrew Murray take a historical perspective to trace the origins of the now popular technique of rephotography which juxtaposes historic and contemporary images of the same viewpoint. They chart the recent success of the technique in apps like StreetMuseum and online newspapers, and identify four key motivations that they argue underlie the appeal of this phenomenon. The next three chapters take us still further away from the traditional exhibition and examine the ways digital tools may intentionally, or otherwise, influence our experience of places in situ. This starts with Cristina Garduño Freeman who considers how Google Maps has become the predominate medium through which we encounter places of heritage and significance. Using a case study of Hospicio Cabañas, a hospital complex in Mexico and now a World Heritage Site, she first explains the layers of technological breakthroughs that underpin Google Maps. She then demonstrates how it is subtly shaping and transforming our encounters with historic sites and thereby the production of associated cultural 9

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knowledge. Wally Smith, Dirk vom Lehn, Hannah Lewi, Katie Best and Dora Constantinidis examine the way people use digital walking tours to explore urban histories, taking examples in Melbourne and London created by GLAM and heritage bodies. Through detailed field studies with users, they describe how these apps sometimes appropriate tropes from the pre-digital history of urban exploration on foot, including the 19th-century flâneur and the educational human-guided history tour. Following this, Sara Huws, Alison John and Jenny Kidd describe their project to design a novel audio-guide for St Fagans National Museum of History in Cardiff, Wales. They take us inside their innovative process and describe how their design responds playfully to boundaries between fact and fiction, between the physical and virtual, and how it creates experiences of defamiliarization and grants permission to its users to imagine and explore in new ways. The final three chapters all consider the potential of digital heritage as a resource for communities to develop and maintain collective attachments to place. Steven Cooke and Dora Constantinidis describe an evaluation of a web app called PastPort which provides an online site for citizen-generated heritage. They argue for the value of visual research methods to elicit and document local memories and histories in the area of Port Melbourne, Australia, and they illustrate their approach through the analysis of field observations of people using PastPort, collected through glasses-mounted video-recordings. Diego Merizalde and Jon Voss recount a collaborative project, between the National Library of Colombia and the global digital history platform historypin, to contribute to national healing in Colombia following decades of internal conflict. Drawing on a network of 900 local libraries they staged a nationwide effort to collect, digitize and share meaningful personal stories as part of the reconciliation process. Particularly interesting is their attempt to systematically evaluate the impact of their significant project. Turning to a different community, the final chapter by Alicia Marchant presents the story of designing and developing a website to capture people’s emotional attachment to the place of the Derbal and Djarlgarro (Swan/Canning) river systems in Perth, Western Australia. Participatory design techniques laid a foundation for the website, involving Noongar elders, historians and artists. Marchant describes how the digital site became not just a display of people memories and experiences but a vehicle to further understand the intricate ties between emotion and place. In conclusion, Andrea Witcomb offers some final critical reflections which draw together the handbook’s sections and chapters.

Note 1 The DigitalGLAM symposium and this handbook was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP140101188), and a University of Melbourne Cultural Engagement Grant. Sincere thank you to Andrew Murray for assistance with the original DigitalGLAM symposium and project, and to Capstone editing services in Melbourne.

References Anderson, G. (ed.) (2004). Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Cameron, F. and Kenderdine, S. (eds) (2007). Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. CSRIO. (2014). Innovation Study: Challenges and Opportunities for Australia’s Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. Canberra: CSIRO. Din, H. and Hecht, P. (eds) (2007). The Digital Museum: A Think Guide. Washington, DC: American Association of Museums. 10

Introduction

Dudley, S. Barnes, A.J., Binnie, J., Petrov, J. and Walklate, J. (eds) (2016). The Thing About Museums: Objects and Experience, Representation and Contestation. London and New York: Routledge. Giannini, T. and Bown, J.P. (eds) (2019). Museums and Digital Culture: New Perspectives and Research. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. Greenfield, A. (2017). Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. London and New York: Verso. Kalay, Y., Kvan, T. and Affleck, J. (eds) (2007). New Media and Cultural Heritage. New York: Routledge. Macdonald, S. and Rees Leahy, H. (eds) (2015). The International Handbooks of Museum Studies. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley. Marty, P.F. and Burton Jones, K. (2007). Museum Informatics: People, Information and Technology in Museums. New York and London: Routledge. Murphy, D. (ed.) (2016). Museums, Ethics and Cultural Heritage. London and New York: Routledge. Parry, R. (ed.) (2010). Museums in a Digital Age: Leicester Readers in Museum Studies. London and New York: Routledge. Parry, R., Page, R. and Moseley, A. (eds) (2018). Museum Thresholds: The Design and Media of Arrival. New York: Routledge. Preziosi, D. and Farago. C. (eds) (2004). Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum. Aldershot: Ashgate. Witcomb, A. (2003). Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. London: Routledge. Woolgar, S. (2002). ‘Five Rules of Virtuality’, in S. Woolgar (ed.) Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.pp. 1–22.

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Framing interviews

1 Interview with Seb Chan Seb Chan, Hannah Lewi and Wally Smith

Monday 18 December 2017

Interviewed by Hannah Lewi and Wally Smith Seb Chan is currently the Chief Experience Office at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. He has been a leader in digital curation for several years, winning many awards for his work and holding several key roles in the GLAM sector, including Director of Digital & Emerging Media at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York and Head of Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. In light of your current experience at ACMI, I would like to start by probing your current thinking on how the various traditional GLAM institutions might be crossing over or merging together and borrowing each other’s metaphors. We can see, for example, how application programming interfaces (APIs) and searchable databases are in some ways transforming GLAM institutions into accessible archives and so on. Do you see that digital is really having that kind of profound effect or do you think that this convergence is just happening anyway? SC: Well, I think there’s two things. The first is that the digital has influenced everything in our world. But even quite a lot earlier on when I was working at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, in the early 2000s, we definitely saw that the functional borders of the library, museum and archive were already incredibly porous. And those borders were most strongly held by the staff inside those institutions. Certainly, as the public became aware that museums had far more than they ever put out on exhibit, they began to think of them more as potential libraries or archives. With those expectations came a series of demands that I’ve written and spoken about previously in the early work that my teams were doing at the Powerhouse around opening up that archival and warehoused collection with digitisation. It put a huge strain on curatorial resources, who were expected to know about things that perhaps they didn’t even know they had. WS:

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I have been thinking about this notion of museums needing to become more like reference librarians in their practice, as far back as 2005–2006. For example, you don’t expect a librarian to know about some obscure scientific fact, but you expect them to know and direct you to where to find out about it. Working with the Powerhouse collection, which was a historical collection, a technology museum, a design museum and a social history museum, that made a lot of sense to me. Moving into working with art museums though, those institutional borders and the divide between the museum of art and the museum of science or history is much more rigid – particularly in the United States. I think, largely because of funding, and the social and cultural capital means that the art museum as a reference library seems to be more shocking than in any other sort of museum; it’s a bigger leap for them so they have come on board with these ideas much later. When you ask the public about their perceptions of the museum/gallery/library/archive divide, I think it’s more to do with the use and experience of these institutional spaces and their architecture. The grand façades of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, are quite different from the more modern façades, or the lack thereof, that contemporary libraries often now display, for example. In our thinking about the redevelopment of ACMI in Melbourne, we have been playing with these models, because the ACMI collection has an interesting history, starting as the State Film Archive initially, then becoming a lending library of media and finally a gallery/museum. In rethinking this, we are trying to fuse these models in a way that makes more sense to the visitor and user but also leans into the affordances that those give us, in particular because of our physical location in Federation Square in the heart of Melbourne, designed by Lab Architects. WS: Could you reflect a bit more about how you think digital technologies are changing the way GLAM institutions are thinking about their nature, strategy and brand? SC: I think definitely some museums are coming at it from a brand side and others are thinking more deeply and philosophically about it. Some of the work I was doing at the Cooper Hewitt and Smithsonian museums, as well as some of the consulting work in-between, was very much about digital networks and grappling with this sense of distributed, international or global collections. This of course comes with all the criticisms of globalisation and networked culture that we are struggling with as societies now, like who makes those decisions? Who owns the collections and who has the power? Putting those huge questions to one side for a minute – if you can – we need to be thinking about the fundamental sense of how culture is now networked, how meaning-making is networked, rather than purely about the creation of material culture and the experience of material culture. Much of what interested me about moving from the Cooper Hewitt Museum back to Australia was this sense of working with a collection that was really accessible anywhere: film, television and video games. It’s no longer about the unique artefact; it’s about the experience of playing and watching it. And it’s a collection that is increasingly already digitised, already available through subscriptions and other payment models. So, we have to ask, what is the purpose of the museum? We started to touch on that at the Cooper Hewitt with some of the digital preservation work, the acquisition of the Planetarium app, as well as some other early digital initiatives. But also we realised the importance of design itself; that sense of being a design museum in the early part of the 21st century was about reflecting that design was everywhere and the role of the museum was to be a critical commentator on design, not a warehouse of all design things. 16

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Although at the Powerhouse Museum this was interesting because we had acquired the patent archive of Australia and all the old patent records. So we had to question what our role as a museum was – we were a comprehensive archive but what meaning is attached to that archive? I guess ultimately, in a highly digital networked society, that negotiation is continuous and the role of the museum is to maintain the continuity. I want to take the discussion to the level of the practicalities of running a project. We’re seeing in general in the digital world a number of fashion or hype-cycles with digital decision-making. For example everyone now has to have an app, an API and so on, and then you see these functions everywhere and the shine of novelty quickly comes off them. So how do institutions cope and respond to that? Because in some sense all of those things are innovative and exciting, but can also be conservative if everybody just feels they’ve got to have one for the sake of it. It’s quite easy to see the differentiation between a proper digitally networked museum and a museum that “does” digitally networked products. I think the difference is in the infrastructure really. So for me, a lot of the work my teams and colleagues have been most proud of in the past has been things like the APIs at the Powerhouse Museum, which are really about building-in new digital plumbing. So you could build other more visible bathroom fixtures and so on, but you have to have the plumbing in first. I think this was most notable as an approach at the Cooper Hewitt where the entire collection was digitised and so the plumbing was installed and ready to make any future use of that collection possible. Most importantly it challenged the curatorial staff to think, well, if everything is digitised, what sort of exhibitions, what sort of curation and curatorial practices does that now make possible that I couldn’t do previously? So it isn’t about apps. It isn’t about even about the Cooper Hewitt pen. It was about the infrastructure beneath that makes infinite possibilities of a different sort now available to GLAM institutions, and therefore what really is an exhibition today, and what purpose does a catalogue serve, and how far can they extend into people’s everyday digital lives? Plumbing is never sexy, but plumbers can get paid a lot of money! I do want to ask you about the Smithsonian pen project though, as it is one of those ideas that sits on top of that digital infrastructure. In your article “Strategies Against Architecture”, you tell a really interesting design story about tracking the lengthy development of this project.1 Do you think that GLAM institutions always have to go through that long iterative process for every project to be really successful? I don’t think so, no. But I think we were a design museum and we were all very conscious that the process was the product, as much as anything. The team was very experienced at making complex digital products and services and we also had plenty of failures in the past where we knew things had failed because we hadn’t got the plumbing right, or the interfaces, or the interaction design and in the end that broke it all. We really wanted to map out and deliver a thing that was quite radically different from the field. We knew that that was going to be a pretty challenging thing and we didn’t have that many staff. It was a tiny team that pulled this off and we also had to work with a huge amount of collaborators, design firms, and a strategy firm helped us with the technical production management across three continents. It was really quite a crazy process and I would say it’s definitely not something that every museum could or should do. But if you want that scale of innovation and high risk, it can be a high-reward project. However there were some pretty catastrophic things that occurred to that project, and the fact that we were able to pull it off was testament to the

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really amazing team work and depth of past experience about the challenges of creative digital projects. One of the things that I thought was really interesting in your process for this project at the Smithsonian was the role of prototyping, and how it revealed new constraints, but also kept stakeholders on board. It’s a confidence piece – to show that this smaller product is achievable, even if the bigger one seems in the fog somewhere. That allows others to come along with you in a highly innovative process. At that time that involved, for example, international collaboration with Taiwan to rapidly 3D print the prototype: this was like the novelty of web design in ’93, ’94. Also we were situated in New York, where there was a certain amount of buoyancy around innovation; Kickstarter had spun up a lot of interesting things. But we also knew how hard it was to achieve. However from my observations, with all the other social, political and economic issues in America since then, I think there is a retreat from innovation right now. There are real social justice concerns at stake for the GLAM sector, and many civic museums are in a time of crisis all over the world, but I would argue it is particularly acute in the US. I would like to return to your current thinking at ACMI with the ACMI X Lab being a centrepiece of the institution. So that seems to be coming out of an iterative prototyping methodology, which is also at the heart of user experience design. Is that the way you see it? Look, it is, and I think it’s about taking that to media design. One of the things that’s been interesting coming back to Australia, and to the world of film is that it is very auteurdriven, at least that’s how people think about it – yet it is actually about collectivity. ACMI as an institution is very focused on developing media and digital literacies. For example, screen literacy is about showing that everybody has a role, or a potential role in making and so if a school kid is really great at drawing they could also work in a team on video games or filmmaking or television. Revealing and involving people in that sort of making process and its meaning is important to us. Also I think we’re moving into an age where the phone and computer interface is increasingly the camera, the moving image and the way we search and interact. And if we look five, ten years out, asking what are the skills that not only users need, but also makers might need to be able to work with, that is pretty interesting, and perhaps even more interesting than understanding how a film 50 years ago was made. I’m interested in how films will be made 50 years in the future and how we might watch those, how we consume those and being in a museum where people can glimpse little shards of speculation poking through would be great, as well as seeing the past of course. I think the reframing of the museum around being a place that interprets the present through the past and the near future is more experimental. I would like to quiz you on how you think the big idea of the “post-digital museum” in light of the thinking of Ross Parry, as an enterprise, is actually progressing?2 I think it’s been a bit disruptive actually. When Ross Parry wrote that article in 2011, I think we definitely saw, particularly in UK museums, that the digital was starting to fade; that it was becoming bundled into the operational structure of most of the larger museums. And whether it was really seeping into the operations in a deeper way is still debatable because of the lack of investment in the infrastructure. The purchasing of ICT, as a series of services, rather than funding for capital works has been a real struggle to find support. Although, I would argue that the digital transformation of governments has started to address this pretty well, for example in Australia with the Digital Transformation Office (DTO). The way I would generally measure an institution’s progress is to ask where the

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digital sits in the organisation. In the early days, you started to see it with the IT department, or with the marketing team, and both of those had their strengths. One of the really interesting organisational things at the Powerhouse Museum was that I started off in the IT team and in 2003 a critical decision was made to move me out to run the web and digital within the curatorial team: that was really instrumental in creating a space that allowed us to think about exhibition outputs, but also about the infrastructure collections needed and how to make the most of them. The digital became part of the core of the museum strategy? Yes, and with the collection, it was interesting to put a fast-paced mode of thinking in with the slowest paced part of the institution. I think, the post-digital era is realised, for me, when the institution becomes about the integration of digital collecting; collecting digital things and the digital presentation of things and the integration of exhibitions. It’s not just the marketing of the exhibition, or the experience of the exhibition with an audio guide or app or whatever. I think that the V&A Museum in London has done some really interesting things here, like the rapid-response collecting policies that have enabled them to talk about the digital moment. To me, that is more post-digital than websites or digitising the collection; it is more about the digital experience. ACMI has a product manager, Lucie Patterson, who spends a lot of her time working with staff around how digital tools might improve how they work, not in terms of job satisfaction, but in terms of transforming the way projects are run inside the institution. So, foregrounding transparency of what you’re doing, and changing the tools that are used to create, should also change decision-making as to what gets made. That’s what I’m yet to really see. Although you do see it at the Cooper Hewitt, MoMA in New York, the V&A in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, MONA Tasmania and the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) in Copenhagen. But to return to your point, I would agree that Parry’s basic premise – that the digital as an isolated activity is fading – does still hold up. It’s a question of whether institutions have been able to keep up with that shift or whether, because of lack of funding and skills, they have missed the moment. A lot of museums missed the moment with digitisation as well. It’s very hard to get money to digitise things, you only really get the support when you do your first 20 per cent, after that no one cares. You’ve already got funding to do the hero things and that is what everybody wants to see. And Google has probably already pulled out a number of significant collections into Google Arts and Culture. So it’s what is left that is hugely challenging for institutions. At the “GLAMorous Humanities” conference in 2017 at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra,3 you made the argument that digitisation hasn’t been nearly as comprehensive as perhaps once imagined, so I was interested in your thoughts on what’s next in that space? Will that promote more inter-organisational collaboration across these existing networks and databases to compete with Google, or don’t you bother trying? I think right now you can’t. Without the technical skills in-house to even put their own collections up online, the reality of most institutions is that public access to their digitised content is now through Google. Small museums – like the 6,000 or so in Australia – just don’t have extra resources and they are often run by volunteers. At the national or state level scale then it’s definitely appropriate to figure out what the value of their material is and choose how to shape it, and how to make choices about their focus on working with collections they already have, or defining what they should have for the present and future. I went to an event in Buenos Aires and I was fascinated to hear that some South American museums coming out of political dictatorships had the sense that remembering 19

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the past wasn’t necessarily desired at all. Rather it was about imagining a different future, so the role of the museum wasn’t to be a place for memory but for imagination. If you think about contemporary thinkers like the late Mark Fisher, who was talking about capitalist realism and that we have lost the ability to imagine a post-capitalist world, it’s that sort of sense of the imaginary that is most critical now.4 So there is a point at which museums have to make these existential decisions around preserving memories of the past for their own sake or about creating places for curiosity, imagination and creativity to imagine a different future. Although, as we know, old things can reveal incredibly powerful lessons about the present and even the future. Oh, completely. But if we are going to learn from the past we need to do it properly. Just making accessible the digital scans and metadata of an artefact or collection isn’t going to necessarily achieve that, the work of the museum needs to go way further than that. And you could make great arguments on why we should digitise all these things. I think the work that Tim Sherratt has been doing with the digital archive is amazing, because it’s revealing commentary about politics and race in contemporary Australia. But purposeful examples are scarce. I’m interested in what you said about the architecture of the Cooper Hewitt Museum in an interview5 and your observation that technology was introduced at a strategic time, almost as a Trojan horse to entice visitors back and make them more comfortable in what might be seen as an overbearingly historical building and an elitist institution. This jamming together of old buildings and new digital ideas is interesting and perhaps the unexpectedness adds to the power of the digital interventions? I think that contrast is critical. The challenge at Cooper Hewitt is that the façade of the building still remains the façade of the building. It’s still Carnegie’s mansion house that was designed as a private residence for one of the most powerful white men in a gilded age. And it’s also on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, so during the renovation closure we opened a temporary shopfront and education space up in Harlem. It was fascinating to talk to people there and to hear from them about why they wouldn’t visit the museum or even the neighbourhood, and their feelings of being outsiders to the Upper East Side culture. So if we think of that Eliel Saarinen quote: “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”6 Then each of those onion skin layers are part of the experience of design that is also about creating journeys that can help people navigate through those layers. At Cooper Hewitt, we were able to interject only at the very last moment when they actually made it through the door. But once we did that, we wanted them to be unshackled. The Carnegie’s mansion was a gift to the Smithsonian in the 1970s. But the institution knew that it needed to look beyond those historic walls and through the plan of the house which was quite intentionally restricted. The interjection of a “concierge approach” who gave visitors a digital pen, was like giving you permission to enter; it was like crossing a threshold of the theatre or stepping inside the magic circle of a game that signalled there are different rules inside here. The signification of that is really critical. I felt, as did the other designers at Local Projects (http://localprojects.com/), who worked on the pen project, that if you think of the museum as about creating a special place that’s different from the rest of the world, then getting people off their phones and interacting in different ways is really critical. And even creating a bit of friction into the museum experience – that’s something the pen did really well.

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Can you elaborate that thought a bit? Well the pen was designed with hand straps to hold it in your hand. It was too big to fit in your pocket well, so it was about getting competing items into your hands besides your phone. The physical design was important – it was a substantial object and the designers really thought about the ergonomics in a way that created new affordances but also new frictions. It was this holistic coherence that I think has meant that it’s still being used now years later. If we take those observations about the capacity of technology to create interjections in the built experience, can you talk about the current location of ACMI in Federation Square – which is now a major public and cultural space in Melbourne. How do you see ACMI reconfiguring itself as an important social space for the city, to reach beyond the walls of the museum, as this resonates with the themes in this book strongly? For ACMI it’s also about asking how do we remove the frictions between coming to visit an exhibition, to watch a film or play the video games – making it easy enough but adding something that you can’t experience when doing these things in your own home. But also, it’s about putting some kind of friction in, so when you’re in the building, you don’t just pass through it; you slow down and also use the social functions and spaces. The way we consume media has obviously changed hugely with the rise of the phone and tablet. We still sit around and watch collectively but we also watch on multiple screens, so arguably our consumption of media games, TV and films is less social in a watching sense but more social in other ways. There are more fan groups, more people comment on reviews and social media. So we’re individualised media consumers to a degree but we’re also heavily social at times in that consumption. And in creating a physical space in ACMI, as a museum of film and media, how can we create spaces for people to dwell and reconnect with social watching or social playing and how can we create spaces which are more critical? Talking about say my favourite video games of the year with other people by showing them and playing with them isn’t something I can do when I am at home. So we are asking how can we design a building space that brings to the forefront that social discussion? In terms of museums, they tend not to be still struggling with that sense of socialness and criticality. They can become incredibly social spaces, but then they can also become like every other over-designed space that is just about selling pure experience with no real sense of criticality. I’m biased towards wanting museums to be critical places. I know others don’t have a political bent like that, so for them they just need to be fun. If you take the gaming world, it’s a challenge though isn’t it to make a recognised cultural institution like ACMI informal and open enough to entice visitors to come and really feel at home but not condescended to? Well, if you think about Melbourne, it hosts PAX7 each year and Melbourne International Games Week, and there’s 60,000 people on one weekend down at the convention centre doing things. It was fascinating going this year and seeing the entry brand signage for PAX was “Welcome Home”. I thought that was really clever, and I was messaging all of my colleagues here saying “hey, we should be their home the rest of the year!” What does it mean to be a home? I think libraries, in Australia at least, have evolved successfully in that they have been trying to make that shift since the 1980s. But it’s only now in the last five to ten years that the major public libraries have really made big architectural strides to being those places where you can just dwell and yet still be in a negotiation with the city. But coming back to media museums, we also still want to be a comprehensive reference library – somewhere I can go to try out new and old games. And although gamers 21

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can watch YouTube reviews and demos, but much like the Powerhouse, the Cooper Hewitt, the rapid response work that the V&A has been doing and so on, if you think about design it is really about you getting a physical sense of things by touching and using them. There’s a real gain to that. Museums can still get people curious about art, curious about design and curious about media and willing to invest more of their own time. I’ve got one last question about the future of the GLAM sector, but coming from your past which I gather is drawing on inspiration from music for you? Sure, yes that has stayed with me. So where’s the inspiration coming from now? I’m seeing lots of really strong socially engaged and interesting professionals in the GLAM sector who are coming out from a much more politically fired up perspective. They have social awareness and purpose and they are questioning the purpose of the museum. They also have great communication skills and often community activism skills that are very valuable in gathering momentum and building coalitions around whatever you’re doing inside a museum. That will, by nature, mean that coalition building is done digitally now, so you would have to have some pretty good digital skills to be able to do that using contemporary media. The other skills I see as critical are about designing and making experiences, and there are of course long-standing historical practices from the architectural world and theatre and so on. Going back to your questions about my music background, it just makes me think about space and how sound works in spaces, and about ways to get people interested in things they think they’re not interested in! Because music is all about getting people to listen to things in different ways that they didn’t know they might like, because they never actually sat down with it for a period of time or danced to it for a period of time. It doesn’t matter what it is, but it’s that sense that culture occurs in space and has a bodily element to it. Often the intellectual side of it doesn’t acknowledge those things enough and the digital definitely doesn’t. So projects like the pen show that the digital can have a physical element to it. Even if the physical is just your device, there’s a designed physicality that makes you feel and do things in different ways. So what I would hope is that we’re getting a lot more emerging professionals who have done diverse and practical things. Broadening that experience outwards is always good.

Notes 1 Chan, Sebastian Chan, Aaron Cope, 2015, “Strategies against architecture: interactive media and transformative technology at Cooper Hewitt”, MW2015: Museums and the Web 2015, published April 6, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12118 See also Chan, Sebastian 2013, Opening Keynote, MuseumNext Conference, Amsterdam, slides available at www.slideshare.net/sebsnarl/museumnext-opening-keynote. 2 Parry, Ross, 2013, “The end of the beginning: normativity in the postdigital museum”, in Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, 1(1), 2013, pp. 24–39 . 3 See http://hrc.cass.anu.edu.au/events/achrc-annual-conference-glamorous-humanities-working-culturaland-collecting-institutions. 4 See https://mronline.org/2009/12/27/questioning-capitalist-realism-an-interview-with-mark-fisher/. 5 See www.freshandnew.org/couple-interviews/. 6 See https://quotesondesign.com/eliel-saarinen/. 7 See http://aus.paxsite.com/.

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2 Interview with Dave Patten David Patten, Dirk vom Lehn and Wally Smith

Wednesday 6 June 2018

Interviewed by Wally Smith and Dirk vom Lehn Dave Patten is Head of New Media at the Science Museum, London, where his role includes managing all aspects of new media, from conceptual design, prototyping and production to project managing external developers and production companies. He has a background in electronics and computer science, and has worked at the Science Museum for over 32 years, developing exhibitions and leading development teams. He developed the technical systems for the Science Museum’s Wellcome Wing and Dana Centre, which opened in 2000 and 2004 respectively. Recent work includes Web Lab, the multi-awardwinning collaboration with Google and Engineering Your Future, an interactive exhibition for teenagers on engineering, the Science Museum Group’s Digital Lab. To begin, we would like to explore how you see the current relationship between the physical and the digital in exhibitions, and museums more generally. DP: The relationship between the physical and the digital continues to change and evolve. For us, the conversation is around what are the types of exhibition that we’re developing. If we’re developing permanent galleries focused on our core collection, that are going to be in the museum for 20 to 25 years, then ultimately, what we want is people to engage with the collection. Visitors can see the real object and engage with the stories around those objects. So, in these exhibitions that heavily draw on our collection we’re reducing the amount of technology we put in because technology isn’t sustainable over such long periods of time. Save for a few exceptions of technologies that are easy to maintain most technologies won’t last for 25 years or so. What will work are technologies that use timebased media – video and audio – where it is reasonably easy to transpose into new formats and to update the playback hardware. However, anything that you’re creating programmatically, is much more difficult. Because the software and hardware change over time it’s not only unlikely you’ll be able to replace it with something similar, but almost certainly, the environment you wrote the WS:

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software in won’t exist in the same way. Then you need to look through multiple generations of hardware, operating systems and development environments to get you to a point where you can begin to update the software. Because of these difficulties, we’re reducing technologies that involve computing and programming in those permanent display exhibitions. Or, if we do use such technologies we’re turning to template setups that anybody can drop content in and that are easier for us to maintain over a long period of time. Such updates of systems are relatively easy: you’re upgrading the typefaces, the image quality and change from, say a touch screen you might have put in six or seven years ago, to a screen operated by gesture control – so swipe and pinch to zoom. You can reconfigure the front-end software but still use the same asset and you can kind of make the whole thing feel more contemporary. What about temporary exhibitions that are in the galleries for shorter periods of time? In these exhibitions, the use of technology is less of a problem. Then it’s more about the mix of objects, traditional interpretation and digital interpretation. When we decide about the format of the interpretation we first look at the subject matter and then decide on what’s the best way to tell our audience the story or give them the interpretation they need. Is it through a printed label? Is it through a graphic? Is it through a piece of video? Is it through a piece of audio? Is it through game play or doing some emulation or scenario work? If it’s a collection-focused exhibition, such as a historical exhibition, we really want people to engage with the objects. In these exhibitions screens are often a distraction to people because they’re bright, shiny and contain moving content. If you put an object next to a screen, what people tend to gravitate towards first is the screen. They don’t always look at the object, even if you ask them to do that. We’ve done lots of work, over quite a long period of time, probing the relationship between screen-based media and museum objects, including screen-based labelling of objects. We built an exhibition where we had almost no paper labelling at all. All of the interpretation was done on large touch-screen kiosks. In some of the more recent work we’ve been using transparent screens. So we can actually put the screen in front of the object and you layer the content over the object. That seems to have the most promise because the object is always directly in people’s field of view. There are still some challenges with the technology but it means that you can interpret the object and tell its story but keep drawing people back to the real object. What you are describing is a sort of learning process in the museum, that has at its heart the sustainability of exhibitions. How have you arrived at this point? This has to do with the permanent evolution of technology and people’s approach in using technology. Some years ago, I installed the first tracker ball in the museum, and people didn’t know what to do with it. This was in the late 1980s and pre-Windows 3. Then most people had no experience of Apple Macintosh computers and at that point Microsoft didn’t have a mouse-based graphical user interface. It took people several minutes to make an association with moving this ball around and items moving around on the screen. We experimented with this kind of interface for a bit but ended up not installing tracker balls for quite a long time because visitors struggled with that. Within a year of Microsoft releasing Windows 3 the situation changed. People just completely understood the use of tracker balls (which are essentially upside down mice) because they were getting exposed to them in all sorts of places outside the museum. Another example of this is touch screens. Touch screens were always a fairly intuitive way to interact with computers. When we first put touch screens into the museum, we had a massive problem. We used to have a lot of video screens in the museum to play

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static video. People assumed at the point when they started to encounter touch screens, that every screen was a touch screen. We didn’t always mount video screens very effectively and, in fact, we used to put them on a shelf, in an opening, and people would push and push the screen backwards off the shelf. Now, we have a lot of ‘point and click’ touch screens in the museum. Within a few years of the iPhone coming out, people’s behaviour changed again and they expected all screens to be gesture based. Then they try and swipe old touch screens and it doesn’t work. The visitors then question whether the exhibit is broken or whether it’s them doing something wrong. Ultimately this is a problem for us, what museums don’t want to ever do is to make their visitors feel stupid. The visitor is always right. WS: Yesterday, when we were in the Wellcome Wing, I was really struck by how elegant and how ergonomically pleasing it was. DP: The exhibitions in the Wellcome Wing are concerned with contemporary science, and they are not primarily object based. There are a whole load of things in contemporary science where either an object doesn’t exist that truly represents a story, or the objects are not inherently very interesting. A lot of what we encounter in contemporary science is focused around a computer or a black box. For me, one of the things that helped me crystallise this was when I was working with a curator at a time when the museum collected its first DNA fingerprinting machine. It was a big Hewlett Packard desktop computer, with a big box that you put sample tubes in and that analysed DNA. It looked like any other desktop computer. It wasn’t until you realised that the machine completed in less than a day, what it took a team of people over a week to do before, that you realised how significant this object was. Just looking at the desktop computer and the big box doesn’t help you understand that significance. In exhibitions, technology can be a way to bring those stories to life. It allows you to give visitors agency over an experience. Visitors control the experience and can kind of take in the story or information at their own pace or they can try different things out and look at different outcomes. So technology, in some circumstances, works very well, and I think it’s particularly strong where the objects in themselves don’t necessarily tell the story. If you’re dealing with things like big data, quantum computing or nanotechnology, it’s about taking people to a very different world and a very different experience. You can show the objects but, again, the objects don’t really tell you the story. Ultimately, technology is expensive to purchase and maintain. The technology has really got to demonstrate some real value for the museum, by providing a great visitor experience, for us to decide to put it into an exhibition. WS: Let’s come back to the discussion about the relationship between the physical and the digital. One example of an exhibit that dealt with this directly in the Science Museum, that I remember from a few years back, is the Sketchbot that was shown in the WebLab exhibition in 2012. There was something magical about the way Sketchbot cleverly brought digital data back to something so surprisingly physical and playful. Is that still an idea you try to carry forward? The Sketchbot takes a photo of your face using a webcam via HTML5’s canvas and processes this into a line drawing. This data is then sent to the robot arm and it starts to sketch your face into a sand pit. Check out the video below of the Sketchbot drawing my face in the sand. This by far was my favourite experiment at the Web Lab. www.found.co.uk/blog/google-web-lab/#.W0cZWthKiBs

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Yes, it’s kind of embedded in a lot of our thinking but we’re still some way away from being where we’d like to be. I personally would like to see far fewer screens in the museum. That doesn’t mean there won’t be lots of digital interactives, but I don’t think the input or the output always needs to be on screen. Some of the best input and output isn’t on the screen. The Sketchbots were great but they took a lot of looking after. They’re mechanical devices and they needed a team of people that were competent and confident in maintaining them. Managing the space between the software and the physicality was complicated because some of those services were Cloud-based. It has got easier since then but those things can be still be expensive.

The Sketchbot, the Science Museum, 2013 One of the things we’re always doing as a museum is looking at different ways of interpreting objects. In the Information Age gallery we wanted to help visitors understand how some key objects worked. So we developed a series of physical models that you interact with, and that drive screen-based content. One of these exhibits is a Morse code key. On display we have an actual Morse code key. In front of it, you’ve got a white resin-cast Morse code key. You tap on the key and

Figure 2.1 The Sketchbot, Science Museum, 2013. Source: Science Museum. 26

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basically, that starts to unfold the way a Morse code key works on the screen behind the object. You can send real messages that really respond to the actual key press you send. So with these kinds of exhibit there’s always a real object (from the museum’s collection) in your field of vision. The transparent touch screens are doing the same thing. They’re allowing you to tell the stories and look at how objects work. You can do the same with projection mapping. So you can get rid of the screens completely. There are a number of companies and people that are working on the development of Pepper’s ghost-type screens that allow you to overlay digital information on physical artefacts (museum objects). At that point, you really start to blur the boundary between what’s physical and what’s digital. I think our generation still largely thinks of those things as different. Increasingly, the young generation doesn’t. It’s just a world experience and some of these things happen to be numbers and images, and some are three-dimensional. The boundary is really blurry now. WS: DP:

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Are these technological changes, and the change in expectations around them, also leading to new ways of thinking about galleries? I think a good exhibition tells a story, it can’t just be a fabulous selection of objects with some panel displays and that’s all you need. I think digital technology is still relatively new to museums. I’ve been working in the field for 30 years, but museums have been around for hundreds of years. We’ve been writing label captions for hundreds of years. You could argue, we’re still actually not very good at it or that it’s really hard to write a good label caption. What role, for example, do you think new developments like Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) will play in near-future exhibitions? Bigger museums like us are paying attention to the opportunities offered by VR. But, I think all of us are definitely moving towards augmented and mixed reality that will allow us to do all sorts of really interesting things for our visitors in the museum in a far less intrusive fashion. In the future, these experiences will probably be had using some kind of lightweight wearable device. These technologies will allow you to take objects to pieces, in front of visitors’ eyes, and show them what’s inside and how they work. You can generate context around objects. All of these technologies are possible now, in various ways, and will become increasingly easier to use. One of the big challenges for museums is having the resources to be able to generate enough content to do any of that – it is often difficult to find the time to go back and reinterpret older exhibitions and galleries. We have a digital record of the objects in the museum’s collection, which has grown over quite a long period of time. The quality of that data is often not very consistent. It depends when it was put in and who put it in. For the museum, just to go back and to clean up all of that data will take years of curatorial work and this may need to happen before you can start to generate new things using that data. It would be fabulous though if you could build an exhibition and add multiple levels of interpretation to it. For example, you could imagine going to an exhibition on the history of steam engines and steam trains, and you could look at that purely from an engineering and design perspective. What were the design challenges? How were they met? You could look at how things work. But you could also look at their social and historical implications and contexts. It seems that the digital is blurring the boundaries between the various GLAM institutions. So, for example, many libraries have exhibitions now. Museums can use APIs to make 27

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their collections into archives for others to search. I wonder then, is there a struggle now for each institution to maintain its distinctive identity? Do you in the Science Museum, for example, have new overlaps and crossovers with your neighbour the Victoria & Albert Museum? DP: I think the V&A and the Science Museum are really interesting. There’s a constant blurring of the boundaries between the two museums. This is partly because they come out of a common heritage. We all grew out of the Great Exhibition and the Science Museum collection was originally at the V&A where Rory Hyde recently created The Future Starts Here, an exhibition that shows plenty of technology (see Hyde interview, Chapter 3). Ultimately, this whole quarter of London was set up really to bridge the divide between art and science. I think, in some ways, maybe in the digital realm, there’s an opportunity to join art and science in a more satisfying way than exhibitions allow. But I think, we do create exhibitions here that certainly draw across from the V&A, and likewise, their exhibitions cross over into our territory. It feels appropriate that we both do that because I think the things that make museums unique are their collections. All museums went through that period 15 or 20 years ago, when there was huge internal debate about the building of websites and how the online publication of collections would impact visitor numbers. Some argued nobody would come to museums anymore. That just blatantly wasn’t true. If anything, websites that publish collections drive people to the museum because people see those things online and want to come and see the real things. There’s something interesting to be in the proximity of real artefacts. To stand next to Stephenson’s Rocket. To stand next to the first aeroplane that crossed the Atlantic. That’s a special kind of tangible experience that you don’t get in quite the same way, just viewing things online – although higher quality VR and MR systems may eventually change that. Also, museums are inherently social experiences. You tend to come with other people. At the moment, you don’t visit online spaces in quite the same way and therefore can lose that sense of social experience. I think within that premise, there is a real danger to museums that we could unwittingly unpick experiences that are inherent to what a museum is. For example, it is increasingly easier to personalise the museum experience. So if people tell us a little bit about who they are and what they are like, we can direct them around the museum and find the things for them they want to see. One of the great joys of going to a museum is that serendipitous experience. You think you’ve come to see something and then you walk past something else and suddenly, your visit is completely different. DvL: What then do you make of the attempts of some museums to offer visitors personalised experiences? DP: When museums try to personalise visits, I am interested in how you can try and keep a sense of serendipity and surprise in there. How can you avoid the fact that a personalised visit may lose some of its social aspects and still allow for a shared experience? Part of the joy of museums is, when you go with other people you probably spend as much, if not most, of the time talking to the people you’re with; maybe about the objects; maybe about things suggested by the objects or the contents; maybe about other things. You can certainly imagine a time in the not-too-distant future when you’re using your mixed reality glasses and you’re walking around and having a really personalised experience as the glasses are delivering content just for you, taking you through objects that are just for you. However, such a visit becomes really isolated and may lose all of that shared experience. 28

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With any new technology, we need constantly to be thinking about not just what it can do but what might it change about the museum experience that is precious to us. Should we just take it on board and experiment and see what happens? Or should we say, actually, that could change the museum experience in quite a negative way so let’s not go there at the moment. This leads to a question about exhibition development. When you develop exhibits and exhibitions, how do you go about testing them before deployment? In some ways, every exhibition is only ever a ‘Beta’. They’re never complete. It’s a oneoff prototype. We have always run a very iterative development process, certainly for digital exhibits in the museum. We don’t come up with an idea, go away and build it, install it on the gallery floor and expect that it will work. We build and test a series of prototypes. Either we do it or we’re working with external developers who are building prototypes for us. And we’re testing those prototypes with our audience, throughout the process, to make sure the audience can understand what it is they’re doing. They can understand what it is they need to do, that they take away the key message and have an enjoyable experience. Have you got a panel of participants to test exhibits? No, we test with museum visitors from the floor. The testing is done by our audience research group in the museum, sometimes in dedicated areas of the museum, but we can also do it anywhere. We might set up a prototype in a gallery space that is empty at the time and do the tests there for a month. Or I might have something we want to test and may just set it up somewhere for a couple of hours, and that will give us some useful feedback. We also have the Digital Lab initiative, which is quite new. When John Stack joined the Science Museum Group as Digital Director, three years ago, he developed a new digital strategy for the museum. One of the things in that is the Digital Lab which is not a place but a concept or workflow. It allows us to do some of the more experimental work as well as to bring in potential new funding streams to the museum. Operating at the intersection of design, technology and content, the Digital Lab allows us to explore the new forms of audience experience that are enabled through emerging digital technologies. Some pieces of work fit well within that concept. So, for example, we’ve just come to end of the first tranche of work funded by Samsung that we’re calling ‘enhanced digitisation’. The work relates to the digitisation of our collection. Our collection is predominantly three-dimensional. We wanted to explore the different ways you might capture objects in 3D and how does that fit within our existing workflows? How long does it take to produce a 3D scan of an object like a steam engine? What are the storage requirements for that, and how can visitors use the 3D-scanned objects? So we did some rotational photography, 3D scanning, photogrammetry, 3D modelling and some LiDAR scanning and built some small demonstrators, looked at how you embed those images in web pages and explored where else people might use those assets. This all helps our internal discussions as we decide on how we move forward with this type of digitisation. It allows us to step back and say, digitisation is actually this range of things. At one end, there’s the full-blown LIDAR scan, photogrammetry three-dimensional modelling of something. At the other end, there’s a high-quality, high-resolution photograph. When might you do this as opposed to this? When is this useful and when is that useful? We’ve just scanned Stephenson’s Rocket with LiDar and photogrammetry, that took 11.5 hours and that was just one object. It comprised of a series of LiDar scans and about 2,500 photographs. As well as the 11.5 hours to do the capture it took several weeks to 29

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process the results of that and get a model. That’s not possible for every object (or even a significant number of objects) when your collection is large. WS: So do you have a staged process, whereby you experiment with an idea and then reach a go/no-go decision point? DP: No because, as with all things digital, there isn’t a clear-cut point where you make that decision. So we might do something and say, okay, this is how you do it. This is how long it takes. With the current technology, this is not feasible to do for large volumes of objects. Looking at the technology that will be available in three or four years’ time, it may well be feasible. So we need to revisit those things. A lot of work in digital is about taking the time to step back and see what you’ve done. You have to look at some of the things that appear to be less successful, or that the public doesn’t seem to be ready for and check if that is still the case. Would they still be challenged with that? Technology is constantly changing and so are people and their experience of technology. So, for example, at some point we were really interested in looking at how you might tell stories in VR that are hard to tell in other media. What is it like to actually put the visitor inside the interpretation? For us it is important that VR technologies really encourage visitors to want to look at the object that was at the centre of generating that VR experience. We did a piece of audience research around this, with really positive results that suggest that VR experiences really can drive people to look more closely at the (real) object. But VR is quite expensive to make and to manage on the floor of the museum because the headsets are still expensive and fragile. You need to staff the experience. So it’s not something we could currently widely adopt in the museum. But if you had a special exhibition with one object you really wanted to bring to life in a different way that may be a way of doing it. It also let us start to think about, what does it mean to story-tell in an effective way in immersive environments? We’re really interested in all forms of immersive environments, from large-scale room projections that have lots of people in them, through to mixed and virtual reality. In effect, when you’re telling stories in those kinds of environments, you, as the participant, become the director of that story. It’s a really different way of story-telling and consumption. So this is a way of beginning to dip our toe in the water. What does that feel like? How do you start to tell those stories? When do you need to draw people back so they’re all looping through any really key concepts and when do you let people be more free to explore? Then for the final part of the work, we ran a couple of hackathons looking at different ideas. As part of the new digital strategy, we opened up our main collection system with an API. That’s partly because we need to do that so as to rebuild our own website. We wanted to do some work (i) to see whether we’d got the APIs right and, (ii) to see how usable they were. So we had a two-day hackathon with about 70 people coming into the museum to build a whole lot of prototypes using the API. They built everything from chat bots, projected displays of objects, through to some really nice games based on the API. We ran another hackathon event which was about making ideas rather than working prototypes to explore new ways of surfacing and discovering objects in our online collection. DvL: Thus far we have primarily focused on the process of exhibition development. Let’s now turn more to the audience. How do you think the deployment of new technologies in exhibitions relates to the expectations of the audience? What do visitors expect from the Science Museum? Do they come with expectations maybe to see and use the latest technologies? 30

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We have nearly three and a half million people a year and they’re coming from very different backgrounds. Some people expect to see the latest science. Some people expect to be able to interact with things, whether it’s physical interaction or digital interaction. Some people come because they want to see the art we’ve collected, or they want to see a particular object. People come for all sorts of different reasons and with different motivations. We are a big museum and we kind of need to try and satisfy them all. The question about the deployment of novel technologies is interesting. We tend not to focus too much on that, partly because we’ve done it in the past and it’s really challenging. We’re not using really new technology because museums really aren’t set up to do that. The investment is high, the failure rate is high. Instead, we’re bringing technology that people may not have experienced in museums before, into a museum context. At the end of the day, museums need to present things that people want and enjoy, and you don’t want to build lots of things that don’t work. So you need to be careful about how you use them. DvL: How do you decide about what technology to deploy in the museum. How do you arrive at such decisions? DP: I spend lots of time going to all sorts of non-museum-y places like shops, particularly high-end retail. Because I think they’re investing in all the interesting forms of interaction. High-end retail outlets effectively make themselves destinations, and they need interesting things to do that. We also visit big trade shows to look at what latest tools are coming out. What are we going to be seeing in two or three years’ time? You’re constantly looking for inspiration in all sorts of places, from other museums, through to just being out in the street. Sometimes it’s about new technology and sometimes it’s just seeing technology in a very different way and you think, actually, that’s brilliant. DvL: From your experience, do you think that peoples’ expectations towards the museum have changed in these respects? DP: I think museums sit within a much broader context that drives expectations. For example, there’s an expectation that the quality of videos we show in museums compares to a BBC documentary. And with computer games people expect a quality that is on par with games developed by Electronic Arts with their multi-million-pound budget. Obviously we don’t have the budget to do that. So we have to think really carefully about whether we should sit within that ecosystem. As people’s experiences of the world constantly change, their view of the museum changes and their expectations of what they’re going to see change. Also, people visit not just this museum, but lots of museums. If we do something that people really enjoy, they’ll expect to see some of those things replicated in other museums over a period of time. But I do think the museum is a constant mixing and balancing act, to get that myriad and appropriate experience for different audiences. We get a lot of school audiences, so what are we doing for schools? How do we facilitate schools being here who have quite different needs from general visitors? They come with their lunches. Where do you store their lunches? How do you provide enough toilets in one space for that to be a great experience too? So it’s not only about the exhibitions, but also about the infrastructure and service for those visitors. I guess all museums at one level are interested in the personal technologies people bring with them to the museum. But at the moment, there are still a lot of challenges that make that not something that we feel we can really work with. We’ve commissioned several reports looking at what people do with their mobile phones in and out of museums. What DP:

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might they do in the museum? What are their barriers to doing things in the museum? What do they want and what don’t they want? It was a bit of a surprise to lots of people in the museum, that quite low down on that list of what visitors want is more content. What lots of visitors were saying is, there’s enough content in the museum already so why would we possibly want more? But then lots of people want slightly different types of content. And, we’re not very good at offering content in languages other than English. You can certainly see, with the rise of Google Lens and Microsoft Translate, that people will use their own personal devices to automatically translate text and it will make the museum experience for overseas visitors a more positive experience. You can also see an emerging of number of technologies for people with disabilities. Where, at the moment, we do lots of close captioning of videos and sign language, in the future, I think increasingly we’ll see people use the devices they bring with them to do all of that for them. That will change the tasks that we need to do in the museum. But there is also, I guess, a bit of an inherent danger in there that anybody can do something on a mobile phone in a museum and it isn’t necessarily us. So if we’re not doing it should we be aware of what other people are doing? Should we worry about that? We ran the first study of mobile phone use in the museum in 2012 and the second in 2015. There isn’t a marked shift between what people are doing and expecting to do with their mobile devices. If anything, their use of the Internet within the museum has gone down slightly. The reason for this drop in Internet use is that in comparison to 2012 now almost everybody’s got a smart phone. I think there isn’t yet the killer application for mobile devices that works across museums. And building apps is very expensive, and they are quite hard to market. We have produced apps that are really successful. They download well not only in the UK but also in the US, in Russia, in China, in India and in South America. These successful apps, like some of our gaming apps, tend to be free, and therefore, in effect, are paid for by the sponsor of the exhibition. Although we’re not making money on those apps, they are worth the cost because we are using them to share the museum experience and the museum brand. DvL: Do you develop these apps in-house or is the development outsourced to specialised providers? DP: We have a small team in the museum that builds conceptual prototypes, and we might build small exhibits. Together with the museum’s content team we identify good digital opportunities within an exhibition or within a gallery. Then we manage the process of getting those into the museum. We will identify potential partners to work with outside the museum or we’ll run tender processes and then manage that process from conception to delivery and installation. If you grow a team that’s big enough to deliver on a big exhibition, then you can be carrying a lot of the additional cost when you’re not working on an exhibition. If the team is internal, you’re reliant on the skills you have internally. But this is a rapidly changing field. You probably need to invest in quite a lot of training to make sure that the team always has the relevant skills. I’ve always been worried that you’ll take a group of people on, they’ll be really good with a particular technology, then the technology gets out of date, and it will be really hard to get them to move on to new technologies. The joy of working with people outside is you can identity people who are really good at the thing you need and have the skill set to do the thing you need. 32

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In terms of the developments over the past few years, what has been the biggest change in the make-up of your team? DP: Twenty years ago, partly just because the development of environments was much more tech heavy then, there was a lot of low-level coding and it tended to be things that individuals could do. The kinds of experiences we create now, by and large, are not things that an individual can do. You need teams of people do them. So you’ll have audio specialists, an animation specialist, a coding specialist, etc. Therefore, what I’m looking for are people that have got a little bit of experience of all of those and know how everything fits together. They may be really good at one element of that but it’s kind of the understanding that the raw creative process, I think, has changed. DvL: Let’s come back to technology. As we were wandering through the museum we came past exhibits like the flight simulator. How do you make decisions about the display of such exhibits, and what technology to use? DP: Exhibits like the flight simulator: that’s a purely commercial proposition. It’s run as a commercial activity for the museum. When the simulators were put in, they’re looking at things that are very loosely aligned with the museum experience, that are commercial. Because, ultimately, we’re a national, free museum. We can’t charge for access to the core collection. But we can charge for experiences like IMAX and simulators and these are important sources of revenue for the museum. We make sure that there are films themed around the content of the museum. The simulators, for example, allow visitors to fly an Apollo rocket or you can ride in a Red Arrow etc.; flights that relate to our exhibitions, such as the aeroplanes or the exhibition about space. The VR experience is slight different. It’s the first time that one of those more immersive technologies has become available, where we can afford to own and make content that’s about the things that we really care about. It’s about objects in our museum. So the Space Descent VR is based around Tim Peake’s TMA-19 capsule, which the museum acquired for its permanent collection, that came back from the International Space Station. So you can come to the museum and see the real thing and then you can ride in VR, with Tim Peake, in that real capsule. That actually is a really strong experience because you’ve seen the object and you have experienced the journey it made. You can then go back and see this real thing. It makes you appreciate this amazing object that travelled at 180,000 miles an hour, in an uncontrolled freefall and at the extreme temperatures generated during re-entry. This is insane and really makes you think differently about it. I think that it’s kind of interesting that we can now start to build experiences about things in our collection that we care about. So we could build a flight simulator but it probably wouldn’t be like one of the commercial flight simulators you see now. For example, we might do something about the first flight across the Atlantic because this is a significant object in our collection. The cost for these kinds of technologies has begun to decrease so that large museums now can afford to make their own content. For example, we own all rights for the Space Descent VR experience and can license that to other museums and venues. We may choose to run it as an in-museum experience for two years and then decide to publish it, for example, in the Oculus app store and all of this helps us recoup the investment we made in the product. WS: Does each exhibition have to be almost like a little business that must pay for itself to survive? DP: Exhibitions all have budgets. The on-site commercial activities are really important because they bring in additional money to allow us to improve the museum and its DvL:

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infrastructure. As a museum those commercial opportunities are a very important part of the overall experience and ever more tightly bound to our cultural offer and brand. WS: This brings us to the question of careers. What kind of skills do people need nowadays if they are starting out on a career in museums and galleries, especially if they want to work in the new media department? DP: It varies for different museums. So for my team, I am looking for people who have a level of technical experience. They can develop exhibits in a particular environment and understand the challenges of doing that. I want people who are really creative, who can work in multidisciplinary teams and who can help shape the vision of exhibitions and experiences. Then, they can take and champion that vision into products. But it’s important that that’s underpinned with a technical ability because when you’re working with agencies, you must know whether things are possible or not. When a developer comes back and proposes a particular development you need to be able to judge the costs of the proposal and how much time it will take to implement. DvL: When you talk about a common background in technology, I suppose what you are talking about are coding skills? What other skills are required to work in a department like yours? DP: When we go out to advertise for jobs like that, we’ll say we want the experience of development environments and might list three or four more specific skills, including for example coding skills in Unity, HTML and Java Script. Photoshop or Illustrator, working with APIs and with cloud-based services and a basic understanding of networking as well as simple video editing skills are also useful. Ultimately, I want somebody that can understand and love the content and then use technology to bring that to life. DvL: You have been working in the Science Museum for a while now. What is it with museum work that keeps you so passionate? DP: I’ve been working here, at this museum, for 32 years. I wouldn’t still be doing this if I wasn’t really passionate about it. I came to the museum thinking I was going to be here for four years and do one project. Museums are just amazingly creative places. We have more stories than you could ever imagine. I love being a part of that, helping craft and tell those stories to visitors. But also, I love that the people who work in museums are really passionate and really interesting people who come from a variety of backgrounds. Every project that you work on in the museum, you’re working with a different combination of people. The speed of change is constantly accelerating, and you’re always running and that’s just exhilarating! WS: That’s true for museums in general, but for the technology side it’s perhaps even more true. DP: Yes, indeed. With technology the changes are rapid. At the moment, for example, I think we are only at the beginning of the development of personal devices. Soon we will see really lightweight, wearable devices and some kind of glass/headset device, probably in the next five years. Once those kinds of devices become commonplace, the ability to transform the museum is huge. That’s really exciting and ultimately, might mean you can hide all the technology away. For me, I’d love to be able to do that and not be confronted by it because it can be a distraction. But I still want visitors to be able to have those amazing transformative experiences. I’m as excited working in the museum now, as I was when I was a child coming to the museum and having those amazing experiences. 34

3 Interview with Rory Hyde Rory Hyde, Dirk vom Lehn and Wally Smith

Tuesday 5 June 2018

Interviewed by Dirk vom Lehn and Wally Smith Rory Hyde is a designer, curator and writer based in London. His work is focused on new forms of design practice for the public good and redefining the role of today’s designer. He is Curator of Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Design Advocate for the Mayor of London. He was co-curator (with Mariana Pestana) of The Future Starts Here1 exhibition, which was running at the time of this interview. We really enjoyed visiting The Future Starts Here exhibition. It provoked thoughts about the digital not so much being a medium, but more the content of the show. Do you think that’s going to be an ongoing theme, that the digital is now something to be talked about and shown in the museum as subject and artefact? RH: It’s a really good question. The V&A has always been about making sense of the world through objects. Mostly these objects are historical, and we are making sense of the past. For this exhibition, we felt it would be interesting to apply that same approach to contemporary design and technology, to try to make sense of the future. So, in a way, this exhibition is no different from any of our other shows—whether they be Modernism or Art Deco—that look at how our culture is shaped by its design. We have adopted that same approach to the now and the future to frame the digital not just as a form of interpretation or communication, but as content and objects that can really speak for themselves. WS: One of the interesting things about the exhibition is that it looks to the future, but it is a very imminent future. It’s not science fiction; it’s about things that are already here or are very close, like the driverless car and Amazon’s Alexa. RH: Yes, almost the first decision we made was to create an exhibition about the future without speculation, without making it about science fiction or design fiction. And to ask, can we talk about the future through the real? On the surface, that sounds almost impossible; but what we are looking for are the seeds of potential. What kind of a world do these things promise to bring about? How might they change the way we live together? Some WS:

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Figure 3.1 The Future Starts Here exhibition 2018, V&A. Source: Photo courtesy of V&A.

of these things are more familiar than others. In the first section about the ‘smart home’, many of the things are commercial products you can buy, because that’s a sector being pushed hardest on the consumer-facing side. Whereas for other issues like climate change, technology still has quite a different and more distant relationship to the individual. These are things you may never encounter outside the exhibition in your day-to-day. So, we worked really hard to discover what’s next and to bring these things into view. WS: I think it works really well because although talk about things like driverless cars and so on has become commonplace, not many of us have actually seen one, let alone been inside one and thought about how strange this technology is? RH: I think that’s right. You get a different kind of understanding from experiencing the object itself than you might reading about it in the newspaper or Wired or whatever. The film we have inside the car shows how Volkswagen is thinking about the kind of relationship you might have to the car; what they call ‘emotional intelligence’. It’s not just about how to solve the technical challenges, but also exploring the emotional challenges of a driverless car. That’s pretty fascinating.

The Future Starts Here exhibition 2018, V&A It’s also interesting to see that the exhibition has strong architectural and urban planning elements that presumably come from your background. Its inclusion made me think about architecture as the more mature, older discipline and the digital as quite a young and immature field of design. I wondered if that was a conscious reflection, to bring an architectural sensibility to the social impact of the digital? RH: I guess I think of these things in terms of the pace of change. There’s this great diagram by Stewart Brand, which is called Shearing Layers,2 where he describes the evolution of the construction of a building in different timescales. For example, the foundations might change every 500 years; the building might change every 100; the internal partitions change every 10; the digital infrastructure changes every five and the furniture changes every week. All these different paces inter-relate to each other and I think architecture is somewhere on the outer level of change. It’s a bit slower, but it lasts a bit longer; therefore, it has a different kind of consequence in the world, whereas the digital spins far WS:

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quicker. It can have huge impact, but it doesn’t have a legacy and it’s immediately outdated. I see these different disciplines as cogs within a wheel that are spinning at different speeds, but the impact they have on us as people can be much the same. DvL: How do you see the exhibition in relation to the rest of the V&A, which is of course a much more traditional setting in which visitors expect to see and learn about sculpture, applied arts and so on? RH: In the introductory essay to the catalogue, Mariana Pestana and I write about the Great Exhibition of 1851, the first World’s Fair and really the origin of the V&A. Prince Albert comes up with the idea of hosting a huge public exhibition, and invites designers from all the countries in the Empire to bring their best art, design and technology to London as a way of making sense of the Industrial Revolution. These objects then became the collection of the Museum of South Kensington, which was later divided into the V&A and the Science Museum, with art going one way, and science and technology the other. So, for The Future Starts Here, we were eager to bring these disciplines back into dialogue, as a way of making sense of the digital revolution. The other way the show relates to the history of the V&A is how we introduce each section with an historic object, which is attached to a question. For example, we ask ‘Who wants to live forever?’ and display a religious relic that speaks about the afterlife. When we ask, ‘Does democracy still work?’, we present a suffragette scarf from 100 years ago. Those things are there to remind us that the questions that we’re asking now are not new ones. WS: How do you see in relation to the questions about the relationship between the digital and the real, and concerns about whether the digital is encroaching on traditional galleries and museums like the V&A, and possibly displacing older physical forms of exhibition? Do you see the digital and the real in competition, or do you see them as complementary? RH: It’s a difficult question and I have to say that even as a curator of the future, I’m still quite sceptical of too much technology in galleries. For this show, at one point we stripped out a lot of the screens and interactive interpretation. Even though there is quite a lot remaining, above all, we believe in the power of the object to speak and to tell stories. It doesn’t need too much interpretation or trickery, you know. Perhaps I am quite traditional in that sense, but I like to have a physical object label. I like to have things written down. For me, that’s a sort of handrail for a visitor, a reliable thing they can grab on to. Everyone knows where to look. I’m also interested in the exhibition as a public space, as a civic space, as a collective space in which you can have a discussion, argue with your friends and family. That’s why we ask lots of questions. We hope people are talking throughout; we don’t have headphones, which tend to put you in your own world. You’ve got to be aware of who you’re going with and having that place of discussion. We see the exhibition as a public forum, a place for debate as much as a place of entertainment. DvL: A few years ago, we saw a move towards digital labels and videos alongside exhibits to show how they work. Is that something you think is outmoded, or will that continue to feature? RH: I think that can be really successful if done in a way that’s complimentary to the object. For example, upstairs in the furniture gallery it’s great to be able to show how something’s made alongside the thing itself. It can be quite ambient and quite unobtrusive; a video with no sound, so you don’t need headphones or other things. It can really make a work come alive and I think people love seeing behind the scenes, whether it’s how that work was conserved or made, or its history. 37

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What methods do you use to learn about visitors’ perceptions? Do you pursue an incremental prototyping approach to exhibition design and interpretation? We have market research, so we will prepare a suggestive package of what the exhibition is about, its content, and maybe its title and so on. We use the market research to test whether we’re on the right track. The visitor numbers and targets here can be quite intimidating. For instance, for this show it’s 200,000 over six months. So, very early on we tested this idea of doing a show about the future without science fiction as we discussed a minute ago. People responded really well to that and that gave us confidence, but it also gave the senior management team confidence in our approach and really brought us a lot of trust and space to develop it as far as we wanted. Once you’ve got an exhibition installed with an interactive component, do you evaluate it in terms of user experience? We are constantly changing, so really once the exhibition is open, we’ll start watching how people interact. If there’s a bottleneck, we might move some labels. We might remove some objects if necessary, and if people are missing things we might introduce new signage. So how long does that period of adaptation last? Probably a month. We have just installed new lighting on the aircraft exhibit to highlight it more, for example. It’s one of those things that is so big and out of your line of sight you tend to miss it. I’d be interested to get your thoughts on whether it’s still helpful to think about museum practices as being about collection, exhibition and then projection, or is the digital in fact breaking down the distinctions between those domains? I think they are still separate—in terms of the way the V&A works internally anyway. Maybe to the visitor, however, those separate categories are not relevant? If you think about what a museum is from a user-experience point of view, what are your touchpoints, what are the reasons for going? We’re trying to apply some more of that thinking in the way we design our offerings as a whole museum. Something we picked up from a presentation from SFMOMA, as part of its rebrand, was that if you’re actually going to make the decision to go to the museum, you need three things. One of them can be a great exhibition and that’s what we’ve focused on, but it also might be a great shop and it might be a great café. Those three things together compel you to visit, or they give you the impetus to go. I think the digital is potentially what links all those experiences together, from the first time you Google the museum onwards. Thinking about the various institutions of the cultural and GLAM sectors, do you see the digital as somehow blurring the boundaries between them? Because we see libraries doing exhibitions now, and we see museums that are archive-like in terms of the way the public can access and use collections, and so on. It’s a really good question and I think it’s a really hard one for us to answer. I think libraries are a good example. At some point they had this crisis of relevance and felt the need to reinvent themselves. In answer to these challenges, they responded with ‘we’re not just books, we’re about information and culture, and the communities and networks of all those things’. Somehow out of staring into the abyss, they managed to make themselves even more relevant than they were. I think that if you ask museum people generally what are you for, why do you exist—you know, those really big, confronting questions—and why do you get all this public money? They will turn around and say, ‘the collection’. Like a librarian saying ‘books’ ten years ago, it’s just not a good enough answer anymore, because collections can be digitised. Objects can be found on eBay. Objects have many

Interview with Rory Hyde

places where you can discover them and that’s key. The thing that we used to cling to and lean on for safety was that we are keepers of national treasures, and that is still a big part of it. But it doesn’t have that civic purpose underpinning it and I think that’s the process that we’re going through now in museums more broadly—that is to ask what is our public role? What is our contribution to society? If it’s not just objects, is it making sense of the world through objects? And how do you foster that sense-making? Is it just through your learning programmes, or your talks series, or can you host and create different kinds of experiences, different kinds of subjectivities and voices to be accessible to a broader public? Returning to your questions about the institutional boundaries, yes absolutely. I think the digital is forcing confrontation with those big questions in a way that might not have been necessary 10 or 15 years ago. WS: Is there a struggle for each institution to maintain distinctiveness and difference? RH: Yes, absolutely. We had a workshop the other day in which we were looking at all the taglines from museums around the world; for instance, the V&A’s is ‘Inspiring, Beautiful, Free’. The other museums are more or less the same—the greatest place for culture and the arts or whatever. You could easily switch them around and it wouldn’t make much difference! One of the things that my previous show, All of This Belongs to You, was really looking at was this idea of the museum as a public space and asking, what is its role in society, and some of those really big tricky questions about the function of a museum today. Again, one of the things that inspired and motivated us were the Victorian origins of this institution. It was the first museum with late opening hours, the first museum with a restaurant and the first museum with gas lighting. That was intended so that working people could come here after their day of toil and improve themselves, improve their lot through exposure to culture and the finest things in the world—which when you say it like that today seems naïve and simplistic. But there’s perhaps some great public ambition there about what it means to be a really democratic public place and a really democratic institution. I am interested in reviving that ideal that the museum is a place for everyone in a different way now. What does it really mean to be inclusive on all those metrics of race and wealth? Because that’s been a traditional failing of museums that they really are generally still, and despite their language of openness, places for the educated and elite. DvL: Museums not only used to disseminate knowledge about design art, science and technology, but also shaped people’s behaviour and conduct in public. Do you think museums are returning to this idea of bringing people together and fostering certain behaviours at a society level? RH: That’s a really good question and we were talking about it this morning with a school group actually, in terms of the observation that the digital is increasing the atomisation of society. To take one example, we’ve just done a study with a polling organisation who asked the British public through their survey platform, if you’re in an empty supermarket do you go to the human who’s scanning your groceries or to the machine? Seventy per cent of people answered that they would go to the machine. If you believe in society, as I do, then you would know that those seemingly meaningless exchanges—of handing over change, talking about the weather, offering your seat up to someone on the bus—they’re the things that make societies work. They’re the things that bind people, and they’re the times where we’re confronted with the other in a way that is what builds civilisation. Many people are working really hard to eliminate those

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kinds of civil exchanges under the name of efficiency, or just because we have the technology—so we can. Of all the things that are scariest for me in the current exhibition—from Facebook aircraft to driverless cars to cryonics—it’s the atomisation of society through automating those seemingly meaningless exchanges. That worries me the most. Museums could respond to this atomisation I think, although we might pretend that there is only a one-to-one relationship between you, the visitor and the art, when actually that relationship is more triangular, and more spatial, between you, the artwork and the other people present. You’re watching them and you’re watching how they react to the same things: you’re aware that you are part of a public again—a big public. You can’t avoid that experience in a museum. I think we need to remember that that’s what we curate and manage. It’s not just about knowledge dissemination as a very technocratic process, but the museum is also a public space and there are few of these today where you’re allowed to just walk in off the street and hang out all day, often for free. And unlike Starbucks or these other so-called ‘third spaces’, you’re not even obliged to buy a coffee. DvL: On that point, what mechanisms do you use to provoke audiences to engage and interact with each other? RH: It’s a tricky question. I mean we wouldn’t be so explicitly hands-on in that sense, but we do use questions, for example, and hope they provoke discussions—or at least raised eyebrows. I find that you can read quite a lot from people without necessarily having to engage them directly, so that’s one way. The other way is through training our gallery assistants, so they’re there to enable those kinds of conversations. They know a lot about this show, and there are experiences which they are hosting, so for instance on the hour they will invite people to sit down in the ‘restaurant for one’ exhibit and tell them about the experience and the restaurant. DvL: We now hope and expect that visitors will interact and communicate with the exhibits and each other, but this is a departure from some years ago when passive spectatorship was the expectation from many curators. RH: I hope we can get away from that sense of the museum being too intimidating, too much of a sacred space where you’re expected to be quiet and reverential. That’s certainly the feeling that you have in different galleries where people tend to speak in whispers. In our space, we’ve got a soundtrack, bright colours, and lots of audio, so hopefully that breaks down some of this reverential feeling that you might have in a museum exhibition. As part of the All of This Belongs to You exhibition, we rewrote some labels, looking at the social purpose of these objects. For example, there’s a 15th-century wall relief of a Madonna from Venice in our medieval and renaissance gallery. She’s there holding her cloak open, sheltering a group of people underneath. The conventional label describes the piece; the school it was derived from, its style, what was happening historically at the time and so on. We rewrote the label as a piece of social design in a way, thinking of the Madonna as a sign above a church, signalling to those who couldn’t read that this was a place of charity, a place of care—come here and we will look after you. We then worked with Muf Architecture/Art, who suggested that although the work had been severed from its context some 200 years ago, this offer of charity still persisted today. They argued that we are obliged to maintain that promise and proposed to turn this gallery into a place of charity. Muf worked with a charity called Women for Women Refugees, who advocate for women refugees’ rights who are in detention and so on. The V&A hosted the refugees’ English language lessons in the gallery and gave them tours of the content and so on to make some social space for them within that gallery. For us, that’s what being 40

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inclusive can look like when reinterpreted through contemporary eyes and historical artefacts. That’s probably one intervention I’m most proud of here. DvL: In response to these big changes in expectations, do you think that future curators and interpreters will require a very different set of skills? RH: I hope the role of the curator is changing. I mean certainly the stereotype of the curator with the door shut, working on their heavy books that they will release every ten years, and never going in to the galleries, never talking to the public—I think that’s changing. The curator’s role is shifting more to one of a public host. You’re expected to speak directly and clearly, and to be a strong communicator and interpreter of your material for a big public. I’ve already given three tours today of the current show!

Notes 1 The future starts here, catalogue. Curators: Rory Hyde and Mariana Pestana, V&A Publishing, 2018, London. 2 Shearing Layers was coined by Frank Duffy and later developed by Stewart Brand, How buildings learn: What happens after they’re built, 1994, Viking Press.

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4 Interview with Keir Winesmith Keir Winesmith, Hannah Lewi and Wally Smith

Tuesday 28 November 2017

Interviewed by Hannah Lewi and Wally Smith At the time of the interview, Keir Winesmith was the Director of Digital Experience at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he founded the museum’s R&D group SFMOMA Lab. Keir Winesmith is currently CTO at Old Ways, New and Professor in Art & Design at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia. Over the last 15 years he has led and collaborated on award-winning digital and cultural projects in Australia, Europe and the US, and in 2018 was named in Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business for his work in this area. With Suse Anderson, he is the co-author of The Digital Future of Museums (Routledge, forthcoming). Thank you for spending some time today reflecting on your experience in thinking about and creating innovative digital media platforms for a number of leading museums in the world. We would be really interested in talking broadly about your time at SFMOMA, and in particular about some lessons learned in the design of the SFMOMA’s recent touring app and audio project that has been associated with the major redevelopment of the museum site.1 KW: Numerically, the touring app has gone well, with well over 100,000 downloads, plus additional on-site device rentals, which is almost another 100,000. Also, the usage is incredible. We’re only measuring people who listen to more than three things on-site, as it’s important to be strict about who we consider a ‘user’. Someone sampling it from home in, say, Japan doesn’t count as a user, as this is an on-site visitation app and very much about your experience in the SFMOMA building. The people who match that criteria, on average, have session lengths above 100 minutes, which is very high for a museum interpretive experience. In our approach, we intentionally moved away from the traditional model of the curatorial voice as one of authority. Instead we’ve gone to a model of particular expertise— HL:

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like a kind of passionate advocate for the artwork itself, the ideas explored and how it fits into the museum space. The model is much more in the style of This American Life2 but delivered as the user walks from space to space, with each new space triggering the next episode of the narrative. In our deep, root-and-branch survey of the San Francisco Bay Area’s arts-interested population, we found some die-hard fans of museum visitation, but to attract and be relevant to a wider audience, and to be sustainable, we need to be able to speak to audiences in a way that’s relevant to them. That is not necessarily using academic authoritative language; it’s really about using passion, expertise and interest. Stephanie Pau, who was the executive producer for all the in-building audio content, was really trying to find people who could passionately speak to why you should look at the artwork and the building. Not to explain it or encroach on the visitor’s ability to understand and interpret it, but to make room for you, as a visitor, to be an expert in your own way, and leave room for you to find things that you didn’t know were there. The curators were totally involved in almost every step of the app development and content; they were providing stories that might work, suggesting people who would be good for those stories, and so on. We approached a diverse set of writers, thinkers, artists, designers, philosophers, comedians and local producers to offer a distinct set of ways into the art, for anyone coming into the museum with some sort of openness. We’re not going to convert people to being more open, so I consider openness a prerequisite for taking up the experience. Many users have found a voice within the app that speaks particularly to them. For example, there is one tour with a couple of comedians who are actually confused by modern and contemporary art but open to learning about it, so they’re very good avatars for the interested but unconvinced visitor. Another voice that really resonates for me is the young German-American radio producer Luisa Beck, who does the tour of the German post-war art collection. She interviews her mum and grandmother about what it was like to grow up during and post-Second World War in Germany and unpacks and explores her German identity and the stories of those two generations through the artwork on the wall. In another tour approach, a philosopher talks about how the eye sees, and how the brain consumes abstract visual imagery. That combination of expertise and close-looking, with your eyes on the art and your telephone in your pocket, is critical to the experience design of the project. We didn’t want to clobber the museum experience. We’re very much about telephone in pocket and eyes up, which is why it’s also so important that the location triggering service works seamlessly (which it hasn’t always). When it does, there are truly moments when it is like someone is holding your hand and telling you a story that you feel is hidden from everyone else and was hidden from you before you visited. HL: Have any of the tours not been so successful? KW: Yes, we have found that when we stray too far from the art, people don’t go with us. For example, one of the tours is a kind of ‘sport meets art’, where we’ve taken the language of sports broadcasting and applied it to the art museum context. I think it’s hilarious, but I’m a sports nerd and an art nerd. The success rate of this tour has been much lower, with the vast majority of people not making it to the end, in contrast to some other tours, which have as much as 85 per cent of people completing the full length—often 25 or 30 minutes. Overall, the reviews for the app have been off-the-charts positive, except for when the location services don’t work. I sometimes liken it to going on a walk with a close friend in

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a new town, who is giving you directions like ‘we’re going to turn left here, we’re going to turn right here’, but they’re also telling you their story of the place. WS: You have a lot of statistics and evaluative data to hand about the SFMOMA app, and I was wondering how important it has been to build in tracking and diagnostics? KW: Yes, we have been using a model of ‘3:18:3’ for our digital projects, which includes three months of testing and evaluating immediately after launch date, then a period of reflection and change after 18 months when you can refresh content or tweak the user experience, and then after three years you should be able to replace the technology. If you can’t fund a cycle of evaluation and alteration, if you can’t fund new content, and if you can’t fund replacement hardware or software after three to four years, then maybe you shouldn’t do the project. And yes, we’re baking analytics into our practice, including every interactive inside SFMOMA, the website—every single thing—from the first day is being measured and tracked. Because without that, mixed with genuine human qualitative evaluation, you won’t know what’s working, and you can’t get better. HL: Can you tell us about one of the tours that is in the local environs of the city? KW: One of the tours is actually out through the city. We start in the building, but then we say, ‘turn around—we’re going to walk outside’, which is odd, but exciting for a museum app. We have found that it really resonates with people, because it’s saying that the story of this building is tied to the story of the city of San Francisco, and we’re going to show you inspirational spaces, share the history of the city, and how it influenced the building project. WS: It strikes me that that the app’s success lies in the simple idea and technological concept of the audio tour that is done very well. But it’s the thinking behind the content and the choice of that content that really resonates. Do you agree with this characterisation? KW: Yes, I think that’s a fair summation. Within all the digital projects we have worked on in the museum we try to achieve a balance of about a third focused on content, a third focused on software and the user experience, and a third on hardware and operations. If you can keep these activities in balance, then I think you stand the best chance of doing a meaningful project. If you’ve only got enough money to build the thing, but not enough money to do proper experience design, and proper content, then it’s going to fail. The other thing, and you picked it up immediately, is there is an intuition in museums that everything is for everybody, which is generous and, in many ways, correct. Anyone should be able to get into the building and it should be accessible to all. However, in my opinion, when it comes to an interpretive project, there is a tendency to make it function like the kitchen sink; it has to work for the visitor planner, the researcher, tours for schools and teachers, and kids and families. Once you’re working for everyone, you’re kind of working for no one. So, we pushed hard internally during the scoping stage on simplifying the feature set. For example, we took out the parking helper system that was requested. By doing this, we aim for greater legibility to visitors, as they absolutely understand the value proposition of the tours; there are two models—guide me or let me guide myself. Within each, you can sync with friends and family to have a social experience, if you choose. I think it also works because the technology came to maturity in the six months before we opened. If SFMOMA had opened a year before, we would not have built this app. And two years from now, I think it will be different again, and the right thing to do will be different than what it was for us in 2016.3 HL: Turning then to your reflections more broadly on current assumptions that pervade the GLAM sector that the digital can ‘do everything’, from drawing out an archive, to providing a searchable database tool, to creating an immersive experience, and to situating 44

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content and so on. Are you suggesting that it is more productive to be much more targeted when conceptualising and designing digital tools? KW: I see that there are two ways that the GLAM sector engages with the uptake of digital. The first is the ‘othering’ of digital, in that it is somehow still considered distinct from the lived experience of the world, by both our audiences and some of our staff. But as we know, the world doesn’t stop when they get to the front door (even if it’s a beautiful old front door). All the Instagram alerts, text messages and emails follow you into the building. Given the technological transformational context of people’s lives, I think the othering of the digital is anachronistic. At the other end of the spectrum, the second response is the fetishising of the digital as the solution to a set of diverse problems, and this is also problematic—although a more nuanced and contemporary issue. And one I think will go away. We will, I predict, see an end to dedicated ‘digital officers’ and targeted funding exclusively for digital development in ten years. I’m also predicting that the best museums, galleries, libraries and archives who are embracing digital are going to approach it in a way that is much more like water: something that everyone is drinking and part of normal practice, and not something that’s delicious and shiny to add on at the end. I think in many ways, it’s fewer digital products and more digital practice that will leave a lasting impact on the cultural sector, in that digital can offer something more fundamental to cultural memory than shiny products and projects can. WS: Can you elaborate on these cycles of production? KW: The GLAM sector is very good at thinking and working on what I call ‘object time’; think of a 200-year-old object where a conservator is making a choice today about how it is displayed to ensure it’s going to last 1,000 more years. If you’re in a city history museum, you might be operating on the 10–20-year horizon. If you’re a modern or contemporary art institution, you might be on a 20–100-year horizon. If you’re the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, you’re operating on a multi-thousand-year horizon. Your ‘object time’ is very broad in both directions. Then there is ‘exhibition time’, which is 18 months to five years of planning, with some exhibitions ten years in planning. And the exhibition might only run for three to four months. Some works are displayed for longer in permanent collections; however, they are still only ever on show for limited periods. Then there’s the scariest of all time scales in the GLAM sector, ‘strategic initiative’ time, which is the humorous mimetic version of museum time, where people roll their eyes! When you think of a strategic plan for a new building that is years in the planning, and years in the making and then years afterward as you adjust to the new normal. The concept that’s new, and the one that we need to respond to and the idea that resonates with this book is ‘digital time’; that is a mixture of real-time responses to visitor actions, social media, press and problems as they arise, and the life of technologies we’ve developed and deployed. At the moment, most GLAM organisations applied the exhibition and strategic initiative timescales and models straight onto digital, and I think that’s actually a failure of the sector. What I hope we’re going to see more of is the introduction of strategically short runs for some experimental digital projects: projects that teach us something, and then we either decide to drop them or consider operationalising them. Something that SFMOMA learned from Silicon Valley is how to adopt their R&D process. We created an R&D lab within the museum that’s simply a loose confederacy of people who want to work at that inventive and responsive tempo. I hope we’ll see this in 45

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the next decade as normal behaviour. However, we’ll also need to see changes in granting and funding behaviours to make room for this way of working—especially for small to medium institutions. HL: In asking the GLAM sector to invest more in experimentation and risk-taking, isn’t their agency and authority on the line? KW: Yes. I think it’s a matter of trust. In the US, the vast majority of public institutions have less than 50 per cent trust from Americans. Libraries and museums, though, are well above 50 per cent in terms of the trust of the general public. GLAM-sector institutions need to handle that trust with great care, because trust is an easy thing to lose. However, that can lead to conservative behaviours, as we’re very nervous about anything that could negatively affect the perception of our audiences and the funding we attract. However, I think that trust is worth spending. If you’re honest with your community, you can take a stance about something that is important to your community. You don’t need to do everything perfectly as long as you’re transparent about it. We might put something out and say, ‘this is a part of an experiment, we don’t know if it’s going to work, but we want to understand from you, our audience, if this resonates with you’. That generates trust too, and audiences feel that agency and the sense that the museum is relevant to them, because it’s trusting them to give important feedback. WS: Do you think that the digital is playing a role in redrawing of institutional boundaries in the GLAM sector? KW: I’m not convinced those boundaries are being redrawn now. However, I agree that they should be. I think there’s an enormous amount that visitation/audience-focused institutions (galleries and museums) can learn from use-focused institutions (libraries and archives). Interestingly, I see a shared way in which museums (and heritage) are using the same language as prisons and hospitals, by referring to ‘visitors’ not ‘users’. HL: This is architecturally, of course, where the museum came from in the 19th century really, as the museum and the prison often shared the same typological plan. KW: Yes, there’s a language of protection there, that we don’t trust the public with these objects, as they are our history. However, I am seeing an appetite for change from midlevel museum workers, who are often the glue between institutions, and are more likely to work across different sectors. There’s a transferrable skill when you start to see people move more fluidly between the ‘G’, ‘L’, ‘A’ and ‘M’ (and actually the ‘P’ of park as well). I think there is an appetite; however, we maybe more like a decade away from a real confidence in blending these types of institutions. There are some institutions that are blended from the outset—encyclopaedic institutions in smaller geographies with smaller communities that just do everything because they have to. Cases of museums genuinely learning from libraries about user service models for their various systems, I believe that is further away than I would hope it to be. It would be interesting to see libraries and archives push further out into a participation model and try to draw galleries and libraries with them. Twenty years from now, unquestionably, all the successful institutions will have more progress in terms of participation. The ones that will be left behind are those that hold fast to this prison-like metaphor of visitation, in which audiences need to be kept at arm’s length. I also believe that many of the cultural institutions we need for society in the future do not exist yet. HL: I am interested in teasing out a bit more the relationships between the physical institution and the digital institution and digital practices. For example, if there is a major renovation

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of a museum, as there was at SFMOMA, does that necessarily mean a remake of the digital identity as well? KW: One of the things that attracted me to the project, as described by SFMOMA’s Chief Content Officer Chad Coerver, was the opportunity to work with a team of super-smart and really dedicated folk on presenting our digital self first, and for it to be emblematic of the institution we wanted to become. The decision to rebuild the institution—the shape and size, the façade and the galleries—had been done but the practical application of the visitor experience, the flow into the galleries, and the stories we would tell, that work had just begun. Also, being able to close the museum for a lengthy period left room for wonderful crossfunctional teams to excel. There was the visitor experience group, which had members from all across the organisation, to really think holistically about the visitor experience and how that would affect the brand and the visual identity, and the language we used, from the home page on the website right through to the design on the elevators. We didn’t outsource any of the thinking about the digital and we worked closely with those cross-functional teams. The new digital presence was launched nine months before the museum opened its doors, and the vast majority of people who came to the museum had had a digital-first experience. I think many institutions that are rebranding while keeping the trains running at the same time can struggle to get mental space to really interrogate what they’re doing. To generalise, I certainly don’t think the digital should be leading rebranding, I don’t think it should be leading how we define what an organisation is, but it needs to have a seat at the table, and it needs to be considered in that 360-degree view of what you’re about. I think what is more problematic than people leaving the digital out is actually leaving the audience out of that thinking, being too inwardly focused and too departmental, in how you define or redefine yourself. To maintain a connection to our communities, the best investment we can make is to actually understand our audience and their motivations, and our non-audience, and understand which bit of our non-audience would be open to engaging with us in some way, even if that’s purely digital or purely social. HL: I’m interested in the way that some museums are built with a very striking spatial and curatorial ordering (like the Guggenheim New York), and how influential that is when designing new digital apps and so on. KW: It’s interesting you bring up the Guggenheim, as they have taken the approach with their app to function as a search or browse tool, yet the spiral building dictates a linear experience from top to bottom. We’re lucky at SFMOMA because there’s a pretty consistent floor plan that is very legible. Institutions that have grown over 100 years adding new wings, or buildings, or places that started as a historic house, are often seeing digital as a solution to difficult spatial architecture and wayfinding. Apps made for wayfinding as a primary function almost always fail. (I’ve built one, so I speak from experience there!) WS: You mentioned about having that team of different experts and skills in a project. I just want to ask you a bit more about the collaborations behind successful projects generally. Looking from outside, there seems to be a constantly evolving new set of job roles, skills and titles like the content strategist and so on. If that’s right, how does someone plan their career if they want to work in the space? How do institutions manage the fluid mix of skills that are needed? 47

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KW:

WS:

KW:

WS:

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That’s really tricky. More than anything, a diverse set of experiences and successful projects that offer a constellation of knowledge and skills are in many ways the most valuable things you can bring into an organisation. Technical competencies can be learned, but the practical application of them on a dayto-day basis is something that you need to perfect. A diverse interest in design, digital and your audience is key. However, I am not in any position, and I don’t trust anyone else who says they are, to judge and gauge what practice is going to look like in 20 years from now. If you’re just entering school and you want to work in digital culture in ten years from now, I can only encourage you to be curious and omnivorous because we don’t actually know what you’ll need. We really enjoyed the article that you wrote on institutional philosophies in online collections, and there is a quote from Peter Gorgels of the Rijksmuseum, where he talks about ‘culture-snackers’ and compares them. Just extending that, do you think digital projects are creating new opportunities to identify new kinds of users with different expectations (Gorgels, 2013)? It’s not creating them, they exist, but it’s reaching them when we weren’t before. One of our projects that has been incredibly successful is ‘Send Me SFMOMA’. This is a textbased service, where you SMS the collection and say ‘send me a landscape’, ‘send me a hamburger’, ‘send me an emoji of kisses’ or ‘send me something blue’. Over the last ten years, we have been tagging our collections with quite vernacular tags. More recently, we added colours and connected the collection management system to a digital management system that is accessible via an API. We wanted to create something that has no barriers in terms of access, but also something that encourages unexpected results beyond just famous white male artists that everyone knows. Creative Technologist Jay Mollica decided to go with SMS, and in a few days of development, he had a pilot to test the idea. As we had all the infrastructure in place, it meant that someone in our team who had a really good idea could execute it in a short period. It has been incredibly popular, so popular it got blacklisted by the carriers as spam—art spam. We then added some functionality and a few hundred more emojis because they were clearly popular with people and, when we relaunched it with a registered sort code, it went viral. It’s received 4.5 million text messages this summer, which is incredible. It’s giving the ‘culture-snacker’ a way of connecting with art in their life. People are discovering art they’ve never seen before, because we’re surfacing the rest of the collection that’s not currently on view. People drop in and out of it, and we’re seeing patterns of binge user behaviour. On average, people are sending 20 SMSs to us, which is enormous, but they’re doing it episodically over a number of weeks. In that same article, another interesting thing that struck me was the way you talked about how digital technologies become metaphors for the way people talked about non-digital things. You talked about, for example, Aaron Cope of the Cooper Hewitt Museum, talking about the database. Also, within the Rijksmuseum they have found that Pinterest and Flickr are their natural digital metaphors to resonate with. In light of these observations, do you think these digital technologies are providing new metaphors for the way to think about the old practices? Yes. What I was trying to argue is that the digital manifests institutional philosophy in all the ways that the digital is presented to the public, including something as normal as online collections, the visit planning page, or the ticket purchase page. In the institutions that are really doing this work well, they are manifestations of their inbuilt biases, focuses

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and priorities. If you’ve got an organisation that is say bilingual, then your online collection is going to look and feel very different to that of an institution that only has historical artefacts, or one with only work by living creators. There can be a sense of normalising what GLAM institutions are doing; it’s like saying ‘everyone should have an app’ and they’re all kind of the same. Those that are doing the digital well are expressing a unique understanding of their mission and audiences in every single decision and activity, including their online collection presence. For example, at SFMOMA, our online collection is 100 per cent about big delicious photos of the artwork. When you go to any page, you can zoom in right down to the brushstrokes and actually look at it closer than with the human eye in the gallery. Then we say okay, here’s the metadata and the stories and so on. But the first thing we want you to do is just fall in love with the power of the object. We wanted to lead with that over everything else, whereas Cooper Hewitt leads with the database, which I think is cool, but it’s not us. WS: It was a very interesting article on digital strategies and how they are manifest. Related to that, many of the things that you’ve written about, say through the widespread use of APIs now, and SMS access, is that galleries are expected to almost give things away now that were once held privately by each institution. Are there dangers in this democratisation going forward? Do up-and-coming artists have any fears, for example, like in the music industry and the way the digital has fundamentally changed access? KW: I think there’s two points in there. I actually don’t believe the openness and transparency is an unalloyed good in all cases. In many cases, institutions are ‘giving it all away’ but in a way that is not necessarily connected to the context and the history of the institution. It can be more like an illegible dump—just putting up all your collection metadata on the internet without anything wrapped around it to contextualise it. It’s the digital equivalent of taking your files and dumping them in the street or grabbing polaroids and throwing them in the park. Sure, people can find them, and it is open, but unless you know where to look, and unless you know how to look, it’s still actually excluding people who don’t have this weird mix of say art history knowledge and a programming degree, or the ability to process spreadsheets. I’m absolutely in favour of openness but I think we take an open-first approach at our peril, and we should be taking instead a use-first, context-second and openness-third approach. Unless we’re using it institutionally, why on earth would someone else want it in a big file dump? We should be providing that context and taking that and making it open; that’s genuinely democratic. Some institutions are doing that and they’re amazing and I hold them in the highest regard, but many aren’t. I think of other systems of extraction like hackathons, and unpaid internships, with the expectations that ‘I’m giving you exposure therefore you’re going to work for free’. I would argue against an extractive model for this sort of work, unless it’s benefiting the original creator, the community, new practitioners, designers, historians, theorists, artists or programmers. HL: We are just about out of time, but I was interested in what you have said at the MuseumNext in Melbourne in 2017 about your observations that your audiences were interested in expertise and learning something.4 And that the allure of purely social media functions is dissipating? This is really interesting, and in the context of this book, as we have heard the mantra for some time that we’ve got to encourage the community to speak, and that people are interested in listening to each other. 49

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I think people are overwhelmed by this firehose of information and content that is constantly available online. Going to memory institutions is a way of seeing the work that has been collected and curated and presented in a thoughtful way. That doesn’t reduce their want to make a response to that creativity, as people love to create in that environment and see that creation reflected back through their communities. They like to draw, they like to take and share photos and love to tell stories. I think one of the best things about going to a museum is going with friends and having discussions, taking a photo of the thing that you’ve just fallen in love with. However, people have less and less appetite for other people’s creative output. There’s so much creative material being generated that you need to have some sort of filtering mechanism to not just drown. The most common filtering mechanism is ‘people I like’ and ‘people who think like me’, which is a premise of social media. But if you’re going to trust someone—and we go back to trust again—if you’re going to trust someone you don’t know to make aesthetic decisions on your behalf, ultimately you are paying with your investment of time to receive an experience that has been designed for you. However, we have found that people are not necessarily interested in the creative output of strangers in the museum context. We definitely want to continue to feed social media habits. We have no problem with people promoting our institution, and it can be definitely generous, playful and fun, but it doesn’t change the visit in a fundamental way. HL: Finally, I want to come back to this idea of digital storytelling, as a key motivation in the SFMOMA app. What was the process of arriving at that creative decision? Is it from listening to what the audience might want, or is it coming from knowledge of the collection, or from the fact that it’s in Silicon Valley and people are pretty fed up with a lot of tech-savvy experiences and want something that’s quite tangible and real? KW: It’s a constellation of factors. In Northern California there are, more than anything else, people looking for an information-rich and compelling story. At SFMOMA, we want to do some of that in digital form, because there were things we wanted to say, and ways we want to say it that were just simply not possible in printed words on the walls. We thought, as a team, really broadly about what our voice would be and about it being welcoming. So, with the app, and a book SFMOMA 360° published in 2016 (Bloch & Stein, 2016), we drew from a community of poets, artists, philosophers, performers, writers and curators, all writing about the work they love. They’re writing anecdotally and really personally, even the curators are writing personally. The interpretive narratives are drawn from a bunch of different places and different people. There are playful things in the museum, things you can make, such as a digital photogram, where you can make your own portrait in the style of old photogram using the things that are already in your pocket. Then there’s the wall labels that I think are really well written, really open in their interpretation, not closed, and not didactic. Also, in the text on the website, which is hopefully making room for you to engage with the museum and the work immediately. I think that’s one of the reasons SFMOMA is being looked at by other institutions, and it’s not because we are displaying novel technology in Silicon Valley, as we’ve seen technology has a short shelf life and is often superseded or simply disappears. It is because we have a really compelling set of stories that anyone can find themselves within, that we’ve developed through an experimental, iterative and collaborative approach. What I’m encouraging is an openness to trying new things, and for every institution, that’s going to mean a different set of concerns. I’m excited to be a GLAM visitor in the KW:

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Figure 4.1 SFMOMA Touring App. Source: Photo by Emily Robbins; image courtesy SFMOMA.

future—some 10–20 years from now—that’s the world I want to live in. Too many times I’m annoyed, frustrated, talked down to or disappointed when visiting a cultural institution. That is what makes me want to be part of change in the GLAM sector.

Notes 1 SFMOMA tours available at www.sfmoma.org/app/. 2 This American Life available at www.thisamericanlife.org/. 3 Five months after this interview, the app platform used by SFMOMA was acquired and decommissioned. The SFMOMA app is no longer available to download. 4 www.museumnext.com/conference_history/melbourne/.

References Bailey Hogarty, S., Winesmith, K., Hrudka, M. & Schechter, B. (2015). Art + Data: Building the SFMOMA collection API. In Museums and the Web 2015. Retrieved from https://mw2015.museum sandtheweb.com/paper/art-data-building-the-sfmoma-collection-api/. Bloch, J. & Stein, S. (Eds.). (2016). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 360°: Views of the Collection. San Francisco: SFMOMA. Gorgels, P. (2013). Rijksstudio: Make your own masterpiece! In N. Procter & R. Cherry (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2013. Retrieved from https://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/. Winesmith, K. & Grant, F. How do institutional philosophies manifest in online collections? Retrieved from www.sfmoma.org/read/how-do-institutional-philosophies-manifest-online-collections/.

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Part I

The emerging global digital GLAM sector

5 Theorising heritage collection digitisations in global computational infrastructures Fiona R. Cameron

Introduction Digitisations (commonly described as digital copies of heritage collections) are viewed as immaterial, informational replicants of their parent, the ‘real object’, and as networked human and machine subjectivities. Here, connecting people and sharing information of the real via the digitisation continues to be the primary concern. The value of the digitisation settles on their role as forms of cultural communication alongside their potential to promote the radical democratisation of institutions in regard to access to and engagement with their collections. Accordingly, users are conceived as autonomous human actors within a global infosphere. While material heritage is founded on an artefactual notion of identity, the digitisation is founded on an informational one (Owens, 2018, pp. 13–17). The digitisation as an ‘informational object’ attempts to carry the cultural information and aesthetic impression of its parent, although how accurately it does so is a question of much debate. The digitisation is also classified as informational in a software sense. Within the immaterial and informational discourses occasioned by computer code to which the digitisation is attenuated, materiality is rendered less important or indeed irrelevant because it is put to work to authenticate its parent not itself. Put simply, the digitisation is informational, the material object is its parent and the information of the parent is encoded into the digital. To this end, the digitisation is subject to and judged based on a relation of sameness—in respect to how well or accurately it simulates its parent, the physical object, and what it lacks in terms of its physical characteristics and aura, that is, its history and connections with people and events in the past.

Breaking the material, immaterial binary: the first theoretical move Since 2005, I have sought through my research and writing to break the material/immaterial binary and cast the digitisation as a non-identical thing through a series of conceptual moves.

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In 2007, I argued for rethinking the digitisation, using Michelangelo’s David and the digital version, by lending equal weight to digital materiality as the first step in redefining the place and value of digitisations within institutional settings: There is … a need to move away from formalist notions of technology and materiality, the original and authentic, and the desire to make digital objects fit into the rubric of replicant … the digital historical object should no longer be understood as a terrorist. By understanding its modality and materiality these discussions clearly pose new roles for the digital historical object beyond its role as servant to the ‘real’. (Cameron, 2007, p. 89) While taking the materialities and the differing ways the analogue and digital were crafted seriously, the narrative I progressed in 2007 framed a humanist account of the relations between the digitisation and its ‘real parent’ by focusing on the human–technical, thereby foregrounding human actants and their processes of production including that of the computational. While gesturing towards the sequential and iterative processes by which their respective making was performed, both narratives restricted the coordinates and ecologics of each to their respective materials as marble; the act of sculpting; computational operations and code; human intent; labour and subjectivities. Here, the explication of the digitisation’s materiality and auric capacities was a way of describing their ‘essence’ as an antithesis to discourses of immateriality. Importantly, digital historical replicants (digitisations) can be viewed as objects in their own right through consideration of their processes of production; they can play to notions of polysemy, the experiential and the sensual (Cameron, 2007). Further, I considered the different affectual tone of the digital and analogue as a way of demarcating their non-identical nature as an entry point to consider the alternative uses of digitisations as representational, as presence, as affect, as experience and as value in a museum context. I demonstrated how the materiality of the ‘real’ and the digitisation are different in essence and composition; the former analogue made of continuous data from one point to another as well as discrete data, whereas the latter comprised at its most fundamental level digital codes, with each thing exhibiting their own unique processes of production. I also made a case for digitisations to be considered as different, albeit related, things in respect to their ‘real parent’, where difference was based on their respective materialities, processes of production and notions of authenticity. The digitisation does not lead to the impoverishment of its original—rather, it is and does something different, but also carries some of the information and affectual responses invoked by its parent. By reworking the digitisation in material terms, I sought to unravel the fear-based disregard of the so-called replicant and its charge as an imposter circulating at the time. From this position, it was clear that digital cultural heritage objects as digital reproductions are a new type of thing (Cameron, 2007). They have their own history; each are unique in their technical and processual characteristics and they embody a different type of computational aesthetic and individuated politics. While digital historical collections shared some of the attributes and responses invoked by the real parent, they were not identical in respect to authorship, provenance, materiality, their objecthood and aura. These narratives still upheld a hierarchy of materials—marble, as opposed to digital code—thereby situating the digitisation and indeed the born digital ‘object’ further down the value chain. In contrast to the digitisation that is viewed as immaterial, physical objects were also seen as having an inherent material essence that resided within them. Accordingly, the digitisation also remediates representation as dialogical and polymorphous through their distribution (Cameron, 2008, pp. 229–243). 56

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The parent and the digitisation as related, overlapping, non-identical assemblages: the second theoretical move More recently, I reframed digitisations differently, viewing them as things in themselves: as related, overlapping, emergent and non-identical assemblages in respect to the ‘real parent’ (Cameron & Mengler, 2015, pp. 69–70). Here, I shift the interpretation of the digitisation from a sole focus on their technicity and semiotic meanings and the study of their effects on the human subject to their repurposing in broader ecologies and heritage contexts. My first task in the conceptual reworking of digitisations was to extend the array of coordinates that constituted each. In a series of articles and the co-authored chapter ‘Transvisuality, Geopolitics and Cultural Heritage in Global Flows: The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict and the Death of the Virtual Terrorist’, and through working with two Palestinian objects and their digitisations—a British Mandate coin and a thob abu qutbeh wedding dress—I finally laid to rest debates about the virtual as inferior, suspect and irruptive and called for the release of the virtual as a terror suspect (Cameron & Mengler, 2015, pp. 59–72). I worked with alterity here as an analytic to pull apart discourses of simulation by ascertaining the relational contrasts between the thob and the coin. I founded my argument on a deeper consideration of similarity and difference not only in terms of substance and affect, as I had some in previous work, but also through framing the digitisation and its parent as a broader range of human, non-human, inhuman and more-than-human coordinates, and rethought as processes in relational, agential terms. Here I restored material attention to the digitisation through a different relational, multiagential, compositional and affordance lens. Rather than thinking of the thob and the coin as ‘dead things’ or concrete stable entities, as the copy and the original, or solely in terms of bits, computer code, processes, platforms and algorithms or respectively physical matter such as marble, I instead argued they each become enlivened, vibrant, mobile, heterogeneous assemblages as mixtures of different types of content, processes and materialities (Cameron & Mengler, 2015, pp. 68–71). The respective assemblages of the thob and its digitisation comprise all manner of human and nonhuman elements and organic and non-organic matter. These coordinates include bronze; cotton; soil; silk worms; cotton plants; threads; people; digital code; digital cameras; algorithms; interfaces; elemental forces such as rare earth minerals; silicon and carbon; the Israeli– Palestinian conflict; ideology; religious and spiritual phenomenon; aesthetic values; heritage values; laws; social practices; technologies; political and personal views such as emotional links to homeland; land; women’s culture; marriage; love and happiness; the skill and beauty of the handmade stitch and others that may not be perceivable (Cameron & Mengler, 2015, pp. 68–69). These all comprise power relations, agential, machinic and human subjection that are heavily trafficked across the assemblage. Accordingly, digitisations and their so-called real parent also invoke a different sensing of things. The digital thob and the ‘real’ thob also embody different experiences; for example, the latter provides a tactile experience of the fabric and the stitching of the motifs whereas the former emerges through a graphical interface, through computational processes in which the visual, mutable and interactive rather than the tactile is foregrounded. Conversely, the items may invoke identical affects such as belonging to territory and fear of cultural appropriation. In this sense they are at once non-identical but at the same time overlap, sharing some of their affordances such as in the ways humans read them as representational in the invocation of territory and homeland.

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Further, the digitisation invokes different modes of experiencing and perceiving things, which is also enabled through interaction, immersion and haptic experiences (Cameron, 2007, p. 89; van der Akker & Legéne, 2017, p. 8). In respect to degradation, the breaking down of fabric is a qualitatively different process to the degradation of the digitisation through bit rot. The aesthetics are different but also overlap, due to the superficial charm the digitisation shares with its ‘real parent’. Digitisations are coupled to their material parent through their semblance, but they and indeed other copies rarely if ever are the same as each other; they appear on different platforms, browsers, monitors and according to different resolutions (Allison, et al., 2005, p. 366; Hamid, 2009, p. 2554). Normative practices invoked by the parent–copy relationship based on information theory overlook the digitisation as a thing in itself with its own coordinates and interdependencies. So here I instigated a shift in thinking of the digitisation as information to materiality, and then as a multi-agential and distributed assemblage. In doing so, I decentred human agency and opened the digitisation to the full range of material, human and more-thanhuman agencies as exogenous and endogenous to itself. The notion of objecthood operates according to the assumption that things function on the basis of the spatial and temporal boundaries of any given object. But here, digitisations become processes—they look like objects, but are reframed as assemblages. They appear as objects because their becoming proceeds at a speed above the threshold of human discernment and indeed through internal machinic processes that may not be known, or at the very least be discernible, to humans. While digitisations appear as stable things on the screen, they are already evidentially born of manipulation—the writing of codes, algorithms, pixels and electromagnetic fields—and therefore are discerningly emergent. The same can be said for the ‘real’ thob. Its becoming proceeds at a slower rate because of its solidity, at a threshold below human discernment through a different set of complex agentic processes as its making and its unmaking, its degradation. Both the real and digitisation become processual and continuous as different temporalities and modalities. Here the digitisation and ‘real parent’ become, respectively, the radical interrelatedness and gathering of diverse actants (Cameron, 2014, pp. 208–226; Cameron & Mengler, 2015). Each of the components within these respective assemblages are themselves composites of things that have their own properties and expressive forms, agencies and capacities to affect and be affected within their unique fields of dynamical relations as they come together in various combinations, interact, compete, emerge and dissipate (Cameron, 2010, pp. 112–129, 2014). The digital and the analogue as things are put into motion as assemblages in which new object, thob and coin assemblages are continually modified, made and remade through the insertion of new and at times competing actants such as the subjectivities of Palestinian and Israeli curators or through algorithmic processes (Cameron, 2010, pp. 112–129). The so-called discrete analogue and continuous digital distinction is unravelled, and at the same time folded together in new ways. This new concept treats the digitisation and the real parent as relational. Accordingly, our experience of reality is neither analogue nor digital, virtual nor real, rather it embraces all these things. Inserting the thob and the coin into a more-than-human framework, disrupts the sole focus on the social constructivist informational framework to which it is attenuated. The informational and representational therefore become just one type of actant in the case of curatorial authorship—or actants if invoked by the multiple subjectivities of the human. Through this process, I disrupt the archetypical informational rendering of the digitisation and rework it as encompassing different conceptual, material practices and affectual registers. I shift the interpretation of the digitisations from a sole focus 58

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on their technicity and semiotic meanings and the study of their effects in their engagement with the human subject. Significantly, here I set the digitisation free from the material binary of the object and of substances, and also release it from the obsessive formalist grammar in which it is thought about. Finally, the digitisation is liberated from parental control and its narcissistic projections. In considering the digital and the thob and coin as compositions of different types of content, the digitisation becomes a different gathering of actants, with a different history and materiality in which new connections are created beyond that of their specific technicity (Cameron & Mengler, 2015). The digital and the analogue are entangled with each other through sharing some of their components, relations and effects as opposed to the uneven demarcations between the superior real and the inferior dematerialised virtual that lacked many of the attributes of the real (Cameron & Mengler, 2015, pp. 68–70). The means by which the virtual or the digitisation in this case is posed as inferior—as merely the carrier of meaning of the parent and as code/information, processed through algorithms—is disrupted as we move from a focus on substance to polysemy, to content, to relations, processes and effects. The conceptualisation of heritage objects and digital heritage objects as entangled relations and interactions, as pluri-modal transvisual experiences, as polysemic heritage representational systems and as non-representational dynamic processes signals the demise of the virtual terrorist. Therefore, the virtual terrorist is technically and metaphorically dead. Further, digitisations and indeed their material parent are no longer thought of as static, completed entities.

Digitisations as ecological compositions in global computational infrastructures: the third theoretical move Currently millions of collections of digitisations and three-dimensional visualisations of heritage objects and sites inhabit and circulate in global computational infrastructures. These images are produced through local, national and regional digitisation initiatives and through databases available on search engines. They are shared through social media and more recently bolstered by Google Cultural Institute’s global digitisation push and can be accessed through all manner of smart devices. My third conceptual move is to consider the digitisation more deeply as a new type of ecological composition within multiple, multi-scalar planetary computational infrastructures. Theorising the relations between the digitisation and its real parent based on their similarities and differences does not address the more complex roles and agencies digitisations play in global computational infrastructures. While strong relationships are still apparent between the physical object and the digitisation as related through some of their informational qualities and affects in terms of human aesthetics and their politics on the internet, they also become radically different things. Technological development and change; the expansion of the digital economy and technological capitalism; new types of digital platforms and media types such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest; video games, mobile applications; the messiness of global computational infrastructure; the rise of automation and algorithmic governance; different types of mobile devices; cloud computing, multiple internets; the destructive forces of media waste; the mining of rare earth minerals; the advent of climate change and the Technosphere positions and draws digitisations into vaster, deeper and more complex ecologies of life itself. 59

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Consequently, an ever-expanding range of coordinates and subjects enter the field of things we call digitisations beyond our immediate concerns in regard to code, bit streams, platforms, file formats, media, the interface and human subjectivities and will continue to do so. Thus, digitisations can no longer be considered singular bounded images even if they appear to be so. They appear on screens across multiple locations simultaneously and comprise extended multiple ancestor and descendant iterations through which they become open to and take part in the world. Therefore, I advance complex ecological understandings of them as multiple, messy, multi-scaled ecological compositions made up of heterogeneous coordinates, forces and agencies with effects that are at once complex, emergent and multivalent. Here, digitisations and their coordinates are embedded, extended and distributed, interpenetrating human and non-human life itself from deep time through the geological and material substrates in which the raw minerals used in the making of hardware are embedded to the exploitative labour practices and global supply chains from which they are made and remade. To do this, I theorise the digitisation further, proposing ‘thingness’ to account for the multifarious coordinates that comprise them and their radical interoperability as a new compositional logic in contrast to prevailing object-centred ways of thinking and my previous attunement to assemblage (Cameron, 2018). I draw on French philosopher Etienne Souriau’s concept of ‘thingness’ as a mode of existence that can account for both psychisms (ideas of things, extraordinary, unexpected occurrences or the appearance of things perceptible by the senses) as well as for realisms (substances, infrastructures and materialities) to describe the special cosmos of physical and practical experience (see Latour, 2011, p. 32). Thingness as a lexicon works against solid objects and bounded things. I use thingness to extend the digitisation’s coordinates beyond conventions of materiality and code to include ideas, the experiential, the presence of more-than-human and non-human things and cognitive processes, the appearance of unexpected events and so forth. It opens a space to also consider diverse ontological renderings of digital data—machinic, cultural, discursive and other-than-human—as a lever for describing how digitisations emerge as a result of the radical interoperability of their coordinates across scalar, temporal, geographical and technical domains. The digitisation as thingness and its gatherings as temporo-socio-materio-politicotechnico compositions operate as a lively federation of coordinates, as entangled and multifarious temporalities, spatialities and intra-active entities and their affordances, as emergent compositions constantly forming and reforming. Here the coordinates that comprise digitisations are not just networks of discrete things, of digital code, graphical interfaces, file formats, computers and discursive, disciplinary perspectives. My notion of thingness is post-relational, that is, it incorporates different types of relatedness and embodied vitalities generated by digitisations’ interoperability. Thingness operates as the conation of the agencies of human, more-than-human, more-than-machinic and non-human bodies, and the vitality of organic and inorganic elements and technologies. Intensities gathering around the digitisation as its thingness include algorithms, electromagnetic fields, media elements, bit streams, images, shapes and behaviours represented as collections of discrete samples (pixels, polygons, voxels, characters and scripts) assembling into larger scale things through database logics and transactional metadata interactions, computer graphical user interfaces and platforms and through automation dynamically generated by user defined queries, pre-programmed interactions and software agents. The interactions with digital devices and computational processes that enable the digitisation to appear comprises the entanglement of calculable and predictive entities such sensors, robots, algorithmic 60

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automations, internet domains, cables, data centres and server farms, organic nervous systems and electronic circuits, between storable data, rare earth minerals that conduct electricity devices such as computers and smart phones. The radical interoperability of all these things enable the digitisation to become machine and human readable. At the same time these processes are folded into heritage categorisations, cultural perspectives and so forth. They also become entangled with the subjectivities of the thob, for example, as a living tradition worn by women in villages and refugee camps; as a national symbol, a marker of identity, social class, marital status and origin. Here the digitisation and the thob and coin illustrate the nonlinear experience of human thought, memory and history as a jostling of enunciations from struggles over land, for example, to the fear of algorithmic mutability—that is, the fear that digitisations will go viral, that they might be hijacked by bots and indeed Israeli interests through global computational infrastructures. All these things are coordinates unique to each digitisation; they act as a dynamic composition-in-itself in which subjectivities and the cultural, political and aesthetic cues, fears and concerns that drive them are at times indistinguishable from those gathering around their parent. Thingness is a post-object concept (Cameron, 2018) because digitisations are unique, and emergent consequences of the conation of a series of different types of coordinates and affordances that represent their unique materialities, discourses, meanings, aesthetics, politics, technicities and bodies, including the enunciations of curators and users that operate across scales. Further to this, these ecological compositions bring about multifarious overlapping effects, that is machinic, economic, informational, political, discursive, material, aesthetic and sensorial, to name a few—some of which are frictitious, simultaneously productive and destructive but are more often unpredictable until they unfold. Thingness also acknowledges digitisations as diverse modes of existence that incorporate a wider range of culturally inflected coordinates and meanings as in the case of digitisations of Māori material culture (taonga—treasured possessions) or Malagan funerary masks originating from New Ireland Province in Papua New Guinea as embodiments of their ancestors (PNG Malagan masks, 2012; also see Frey, 2012). Herein and through thingness it is difficult to categorise the digitisation’sunique coordinates as either distinctly human conceptual or ideational, technological, biological or mineral, for example, because they are radically interoperable as sprawling webs of force-fields, in which none have an independent existence and therefore cannot be extracted into discrete things or objects. The use of thingness progresses a renewed consideration of the coordinates hidden from view or rendered discursively invisible such as computational cognition. My thingness concept and its application to digitisations most importantly acknowledges them as programmable things; it captures their multiple dispersed and non-identical character, extended provenance and multiple locational politics and at the same time their heterogeneous interdependent coordinates, multiple networked modalities, their emergence as multivalent compositions, their transmedial, non-linear character, and their changing forms and combinations. Digitisations, especially those that reside on the internet, lack any inherent framing and are so dispersed, non-identical and dynamic they can no longer be thought of as a coherent object or a thing even though they might appear that way on an interface. Importantly, digitisations have both a human aesthetic and a deep learning aesthetic. The image of the thob and the coin as digital, operational images inflects a human aesthetic—an appreciation of the beauty of the handmade stitch, for example, or the vibrancy of the thob’s colours. Accordingly, digitisations are judged on the degree they resemble the human aesthetic of its real parent. On the other hand, the thob digitisation reflects the operations behind it as its own automated aesthetics, a result of its machine capacities comprising a deep 61

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network of neural layers. Here an aesthetic emerges of what data does—a neural aesthetics of computational processes that is not human. Digitisations appear as images but emerge as a result of processes that are deeply entwined within their neural, machinic ecologies. The image as an automation has an inherent ability to exert forces not only on itself but also on humans, as illustrated in discussions around the meaning and significance of the thob. Code for example is not a simple and predetermined set of logical instructions as might appear on a computer screen; rather, it is performative and continually produced within computational processes, in what media theorist Luciana Parisi (2011) calls an operative mode of thinking. Strikingly, digitisations as thingness comprise the interoperability of their immediate technicities and locales, but their coordinates are extended through their addressability across multiple, multivalent layers in global computational infrastructures. Those that are open to the web through their addressability comprise the layering of ancestor and descendant thingness as multiple events and processes, and as multilayered from the rare earth mineral and code level to that of global computational infrastructures. Bratton (2015) explains how addressed objects are implicated in a manner of multilayered infrastructures on the internet in the context of The Stack: Each object is understood not only as a discrete entity but as a durable intersection of multiple ancestor and descendant objects, events and processes, all of which are ascribed and archived in some sort of available ‘cloud’ of traces, a mature Address layer infrastructure would also generate a second and third-order layers of metadata about metadata produced by the logical intersections of new and old objects, coming and going … Like a text, any object can contain a multitude of contingent layers of logical trace. (p. 204) Digitisations are also complicit in what Peter Haff (2013) calls the ‘Technosphere’. The Technosphere is a subsystem of the Anthropocene bought about by the evolution of technics in which large-scale technology becomes a question of geology on which humans depend (p. 395; Haff, 2012, pp. 149–156). Digitisations and digital heritagisation more generally operates as part of what Eric Hörl (2016) calls a new sense-culture comprising a machinic and relational constitution of sense operating within complex socio-technical ecologies and complicit in technological semi-autonomous systems that lead to environmental exhaustion. Their complicity in the Technosphere is through the mining rare earth minerals, using nonrenewable energy to drive the digital economy and the vast amounts of data that are produced and stored that is in the long run unsustainable. Digitisations when imagined as an ecological composition appear as technological fossils in the archaeological record. Indeed, he history of media is littered with technological fossils from papyrus to the telegraph (Scolari, 2012, p. 212). The fossil traces in this instance are most likely to be the hard parts of digital technologies: the data centre buildings; the rare minerals that comprise them: the metal, the wires, the plastic and so forth. This notion of digitisations as non-identical, sprawling, unruly ecological compositions and of curating and the curatorial as ecological processes of radical interoperability made actionable by the multifarious affordances of its thingness is illustrated through a series of surprising events. The internet operates as a meta-territorial domain of infinite reach and depth populated by diverse actants of the human, more-than-human and non-human kind mobilising all manner of social, economic and political possibilities, frictions and resistances. Digitisations on the internet are subject to a series of uneven and chaotic interactions of the type Benjamin Bratton terms ‘machinic jurisdictions’ (Bratton, 2015, p. 66). These 62

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‘machinic jurisdictions’ through their rhizomic lines of flight disrupt and transcend supposedly ordered geographies of the local, the national and global. One example of a cosmopolitical line of flight in which digitisations are ecologically implicated is a response to the film 300: Rise of an Empire, about the battle of Thermopylae that was waged between the Persians and Spartans in 480 BC. Through Google, collections of Persian objects were used as signifiers of Iranian cultural identity and mobilised to counter negative representations of ancient Persia in this film and in Greek accounts of war (Cameron, 2008, pp. 229–243). Humans who searched for the film were diverted away from the 300 website through search engine spiders to Project 300, a website that displayed contemporary Iranian art, documentaries and links to the British Museum’s Forgotten Empire (an exhibition celebrating the Persian Empire and its artefactual legacies). Iranians involved in Project 300 exploited the modes of power afforded by digital infrastructures for their own ends. Digitisations of Persian objects as interfacial images through their human and other-than-human curatorial processes operated as indisputable facts of Persian sophistication and prowess from an Iranian point of view, and at the same time became matters of concern around 300 as an arena in which its participants, non-humans as well as humans, gathered (Cameron, 2008). Iranian citizens were not directly involved in making the film, but these machinic, more-thanhuman and other-than-human infrastructures brought them together. The digitisation’s politics is not only that of the human but also the more-than and other-than-human. The political capacities of digitisations for humans occur at the very moment they are made machine and human readable, appearing as visible ‘objects’ and able to accrue power. Here data ecologies were used to articulate political questions, such as Iranian nationalism. The conditions of possibility in which Iranians became involved in this event and able to make nationalist claims was borne out through the agential interrelatedness promulgated by computational infrastructures, the language including programming, code and algorithms and the people, information technologies, Project 300, designers and so forth (for a discussion of data politics see Ruppert, Engin & Bigo, 2017). Data politics is not only of the more-than-human kind but is also apparent in what media theorist Luciana Parisi (2011) calls ‘soft thought’. The subjectivities of soft thought are not simply the execution of instructions, Parisi (2011) explains, soft thought ‘develops its own algorithmic modalities where the sequence of instructions changes according to the way the machine orders data’ (p. 10). Accordingly we see the techno-extension of cognition into the world (Parisi, 2011) based on machine learning and strikingly emerging as new and additional coordinates within digitisation ecologies. New forms of digital communication and machinic automated thoughts and memory emerge, based on the quantification of data from which new capacities for power and manipulation arise. Machine logic also signals the end of the notion of reasoning and truth (Majaca & Parisi, 2016) we so value in heritage work based on human cognition. Instead, new forms of computational thinking and subjectivities emerge around and within digitisation compositions. However, we do not yet know enough about these automated cognitive processes and how they will change digital heritage work. Critically, thingness as a concept in which machine learning is now a coordinate opens a space to consider digitisations akin to what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call ‘bodies without organs’. As ecological compositions, the interoperability of its heterogeneous coordinates that concretely ties the digitisation together often operates in ways that defy any notion of organisation or ‘bodily’ structure that can be known in advance. Here, the Deleuzian notion of ‘body without organs’ also best describes how digitisations as thingness are curated in these dense ecologies.

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Indeed, digitisations are and can also become economic things again, in global computational infrastructures. Their commercial disposition and economic agency arises through their distribution in the marketing of an exhibition or an institutional collection; the sharing of images on social media, the development of personal collections through applications such as Pinterest; as images for product production and as inspiration for making new products often enabled through creative commons licences. But they also become economic things again through juxtaposition, as in the case of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences NuBra by Berlei, 1957, and the launch of the Ubra by Fantasy Lingerie in 2006 where algorithmic agency brought these items together in Google search results (Cameron, 2008, p. 231). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, launched a series of collection digitisations as thematic boards on Pinterest and in doing so allow access to their collections. Described as a ‘catalogue of ideas’, some pins are based on collection themes and others on exhibition content. One example is the Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology exhibition. Here, digitisations of museum collections of items that were once commodities themselves before their museumification become economic again when juxtaposed with commercial fashion enterprises on Pinterest, which is itself a commercial platform. The act of selection and pinning by ecological alliances involving the human, more-than-human, the machinic and the other-than-human as described, and the streaming of home boards also driven by personalisation according to user preferences, is a process that not only enables the insertion of new digitisations—thereby forming new collections—but also represents the operation of complex, multilayered, emergent, ecological compositional processes that are never completed. Digitisations, in their role as Pinterest collection pins, are enacted by and emerge as the result of the convergence of platform logics and the contradictory, frictional and radical consequences of troll culture, algorithms, robots, technological capitalism, data centres, server farms, concrete, the vast sub-sea fibre optic cable network, molecules and bits, databases, the atmospheric envelope, network geographies, human labour and selfinterest, and energy, and form part of what Bratton (2015, p. 52) calls The Stack. The complexity of these sprawling ecologies, the extension of the coordinates that comprise them alongside their heterogeneous affordances, gestures towards the inadequacy of the relational frames and reductive agentic qualities and subjectivities many media ecologies promote. Aura as a concept is bound up in the technical, in the social production and reception of collections. The digitisation’s aura is connected to its parent as its informational aura, more or less, but it also has many potential auras born of its multiple origins, histories and cultural conventions; its different human and machine aesthetics, for example. Its aura is part of its becoming as a human interpretative process in which a multiplicity of auras emerge, are made and remade.

Users and curatorial agency as more-than- and other-than-human ecological alliances Museums and other heritage institutions conceive of their users as agents of self-mastery able to model their own thoughts, actions, desires and opinions through collections interfaces where digitisations emerge as a coherent visual metaphor of cultural identity. Forgotten Empire is an example of what Bratton (2015) calls the ‘ongoing political surfacing of the posthuman user in which such occasions have the potential to become a political and anthropological event rather than solely a technical one’ (p. 287). In these circumstances and contexts, human users as participants in interactions with digitisations and their subjectivities operate as becoming more-than- and other-than-human intersubjective alliances with switches, robots, codes, algorithms, sensors, organic and non-organic 64

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things and so forth. The notion of the museum user as an autonomous agent is therefore technically dead. Users become part of digitisations’ thingness because they operate within these ecological alliances. The extension of cognition into the world is more than technical, rather it becomes ecological. Influenced by Alfred Gell’s (1998) notion of art as agency, as a system of action directed towards changing the world, the term curatorial agency arose as a concept to progress a critical rethinking of curating contemporary art in culture and society (Milevska, 2013, p. 69). No longer merely viewed as an author or presenter of preexisting artistic concepts, the curator is viewed as an active social agent who contributes to cross-referential understandings of art between different artistic, cultural, ethnic, class, gender and sex groups for the betterment of society (Milevska, 2013, p. 69). Curatorial agency as a concept that denotes acting in the world takes on a different meaning as the affects afforded by the conation of ecological (social, biological, cultural, technical) forces and as emerging compositional alliances. Strikingly, here curating is no longer authorial in a conventional sense as a series of actions by individual humans—rather, it is more-than- and other-than-human. The production of curatorial knowledge and the act of curatorial authorship by humans operates on another plane of immanence, as one of influencer working in collaboration with and forming all manner of allegiances as a new type of curatorial ecologic in which some enactions are knowable and others are invisible or indeed unknowable performed by other-than-human actors. Curatorial agency is actionable through the interrelatedness between and performed by a wider range of coordinates from algorithms to bots to data centres, automated systems, human and machine subjectivities, code, data centres and even rare earth minerals as conductors of electricity. Machine and non-human curating produces different types of eco-cognitive processes and politics outside human control because all these things curate. A different relational sense-culture emerges not just through technical or machine learning but through curating intra-actions of all its coordinates. Further curating as ecological alliances and as becoming curatorial happens across multiple locations and scales at times simultaneously—it is never completed or fixed, rather it is vast, infinite, uneven and sometimes chaotic. The chronologically framed object text and descriptions written by curators for the digitisations in the ‘Forgotten Empire’ online exhibition merged seamlessly with the real parent. Here digitisations were presented as the real, not as something different. It is this relationship to the real that enables the digitisation to accrue human political capacities as its data politics. However, within these ecologies human curatorial agency and their subjectivities are subverted, made mutable and rhizomic through becoming curatorial ecological alliances, they emerge as multiple subjectivities and affects often not necessarily known in advance with sometimes surprising or indeed alarming effects. Curatorial agency and the production of knowledge and truth therefore comprises multiple subjectivities as the affordances borne out of the federation of actants operating within these extended, ecological, emergent compositions. Clearly all its actants or what I call coordinates are curatorial agents if we view curating in the broadest sense as acting in the world and at the same time look beyond our limiting views of curation online as acts by human curators and more recently algorithmic processes. So here we can no longer track curatorial authorship solely as a human act back to an origin or location as with conventional curating. Rather it is iterative, chaotic, distributed and extended. It is clear that the conventional relationship of human–subject has collapsed, and instead human agency becomes part of its thingness. Further, curating becomes exogeneous and endogenous to itself. Finally, the digitisation is not an object, it is a dynamic extended, sprawling ecological composition and interpretation and documentation procedures therefore must take this into account. 65

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Accordingly revised collections research and documentation procedures have the potential to support the analysis, description and interpretation of digitisations as thingness and as ecological compositions (Cameron, 2018). These practices therefore involve: (1) the detailing of the coordinates that make up the extended ecological composition in the field, (2) their multiple agencies, sequences, independences, entanglements, interactions, spatial and temporal dimensions and (3) the cartographic mapping of the movement of these coordinates as representative of their performativity and as emergent processes. Given the extensiveness, unruliness, complexity and most importantly as dynamic ecological compositions, interpretation becomes a process of cutting into and across its thingness according to what aspect of its history of emergence one wishes to foreground or investigate. For example with the digitisations of the thob or coin, intent may be to investigate their movement through algorithmic or machinic agency; its human inflected history as the interrelatedness of its human centred narratives as it moves; a reading of the fine grained affordances and interoperability of its many curatorial agents or the digitization’s character as an extended ecology of forces.

Conclusions Digitisations can be explored through multiple optics. Here, I choose to move from a normative semiotic and representational reading of the digitisation grounded in an informational and computational paradigm to embrace a broader range of coordinates that represent their expanded, ecological and machinic involvement in the world. The digitisation is no longer solely a visual symbol; rather it becomes a sprawling, machinic ecology of human and more-than-human actants, historical events, entanglements and emergent possibilities. All digitisations become unique ecological compositions and things in themselves, because they are non-identical, have their own history, are each unique in regard to their technical elements and the processes through which they emerge and they embody a different type of computational aesthetic, and individuated human and machine politics. Within this new extended ecological composition, digitisations are no longer solely informational, nationally situated, geographically located or human centred or apolitical, rather they cross multiple national territories and are subject to multiple curatorial agencies within global computational infrastructures. Considering digitisations in an ecological sense enables us to widen the circle of what we consider human, rethink human and human–subject positions in digital heritage thinking and practices, and frame new collectives that encompass a wider range of more-than-human, machinic and other-than-human things. Critically, the locational politics of the human—the user, curator and collections manager—is decentred in these more-than-digital ecologies. Here the thingness we call digital heritage is codesigned by its coordinates and their conative agencies Critically, the notion of the digitisation, a concept that is born out of its relationship with its parent, is no longer tenable. Digitisations are unique and non-identical as compositions of thingness. We can never view or know the whole thing in its entirety. On a final note, the digitisation as a descriptor to identify itself as a copy alongside its charge as a terror suspect is no longer tenable. It has never been identical to its parent, nor to itself. It was never a copy and never will be a copy. Digitisations are new things.

References Allison, A., Currall, J., Moss, M. & Stuart, S. (2005). Digital identity matters. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 56(4), 364–372. Bratton, B. (2015). The Stack: On software and sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Cameron, F. R. (2007). Beyond the cult of the replicant: Museums, objects—new discourses—traditional concerns. In F. R. Cameron & S. B. Kenderdine (Eds.), Theorizing digital cultural heritage: A critical discourse (pp. 49–77). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cameron, F. R. (2008). Object-orientated democracies: Conceptualising museum collections in networks. Museum Management and Curatorship, 23(3), 229–243. Cameron, F. R. (2010). Liquid governmentalities, liquid museums and the climate crisis. In F. R. Cameron & L. Kelly (Eds.), Hot topics, public culture, museums (pp. 112–128). Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Cameron, F. R. (2014). From dead things to immutable, combinable mobiles, H.D. Skinner, the Otago Museum and University as centres for the collection and calculation of Maori material culture/Taonga and the governance of Maori populations. History and Anthropology, 25(2), 208–226. Cameron, F. R. (2018). Posthuman museum practices. In R. Braidotti & M. Hlavajova (Eds.), The posthuman glossary (pp. 379–392). New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Cameron, F. R. & Mengler, S. (2015). Transvisuality, geopolitics and the museum. In H. D. Christensen, T. Kristensen, A. Michelsen & F. Wiegand (Eds.), Transvisuality: Dimensioning the visual (pp. 59–72). Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizoprenia (B. Massumi. Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Frey, L. (2012). Digital repatriation—Malagan mask makers in Papua New Guinea try out new way of dealing with cultural property ownership. Retrieved from www.theheritagist.com/2012/12/digitalrepatriation-malagan-mask.html Gell, A. (1998). Art and agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Haff, P. (2012). Technology and human purpose: The problem of solids transport on the Earth’s surface. Earth System Dynamics, 3, 149–156. Haff, P. (2013). Technology as a geological phenomenon: Implications for human well-being. In C. N. Waters, J. Zalasiewicz & M. Williams (Eds.), A stratigraphical basis for the Anthropocene (p. 395). London, UK: Geological Society Special Publications. Hamid, R. E. (2009). Digital artifacts as quasi-objects: Qualification, mediation, and materiality. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(12). Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary. wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/asi.21189 Hörl, E. (2016). Interview. Continent, 5(2). Retrieved from http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/con tinent/article/view/242 Latour, B. (2011) Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s Les Différents Modes d’Existence. Retrieved from www. bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/98-SOURIAU-GRAHAM-GB.pdf Majaca, A. & Parisi, L. (2016). The incomputable and instrumental possibility. E-Flux Journal, 77. Retrieved from www.e-flux.com/journal/77/76322/the-incomputable-and-instrumentalpossibility/ Milevska, S. (2013). Becoming curator. In P. Martinon (Ed.), The curatorial: A philosophy of curating (pp. 65–72). London, UK: Bloomsbury. Owens, T. (2018). Theory and craft of digital preservation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Parisi, L. (2011). Soft thought (in architecture and choreography). Computational Culture: A Journal of Software Studies. November. Retrieved from http://computationalculture.net/article/soft-thought PNG Malagan masks to be digitally repatriated. (2012). ABC News, 12 December. Retrieved from www. abc.net.au/news/2012-12-12/an-pngs-malagan-masks-to-be-digitalise/4423464 Project 300. Retrieved from http://300themovie.info/ Reconceptualising Heritage Collections. (2008a). Palestinian focus group 2008 participant PC1. Reconceptualising Heritage Collections. (2008b). Palestinian focus group 2008 participant P2. Ruppert, E., Engin, I. & Bigo, D. (2017). Data politics. Big Data and Society, 4(2), 1–7. DOI: 10.1177/ 2053951717717749 Scolari, C. A. (2012). Media ecology: Exploring the metaphor to expand the theory. Communication Theory, 22, 204–225. van der Akker, C. & Legéne, S. (Eds.). (2017). Museums in a digital culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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6 The networked image The flight of cultural authority and the multiple times and spaces of the art museum Andrew Dewdney

Introduction In his 2005 book Hypermodern Times, Lipovetsky comments that previous ideas regarding progressive futures, have everywhere been replaced by the near universal acceptance of a drive to greater efficiency, which he sees in the rise of ‘managerial activism: with a vast enthusiasm for change, reform and adaption, which is deprived of any confident horizon or grand historical vision’ (p. 34). The result of such a change is that in the place of any shared, embedded and ongoing thinking about the future, we are left without a future horizon and only an urgent need to keep moving and the need to survive. Such a view permeates the thinking and analysis of this chapter, which examines the current state of the relationship between museums, digital media and network culture in terms of the paradoxical present (Lipovetsky, 2005, p. 50) and ‘the fiction of contemporaneity’ (Osbourne, 2013, p. 16). A perspective on time is threaded through the discussion to trouble the orthodox narrative of relations between art museums, digital technologies and audiences, which is misaligned with understandings of lived entanglements in and of networked cultures. The United Kingdom Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) report, Culture is Digital (2018), provides only the latest in a long line of official British government thinking about art and technology. This dates back to the Great Exhibition of 1851, held in London’s Hyde Park, and the subsequent founding of the Science and Victoria and Albert museums in South Kensington. The report expresses the centrality of coupling nation and industry in the following terms: ‘[The] Digital Culture Report focuses on the use of digital technology to drive our cultural sector’s global status and the engagement, diversity and well-being of audiences.’ The report’s executive summary expresses the view that technology drives the cultural sector, repeating the long-held technologically determinist view that culture follows in the wake of inevitable technological progress. Within this view, the problem

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facing the arts and museums is they essentially have to play ‘catch-up’—that is, adjust to what technology has to offer—and the term digital is used as a ‘catch-all’ for the current products and applications of technology. Something falls seriously short of events and understanding in the world of art and media practices in such policy formulations, which, while encouraging partnership and collaboration, essentially reassert the ontological separation of science and technology from art and culture, at a time when critical academic thought has fundamentally challenged such a foundational divide. Moreover, the view of technology as a driver of cultural change projects the future as continuing an unbroken line from the present and past, when from many disciplinary points of view the future of humanity and the earth has become more precarious (Colebrook, 2014, p. 21), while human versions of their own past become less certain (Latour, 1991, p. 67). The argument that follows has two threads. First, it proposes the idea that if culture is digital, then technology is cultural, and that requires a different set of understandings of what is at stake for any future and of the choices that societies and museums in particular can make. To insist that technology and its underlying sciences are cultural is to admit that they proceed by subjective, social, political and economic values and that 0s and 1s are culturally as well as mathematically coded (Fuller, 2012, p. 72). Understanding technology as culture suggests the need to retrace ontological steps and question the orders, formulas and procedures of technological practices, if what is at stake is the difference between accepting the status quo or choosing a different course of action. Conversely, it is important to recognise that culture is in many respects technical and, in the particular case of the museum, it needs to be understood that the museum is in itself a complex apparatus in the ways it produces taxonomies of objects. The organisation of the museum can be viewed here as an assemblage of different specialist activities, knowledges, departments, roles, policies and physical sites (Delanda, 2016, p. 2). The second thread of argument actively seeks disjunctures in the narratives of museums and technology. It does this through the prism of chrono-reflexivity, by contrasting the hyper-production of programming and events with the historical narratives of cultural time in exhibitions and collections. As organisations that collect, conserve, study and display objects over lengthy periods, museums are time-honoured institutions and some may argue that the duty of a museum is precisely to resist change as the guardian of tradition. Founded upon the practices of aristocratic and bourgeois private collecting, and translated into the values of 19th-century reform and civic society, museums across Europe stand outwardly as the disciplinary bulwark against the increasing ephemeral, temporary and disposable character of societies around them. However, viewed internally from an organisational perspective, museum professionals would not recognise this characterisation of the impervious museum and they would be right. In Britain, since the 1990s public museums have had to adapt to a number of competing demands to increase and diversify both audiences and income streams. The most successful public museums, notably but not exclusively large-scale international ones, have changed by adopting corporate organisational models and goals derived from business and finance in a major reorientation towards consumer leisure and tourism markets. Successful museums followed in the wake of ‘reflexive modernisation’, which Ulrich Beck argued, emerged to manage risk and offset the ‘manufactured uncertainties’ created by the growth of the knowledge economy and its applications (Beck, Giddens & Lash, 1994). More broadly, public museums have responded, and still are responding, to the deregulation of the public sphere and adapting to ‘market forces’. A notable consequence of risk management in museums has been a significant move away from traditional collection display, which in the art museum has been the chronological hang, to temporary thematic exhibitions and even more recently to continuous programming and events. How, then, has new media, the world 69

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wide web and the internet been enlisted in this modernising of the museum? Between 2007 and 2012 research funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council has been carried out at Tate Britain in relation to the collection of British Art at Tate Modern in relation to digital media (AHRC, 2007–2010). The results have repeatedly shown there is more than general confusion within the public cultural sector about how technologies, applications and networks constitute ‘the digital’ and hence what their relation is to culture, audiences and cultural value.

What happens in the space of the museum? The paradox of the hypermodern museum is that the more it changes the more it stays the same—or rather, the faster it recycles its past. If Tate and by implication other art museums have not yet found a way of relating to digital culture (Bishop, 2012) and if network culture is more aligned to Osbourne’s reading of the present as increasingly characterised by different but equally ‘present’ temporalities of ‘times’ coming together, or the chrono-reflexivity of network communications, what substitutes for contemporaneity in the art museum? Tate Modern is a very good example of the paradox of being subject to but unable to fully recognise the digital condition or embrace and work in and with network culture. Tate Modern exemplifies the paradoxical present in a number of highly successful ways. The opening of the new extension to Tate Modern in June 2016 ostensibly provided much-needed additional space for collection display. However, the extension functions not as a traditional set of galleries, but as an extension of the city itself, a vertical extension of the Thames embankment path. The six million visitors to the tenth floor of the new extension are rewarded by a 360-degree balcony affording spectacular views of the city (see Figure 6.1). The extension is a large space of public circulation with cafés, shops, member’s room, offices, workshop and partnership spaces occupying most floors. The new building, badged as the Switch House at its opening has recently been renamed the Blavatnik building in recognition of USSR-born billionaire Len Blavatnik, whose donation was one of the largest in Tate’s history and ensured the completion of the building. When Tate Modern opened in 2000, the Turbine Hall functioned as a spectacular extension of the urban space of the city, with its industrial cathedral accommodating ambitious installations and large crowds. The current Turbine Hall, Hyundai-sponsored commission, One, Two, Three Swing! by Superflex, a literal playground of connected swings, exemplifies the merging of exhibition space with public space (see Figure 6.2). Meanwhile the blockbuster The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932—Love, Fame, Tragedy returns the visitor to chronological modernist art history (see Figure 6.3). The Picasso exhibition is sponsored by the global multinational accounting firm Ernst & Young, while level three of Tate is now named as the Eyal floor, after a £10 million gift from Israeli-born shipping and property billionaire, Eyal Ofer. It is worth noting that the donations, gifts and sponsorship of Tate Modern come from individuals and companies whose fortunes have been made by global investment in oil, aluminium, shipping and property, the cornerstones of the neoliberal economy, as well as from the global accountants who advise them. The expanded space, the large numbers of visitors, external partnerships, blockbuster exhibitions and relentless programming led by the strong brand have ensured the popularity and success of Tate Modern. However, the spaces of Tate Modern are not uniform and the galleries that rise alongside the Turbine— containing free displays from the collection as well as ticketed exhibitions—are organised on a different logic of time. The chronological time of art history asserts itself to make sense of the assembled objects, be they paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, film, sculptures or texts. The art historical logic of Picasso is his place in the evolution of the singular modern; however, in 70

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Figure 6.1 Tate Modern extension under construction (2015). Photo: Andrew Dewdney.

networked culture the logic of modernism no longer applies and paradoxically its designated objects are indistinguishable from heritage and therefore no longer participate in arguing for or shaping the contemporary. It is as if the curators of the exhibition know this is the case, as the exhibition appeals not only to the formalism of modernist art, but to the identity of the artist. Picasso is here curated as the paradigmatic paradoxical individual for hypermodern times. Life is to be played out through love, fame and tragedy and the title comes straight out of celebrity media, reflecting the curatorial power of marketing, and the recognition of the multiplicity of contexts and times in which visitors will experience the exhibition. One of the significant changes in the way audiences experience exhibitions is, of course, networked media, accessible on wi-fi enabled mobile devices. In Tate Modern’s spaces of exhibition, however, the interpolation of network culture remains veiled and only tentatively acknowledged, whereas visitors are consuming the museum through the internet as well as image capture and sharing.

The digital as tool At Tate and across museums more broadly, as with most organisations, the digital is taken as a set of practical tools used predominantly for administrative, media and communication purposes. On this view, the digital consists of hardware and software, providing devices and applications 71

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Figure 6.2 Turbine Hall, Tate Modern (March 2018)—Superflex, One, Two, Three, Swing! Photo: Andrew Dewdney.

used at different levels across departments. Here, digital tools are viewed as nonproblematic and ‘value neutral’, simply a means to perform a given task. The main problem with viewing the digital as tools is that networked media itself comes to be viewed as a transparent channel of transmission with little or no inscribed coded value. This is especially true of the ways the museum first responded to the development of ‘social media’ platforms, seeing in them a marketing tool to reach new audiences and cultivate interest and loyalty. However, one of the pervading messages from museum professionals who contributed to the research (AHRC, 2012) was that instead of thinking about the ‘digital’ as a conventional add-on to existing forms, codes, conventions and practices of media and institutions, new media draws attention to the larger dimension of the fundamental changes in human communication made possible by computation. In this description the digital is a paradoxical culture of staggering global reach; a sprawling and chaotic network of information, connections and associations underpinning everyday life. At the same time, it is a highly structured, clandestine, data gathering and processing system supporting and informing commercial, state and military formations. Despite high levels of digital activity, the art museum continues to struggle with its engagement with the fundamental changes being wrought by the digital condition. Museums in general 72

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Figure 6.3 The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932—Love Fame, Tragedy, Tate Modern (8 March– 9 September 2018). Photo: Andrew Dewdney.

perceive the need to retain cultural authority, based upon the taxonomies of analogue collections, and the hierarchical organisational structure of corporate risk management which militates against experiment and change has meant they have been cautious in engaging with network culture and doubtful about the value of doing so. This has limited engagement with the potential scale of changes that the digital makes possible across the fields of curating, acquisitions, communication and audience engagement.

The digital as medium A second and related way in which ‘the digital’ is understood and operationalised in the museum is as a medium or media. At Tate, this has taken two established forms. As an art medium the digital is slowly forming a distinct canon of collection, with a retrospective history of linking art and technology. An art historical canon for a category of art and technology has been gathering pace for a number of years; digital art (Paul, 2015), electronic art, computer art, Netart and media art (Grau, 2007) are some of the titles currently in play. Historically, the Institute of Contemporary Arts exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity curated by Jasia Reichardt (1968), and more recently the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition Electronic Superhighway—2016–1966, curated by Omar Kholeif (2016) were also attempts to define a field of practice. The art museum is better 73

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able to manage a distinct genre or category of art under the rubric of art that uses technology, than it is to confront the idea that the digital as culture challenges not only the existing organisation of the museum, but also its categorical distinctions. The art museum is happier seeing the digital as categorically science and technology, in clear distinction from art history and humanist, modernist artistic practice. The unease of the art/science divide in the museum is largely responsible for a lack of engagement with artists’ use of technology. This reinforces separations between art, media and technology, which again limits the perception of the wider digital default of culture and society. In parallel to the digital as an artistic medium, the art museum has seen and harnessed the potential for the digital as a channel of representation and reproduction. Tate has spent considerable time and investment in harnessing the tools and channels of online media to broadcast themselves (technically, narrowcast), and has harnessed the potential of video to arts programming. This is an expression of Tate’s commitment to maintaining cultural value based on analogue cultural heritage, which as yet does not connect with the digital as culture. Ironically for a museum committed to the modern and to openness and equal exchange, the analogue broadcasting model of television and radio emerges as the predominant model of operation in the production of content and in the relationship to audience. Tate has been able to adapt the analogue broadcast model, based upon the one speaking to the many, by embedding high production value documentary art videos on various web platforms.

The digital as archive The digitisation of collections was the historic entry point of the digital in the museum. More than two decades on, the sheer scale of the project of digitisation over a period of rapidly changing and upgraded technologies of digitisation has led to proliferating technical issues and problems around the quality, format and metadata of images—raising questions about the very purpose and value of the grand project of digitising everything. The technical minefield of digitisation has led to a further set of organisational problems in resource allocation, asset management, use value, copyright, and the need to build and manage a new skills workforce not necessarily professionally invested in the object of analogue collection. Museums such as Tate have taken the route of reproducing cultural value, using their historical knowledge base coupled with the commercial ecologies and business models of the corporate internet to achieve large-scale distribution of content. The increasing use of arts and cultural documentary video content in museums through online channels has been driven by brand awareness and funding policies emphasising audience development. The main change to the digitisation project of online collections, however, has been brought about by image search engines and image-sharing platforms, in which digitised images from collections merge in the flow of the networked image.

The academy and the condition of knowledge Like the museum, the academy has been slow to foresee or grasp the transformation of knowledge ushered in by the nexus of science, technology and economics. While the management of the academy has modernised along corporate lines, its organisation of knowledge remains based upon traditional discipline distinctions. The Tate research cited above was not exempt from the instrumental forces of knowledge exchange outlined by Lyotard (1984) and this was manifest in the ways the research findings were distributed and received. The various speeds and times of the reception of the research have been structured by separations of the discourses and practices of the academy, museum and 74

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government. This situation reproduces distinctions between theoretical, operational and practical knowledge brought to bear upon common objects and practices in the world. In the museum, such knowledge separations are reproduced through subject specialism and mirrored in the museum’s organisational practices, but what happens to these knowledge practices when the real-world situation to which they correspond accelerates? The collaborative Tate research in question set its sight on real-world results, addressing problems and questions faced by museum professionals, and yet the outcomes remain primarily limited by the very division of academic knowledge it seeks to overcome. In the published account of the Tate Encounters research (Dewdney, Dibosa & Walsh, 2012, p. 221), a new methodological position was outlined as post-critical museology to both resist and bypass the instrumentalism in research and the limits of academic critique. Post-critical museology emphasised that research needed to be collaborative, transdisciplinary and embedded in practices seeking to find ways of doing things differently; however, the pragmatism of the strategy can easily be adapted in the drive for greater efficiency and maximisation of impact. Collaboration and partnership are becoming the new watchwords for humanities research in justifying outcomes in terms of the informational economy. The museums’ resistance and misunderstanding of network culture now pose the new question of how museums will deal with and respond to the acceleration of cultural information in networked cultures. What new problems do museums face and how are they responding?

Hypermodern times in the museum Paradoxically for institutions whose analogue objects are rarely malleable, their digital counterparts are subject to new morphologies, modes of distribution and speeds of circulation. The material objects of collection, like the gold held in a reserve bank, now stand as a proxy to the currencies of digital image circulation. The increasing turn to programming over display is a manifestation of a particular form of cultural hyperproduction, allowing the museum to become prolific and mobile. This is a hypermodern strategy of maximum efficiency, niche marketing, quick turnaround and microdifferentiation of product within the cultural market place, which like the society of fashion focuses upon and appeals to the individualism and subjectivity of the consumer. The hyper-circulation of digitised images of collection has another effect, which is to reduce the distance in time between objects, rendering the modern, historic and ancient as homogenised heritage. Hyper-circulation in the museum is a direct consequence of the digitised cataloguing projects that began in the 1990s. Digitisation, originally conceived as an archival cataloguing tool, became an extension of the museum itself, fuelled by the belief that curatorial and provenential authority would be reinforced, while expanding the reach of collections to new and wider audiences. But since the widespread adoption of social media from 2005, digitised images from online collections have fled the museums’ webportals to merge in the exponential flows of the networked image. It might be said that the hyperactivity of museum programming, which increases the circulation of the proxy collection, is a new form of ‘cultural quantitative easing’ because it increases liquidity and encourages more consumer exchange. Programming is a logic of the branded museum in which marketing drives and produces content to keep the brand recognised and at the forefront of the market. The rise of programming within the organisation of the museum now repositions marketing as ‘curator in chief’ at the same time as the 75

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digitised heritage image escapes the museum. In parallel it is the algorithms of search engines and platforms that co-curate the networked image, rather than simply human users. The alliance of marketing and algorithmic metrics now seriously entailed in creating the links and chains in cultural communication, meaning and value, reinforces the recognition of the argument that technology is cultural and culture is technical, hence the urgency of developing new forms of co-curating and cooperation between humans and computers in network cultures.

The networked image and the digital condition The networked image is a hybrid of culture and technology founded in and by the world wide web and the internet over the past two decades as computer power has increased and extended. The networked image is not singular or a special kind of conventional visual image. It is a complex and dynamic assemblage of digital capture, datastorage, computational orders and social communication practices. In many senses, the term ‘networked image’ is a temporary placeholder to register a set of radical changes in the conditions and modes of human communication in which the internet, hybrid media platforms and mobile devices have come to dominate. The use of the term has two related sources. First, it retains the established cultural notion of the image as representational, pictorial and conceptual, but problematises this by recognising that indexical and archival representation of a unique point of origin is no longer a sustainable definition for the image, even though paradoxically its reproduction in culture persists. Therefore, there is an ongoing semantic struggle being waged over the meaning of the term ‘image’, reflecting how it is both diffused in culture and operationalised in computation. The image—indeed representation—now has to be understood in the ecologies of networked culture, acknowledging that value and meaning are constituted in and by circulation. A new and unspoken set of allegiances between human and machinic agents has supplanted the ways of seeing based upon representation and brings into existence a new politics and set of power relations of the networked image. In a closely related but more specific analysis outlining how human and machinic interactions were entailed in the photographic image the very useful term ‘algorithmic image’ was developed (Rubinstein & Sluis, 2013). However, the networked image seeks a wider definition, one that recognises the increasing power and political impact of algorithms in culture and society. This leads to the second source of definition for the networked image, echoed and developed in Felix Stalder’s (2018) recent book, The Digital Condition. Stalder defines what he calls ‘the digital condition’ as the material and symbolic processes of negotiated and contested social meaning in which a digital infrastructure is now the default. However, Stalder is careful to avoid any over-determination of the computer and rejects the binary opposition between digital and analogue, material and immaterial. For Stalder, the digital denotes, ‘the set of relations that, on the infrastructural basis of digital networks is realized today in the production, use, and transformation of material and immaterial goods, and in the constitution and coordination of personal and collective activity’ (Stalder, 2018, p. 8).

The post-digital perspective Stalder acknowledges his account of the digital condition comes close to the idea of the post-digital, a term that arose in internet art discourse and is gaining a wider purchase in 76

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media and cultural debate. The post-digital describes a perspective that, like that of the digital condition, does not focus obsessively upon technical innovation and improvement in digital information technology. One consequence of the post-digital emphasis is rejecting the usefulness of a number of binaries such as ‘old’ and ‘new media’, the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ and ‘material’ and ‘immaterial’ in defining digital technology (Cramer, 2014). Post-digital culture might usefully be taken to describe a situation in which the digital is so deeply embedded in such a wide spectrum of the human world that, paradoxically, technology ceases to be its defining feature. More locally, for Cramer the post-digital describes a situation in which an aesthetic practice developed by early practitioners of new media arts, which emphasised the ethics of open source software, is now more widely recognised as a collective value. While post-digital as a term is a useful rejoinder to techno-utopian rhetoric, fixated as it is by the power of machines, it remains that only now are far-reaching consequences of the digital condition and the networked image emerging.

The museum’s audience and the paradoxical present Stalder defines three characteristics of the digital condition through which more and more people in more and more segments of life are reacting to the demands of an overwhelming sphere of information: referentiality, communality and algorithmicity. Stalder perceives two opposing social and political tendencies within the digital condition, authoritarianism and communality, which, like Crouch’s (2004) view of post-democracy, he sees emerging in Western cultures as a consequence of the rise of technocracy. The arguments put forward to support the digital condition share a similar characterisation of the problems, tensions and paradoxes of hypermodernity (Lipovetsky, 2005). The intellectual utility of hypermodernity is that it offers a sidestep from the exhaustion of the modern versus postmodern periodisation debates by opening out many of the observations of 1980s postmodernism in a new account of the present conditions of late capitalist society. Late capitalism is characterised as hyper-productive and accelerated in its cycles of production and consumption. Postmodernity is reformulated as a twosided phenomenon, a paradox in which two logics increased autonomy and increased dependency coexist, creating the individual who on the one hand strives for freedom and on the other seeks security and regulation. Hyper-individualism is a state in which actors are more autonomous but personality is more fragile; in which the individual is ‘opened up’, fluid and socially independent, no longer tied to fixed bonds of social class, sexuality, race or ethnicity. Paradoxically, the state of hyper-individualism also heightens an individual’s need to belong and to develop separate identities, a result of the paradoxical present’s double logic of moderation and excess, order and disorder, subjective independence and dependency (Lipovetsky, 2005, p. 33). Individuals curate themselves and work on identity through performance, sensualism and spirituality, while cultural reproduction ceaselessly exhumes, rediscovers and memorialises the past. As Lipovetsky (2005) asserts: ‘It is no longer class against class, but time against time, future against the present, present against the future, present against present, present against the past’ (p. 49).

Contemporaneity, modernism and heritage Applying Lipovetsky’s notion of the paradoxical present to the art museum resonates with Osbourne’s discussion of a decisive shift in thinking about the designation of the terms modern and contemporary (Osbourne, 2013). Osbourne points out that, from the mid-20th century, the term contemporary has been used as a qualifier or stabiliser of the modern,

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referring to the most recent period, or to new art practices. Osbourne (2013) argues that contemporaneity has taken on a new meaning as a condition rather than period, denoting: a coming together not simply ‘in’ time, but of times: we do not just live or exist together ‘in time’ with our contemporaries as if time itself is indifferent to the existing together—but rather the present is increasingly characterized by a coming together of different but equally ‘present’ temporalities of ‘times’ a temporal unity in disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times. (p. 17) The backdrop to such a view within art history and curation is the globalisation of the art market in which it makes little sense to map the cultural world from the axis of 20th-century European and North American modernism. The internationalisation of the modern has been fully established within art historical discourse, but the pluralisation of moderns, anti-moderns or the altermodern (Bourriaud, 2009) presents a greater challenge to the very idea of the modern, which can no longer be thought of as the global meridian for the modern and contemporary. What then happens to the experience of the modern in the modern art museum? In 2014, the exhibition Reset Modernity held at ZKM in Karlsruhre and curated by Bruno Latour and Christophe Leclercq, suggested that since modernity’s compass is no longer a reliable guide to time and space there was a need to reset modernity (and postmodernity) and discover and adopt new procedures in order to grasp the actual state of things as well as decided upon any future course of action (Latour & Leclercq, 2016). The thinking behind this curatorial trope came from Latour’s (1991) earlier book, We Have Never Been Modern, in which he very clearly explained the central contradiction or paradox at the heart of modernity. Latour argues that Enlightenment knowledge separated the world of nature and things (the sphere of scientific influence and discovery) from the world of culture and politics (the sphere of human affairs). Latour’s analysis goes on to demonstrate the world proceeds through entanglements of objects, people and ideas all of which have agency.

Technological obsolescence The paradox of the traditional museum dissolved by its own demand to constantly generate new content, based upon the currency of its analogue proxy, is reversed in technological development in which an economic engine of profit builds in obsolescence, constantly discarding its material past and ceaselessly repurposing the present in a constant process of miniaturisation, telecommand and microprocession (Baudrillard, 1985, p. 129; Steyerl, 2009, p. 33). The preservation of ‘old’ technology as yet holds little heritage value although media scholars and archivists such as Wolfgang Ernst, who works on media archaeology (2013, p. 92), argue for its future taxonomic and ontological importance. More importantly, digital technologies drive towards their own invisibility, their infusion into all material and psychological things and spaces. At the back end of technology ever more secure server farms proliferate, holding a universe of data together with an invisible global labour force tasked with monetising data through making stored digital data legible, retrievable and profitable. At the front end, meanwhile, the smooth surface of operation is ever more mobile, naturalised, socialised and intimate.

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What is at stake: the art museum in the age of the Anthropocene The point of living in the epoch of the Anthropocene is that all agents share the same shape-changing destiny, a destiny that cannot be followed, documented, told, and represented by using any of the older traits associated with subjectivity or objectivity. Far from trying to ‘reconcile’ or ‘combine’ nature and society, the task, the crucial political task, is on the contrary to distribute agency as far and in as differentiated a way as possible—until, that is, we have thoroughly lost any relation between those two concepts of object and subject that are no longer of any interest any more except in a patrimonial sense. (Latour, 2014, p. 17) How should the art museum recognise and develop a dialogue with its audience now the modernist conceit of contemporary art’s relevance to society has been surpassed by the paradoxical present? And how can the art museum formulate a new set of social goals in the face of the commodification of culture as heritage? What is the space of the museum for, now that value and meaning are thoroughly networked? The historic role of the reforming museum was to first civilise and subsequently educate an audience seen to represent the public. In neoliberal, post-democratic societies the civic audience has dissolved and been replaced by individual atomised consumers. The museum of the public—that is, the museum that structured a civic narrative of cultural value and gave meaning to objects—has become distributed information. Is it possible—or necessary—to reassemble a new public for the era of networks and find a public in a non-representational system of exchange? Over the past two decades museums have, to varying degrees, adopted corporate organisation models of efficiency and market orientation. Museums have been more than encouraged to adjust to the deregulation of the public sphere and in this they now work at the speed of hypercapitalism. But hyper-production comes at a cost to museums’ historic, critical and public knowledge, which have been converted into a heritage commodity. If anything, the museum needs to accelerate even faster than the speed of the conditions that drive it if it is to prefigure and materialise a new public. Cultural institutions are trying to adapt to the distributed, hyperlinked model of digital networked communication through which new collectives and collectivities are attempting to reform the idea of the social and publics, but struggle to identify and find ways to work with these new users. The network is in the museum by virtue of its audiences, but the museum has not yet found a way of recognising this. The burden of this chapter has been that the managerial discourse which links the museum and technology is narrowly instrumentally focused, while the curatorial discourse remains sceptical of networked culture, or only admits it as the antithesis to its own knowledge and aesthetic predispositions. Younger museums of modern art, or cultural institutions and organisations whose governance, practices and activities are not defined by collections or national cultural heritage are more adept and flexible than traditional museums in responding to the new forms of cultural and social value being developed through creative and open engagement with networked communities. The digital with which this chapter started and upon which the Tate research attempted to shed light, is being usurped by neoliberal research agendas and the radical, subversive and potentially transformative potential of networks is being ignored. The enormous scale of available information and the competition for attention created by digitisation and online networks demand that the criteria for what

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the museum should collect as well as how to display objects be re-examined as well as exposed to transdisciplinary perspectives. Whether this might be formulated within or across existing disciplines, the underlying issue is the need to create new understandings of the convergence in the discourses of art, media and technology, which aesthetic modernism has historically resisted.

References Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). (2007–2010). Tate encounters: Britishness and visual culture. London, UK: AHRC. Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). (2012). Modeling cultural value in new media cultures of networked participation. London, UK: AHRC. Baudrillard, J. (1985). The ecstasy of communication. In H. Foster (Ed.), PostModern culture (p. 126). London, UK: Pluto Press. Beck, U., Giddens, A. & Lash, S. (1994). Reflexive modernisation: Politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Bishop, C. (2012). Digital divide. Artforum, 51(1). Retrieved from https://www.artforum.com/print/ 201207/digital-divide-contemporary-art-and-new-media-31944. Bourriaud, N. (2009). Altermodern: Tate triennial 2009. London, UK: Tate. Colebrook, C. (2014). Death of the posthuman. London, UK: Open Humanities Press. Cramer, F. (2014). What is post digital. APRJA, 3(1). Retrieved from www.aprja.net/post-digitalresearch/ Crouch, C. (2004). Post democracy. Cambridge, MA: Polity. DCMS report. Culture is digital, published March 2018. Retrieved from www.gov.uk/government/publi cations/culture-is-digital (accessed 17 October 2018). Delanda, M. (2016). Assemblage theory: Speculative realism. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Dewdney. A., Dibosa. D. & Walsh, V. (2012). Post critical museology: Theory and practice in the art museum. London, UK: Routledge. Ernst, W. (2013). Digital memory and the archive. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota Press. Fuller, M. (2012). Evil media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, B. (1991). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2014). Agency at the time of the Anthropocene. New Literary History, 45, 1–18. Latour, B. & Leclercq, C. (2016). Reset modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lipovetsky, G. (2005). Hypermodern times. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Lyotard, J. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Osbourne, P. (2013). Anywhere or not at all. London, UK: Verso. Paul, C. (2015). Digital art (3rd ed.). London, UK: Thames and Hudson. Rubinstein, D. & Sluis, K. (2013). The digital image in photographic culture: Algorithmic photography and the crisis of representation. In M. Lister (Ed.), The photographic image in digital culture (p. 22). London, UK: Routledge. Stalder, F. (2018). The digital condition. London, UK: Polity. Steryrl, H. (2009). In defense of the poor image. Eflux Journal, 10. Retrieved from www.e-flux.com/jour nal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

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7 The distributed museum is already here It’s just not very evenly distributed Ed Rodley

Three descriptions of the distributed museum The title of this essay is a play on science fiction author William Gibson’s quote, ‘The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed’.1 It seemed fitting, given that most, if not all, aspects of Balsamo and Bautista’s (2011) ‘distributed museum’ – one in which the generative acts of the museum are decoupled from the edifice of the museum building – currently exist, though nowhere all under one roof, physically or figuratively. I will explore three seminal descriptions (Balsamo & Bautista, 2011; Dewdney, Dibosa & Walsh, 2013; Proctor, 2010) of the distributed museum and add five additional dialectical relationships that characterise the problematic state of 21st-century museum practice. From the outset, the community of practitioners trying to understand how museums should exist in the digital realm has been international in scope. Many leading voices have contributed to this book, along with many newer voices, who demonstrate how truly global this community is. The idea of the distributed museum has great utility to help us understand the dialectics affecting museum practice and explore how they are (or are not) manifesting in museums across the globe. A logical initial question is what exactly is being distributed in a ‘distributed’ museum? The early instantiations of the idea of ‘the distributed museum’ explore the emergent shift in focus from the physical realm to the digital, and back again to a more nuanced approach that encompasses both. In ‘The Museum as Distributed Network’, Nancy Proctor (2010) adopted the then-provocative position of advocating for museums to treat their online audiences as a core audience rather than supplemental, and to develop unique engagement strategies for them, rather than applying those designed for physical audiences. In this regard, she follows Falk & Dierking (2008), who place a great emphasis on relevance for online visitors: Since visitors do not make meaning from museums solely within the four walls of the institution, effective digital media experiences require situating the experience within the broader context of the lives, the community, and the society in which visitors live and interact. (p. 27) 81

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She problematises both the traditional museum and the typical multi-platform ‘hub and spoke’ model of centralised production as insufficient; she imagines a museum that seeks to apply the cultural norms of the internet to museum practice and expand into the various platforms of the digital realm to fulfil their missions to connect audiences with the cultural assets museums hold. For Proctor (2010), museums that function as distributed networks: • • • • •

are conversational rather than unidirectional engaging and relevant, rather than simply didactic generative of content and open-ended rather than finite and closed sustainable across platforms, communities and time and that become ‘smarter’, more effective and useful the more they are used: rather like Pandora or the Amazon recommendations system – increasing the quality of both the visitor experience and the online museum itself.

For Proctor (2010), audience agency and opportunity to engage suffuse all her categories. The distribution of museum content in this case builds longer-term relationships. This move away from the transactional ‘visit’ model is echoed by Saldaña & Celaya (2013): A close relationship with users should be one of the keys to digital presence in cultural institutions. Visitors should feel free to converse and exchange experiences in both the analog and virtual environments of any institution. The entire digital content of a cultural institution should be predisposed to being shared by its audiences. Museums are no longer places to simply visit: physical, geographic and time concepts fade away. Museums may be found in a tablet, a mobile application or a social network. (p. 21) One of the most challenging aspects of Proctor’s (2010) model of ‘distributed museum’ is her description of it being rhizomatic in structure: without a fixed direction of growth and or a clearly defined centre and periphery. Proctor’s (2010) distributed network rejects the assumption of communication and engagement exclusively emanating outward from a centre in favour of the dialogic and non-hierarchical processes upon which the internet is built: Design based on the distributed network model turns visitors into curators and creators, docents and ambassadors for our museums by giving them the tools to contribute meaningfully to the development of the museum experience. Rather than being at the centre of an online network from which knowledge is broadcast, Proctor (2010) places the museum in the midst of an ever-evolving network of nodes, with knowledge and discourse travelling in every direction. As an aside, it is worth noting that though all Proctor’s examples are internet-based, none of the qualities of her imagined distributed network are possible only via the internet. For Proctor, what is distributed is both content and authority. Proctor’s distributed museum is in many ways a Hegelian (1910) antithesis to the traditional concept of a museum in the pre-digital era. What later authors like Balsamo & Bautista (2011) have articulated, and Dewdney et al. (2013) have studied in great depth, are the various ways museums wrestle with these dialectics to synthesise new understandings of what it means to be a museum. Whereas Proctor (2010) was focused primarily on exploring the potential of mobile social media, Susan Bautista and Anne Balsamo’s (2011, p. 55) ‘Understanding the Distributed Museum: Mapping the Spaces of Museology in Contemporary Culture’ looks more broadly at current museum practice to plot three different dimensions of tension – the virtual versus 82

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the physical, fixed versus mobile and open versus closed systems of creative offerings – and locates examples of progressive practice along these axes. It is informative to compare their categories to Proctor’s: The first set of terms, ‘physical’ and ‘virtual’, describes two ends of a continuum of ‘locations’ where the term ‘physical’ identifies a material location and the term ‘virtual’ identifies a digital location. The second set of terms refers to the boundaries of the experience. The term ‘fixed’ suggests that the experience is bounded by a particular location; the term ‘mobile’ means that the experience can be accessed as a person moves among locations. The third set of terms is used to describe the creative expanse of the activity. The term ‘closed’ is used when the activity is scripted or explicitly organized for a participant. The term ‘open’ describes activities that can be modified, changed or expanded by a participant. (Balsamo & Bautista, 2011, p. 59) While Proctor (2010) is focused on the actors and qualities of their relationships, Balsamo & Bautista (2011) focus on content or experience. Their so-called binary pairs incorporate some of Proctor’s networks functionalities, but despite the name are intended to function not as oppositional binaries, but as endpoints of continua that delineate the location, boundaries and creative expanse of museum activities – all activities, not just those in the digital realm. In this regard, Balsamo and Bautista have already begun moving beyond the typical ‘physical v. digital’ dialectic to situate their exploration of the three binaries within the larger context of the transformation of the museum from a place to a space. Following sociologist de Certeau, they argue: The concept of place has been used by the dominant orders to organize and control society, as through urban planning and architecture. Space, on the other hand, is constructed by people through the practice of living and walking. (Balsamo & Bautista, 2011, p. 58) The distributed museum is a space, inhabited by people and museum professionals engaging over time, across platforms and in multiple locations, negotiating an emergent understanding of cultural heritage. It is hard to overstate the importance of the shifting power dynamic embedded in the idea of ‘a space, not a place’. A 2014 survey conducted by the United Kingdom (UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council found that ‘digital technologies themselves have the potential to undermine the museum as a centralised controlling force in heritage, allowing participants to record, share and remember heritage experience in new ways’ (Cooke, King & Stark, 2014, p. 17). The authors state that though practitioners devote considerable thought to the matter, visitors had little to say about the importance of place: Finally, a key question around digital engagement with heritage focuses on the role and significance of place. In a digital encounter, does a physical sense of place matter, and, if so, does it get lost? Whilst this theme was largely imperceptible in the questionnaire responses, it is an important subject within the literature. (Cooke et al., 2014, p. 18)

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The great challenge for contemporary museums, and specifically art museums, is how to demonstrate their expertise and authority while encouraging visitors to demonstrate their own in the digital era of distributed authority. Now, museums must: Rethink the nature of visitor engagement as one of collaboration that involves two-way conversations … The museum’s challenge, and indeed its authority in the digital age, comes not only from a sense of accumulated expertise, but also from its ability to seamlessly navigate contradictory spaces and practices within this distributed learning network. (Balsamo & Bautista, 2011, p. 66) The internet, and the varieties of social interactions it has created, are all specifically designed to resist the kind of oversight and control museums traditionally employ over their offerings (Dewdney et al., 2013, pp. 190–191). How museums navigate the competing imperatives of opening and reaffirming authority is the subject of the third description of the distributed museum we will examine. The most thorough study to date of how the digital realm now influences museum practice, and how difficult institutional culture change can be, even when that change is acknowledged as strategic and existentially essential, is Dewdney et al.’s (2013) Post Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum. The result of several years of research, their book lays out what they call Tate Britain’s ‘general crisis of representation’ – what the authors define as the way that 20th-century art curatorial practices, combined with modernist aesthetics, not only run counter to, but actively inhibit the museum’s potential to reach distributed audiences (p. 5). The book is a result of a major research project to study a programme developed at Tate Britain: ‘Tate Encounters: Britishness and Visual Culture’. The unprecedented access Tate granted to the researchers over a period of years has resulted in a unique (to my knowledge) output – a book-length study of one effort to attract more Black and minority ethnic audiences (Dewdney et al., 2013, p. 4). The ‘post-critical’ stance of the authors is noteworthy. They seek not merely to critique, but as self-described museum goers themselves: To develop a position which brings together academics, museum professional, and others, in productive ways in order to open up new avenues of meaning and purpose through the agency of audiences (Dewdney et al., 2013, p. 2). In this focus on agency, they are part of a chorus of progressives who view audience agency as a central part of the postcolonialist endeavour; they see the potential for a museum to open its processes to ‘become an embodiment of democracy, which does not silence controversies but gives diversity public voices’ (Schorch, 2009, p. 28). For Dewdney et al. (2013), the term ‘distributed museum’ becomes a way to understand ‘the networked, relational, hybrid and performative dimensions of the museum’ (p. 189) The traditional understanding of the museum as a collection of objects is now competing with an understanding of the museum as conversations about collections. What Tate Britain tries to navigate is nothing less than ‘radical reconfiguration of how “the social” is registered through the operations and functions of communication and knowledge’ (Dewdney et al., 2013, p. 190). In this regard, digital technologies accelerate the undermining of traditional privilege by intersecting with ongoing attempts to redefine museums in a postcolonial era. James Clifford (1997) studied this process in the 1990s, in his application of sociologist Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of the colonial ‘contact zone’ to museums:

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When museums are seen as contact zones, their organizing structure as a collection becomes an ongoing historical, political, moral relationship – a power-charged set of exchanges, of push and pull. The organizing structure of the museum-as-collection functions like Pratt’s frontier. A center and a periphery are assumed: the center a point of gathering, the periphery an area of discovery. (pp. 192–193) In the non-centralised, non-hierarchical, rhizomatic model of internet society, where do museums, with all their troublesome history, fit in, and how? For Proctor (2010), the distribution of authority and content is essential to making experiences that are: higher quality, more meaningful and relevant to different audiences and their interests. In this model, the museum curates not just exhibitions and collections, but also conversations, facilitating and fostering communities of interest around the museum’s concepts, objects and events. Balsamo and Bautista (2011) identify three cultural implications that digital technologies have revealed, which, for them, have the potential to shape the role of distributed museums in a digital age: 1) An emphasis on open culture that ‘demonstrates the museum’s understanding of its role and responsibility to provide public accessibility of cultural materials’; 2) an appreciation that a museum’s digital network ‘is not monolithic: it is a network of communities that includes the community of visitors, patrons, teachers, artists, advisers, scholars, local community members and learners of multiple stripes’; and 3) place-based experiences where the ‘museum as a “place” travels as personal mobile technologies allow visitors to experience the museum wherever and whenever they choose’ (p. 67). Dewdney et al. (2013), with their singular focus on one project in one art museum, identify the central challenge as: the many-to-many mode of communication now operating as an alternative to and replacement of the one-to-many culture of analogue print and broadcasting in which the analogue museum functioned: which is to say that the art museum in particular is a part of the system of representation that is now challenged. (p. 191) All three descriptions of ‘the distributed museum’ share an emphasis on museums needing to engage in more open and dialogic processes, to make museums ‘sites of interactive engagement rather than passive observation’ (Gonzalez, 2017). These attempts to define a way forward for museums are a potential antidote to the existential despair voiced by Helen Molesworth (2018), former chief curator of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, who recently wrote: The museum, the Western institution I have dedicated my life to, with its familiar humanist offerings of knowledge and patrimony in the name of empathy and education, is one of the greatest holdouts of the colonialist enterprise. Its fantasies of possession and edification grow more and more wearisome as the years go by … I confess that more days than not I find myself wondering whether the whole damn project of collecting, displaying, and interpreting culture might just be unredeemable.

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Five further digital dialectics In my own research and practice in museums, I have encountered a number of other dialectics that surface, particularly during the course of projects that have been identified as opportunities to innovate. I offer five pairs that to some extent mirror Proctor (2010), and Balsamo and Bautista (2011) and which I imagine would seem familiar to the museum staff studied by Dewdney et al. (2013).

Change v. transformation The theme of ‘change’ has been a constant in museum discourse in the digital era. Responding to rapidly altering cultural, media and social landscapes is a relatively new imperative for institutions founded around the concept of preservation for the long term. How to respond to new developments, technologies and social structures is an ongoing challenge for museums, which often manifests in two distinct ways. The first, change, is often treated like a discrete, time-bounded process that assumes a static endpoint one can visualise. An organisation that undergoes change is still recognisably the same, aside from the part, process or people that has changed. Transformation creates continuously evolving, learning institutions that become whatever they need to become to address their missions. The endpoint is unknown and not fixed, and the organisation that has gone through a transformational process is difficult, if not impossible, to visualise beforehand (Rodley, 2017c). Janet Carding (2015), former director of the Royal Ontario Museum, wrote that ‘change that is focused on achieving a specific endpoint is out-of-step with the digital-dominated trend towards perpetual beta’. These strategies have strong similarities with Piagetian theories of assimilation and accommodation in learners. Like change, assimilation involves incorporation of new knowledge to an existing corpus of knowledge. Like transformation, accommodation involves a metacognitive shift, in which new knowledge fundamentally reorganises the entire corpus of knowledge.2

Tradition v. design I would argue that one of the greatest challenges of working in a museum that is interested in innovation is the burden of tradition: the unquestioned processes, mindsets and workflows that have possibly outlived the circumstances for which they were designed. The unwritten and the informal are hard to overcome precisely because of their lack of specificity and mutability. This desire to improve efficiency, which at least partly underlies the current vogue in applying development methodologies transplanted from other industries, like manufacturing (Lean) and software development (Agile) to museum work, represents an important elevation of process design. Innovation happens through making active choices, from examining a situation and searching for what interaction designers call the ‘designable surfaces’ (Rodley, 2017e). The difference between tradition and design is the difference between what Donald Schön calls ‘nonreflective’ and ‘reflective’ practice and resonates strongly with Schön’s idea of reflection as knowing-in-action.3 There are also parallels between the design v. tradition dialectic with psychologist Carol Dweck’s (2006) theory of fixed v. growth mindsets. According to Dweck, people with a fixed mindset tend to view failure as an indictment of themselves while people with a growth mindset view failure as an opportunity to learn and improve (Popova, 2014). Often, real innovation will require designing processes and projects that run counter to tradition and will result in tension as the institution grapples with resolving this dialectic.

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Hierarchy v. network (or arborescence v. rhizome) Hierarchy, ‘the sacred order of things’ – originally the Roman Catholic description of the heavenly order of angels who oversaw all of creation – has evolved to describe any entrenched system in which people are ranked according to authority or power or status. The apparatus of control is very clear and explicit, and the relative positions of actors in a hierarchy is apparent to both. In this system, increasing one’s power is tied inextricably to increasing one’s rank in the hierarchy. Paired with strong traditions, a strong hierarchy can be almost impossible to influence, let alone change or transform (Rodley, 2017d). As James McAnally (2016) stated: When dismantling a hierarchy, those with real power always want to settle for plucking out a brick when it’s the foundation at fault, something in the water that was mixed in with the cement. Traditional hierarchies, like everything else, have been profoundly affected by the advent of the digital era and the transformations it has wrought. In The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler (2006) describes how different power dynamics are a networked environment using the example of Linux inventor Linus Torvald’s relationship with the network of developers working on Linux: Torvalds’s authority is persuasive, not legal or technical, and certainly not determinative. He can do nothing except persuade others to prevent them from developing anything they want and add it to their kernel, or to distribute that alternative version of the kernel. There is nothing he can do to prevent the entire community of users, or some subsection of it, from rejecting his judgment about what ought to be included in the kernel. Anyone is legally free to do as they please. So these projects are based on a hierarchy of meritocratic respect, on social norms, and, to a great extent, on the mutual recognition by most players in this game that it is to everybody’s advantage to have someone overlay a peer review system with some leadership. (p. 105) Thinking about organisations as networks rather than hierarchies is widespread in the business community and has been making its way into museums. Patrick Greene’s (2006) discussion of Museum Victoria’s new organisational structure explicitly described the museum as a ‘networked museum’ and applies Lipnack and Stamps’s idea of a networked organisation as one in which ‘independent people and groups act as independent nodes, link across boundaries, to work together for a common purpose; it has multiple leaders, lots of voluntary links and interacting levels’. In this dialectic, power shifts from being tied to status, to being a function of the density of connections at any node. As with any redistribution of power, conflict can and will occur. In the course of exploring this dialectic, I have encountered a different pair that offers some interesting insights into how to understand distributed networks. Venkatesh Rao has proposed dispensing with the network/hierarchy dialectic as unduly simplistic. He favours thinking in terms of arborescent (tree-like) v. rhizomatic (rhizome-like) structures. In an arborescence like an onion, it is always possible to discern which way is up and distinguish horizontal sections from vertical sections by simple visual inspection. With rhizomatic structures like a ginger root, there is no clear absolute orientation around an up, and no clear distinction between horizontal and vertical. The rhizome has no default orientation, direction of change or defining internal symmetries. Power, in a rhizomatic model lies in the potential for growth to occur at any point, in any direction. For Rao (2014), the rhizomatic/arborescent distinction is also

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superior to the hierarchy/network dialectic because both onions and ginger roots show signs of both hierarchical structures and network-like internal connections. For museums exploring the digital realm, being locked into one orientation for growth is a recipe for missing countless opportunities to take advantage of the way the internet works.

Literacy v. fluency According to Freeman et al. (2016), digital literacy ‘is essential to improving technical infrastructure and workflows. Digital literacy needs to be achieved across the board, especially in the context of museum leadership’ (p. 24). The mismatch between the digital literacy of current museum staff and museums’ digital ambitions is well-known and documented. Implicit in the mindset is that ‘digital’ needs to be understood, at least as well as any curatorial domain, if anything is to be done. Since museums derive their authority from the expertise of their staff, it follows that without that same level of digital expertise, they cannot engage meaningfully in the digital realm. The literacy v. fluency dialectic, unlike the others in this chapter, is more a confusion of related issues, rather than a real conflict (Rodley, 2017b). Museums that want to succeed in the digital era need to address both the digital literacy challenge and the lack of digitally fluent staff. Focusing on one to the exclusion of the other will produce results but will not achieve the kind of transformation possible by doing both. According to the American Library Association, a digitally literate person: • • • • •

Possesses the technical and cognitive skills required to find, understand, evaluate, create, and communicate digital information in a wide variety of formats; Is able to use diverse technologies appropriately and effectively to retrieve information, interpret results, and judge the quality of that information; Understands the relationship between technology, life-long learning, personal privacy, and stewardship of information; Uses these skills and the appropriate technology to communicate and collaborate with peers, colleagues, family, and on occasion, the general public; and Uses these skills to actively participate in civic society and contribute to a vibrant, informed, and engaged community. (Visser, 2012)

One response to this literacy gap has been a movement to bootstrap internal continuous professional development in museums. Greg Albers and Annalisa Stephan (2017) detailed the Getty’s staff efforts to increase their own digital literacy by hosting a series of 10-minute peer-to-peer technology classes, new communications tools and meeting formats, and an onsite retreat for staff working on digital projects. At the Peabody Essex Museum, we have been engaged on a multi-year process of developing professional development programmes for our colleagues and ourselves that cover issues from using social media as professionals, to copyright law and the internet. I can already see how the efforts are beginning to pay off, in terms of colleagues trying new tools, new ways of collaborating and examining their practices more reflectively. Continuous professional development is a tide that lifts all boats. Increasing digital literacy, though important, will not be enough to bring museums’ ambitions to fruition. Digitally literate professionals may be able to identify digital endeavours that could address their museum’s mission, but doing that work requires professionals fluent with the tools. A common feature of the museums that have launched ambitious digital projects in the past decade (Cooper Hewitt, Cleveland Museum of Art, SFMOMA, Te Papa, 88

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etc.) and without fail, is digitally literate leaders, digitally fluent staff, software developers, coders, UX and UI developers, database administrators and so on. Lack of fluent staff is a sector-wide issue, not just in museums, but in the corporate world more broadly. A recent report in Venture Beat highlighted how far all organisations must go. Rogers (2017) stated: A lack of digital talent and expertise is one issue, according to 31.4 percent of respondents. And the perception that digital transformation is a cost center and not an investment is reported by another 31 percent. The successful distributed museum will require a staff with enough confidence and training to use the digital tools at hand. The next step, building new tools to solve museums’ specific challenges, will also require staff who deeply understand those tools and can build new ones. It is not an either/or situation, but a both/and situation.

Values v. culture A quick Google search of ‘museum values’ will produce a long list of worthy-sounding concepts like cooperation, courage, determination, generosity, integrity, optimism, positive approach, respect, self-discipline, teamwork, trust, sacrifice, volunteerism and many more. Vision statements are an accepted part of the museum strategy landscape (Rodley, 2017a). According to the American Alliance of Museums (2012), ‘mission is purpose; vision is future; and values are beliefs’ (p. 1). If you have ever doubted the power of standards, do a web search of how many museums in the United States (and outside) use this precise mission–vision–values formulation. Jeanne Vergeront’s (2012) excellent dissection of museum values statements concludes: If values are to be authentic and effective, effort, tested beliefs, and even sacrifice are required. That doesn’t seem to be too much to expect of the beliefs for a museum that wants to matter or, perhaps, to be indispensable. The dozens of museum mission/vision/values statements I have examined generally fail to provide any concrete guidance on how to bridge the gap between the lived realities of employees and the grand pronouncements of the vision and values statements. The staff at Tate Britain studied by Dewdney et al. (2013) are a signal example of how difficult it can be to inhabit that gap. Jan Gunnarsson (2016) neatly (if crudely) summed up the trouble with values statements: ‘Values have a tendency to be bullshit. Translating them into a culture, actually acting on those values, is the really challenging part.’ Like Gunnarsson, I believe that culture is the manifestation of values, and that as a field, museums need to invest greater effort in manifesting. Economist Peter Drucker’s famous line, ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’, is a mainstay of business school teaching. For Nick Poole, former head of the Collections Trust in the UK, a digital culture that privileges reflective action over strategy is a better indicator of future success: ‘A digital culture will get you through a time without a digital strategy much more than a digital strategy will get you through a time without a digital culture’ (Poole, as cited in Looseley, 2012).

Conclusion The distributed museum represents a radical departure from 20th-century museum practice and is proving a fertile ground for experimentation. Tate Britain’s embrace of radical empiricism in their Tate Encounters programme (Dewdney et al., 2013, p. ix), the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum’s reconceiving of their visitor experience to privilege design 89

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thinking (Gonzalez, 2017) and non-institutional efforts like Wallace and Deazley’s (2016) Display at Your Own Risk exhibition of variously-licensed museum images, all demonstrate how practitioners are exploring avenues of distribution to make museums ‘more radically become platforms for inspiration, critical dialogue, creativity, tolerance, and community’ (p. 261). The distributed museum is still elusive, though countless examples exist of museums striving to become more distributed. The challenges of doing so, as reflected in the dialectics described here and elsewhere, are substantial, but not insurmountable. Designing museums and museum workplace cultures that facilitate communication and dialogic processes with potentially global audiences as part of their core functionality will be the next step towards the creation of truly distributed institutions. The digital dialectics described here represent one practitioner’s attempt to create a toolkit of reflective practices that will encourage managers to view new projects as opportunities to experiment, and make that the norm, not the exception, with the goal of empowering museum staff to recreate their design processes and view themselves as experience designers rather than simply perpetuating older processes. This kind of reflective work in the digital realm will, out of necessity, build both digital literacy and museum literacy learning processes and outcomes into projects, which is, I believe, the most effective way to create the kinds of workplace cultures that will actually manifest the values museums espouse.

Notes 1 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson consulted January 23, 2017. 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive_development#Assimilation_and_ accommodation. 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_practice. Consulted October 14, 2017.

References Albers, G. & Stephan, A. (January 2, 2017). Making the workplace we want [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/1thing/. American Alliance of Museums. (2012). Developing a mission statement: Why it is important. Retrieved from www.aam-us.org/docs/default-source/continuum/developing-a-mission-statement-final.pdf? sfvrsn=4. Balsamo, A. & Bautista, S. S. (2011). Understanding the distributed museum: Mapping the spaces of museology in contemporary culture. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds). Museums and the Web 2011: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. (pp. 55–70). Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Carding, J. (2015). Changing museums. Retrieved from https://medium.com/code-words-technologyand-theory-in-the-museum/changing-museums-f82c98f33f92. Clifford, J. (1997). Museums as contact zones. In J. Clifford (ed.), Routes: Travel and translation in the twentieth century (pp. 188–219). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cooke, P., King, L. & Stark, J. (2014). Experiencing the digital world: The cultural value of digital engagement with heritage. Retrieved from www.digitalheritage.leeds.ac.uk/files/2014/10/AHRC_Cultural_Va lue_CR-Experiencing-the-Digital1.pdf. Dewdney, A., Dibosa, D. & Walsh, V. (2013). Post critical museology: Theory and practice in the art museum. London: Routledge. Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York, NY: Random House. Falk, J. H. & Dierking, L. D. (2008). Enhancing visitor interaction and learning with mobile technologies. In L. Tallon & K. Walker (eds.), Digital technologies and the museum experience: Handheld guides and other media (p. 27). Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.

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Freeman, A., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., McKelroy, E., Giesinger, C. & Yuhnke, B. (2016). NMC Horizon report: Museum edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium. Gonzalez, D. (2017). The public as producer. Art in America. Retrieved from www.artinamericamagazine. com/news-features/magazine/the-public-as-producer/.. Greene, P. (2006). Museum Victoria: Building the networked museum. reCollections, 1(2). Retrieved from http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_1_no_2/commentary/museum_victoria. Gunnarsson, J. (2016). Hostmanship—Making people feel truly welcome. Alibis for Interaction. Retrieved from www.alibisforinteraction.se/portfolio-item/jan-gunnarsson/. Hegel, G. W. F. (1910). The phenomenology of mind (Vol. 2, James Black Baillie, Ed.). American University Studies: Philosophy Library of Philosophy. London: Sonnenschein. Looseley. R. (2012). UKMW12 takeaways [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://rhiannonlooseley.blog spot.com/2012/12/ukmw12-takeaways.html McAnally, J. (October 11, 2016). A call for a collective reexamination of our art institutions. Hyperallergic. Retrieved from https://hyperallergic.com/329506/call-collective-reexamination-art-institutions/. Molesworth, H. (2018). Art is medicine. Retrieved from www.artforum.com/print/201803/helen-moles worth-on-the-work-of-simone-leigh-74304. Popova, M. (2014). Fixed vs. growth: The two basic mindsets that shape our lives. Retrieved from www.brain pickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset/. Proctor, N. (2010). The museum as distributed network. Retrieved from http://museum-id.com/museumdistributed-network-21st-century-model-nancy-proctor/. Rao, V. (2014). Frankenstacks and rhizomes. Retrieved from https://mailchi.mp/ribbonfarm/franken stacks-and-rhizomes. Rodley, E. (2017a). Useful dialectics, part five: Culture vs. values. Retrieved from https://thinkingaboutmu seums.com/2017/10/30/useful-dialectic-part-five-culture-vs-values/. Rodley, E. (2017b). Useful dialectics, part four: Literacy vs. fluency. Retrieved from https://thinkingaboutmu seums.com/2017/10/23/useful-dialectics-part-four-literacy-vs-fluency/. Rodley, E. (2017c). Useful dialectics, part one: Transformation vs. change. Retrieved from https://thinkinga boutmuseums.com/2017/09/28/useful-dialectics-part-one-transformation-vs-change/. Rodley, E. (2017d). Useful dialectics, part three: Hierarchy vs. network. Retrieved from https://thinkingabout museums.com/2017/10/10/useful-dialectics-part-three-hierarchy-vs-network/. Rodley, E. (2017e). Useful dialectics, part two: Design vs. tradition. Retrieved from https://thinkingaboutmu seums.com/2017/10/02/useful-dialectics-part-two-design-vs-tradition/. Rogers, S. (2017). Altimeter: When it comes to digital transformation, companies are still way behind. Retrieved from https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/04/altimeter-when-it-comes-to-digital-transformation-com panies-are-still-way-behind/amp/. Saldaña, I. & Celaya, J. (2013). Museums in the digital age: Using new technologies before, during and after visiting a museum, cultural institution or art gallery. MuseumNext. Retrieved from www.dos doce.com/articulo/estudios/3842/museums-in-the-digital-age/. Schorch, P. (2009). The reflexive museum: Opening the door to behind the scenes. Journal of Museums Aotearoa, 33(1–2), 28–31. Vergeront, J. (2012). Values as commitments [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://museumnotes.blogspot. com/2012/03/values-as-commitments.html. Visser, M. (2012). Digital literacy definition. Retrieved from http://connect.ala.org/node/181197 Wallace, A. & Deazley, R. (2016). Display at your own risk. Retrieved from http://displayatyourownrisk. org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Display-At-Your-Own-Risk-Publication.pdf.

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8 Speculative collections and the emancipatory library Bethany Nowviskie

This is the lightly edited text of an October 2016 keynote talk, delivered at the Hazen Symposium, a Harvard University gathering on the future of academic library collecting. A video and transcript of the presentation is available at http://nowviskie.org/2016/speculative-collections/. Reproducibility. Openness. Transparency. Rationality. Interoperability. And an orientation towards interdisciplinary problem-solving. Mine is a non-exclusive list, to be sure, but you may recognise it as one accounting of the values that shape data management in the sciences and social sciences, and underlie the creation of collections, interfaces and infrastructure in so-called ‘data-driven’ fields. They have their problems of positivism, these values1—but I will risk the ire of friends to say that, taken together, the shared values of open science represent one quality I find disappointingly, maybe even irresponsibly absent from digital library interface design and collections-building. They represent a forward-looking temporal orientation. And I think we feel the absence of that orientation now, in our presentist mode of library collections-building—in which the balance has tipped in many institutions from the development of carefully curated long-term holdings towards the renting of transient digital content. While administrative imagination slowly catches up to the logic of the network (Dempsey, 2016) and we develop collective approaches that might mitigate attendant loss (Chilton, 2016), local pressures move inexorably in, training our attention on contemporary, not future needs: on meeting requests—as we say— ‘just in time’. Beyond the rare book room, libraries have left the era of collecting speculatively, ‘on spec.’ They are decidedly past, that is, being able to hold an image of themselves as unstuck in time, of libraries on the long tail, libraries with a far-future reach—in which we invest in and gather materials with no immediate application or measurable value to use. Please do not misunderstand. I do not propose that we adopt the values of open science wholesale. It will be a cold day in hell when ‘reproducibility’ takes hold in the liberal arts— and ‘openness’ itself has different valences and dangers across communities and fields. Instead, I suggest that we consider the cumulative effect of underlying value sets like those I have named in terms of their temporal orientation—the degree of forward-looking-ness and openendedness inherent in the concepts we hold dear—and what that means for the systems we build. How might we articulate cultural heritage values that help us attend to the liberatory

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potential of humanistic digital libraries—and to freeing up the unrealised, multiple, creative trajectories that mostly rest too latent in them? My argument builds on an intuition that digital humanities collections—archival and otherwise—are much more likely to be taken by their users as memorialising, conservative, limited and suggestive of a linear view of history than as problem-solving engines, branching, generative and non-teleological. This is a design problem. We are building our digital libraries to be received by audiences as lenses for retrospect, rather than as stages to be leapt upon by performers or co-creators of future histories. In other words, they are not the improvisational platforms they should be: spaces for projection, planning, performance and speculation. Whether we are discussing born-digital records or historical documents and artefacts that have undergone the phase-change of digitisation—once they are online, I do not want merely special collections anymore; I want speculative ones. If it is true that we foster passive retrospect over active prospect in collections-building and the design of our digital libraries, it presents a serious, practical problem. This is because, if we mean to address the grand challenges of the 21st century, we have a pressing need for humanistic knowledge and patterns of work to interweave more fully with scientific understanding and practice, and for both to be opened to a vastly wider array of people who can apply their various lived experiences and intellectual perspectives—and their future- and freedom-oriented turns of mind—to the problems we share. That said, it is not as if speculation is wholly absent from the digital library enterprise. Uncertainty is the pre-existing condition of 21st-century librarianship. We reshape our inherited ontologies, platforms and patterns of information access and control at a moment of extreme unpredictability and rapid technological, social and environmental change. We have begun to pay an overdue extinction debt, a toll for carbon use in this, our 200-year technology boom, which is being taken in the alarming disappearance of plant and animal species.2 We face political instabilities, which will only increase with globalisation and environmentally driven human migration. Refugee crises and famine will intensify under climate change, along with genocide, war and domestic extremism and strife. Libraries and museums grapple with the destruction of both tangible and intangible cultural heritage that attends such change. All this suggests one line of opposition, already, to my appeal for more speculative collections. Perhaps, given such a level of disruption and shock, you are prompted to wonder— with media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst (2016)—whether ‘archival resistance against change is indeed a virtue’: What used to be sacred space, secluded from public insight … is now directly wired to the communications circuit of the present. The archive loses its temporal exclusivity as a place remote from the immediate present … With increasing mobility and acceleration, should we rather value the immobile archive for its time-resisting virtue? However, even if we wanted our archives only to sit still and look back, we would have to prepare the digital knowledge infrastructures that surround them to operate under uncertain and fast-changing conditions. I mean this in a most straightforward and practical way. Are our collections sufficiently accessible, data-minable, documented and linked? Are they resilient, redundant, well-stewarded and robust? Are we adequately imagining far-future conditions as we put them together, including conditions of resource-scarcity and decline? This is not the kind of pragmatic future-orientation I will reflect on here, but it is the one that has rightly consumed most of the energy and imagination my own communities, at 93

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the Digital Library Federation and National Digital Stewardship Alliance, have for their work. Instead, it is that word—imagination—that leads me to the conceptual and emotional issues at the heart of my talk: to design problems, to problems of mission and affect and agency. I will return to some pragmatism at the end, but will start with ideas that are squishier. Are we designing libraries that activate imaginations—both their users’ imaginations and those of the expert practitioners who craft and maintain them? Are we designing libraries emancipated from what, as I will shortly demonstrate, is often experienced as an externally imposed, linear and fatalistic conception of time? Are we at least designing libraries that dare to try, despite the fundamental paradox of the Anthropocene era we live in—which asks us to hold unpredictability and planetary-scale inevitability simultaneously in mind? How can we design digital libraries that admit alternate futures, that recognise what should be their users’ most fundamental freedom: to construct their own, independent philosophical infrastructure, to escape time’s arrow and subvert, if they wish, the unidirectional and neoliberal temporal constructs that have so often been tools of injustice? All these concepts stem from theory and practice in Afrofuturism and other forms of speculative art and design, from concepts of kairos and temporal modelling, from the Caribbean ‘otherwise’, a striving towards ‘impossible archival imaginaries’ and ‘usable pasts’, and from emancipatory research, a notion of ‘archival liveness’, and a feminist ethic of care: ideas and fields I will draw from—if only telegraphically, in the time allotted here—as I offer preconditions for humanistic digital libraries that might, as C. P. Snow (1959) once said of the community of scientists, hold the future in their bones. In ‘Rethinking research library collections’, theorist-practitioner Dan Hazen (2010) discusses the ‘exuberantly expressive’ new modes of both authorship and authority he saw emerging in the digital age. ‘Libraries,’ Hazen (2010) wrote, ‘are on uncertain ground as they engage with this fractious, seductive, alien, and essential universe’ (14). This line resonates beautifully with concepts from Afrofuturism—the fractious, seductive, alien and essential cultural and aesthetic movement that first set me on this line of inquiry. In his introduction to The Last Angel of History, a brilliant 1995 documentary on Afrofuturist art and philosophy, filmmaker John Akomfrah tells two brief tales.3 The first is that of legendary singer and guitarist Robert Johnson, who sells his soul to the devil at a crossroads—not in exchange for the simple musical gift that is usually referenced in this story, but for what Akomfrah figures as the ‘Black secret technology’ of the blues. Next, he sets a ‘flash-forward’ scene, ‘two hundred years into the future’, in which ‘another hoodlum, another bad-boy scavenger poet-figure’ called the ‘Data Thief’ is given a mission and a clue. If the Data Thief can locate Johnson’s crossroads and conduct an archaeological dig there, excavating and reassembling buried ‘techno-fossils’, he will be able to find a hidden ‘code’. Once cracked, with the help of a single clue, the code will provide ‘the keys to your future’. The clue? ‘Mothership Connection.’ It is important to note that both the evolving music that is evoked—‘the blues begat jazz, the blues begat soul’—and the fragments of the past that are to be discovered archaeologically by the Data Thief are all figured not as pop culture or ‘the arts’, or (as is common in collecting institutions) as ‘our shared history’, but as an active technology. In other words, cultural heritage—this cultural heritage (like Akomfrah’s place-based emphasis: ‘this crossroads’), even when excavated in the far-off future—will never be something the initiated passively encounter (Akomfrah, 1995). Those possessed of a Black secret technology are not limited to simple playback. Every phonograph record becomes scratchadelia—vinyl for the scratchartist, the DJ at the club (Fintoni, 2015). We are discussing playable archives, simple records 94

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that themselves become instruments—a truly usable past.4 In other words, the archive becomes the instrument. Inherent in Aftrofuturism is an orientation towards past culture as futureoriented technology: codes to crack, tools to use, and collections to transform. Now—like Akomfrah—let us skip forward in time, before we return and ‘fill in’ the middle. Rasheedah Phillips, a brilliant lawyer and community organiser, is the artist and thinker behind projects called Black Quantum Futurism and The Afrofuturist Affair. She is also a science-fiction writer, frequent collaborator with musician Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) and the author of an important entry on the word ‘future’ in a new edited collection of Keywords for Radicals, a book about ‘the contested vocabulary of late-capitalist struggle’ (Phillips, 2016). Recently, Phillips offered a workshop at the Philadelphia storefront that has become her group’s experimental ‘Community Futures Lab’. This place blends grassroots, activist community archiving with science-fiction imaginings towards the design of alternate futures (Kim, 2016). It specifically works to document and resist forces of gentrification and displacement in North Philadelphia to create counter-imaginings: Join us as we consider what technologies are practically and readily available to us to help shift/adjust/manipulate/augment/enhance our experiences of space–time at will. Black Quantum Futurism is exploring and developing temporal technologies that are more beneficial to marginalized peoples’ survival in a ‘high-tech’ world currently dominated by oppressive, fatalistic, linear time constructs. (Community Futures Lab flyer, 2016) You will not find a clearer statement of a problem and a need. Penn scholar Deborah Thomas (2016) reinforces the necessity for temporal reconception articulated in a recent article in Anthropological Theory, called ‘Time and the otherwise: Plantations, garrisons, and being human in the Caribbean’. Thomas (2016) catalogues ways in which ‘blackness is foundational to modern temporality’, and how what she calls ‘moments of exceptional violence’ in the Black Atlantic (past and present, emergent from cyclical patterns of violence) make more legible those subjective experiences of time that can challenge dominant narratives of causality. This explains why, as she points out, Caribbean philosophers have long been drawn to insights about nonlinearity and temporal entanglement from theoretical quantum physics. An ‘erasure of foundational violences,’ Thomas writes, ‘becomes the tool through which inequalities are reproduced and made to seem inevitable in the contemporary period’. This is ‘generated, in large part, through a constant insistence upon the supremacy of a concept of time rooted in linearity, progressive teleology, and a tendency toward perpetual improvement’. Yet it is an ideology that is not ‘seamless’ or easy to maintain in the face of trauma, and which, particularly in the ‘prophetic redemptive tradition … [of] radical black politics in Jamaica and the Americas … opens the possibility of unforeseeable and unpredictable futures’. Thomas concludes by asking: ‘How do we mobilize a transformed apprehension of temporality … toward the project of repair?’ In other words, what would we change if we took people at their word when they tell us there is something wrong with the temporal dimension of this world of records and histories we have designed for them: That we need to work against the implicit sense our Enlightenment interfaces provide? That the situation of the present is the only possible conclusion of the accumulated evidentiary data of the past? Maybe the best way for the digital library community, in particular, to help break the sense of fatalism, inevitability and disaffection from the historical archive that dominant narratives can provoke is to take seriously the Afrofuturist notion, drawn from 95

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Kodwo Eshun (1998) and John Akomfrah, of cultural heritage not as content to be received but as technology to be used. How might we position digital collections and digital scholarly projects more plainly, not as statements about what was, but as toolsets and resources for what could be? A lot has been said about Afrofuturism. I think I first heard [the word] in John Akomfrah’s documentary The Last Angel of History … I watched it and I thought, ‘What does it mean to me?’ I went to a lecture by Kodwo Eshun … [who] was talking about Afrofuturism as … poeticising the past. That you recontextualise it, and mould it in a way that gives you a power over history. I like that sentiment. It’s essentially this Sun Ra philosophy that I’m really into: the fact that communities that have agency [are] able to form their own philosophical structures. (British Jazz saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, cited in Smith, 2016) Communities that have agency are able to form their own philosophical structures. This idea should galvanise digital cultural heritage work today. Groups our institutions have relegated to ‘subaltern’ positions must be able—not simply to access their own content in archival and library systems, and not merely to control access to it (as radical as that idea may be in some circles)— but to set the very terms for the infrastructure itself, actively configuring classification systems, search-and-discovery interfaces and visualisation tools in our shared digital libraries to express independent theories of the world: the world as it is for them, and the world as it should be. For examples of work in this direction, I look to content-management tools focused on indigenous intellectual property, like Mukurtu, or to open-ended, multi-vocal, spatial and geotemporal platforms, like HistoryPin, or the emerging Mbira system from Michigan State. Its seeds can be found deep within the theory and rationale for the geotemporal interpretive tool, Neatline, at the University of Virginia Scholars’ Lab. Notably, these projects are led by anthropologists, archaeologists and narratologists—not primarily by archivists or librarians. So, where are digital library developers in all this? Our broader community of practitioners is, in some sense, midstream in its shift from over-reliance on vendor-provided interface and content-management ‘solutions’ to a willingness to invest in open-source, community-built platforms and to foster a more complex set of interrelations among developers and their partners and publics. I view this shift as the necessary precursor to what I am really arguing for: the placement of intellectual and material support behind design experimentation to help us better understand, and ultimately increase, community agency in our digital libraries. You must own your own infrastructure before you can even think about using it to express the vital presence or historical lack of agency embedded in your archives—and before you can take one step toward affording agency to the people whose belongings have become your ‘collections’. You must own your own infrastructure before you can give it away—before you can open avenues to communities that wish to use their own digitised and born-digital materials to craft alternative futures and autonomous philosophies of the world. Afrofuturism, as an artistic and aesthetic practice, dates to the mid-20th century, with much deeper roots in 19th-century Black speculative fiction, including the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Delaney. One of its driving questions was distilled in the mid-1990s, in an essay by cyber-culture critic Mark Dery (1994): ‘Black to the future’. The question is, ‘Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?’ Dery addressed this by interviewing pioneering science-fiction 96

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authors and intellectuals (Tricia Rose, Samuel R. Delaney and Greg Tate), who reflected on a literary landscape in which writers like Octavia Butler loomed large. However, they also spoke to the elaborate performances of Afrofuturism’s early musical practitioners—performers like George Clinton, whose glowing flying saucer descended from concert-hall rafters to the significant tune of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’.5 Further, they talked about the famous Sun Ra and his jazz Arkestra. (Again, a ship, an ark.) Ra’s performance conceit—hardly ever dropped—was that he had returned to Earth from an abduction to Saturn, reborn as what Kodwo Eshun (1998) calls an ‘AfricanAmerican alien musician’. Sun Ra was a saviour figure, on a mission to teleport his people, physically, through the medium of jazz vibrations—and not just spatially but temporally—to an ‘altered destiny’, the alternate timeline they would find in a new and better world (Ra, 1974; Zuberi, 2015). There have been Afrofuturist strains in hip-hop and techno and R & B. Traces of it are visible in mainstream artists (even Michael Jackson or Prince)—but I particularly recommend the work of ‘electric lady’ Janelle Monáe, who leads androids to freedom, and that of a little-known, now defunct Detroit-based techno group called Drexicya (Eshun, 2011; Pulliam-Moore, 2016). This group’s sub-aquatic revisionist history about a futuristic Black Atlantis—its backstory—begins in horror, with ‘disruptive’ pregnant mothers in labour in the Middle Passage: mothers who, thrown overboard, drowned; babies who mutated, breathed water and lived. Even in its exuberance—as it imagines alternate destinies and divergent timelines, turns slave ships into motherships and alienation into salvation—Afrofuturism never loses sight of its origin in trauma and loss. Most especially, it never forgets its archival aporia: gaps and uncertainties that open possibility even as they hurt. Can a community whose past has been rubbed out, imagine alternate futures? This brings me to the ‘impossible archival imaginary’, a term from a recent article by Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell (2016). The concept builds on earlier work in which Caswell (2014) offered grassroots archives as sites where global, diasporic groups, brought together by shared elements of identity and as independently as possible from institutional control, could undertake what she called ‘the messy business of contesting, renegotiating, and redefining collective memory of the past’. Her focus in that first piece was on actual archives. Conversely, the ‘impossible archival imaginary’ centres in on the ‘absent or unattainable archive’—records that do not exist. This may be because they have gone missing, been destroyed or spirited away, or because they were never real in the first place, no matter how much we wish they were. ‘Imagined records’ exert a powerful influence over communities and help define both reality and possibility in an affective landscape of shared imagination, offering important ‘counterbalances and sometimes resistance to dominant legal, bureaucratic, historical and forensic notions of evidence that so often fall short in explaining the capacity of records and archives’ to move us. Gilliland and Caswell (2016) want to counter ‘dominant strands of archival theory and practice [that] maintain an un-reflexive preoccupation with the actual, the instantiated, the accessible and the deployable—that is, with records that have … evidentiary capacity’ (55). Instead, they show how ‘differing imagined trajectories of the future’ can emerge from records both present in and absent from the past. To offer one among their many provocative examples, consider how documentation works in the petition formulated by the grieving parents of Michael Brown after Ferguson, a petition that police officers be fitted with body cameras. This implies ‘a new category of imagined record’, Gilliland and Caswell write, ‘the record that need-not-be-created because its very possibility prevents the brutality of its creation’. The what-if of absent 97

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documentation—in this instance, the ‘nonexistent imagined record of Brown’s murder’ that might have been captured, had a camera been in place, creates an alternate universe, a temporal paradox, a speculative timeline. It has ‘an envisioned aspirational trajectory … to bring about a more just future’. Gilliland and Caswell’s (2016) basic case is ‘that archival theory and practice can no longer afford to ignore … phenomena of the imagination’ and that ‘complicating the link between record and event … opens up archival thinking to non-dominant and pluralist epistemologies’. It is an argument akin to one made by another pair of archivists more than a dozen years before—Wendy Duff and Verne Harris, who advocated for the development of new standards in a 2002 article on deconstruction, narrative, futurism and archival description: ‘Stories and names’. ‘Our dream,’ they wrote, ‘is of a descriptive standard which is liberatory rather than oppressive, one which works as a touchstone for creativity rather than as a straightjacket. What would the attributes of such a standard be?’ (284). For Duff and Harris (2002), a liberatory descriptive standard: Would not position archives and records within the numbing strictures of record keeping … which posit ‘the record’ as cocooned in a time-bound layering of meaning, and reduce description to the work of capturing and polishing the cocoon. (284) ‘In contrast,’ they write: A liberatory standard would … posit the record as always in the process of being made, the record opening out of the future. Such a standard would not seek to affirm the keeping of something already made. It would seek to affirm … open-ended making and re-making. (284) There is currently a small amount of digital library interface experimentation around these concepts. It is of extremely high quality—but there is simply not enough! In the interest of time, I will merely state that I particularly admire projects by my Australian colleagues Tim Sherratt (2015), who has long worked against the grain of existing digital cultural heritage platforms, and Mitchell Whitelaw (2015), who both creates and theorises ‘generous interfaces’. Whitelaw is among several authors of a relevant new piece by Tom Schofield et al. in Digital Humanities Quarterly, on the concept of ‘archival liveness’. Schofield and his coauthors (2015) outline attempts to bring open, broadly participatory, and temporally aware design and visualisation to archival collections—not as something enabled by or resulting from expert metadata creation, but rather happening synchronously with processing by archivists and cataloguers, and in community with end users. I rush to an end. Grappling—in terms of selection, arrangement, description and delivery— with the imaginary, with process, with time as situated kairos rather than impersonal chronos (Nicholson, 2016), with users as co-creators: all these things would bring us closer to having digital libraries and archives that permit speculation and maybe not only demonstrate but help to realise greater community agency in the context of shared cultural heritage. If it must be the library world’s collective argument now, that research institutions can no longer afford to purchase and house truly far-future-oriented collections, collections full of content no one is asking for at present—I would like to suggest that imaginary archives likely come cheap and do not take up much space.

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Could digital libraries emancipated from time’s arrow, geared towards community imagination and control, and looking forward rather than back become systemic instruments of liberty? We know from emancipatory research theory (the best of which I have found in nursing and disability studies) that people make themselves free; scholars and technologists do not do that. So, how can we set our digital libraries up for community-driven transformation into the ‘independent philosophical [infra]structures’, that Afrofuturist thinkers cite as a mark of freedom? In pragmatic terms, what about the trust and the technology? Search itself (despite acknowledged problems of ‘ungenerosity’) is a technical paradigm that seemingly works against the hegemony of the pre-fab, linear timeline interface or the timeordered browse—if only our search engines’ settings could be opened to end users in ways that are less about filtering shared, least–common-denominator results and more about crafting wholly new avenues for discovery. A popular open-source, public-access catalogue (or OPAC) system, Project Blacklight, was designed with this in mind—intended (at least its early days when I was involved) to allow even non-technical librarians and user communities to tweak relevance ranking and control fields that should and should not be indexed—effectively, opening up the black box of search. That is one possible arc of inquiry. However, work by Safiya Noble (2018), Frank Pasquale (2015), and Bess Sadler and Chris Bourg (2015)—among others—demonstrates how sharply inflected and downright biased deeply underlying search algorithms can be. Even if a project like Blacklight could be taken forward in its most open, community-configurable direction, there remain boxes within our black boxes, like nesting dolls. Lest I paint too rosy a picture of the future for open, malleable, community-based infrastructure in general, you only have to view an experiment like ‘Tay’ to understand how difficult this work will be. Tay was the Microsoft chat-bot who was released to train herself in conversational understanding through open interaction on Twitter, and who—based on what people taught her to say—went from dumb sweetness to full-blown violent white supremacy in less than 24 hours (Bright, 2016). They had to take her down. Noble (2016), in an important new paper called ‘A future for intersectional black feminist technology studies’, urges LIS scholars to support counter-narratives and the creation of better tools through continued, rigorous, multivalent analysis of our underlying infrastructure—to help the cause by maintaining ‘feminist pressure on the development of technologies, in the context of material consequences that diminish any liberatory possibility’. Her advice is to concentrate especially on intersectional analysis in technology: areas where overlapping oppressions throw power differentials into sharp relief. As an area ripe for just that kind of Noble analysis, I highlight technologies of digital surveillance—how watchful analytics permeate all our systems and pose a huge challenge to developing and maintaining the kind of community trust that is a baseline requirement to working, as overwhelmingly white institutions like libraries, in partnership with (or service and productive subordination to) minoritised groups. I hope you have a sense, from the theorists, artists and practitioners cited, that the issues raised are worth consideration and an approach from multiple angles. To approach the problem of temporal orientation in our digital cultural heritage interfaces in a humanistic—not to say humane—way, we need archival theory and practice, literary and historical scholarship, the intersectional analysis of built systems. We need community-based activism and the arts; we need experiments in visualisation and imaginative representation, including the picturing of absence and wishes. We also need more basic theorising—coupled with concrete design experimentation—of what liberty, agency and temporal orientation can mean in complex digital library systems.

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Finally, I think we need to begin to articulate a shared list, similar to the non-exclusive set of ‘open science’ values outlined at the beginning of the chapter, along with touchstone concepts for working in speculative collections—ideas we can hold on to, to keep ourselves focused and honest and capable of collaboration across institutional and disciplinary and town–gown lines. How would we start such a list of values for future-oriented, humanistic digital libraries? I will suggest just a few: I value subjectivity, permeability, possibility, agency, hope and respect. To conclude, I want to return to the question anthropologist Thomas (2016) let linger at the end of her essay—a question that, in our context, presumes a level of success for this enterprise. ‘How,’ she asks, ‘do we mobilize a transformed apprehension of temporality toward the project of repair?’ (194). Thomas is discussing repair in the social and cultural sense: repair as healing and reparation. It is difficult for me to consider this question without also thinking of library and digital knowledge infrastructure: systems we may need to correct, patch and maintain (in the sense of Steve Jackson, 2014), and content that we want to migrate and preserve. I cannot answer her question, yet. However, I know that repair itself is not a backward-looking activity, even if that is what is suggested by everything in our Western technology cultures of the new, of planned obsolescence and continual innovation. An argument for future-oriented, humanistic digital libraries is not an argument against maintenance and repair, or appreciating the past and honouring and protecting what our archives house today. Instead, it is a suggestion that we might use the active technologies of our digitised cultural heritage better: to transform our shared and disparate ‘apprehensions of temporality’ in a way that links prospects for the future with an ethic of care for the past— and for the people who will always live in the spaces in-between.

Notes 1 It has become the necessary project of many in the library and information science community (cited later in this talk) to demonstrate how underlying assumptions of neutrality and universality embedded in the values I list here—and therefore in our practices of selection and description, our design of search mechanisms, and even in our libraries’ policies and services—are in fact decidedly non-neutral expressions of dominant, sometimes oppressive ideologies. 2 ‘Extinction debt’ is a technical term in the environmental sciences as well as a transactional promise: all evidence suggests that the sixth great mass extinction of life on this planet is well underway— though uncertainties as to its impact on our own species remain. See Tilman et al, 1994. 3 The clip I showed at the Hazen Symposium is available here: www.youtube.com/watch? v=iYe_nj7xfQM—also linked and discussed in an earlier, brief presentation, ‘Everywhere, Every When’, which treated Afrofuturism in the context of media archaeology and anti-racist approaches to digitisation and digital library design: http://nowviskie.org/2016/everywhere-every-when/ 4 I draw this idea from music critic Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun, the book that blew my tiny mind—soon to be reprinted by Verso Books; highly recommended. 5 That’s your ‘mothership connection’, by the way; the P-Funk Mothership is now on view at the new Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture.

References Akomfrah, J. (Director) (1995). The last angel of history [YouTube]. USA: Icarus Films. Bright, P. (2016). Tay, the neo-Nazi millennial chatbot, gets autopsied. Ars Technica, 3–25. Retrieved from https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/tay-the-neo-nazi-millennial-chat bot-gets-autopsied/. Caswell, M. (2014). Inventing new archival imaginaries: Theoretical foundations for identity-based community archives. In D. Daniel & A. Levi (Eds.), Identity palimpsests: Archiving ethnicity in the United States and Canada (pp. 35–55). Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books.

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Chilton, G. (2016). Planning facilitated collections: A case study, part II: Collective collections. Plenary talk, Hazen Symposium. Harvard University. Retrieved from https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/hazen/plan ning-facilitated-collections-case-study-part-ii-collective-collections. Dempsey, L. (2016). The library in the life of the user: Two collection directions. Opening keynote talk, Hazen Symposium. Harvard University. Retrieved from https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/hazen/library-lifeuser-two-collection-directions. Dery, M. (1994). Black to the future. In M. Dery (Ed.), Flame wars: The discourse of cyberculture (p. 180). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Duff, W. & Harris, V. (2002). Stories and names: Archival description as narrating ecords and constructing meanings. Archival Science, 2(3), 263–285. Ernst, W. (2016). Radically de-historicising the archive: Decolonising archival memory from the supremacy of historical discourse. Decolonising Archives. Retrieved from www.internationaleon line.org/bookshelves/decolonising_archives. Eshun, K. (1998). More brilliant than the sun: Adventures in sonic fiction. London: Quartet Books. Eshun, K. (2011, October). Drexciya: Fear of a wet planet. Wired. Retrieved from web.archive.org/web/ 20130121213605/http:/www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/drexciya_fear-ofa-wet-planet. Fintoni, L. (2015, 24 September). A brief history of scratching. Fact, 9–24. Retrieved from www.factmag. com/2015/09/24/a-brief-history-of-scratching/. Gilliland, A. J. & Caswell, M. (2016). Records and their imaginaries: Imagining the impossible, making possible the imagined. Archival Science, 16, 53. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/article/ 10.1007/s10502-015-9259-z. Hazen, D. C. (2010). Rethinking research library collections: A policy framework for straitened times, and beyond. Library Resources and Technical Services, 54(2). Retrieved from https://dash.harvard.edu/ handle/1/4111039. Jackson, S. J. (2014). Rethinking repair. In T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski & K. Foot (Eds.), Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality and society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Retrieved from https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/RethinkingRepairPROOFS(reduced)Aug2013.pdf. Kim, H. N. (2016). An Afrofuturist community center targets gentrification. Hyperallergic. Retrieved from https://hyperallergic.com/307013/an-afrofuturist-community-center-targetsgentrification/. Nicholson, K. P. (2016). ‘Taking back’ information literacy: Time and the one-shot in the neoliberal university. In N. Pagowsky & K. McElroy (Eds.), Critical library pedagogy handbook (Vol. 1, pp. 25–39). Chicago, IL: ACRL. Retrieved from https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fimspub/41/. Noble, S. U. (2016). A future for intersectional black feminist technology studies. The Scholar and Feminist Online, 13.3–14.1. Retrieved from http://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/safiya-umojanoble-a-future-for-intersectional-black-feminist-technology-studies/. Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York, NY: New York University Press. Pasquale, F. (2015). The black box society: The secret algorithms that control money and information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Phillips, R. (2016). Future. In K. Fritsch, C. O’Connor & A. K. Thompson (Eds.), Keywords for radicals: The contested vocabulary of late-capitalist struggle (p. 19). Chico CA: A K Press. Pulliam-Moore, C. (2016). How Janelle Monáe turned Harriet Tubman’s legacy into an Afrofuturist scifi epic. Splinter. Retrieved from http://fusion.net/story/293496/janelle-monae-many-moons-harriettubman-legacy/. Ra, S. (Writer) (1974). Space is the place [Motion Picture]. USA: North American Star System. Sadler, B. & Bourg, C. (2015). Feminism and the future of library discovery. Code4Lib Journal, 28. Retrieved from http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/10425. Schofield, T., Kirk, D., Amaral, T., Dork, M., Whitelaw, M., … Ploetz, T. (2015). Archival liveness: Designing with collections before and during cataloguing and digitization. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 9(3). Retrieved from www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/3/000227/000227.html. Sherratt, T. (2015). Unremembering the forgotten. DH2015 keynote. Retrieved from http://discontents. com.au/unremembering-the-forgotten/. Smith, S. (2016). Shabaka Hutchings. Red Bull Music Academy Daily. Retrieved from http://daily.redbull musicacademy.com/2016/04/shabaka-hutchings. Snow, C. P. (1959). The two cultures and the scientific revolution. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

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Thomas, D. A. (2016). Time and the otherwise: Plantations, garrisons and being human in the Caribbean. Anthropological Theory, 16(2–3), 177–200. Tilman, D., May, R. M., Lehman, C. L. & Nowak, M. A. (1994). Habitat destruction and the extinction debt. Nature, 371, 65–66. Retrieved from www.nature.com/articles/371065a0. Whitelaw, M. (2015). Generous interfaces for digital cultural collections. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 9 (1). Retrieved from www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/1/000205/000205.html. Zuberi, N. (2015). The transmolecularization of [Black] folk: Space is the Place, Sun Ra and Afrofuturism. In S. Vint (Ed.), Science fiction and cultural theory: A reader (pp. 81–293). New York, NY: Routledge.

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9 Digital heritage profile in China’s museums An evaluation of digital technology adoption in cultural heritage institutions Andrew White and Eugene Ch’ng

Introduction Discussion about the academic use of digital technologies in cultural heritage institutions was contentious even from the earliest days of their introduction. Arguments that the digital provided the public with a qualitatively enhanced viewing experience were countered by more sceptical voices, which viewed it as remaining superfluous. This chapter begins by revisiting that debate before focusing on the adoption of these technologies in so-called Western and Chinese cultural heritage institutions. This approach is not comparative. It was adopted as an acknowledgement that these technologies were integrated in displays in cultural heritage institutions in North America and Europe long before they were in mainland China. (It should be noted that this gap between Western and Chinese institutions is likely to be rapidly reduced in the next decade; indeed, we can foresee a future in which Chinese cultural heritage institutions are leading in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) enhancement rather than following developments in other parts of the world.) The paper concludes with the discussion of a technology adoption survey that the authors undertook in a number of Chinese national museums and, within the context of the earlier debates, an assessment of the extent to which these qualitatively enhance the public’s engagement with museum collections.

What is the point of the augmented experience in cultural heritage institutions? As computing technology became more powerful and portable in the 1980s, academics and cultural heritage professionals began to adopt it for a variety of uses. One of the earliest

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forms of experimentation was in modern literature, where these technologies were deployed in hypertext novels to give people a more interactive reading experience (Barnet, 2015). The proliferation of static and moving imagery that the nascent world wide web triggered in the early 1990s provided a far greater scope for the development of interactive online experiences, including early forms of online three-dimensional (3D) imagery in disciplines like archaeology (Jacobs & Holland, 1997). Contiguous with these attempts to provide viewers/ watchers/listeners (hereafter ‘users’) with more interactive, and visually rich, experiences was the digitisation of academic textual collections. Some of these, in their provision of full-text searching, employed an interactive form of engagement that enabled researchers to find specific terms without the need to manually search every single page of a document (White, 2011, p. 318). The benefits of employing digital technologies in cultural heritage institutions and to augment our engagement with academic material are often assumed rather than made explicit, all the more curious when one considers how underwhelming some applications can be. Studies of interactive reading for instance, have highlighted the banality of much of the engagement between reader and text (White, 2007). Indeed, the notion that giving readers a choice of paths to take through a novel rather than being directed by the author’s fixed narrative fails to appreciate the extent to which the pleasure of reading is, to paraphrase Umberto Eco (2006), dependent on a coherent narrative and a sense of direction from the author, and the reader’s desire to be educated by someone more knowledgeable than them on particular subjects (pp. 14–15). This is supported by studies that have identified readers’ unease when they are navigating online texts without a strong linear narrative (Chiong et al., 2012; Pope, 2013). A further consideration in relation to cultural heritage institutions is that constraints on time and resources mean that it will be virtually impossible to digitise everything in large institutions (Kuan, 2015, p. 43). Indeed, in 2006, the then Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Ian E. Wilson, estimated that, notwithstanding the existence of a longterm technological program, in the following 10 years, his institution would only have digitised 0.5 per cent of its total holdings (Wilson, 2006). It is a similar story with ambitious programs in the private sector, where, more than a decade after it started its project to scan every single book ever published, the Google Books program has not been able to satisfactorily overcome the obstacles to disseminating e-versions to the general public (Somers, 2017). Conversely, institutions that have eschewed what might be termed an industrial approach to digitisation have prospered. A prime example of this is the British Library’s use of Turning the Pages software to present beautifully illustrated books of historical and cultural significance online and on consoles displayed in the entrance of its building in London (British Library, 2018). All this highlights the importance of technology being deployed to enhance rich content within collections, rather than curators fetishising advancements in technical forms of display to such an extent that the importance of that content is downplayed (Koukoulis & Koukoulis, 2016). According to White (2011, pp. 317–318), digitisation of cultural heritage content tends to be motivated primarily by three factors. The first is the desire to disseminate the content, or digital versions thereof, to as wide an audience as possible. We would add that, in their endeavour to widen access, cultural heritage institutions increasingly view ever-more sophisticated digital media technologies as the means to achieve this objective. In a sense, digital media technologies are being used to facilitate ‘experiences’ for visitors to cultural heritage institutions rather than solely presenting content in a static form (Kocsis & Kenderdine, 2015; Kuan, 2015; Thomas, 2015). These experiences can be delivered online, as in the case of the sensation of ‘turning the page’ of some of the British Library’s special 104

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collections. The second factor is conservation. This might appear counterintuitive, as the very act of exposing collections to scanners and other means of visual recording can sometimes damage the originals. However, if this is managed so that the digital capture of the content of collections is not repeated too often, this is a useful means of ensuring that the handling of the original artefact or document is lessened when a copy or simulation is available. Although this argument usually relates to the capture of twodimensional textual material, it is increasingly common for sophisticated simulation technologies (e.g. 3D) to be viewed as a means of ‘conserving’ elements of our built heritage that are vulnerable and at risk of not existing in their present state for much longer (Quintero & Eppich, 2016). Third, digitisation can create new methodologies, or—at the very least—a different way of viewing source material (White, 2011, p. 318). In terms of AR and VR, this might entail the introduction of new ways of seeing, or ‘scopic regimes’ if you will (Kenderdine & Shaw, 2015, p. 199). The argument that new viewing technologies can change our philosophical perception of objects has been recycled at various times, for instance in centuries-old discussions on the influence of ‘Renaissance perspective’ and, more recently, the debates around stereoscopic photography in the middle of the 19th century (Plunkett, 2013). Today, visualisation technologies have become part of the process of research (Ch’ng, Gaffney & Chapman, 2015) using a variety of techniques from data capture to interactive visualisation (Ch’ng et al., 2013). While there is sometimes a danger in confusing an essentially quantitative form of technological development with a qualitative shift in thinking and perception (Plunkett, 2013, p. 389), there are nonetheless some new technologies that afford forms of academic enquiry hitherto not possible. An additional rationale, for not just the digitisation of collections but the use of technological enhancement in all its forms, is the conscious desire to promote the ‘knowledge economy’ (Lin, 2015). In this sense, cultural heritage institutions become entangled in wider discourses about promoting particular forms of economic development, with the consequent danger that collections are being subjected to technological enhancement to match governmental discourses about technological innovation and the creative economy rather than for the purely intrinsic value of so doing. We will explore this relationship between a discourse of modernisation and developments in AR and VR technologies in cultural heritage institutions in the next section.

The development of AR and VR technologies in Western cultural institutions While we appreciate that AR and VR technologies are in many respects qualitatively different from earlier technological enhancements in the cultural heritage sector, the principle of improving user experience is the same. For this reason, we will use the rationales explicated above for digitising cultural heritage content to frame our discussion of the adoption of AR and VR technologies in Western cultural heritage institutions. As with digitisation more generally, the introduction of VR and AR into cultural heritage institutions is undoubtedly partly a means of attracting a more diverse audience into the institutions themselves as well as onto online platforms. For various reasons, including their increasing imbrication in discourses about the creative economy (which we will discuss later), the participatory culture that our exposure to sophisticated digital media technologies has afforded has also had an impact on the cultural heritage institution (Soler-Adillon, 2018); this dovetails with the modern social democratic state’s wider project of ‘inclusion’. In short, 105

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while developments in digital media technologies have provided cultural heritage institutions with the means of displaying interactive online platforms, the institution is as important as it ever was in providing a fixed site for interaction with the collections within it. Nonetheless, attracting people through its doors can only be done with the promise of an experience that reaches beyond what a 1980s cultural heritage institution would have offered. Developments in digital media technologies since the 1980s have raised visitors’ expectations, with a general sense that, in some respects, cultural heritage institutions are competing for attention with their own online collections (Thomas, 2015, p. 127). In other words, can cultural heritage institutions offer a better onsite experience than potential visitors can enjoy online? Most institutions have realised that presenting themselves as an antidote to digital platforms is untenable. Hence, they have thought carefully about how they can bring these technologies into the institution without imperilling the intrinsic scholarly value of their collections. These technologies have encouraged a more personalised experience of mass media forms, in the sense that users can access content on platforms that are not tied to place and schedule in the way that watching television programmes in the broadcast era were (Thomas, 2015). VR and AR can give users a similar personalised experience in the cultural heritage institution. This is especially the case when handheld screens are utilised to provide individual ways of viewing collections in surgical detail or from different visual perspectives (Kenderdine & Shaw, 2015, pp. 205–206). A more kinesthetic experience can be offered, such that visitors’ sense of touch and sensitivity to certain sounds is used to provide a more embodied experience (Kenderdine & Shaw, 2015, pp. 206–208). In extremis, a site, such as an old shopping street, can be digitally reconstructed to provide an immersive experience for visitors that is remarkably similar to being at the actual site (Ch’ng, Chapman & Gaffney, 2015). It is sometimes argued that, in constructing virtual reproductions of original artefacts or environments, AR, VR and 3D technologies have a conservational function; in this sense, the image or idea is conserved rather than the original object (Quintero & Eppich, 2016). The use of digitisation in conservation is a complex task, exacerbated by the urgency to preserve the surface information of artefacts in full, to prevent further erosion or damage with the introduction of high-resolution 3D scanning devices. As demonstrated by the gradual release of a mere 242 3D models online by the British Museum since 2014, in comparison to the collection of eight million objects in both its archives and exhibits, 3D digitisation is not a small task. This is a testament to the difficulty of the act of digitisation alone, discounting the need to process, store, curate and share the digital facsimiles. Funded projects to digitally ‘resurrect’ heritage monuments that have been eroded by natural forces, tourism activities, rapid economic development and especially threats from terrorism through crowdsourcing means (Curious Travellers, 2018) does add further complexities to the issue. However, a stronger case can be made by advancing the proposition that AR, VR and associated technologies enable innovation in learning methods. This in part centres on the earlier argument about these technologies facilitating new ways of seeing, or scopic regimes (Kenderdine & Shaw, 2015, p. 199), where Kenderdine and Shaw argue that scopic regimes are preferable to ‘vision’, as they are culturally specific ways of viewing, preferable to the simplistic, hegemonic universalism that ‘vision’ embodies. The beauty of AR and VR is that they can reveal these culturally specific ways of seeing (e.g. the demonstration of the ‘reading’ of a handscroll) (Kenderdine & Shaw, 2015, p. 199). There is also the sense that the way we construct knowledge has a somatic as well as cognitive element (Kenderdine & Shaw, 2015, pp. 206–208), and that technologies that create embodied experiences in the cultural heritage institution are making a profound pedagogical intervention. Others have 106

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argued that AR is useful for ‘scaffolding’ learning within the museum (Yoon et al., 2018) and that there is some survey evidence from school children that AR is a valuable learning tool (Chen & Wang, 2017). While it is right to be sceptical about some of the claims made for the benefits of technologically enhanced interactive or AR learning environments, the very fact that these can encourage greater engagement with intellectual content is something to be welcomed. Finally, to what extent can the introduction of AR and VR technologies into cultural heritage institutions be understood as part of wider national strategies on the information society and creative economy? In answering this question, one needs to first appreciate the extent to which cultural heritage institutions are already imbricated in discourses of modernity generally and in discussions of the creative economy specifically. Even in a nation like the UK, where entrance to many national galleries, museums and libraries is free, cultural heritage institutions are marketed as valuable contributors to the cultural/creative economy (Kendall, 2015). As in the rest of the creative economy, visitors are viewed as consumers who can be parted from their cash in the numerous cafes, restaurants and souvenir shops that proliferate in cultural heritage institutions. Attracting those consumers is dependent on providing a positive experience, which means that VR and AR technologies have an economic role as well as the more obviously educative one outlined above. This is why much of the academic literature on AR and VR focuses on its role in the tourist industry, in which the pleasure that these technologies can give those visiting sites of historical interest within the city is, in principle, what they are doing within cultural heritage institutions too (Han, tom Dieck & Jung, 2018; Yung & Khoo-Lattimore, 2017). That the cultural heritage institution is an integral part of the way cities market themselves, and consequently attract tourists, demonstrates the key role of AR and VR technologies in these spaces (World Cities Culture Forum, 2015). We will now consider the development of these technologies in Chinese cultural heritage institutions by examining the extent to which the four rationales outlined above can be applied to the present situation in mainland China. Our examination will be informed by the results of a survey on the adoption of various display technologies that we carried out with a number of Chinese cultural heritage institutions in 2017.

Technological enhancement in the Chinese museum While the adoption of AR and VR is not at the same level in mainland China as it is in Western cultural heritage institutions, the Chinese government’s future direction is clear. In the recently released Cultural Technology Innovation Planning (13th Five-Year Plan, State Council of China, 2017), the first goal stated in relation to the marrying of technology with culture is the need to: fully facilitate the integration of scientific technology into the cultural sectors. This includes information networks, intelligent manufacturing, virtual reality, big data, cloud computing, internet of things, 3D printing and to have a broad application of other advanced and innovative technologies. The capability to innovate new technologies for the cultural sector should be greatly improved. This was elaborated further in more concrete terms as to: •

encourage all related institutions to provide the opening of a catalogue of digital resources to collect a complete shared list of digital cultural resources. 107

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• • •

investigate the data resources of libraries, cultural centres, galleries, art troupes, and etc. understand the archives and enhance the storage condition of basic data. To improve the research and development of the collection, cleaning, analysis, sharing and visualisation of big data in the cultural sectors; and based on the storage construction of the metadata of digital cultural resources, all data should be collected, organised and connected … to encourage libraries, museums, cultural centres and galleries to collect and share user data … to develop and utilise the data of cultural resources with the power of the whole society (crowd sourcing), and finally select and integrate the high-quality social data and cultural resources.

To map the use of these technologies in the sector, one author carried out a survey of various cultural heritage institutions in China in 2017. The survey was conducted as part of the 2016 and 2017 Museums Masterclass, coordinated by the University of Nottingham in collaboration with museums such as the V&A, National Portrait Gallery and New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. The data presented below are interpreted together with personal discussions with delegates, who included managers and directors of China’s museums. Following the survey, we evaluated 22 national museums across 16 cities, enumerating the adoption of the types of technologies that Western museums tended to use. While we do not yet have data relating to Western museums, figures on the types of digital exhibits presently installed within China’s priority museums, which received the larger portion of the Ministry of Culture’s funding, provide us with an overview of where, in terms of technology adoption, China is positioned. This will provide a clearer platform from which to gauge how far they have come in meeting the previous 12th Five-Year Plan, and the ambitious objectives of the 13th Five-Year Plan. Our investigation asked six questions related to participants’ roles and seniority in the museums, entry payment, types of digital technologies used, future plans for the adoption of digital technology for exhibits, current in-house human resources for digital contents, and cultural heritage content most suited to VR. Questions: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

Do users have to pay to enter your museum? Do your museum exhibits use any of the digital technologies below? If your museum has plans to adopt the digital technologies (below) for exhibits, when will you likely adopt them? (After 6 months, in 1–2 years, 2–5 years, 5–10 years) Does your museum have in-house human resource and skills to create digital contents for the technologies below? What cultural heritage contents will you be using VR for in your museum?

Categories of digital technologies mentioned in the questions • • • • • • • • 108

VR AR interactive 3D (non-immersive 3D environments) interactive 2D (basic touchscreen) multitouch screens (touchscreens supporting gestures) 3D projection displays (stereo 3D displays) 4D displays (theatres with physical effects) 3D printing.

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Findings We obtained only 10 samples from the 45 museum delegates attending our masterclass. This is a low response rate, which we believe may be due to those in the lesser managerial roles not having access to such information. Further, participants may have been unwilling to divulge strategic information without permission from higher authorities. Our sample represents senior roles from museums and galleries with a participant as an owner, two roles as

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Figure 9.1 Side-by-side comparisons (e.g. ‘VR adopted’ v. ‘VR skilled’) of the number of digital exhibits adopted by museums and galleries and in-house human resource and skills needed to develop that type of exhibit. Source: Eugene Ch’ng. 109

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directors, a director of public relations, two deputy chairs, an international collaboration and outreach activity representative and two anonymous respondents. We generated a graph comparing the number of digital exhibits adopted by museums and galleries to the in-house human resource and skills needed to develop that type of exhibit. Figure 9.1 presents the side-by-side comparisons. The first two graphs—‘VR owned’ versus ‘VR skilled’—show that the museums and galleries on which the interviews focused have neither adopted VR nor have in-house human resources and skills to develop VR. In the graphs comparing ‘i3D adopted’ versus ‘i3D skilled’, we can see that the museums and galleries have adopted interactive 3D installations but do not have in-house teams with skills. This suggests that cultural institutions in China tend to subcontract digital works to thirdparty digital media companies. This is logical, as it is cheaper to subcontract technical development than it is to form an in-house digital team. Personal conversations and our onsite survey of 22 museums confirmed this. The graphs illustrate that overall, museums and galleries tended to adopt more interactive 2D and 3D, with in-house human resource and skills for interactive 2D and multitouch development. Figure 9.2 is a layered bar plot of types of technology adoption reported by the participants. The graph is indicative of an early adoption of between six months and one year for all types of digital technologies. It is not surprising that most respondents reported a low planned adoption rate for VR and AR, pushing the adoption of such technologies further into the future because of concerns about the lack of requisite skills and expertise. More museums aimed for technologies familiar to them—interactive 2D/ 3D, multitouch and 3D displays. In China 3D printing hardware is well known, with many local start-ups designing and manufacturing such machines for sale or as services. Figure 9.3 is a pie chart containing the breakdown of the percentage of digital system types within 22 top-level national museums over 16 Chinese cities. We explored and used 36 digital exhibits and categorised them accordingly. The graph shows that contemporary interactive 2D systems (at 40.6 per cent in our sample) are the most common systems adopted. These are ‘multimedia systems’ (i.e. i2D, from the 1990s). Projection systems with storytelling stands at 32.3 per cent—the second largest group of exhibits. This is followed by multitouch 2D at 13.4 per cent—a technology emerging from 2010—VR (6.3 per cent), i3D (5.8 per cent) and AR (1.5 per cent). The graph demonstrated a small but emerging adoption of more advanced interactive systems, indicating that museums in China are transitioning into a new era. China’s 12th Five-Year Plan for making museums ‘Smart Museums’ has prompted the introduction of newer types of digital exhibits. It is still unclear how VR and AR will contribute to China’s cultural heritage conservation. Chinese museums have only very recently adopted VR and AR for museum exhibits, at 6.3 per cent and 1.5 per cent respectively. Conservation is presently a traditional practice, apart from museums with the financial resources for subcontracting works for creating mobile, interactive 3D and VR/AR applications. Our understanding is that museums do not have digital teams for conservation; high-resolution photography works are subcontracted to companies. Prominent digitisation works, such as those at Dunhuang—which focus on conservation—result from collaboration with Western institutions. Similarly, the effects of the adoption of VR and AR leading to new methodologies for learning about collections in cultural heritage institutions are yet to be proven. According to our understanding of the culture of technological adoption, and the general willingness of society to explore, accept and use new technology, a quick succession of applications will follow. We have already witnessed initial VR and AR devices installed in the museums we 110

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Figure 9.2 Reported timescale for types of digital technology to be adopted (6 months–1 year, 1–2 years, 2–5 years, 5–10 years). Source: Eugene Ch’ng.

visited, some of which, while not having quality computer graphics, were adequate to induce a sense of presence and believability within the environments. Our recent ‘in-thewild’ observation of first-time users of VR and AR demonstrates how far such technologies have advanced. ‘In-the-wild’ studies bring research out from controlled environments such as laboratories into public spaces where technologies can be tested by any users, and in a number of ways unspecified by experimenters. Such studies have become very popular and are extremely useful for testing technology acceptance and observing users with new devices. In the study, we presented the reconstruction of an ancient maritime port in Ningbo to over 200 participants at the 2017 China (Ningbo) Cultural Industries Fair. The participants had no prior experience with VR. We discovered not only the ease of learning of such devices, but the ability of current VR and AR systems to induce the phenomenological approach to 111

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Figure 9.3 A pie chart of the breakdown of the percentages of digital system types. Our sample, collected from 22 museums, comprised 36 digital systems. Source: Eugene Ch’ng.

the experience of ‘being there’. Participants were unwilling to ‘leave’ the environment due to the reality of our simulation. There was an instance in which an elderly spectator reprimanded us for breaking cultural artefacts of national importance, even though they were virtual copies. Virtual Reality and AR have indeed progressed from the 1990s, when they were crude virtual environments with geometrical objects, bad user interfaces and heavy headsets. Now, VR is as real as reality. Although relatively rare in Chinese museums, such experiences are perhaps the next step in the learning and teaching of cultural heritage through embodied experience. The introduction to the Special Issue on VR for Culture and Heritage: The Experience of Cultural Heritage with Virtual Reality discusses the need for museums to contextualise artefacts and provide spaces for personal and social interaction with the artefacts, and in relation to VR, ‘provide, through various media and narratives, an experience of the past’ (Ch’ng, Cai & Thwaites, 2018).

Conclusion A projection of how VR and AR will contribute to conservation and the creation of new methodologies for learning cultural heritage in China is difficult. However, the impact of digital technologies in the wider context of the social web is providing

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China’s cultural heritage institutions with new opportunities. A new programme for cultivating a love of cultural heritage by the CCTV Variety show, National Treasure (CCTV, 2018), gathers nine museums, their directors and various celebrities to promote China’s cultural heritage. Each series has been viewed at least five million times on China’s Youku, a YouTube equivalent, with the most viewed at 17.58 million, shared through one of China’s largest social media platforms, WeChat. Its YouTube playlist indicated an average of 100,000 views internationally. The show is a success, as it has kindled the love of young people for China’s cultural heritage, with many expressing desires to work for museums in the future. While the future projections on the contributions of specific digital technologies to cultural institutions is difficult, we can already see the wider impact of digital technologies for China’s creative economy. In this sense, cultural heritage institutions are increasingly viewed as part of China’s projection of soft power as well as one of the main drivers of the ‘cultural industry [which] will become a pillar industry of national economy at the end of the “13th Five Year” [Plan]’. The Plan states that many cultural heritage institutions should increase their autonomy, which would involve becoming less financially dependent on the public sector (State Council of China, 2017). In this sense, the development of VR, AR and 3D technologies in cultural heritage institutions in China will, in their enticing of more visitors whose admission fees and expenditure in onsite cafes and souvenir shops, generate increased income and contribute to greater financial sustainability. This will have an impact on pedagogy too, as a public habituated to the use of digital technologies will be receptive to the use of those same technologies for social and educational purposes within cultural heritage institutions in China.

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10 Hacking heritage Understanding the limits of online access Tim Sherratt

In 1995, an Australian government plan for digital innovation highlighted some exciting possibilities that lay ahead for the cultural sector (Department of Industry, Science and Tourism, 1995). Access to collections would be ‘simplified’ through the creation of an ‘Electronic Smithsonian’—a portal to bring together the holdings of national cultural institutions: For the user this home page access will be like walking electronically down an avenue of all our major museums or galleries. People will be able to find out about the collections, their significance and context, and use interactive links to other institutions, as well as to access digitalised images. Two decades later, the United Kingdom (UK) government’s Culture White Paper (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2016) envisaged a similar pathway for users, while seeking to make the UK ‘one of the world’s leading countries for digitised public collections content’: ‘We want users to enjoy a seamless experience online, and have the chance to access particular collections in depth as well as search across all collections.’ Digital technologies continue to offer a beguiling vision of universal access. Everyone, everywhere will be able to find and use our cultural collections. Hidden riches will be revealed. Obstacles to discovery and exploration will be removed. Technology, it is often assumed, can push collections across a threshold—it can make them open. But access is never truly open. Voices are suppressed or lost. Information is withheld or restricted. Priorities are set. Technology fails. Yes, placing collections online does create exciting new opportunities for engagement and use, but if we focus on the threshold moments, on the expansion of scope and scale, we draw attention away from the forces that control and shape the cultural record. We make it harder to see what is missing. As the digital GLAM sector expands worldwide, it is important to critically examine the meaning of access. Access to what and by whom? If cultural institutions hope to avoid replicating existing biases, we need to understand the limits and the possibilities of online systems. This chapter explores what we can discover about access by peeking behind existing 116

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interfaces—by hacking them in creative and constructive ways. Using examples from the Australian cultural sector, I suggest that we can turn digital technologies against themselves to question the way access itself is manufactured and controlled.

The promise of online access There is plenty of evidence that the web, coupled with digitisation, optical character recognition (OCR) and search, has transformed the way we find and use cultural heritage collections. The delivery of historical Australian newspapers through Trove is one of the most obvious and powerful examples. A 2013 user survey indicated that Trove use across Australia generally corresponded with the national population distribution (Ayres, 2013). People who had never visited the National Library of Australia in Canberra, or even one of the state libraries, are now able to dive deep into their newspaper holdings. Digital delivery has lessened physical isolation. Similarly, the National Archives of Australia (NAA) has pursued digitisation as a solution to the ‘tyranny of distance’ (Ling & McLean, 2004). In its 2015–16 Annual Report, the NAA (2016) noted that while 111,526 records had been viewed in its reading rooms, 10,579,254 records had been accessed online. This is not simply a matter of convenience. People who might never identify as ‘researchers’, who might never have thought of visiting a major cultural institution, can explore their collections without having to brave the intimidations of architecture or the questioning of gatekeepers, however well-intentioned. Nor is the digital simply a replacement for books or microfilms. The application of OCR and full-text search to large text collections such as Trove’s digitised newspapers may now seem commonplace, but that does not make it any less transformative (Hitchcock, 2008). The change is both quantitative and qualitative. More people are using more resources, but they are also using them differently—navigating patterns, traces and fragments in a way that would be impossible for even the most hardened microfilm operator (Putnam, 2016). Using digital technologies, GLAM institutions can expose the vast number of collection items that will never make it into physical exhibitions. Online collection databases give people the freedom to ask their own questions and embark on their own adventures of discovery (Cameron & Robinson, 2007). Likewise, institutional authority can give way to new modes of collaboration, as demonstrated by the growing proliferation of online crowdsourcing projects in the cultural heritage domain (Ridge, 2014). An increasing number of institutions are providing openly licensed, and easily downloadable, high-resolution collection images (Kapsalis, 2016). Opportunities are being opened, not simply to consume collections as audiences or visitors, but to create with them. Collections are being encountered, shared and used beyond the frame of the institutional website. Instead of waiting for visitors to arrive, Twitter bots set objects loose in places where people already congregate. Services such as Trove, DigitalNZ, the Digital Public Library of America and Europeana bring together millions of items from GLAM organisations to open new avenues for discovery. However, the purpose of large-scale aggregation is not simply to build better search interfaces. These services provide new platforms for sharing, collaboration, enrichment and re-use of cultural heritage collections (Sherratt, 2013). Aggregation enlarges the scope and meaning of access. There is no doubt that digital technologies have changed the way we find and use cultural heritage collections. As the previous examples demonstrate, online access has opened GLAM collections around the world to new audiences and new questions. However, as the number of online collection items continues to grow, as exciting new interfaces emerge, as 117

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more and more organisations share their collection data, it is all too easy to view access as a technology-fuelled march towards some ideal of openness—towards the fabled ‘seamless online experience’ in which the riches of our cultural institutions are arrayed for easy consumption. But seams are not simply obstacles to a smooth user experience; they are reminders that our online services are themselves constructed (Sherratt, 2015b). How and why does information become ‘open’? And when does it remain ‘closed’? By focusing on the technological drivers, we obscure the resourcing decisions, ethical judgements, political controls and historical processes that define the boundary between open and closed and construct our experience of access.

The limits of online access As Tara Robertson (2018) reminds us, ‘not all information wants to be free’. Ethical considerations around privacy and consent should inform decisions about what to digitise. Australian GLAM institutions, for example, generally recognise that access to Indigenous cultural collections should be subject to community consultation and control. The ATSILIRN Protocols (2012), first published in 1995 and updated in 2012, state that access to secret, sacred or sensitive materials requires careful management in the online environment. Digital knowledge management systems such as Ar̲ a Irititja, Keeping Culture and Mukurtu have been developed in consultation with Indigenous communities to provide culturally appropriate controls over access. Kimberley Christen (2012), one of the developers of Mukurtu, argues against ‘false choices’ between open and closed systems, and notes that ‘general calls for “open access” undo the social bearings of information circulation and deny human agency’. Access can be withheld for good reasons. Digitisation itself has a history, rooted not just in recent technological developments, but in much earlier efforts to expand the reach of access. As Tim Hitchcock (2016) points out, early targets for digitisation were canonical texts microfilmed by commercial firms in the predigital age: In other words, what happened in the twentieth century—the aspiration to create a particular kind of universal library, and to commercialise world culture (and to a 1930s mind, this meant male and European culture)—essentially shapes what is now available on line. However, decisions about what to digitise are only the latest in a series of selections, omissions, erasures and accidents that have shaped the holdings of our cultural institutions. ‘As spaces of power,’ Rodney Carter (2006) argues, ‘the archive is riddled with silences’. Collections are formed by exclusion—by decisions about whose lives and voices matter. Online access is built atop generations of absence and loss. It comes with a responsibility to consider whose experiences are missing from our list of search results. As Lara Putnam (2016) suggests, we need to ‘size up the absence’. The ability to type a few words in a search box and find relevant resources still seems miraculous. But we do not know what we cannot find. The apparent omniscience of online discovery systems is maintained by their ability to hide their biases and failures. The reality is different. Safiya Noble (2018) has shown how search algorithms reinforce inequality. Ian Milligan (2013) has pointed at the limitations of OCR when applied to historical texts. Search interfaces lie, OCR is flawed and metadata is incomplete and inconsistent. 118

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Discovery is just the starting point. Having found an item of interest, what can you do with it? How easy is it to share a persistent link, or download a high-resolution image? Can you obtain catalogue data in a machine-readable form for large-scale analysis? Online interfaces make assumptions about the needs and desires of users. They do not merely provide access; they construct it by defining the types of interactions we can have with collections. It is sometimes claimed that the growth in online collections has resulted in a ‘democratisation’ of access. More resources are available to more people. But what we see, and how we see it, are the result of decisions made by someone else. What power do we really have? Most of Trove’s digitised newspapers were published before 1955. This is not because of a lack of content or resources, but because of restrictions imposed by copyright legislation (Sherratt, 2015a). Similar stories can be told around the world (Terras, 2015)—copyright skews online access away from contemporary history. The protection of property constrains our vision of the past. Legislative barriers are frequently erected around archives. Australian government records are expected to be opened to the public after 20 years. But there are limits. Records created by courts and the parliament itself are treated differently, and the Archives Act 1983 defines a series of exemptions that can be invoked to withhold records (National Archives of Australia, n.d.). Most countries impose limits on what we can know about the workings of government—the right of access is defined within systems of classification and control. Political power, bureaucratic processes and professional practice all play a role in determining what we can access. Online collections have a history. Digital access is the product of analogue processes—of institutional policies and individual judgements. Our search results are not manufactured by algorithms alone. They are created by many small acts of human imagination, initiative, obstruction and neglect. But if the development of online access is not an onwards march towards some ideal of ‘openness’, what is it? How can we track, analyse, understand or change it? Many coding languages provide mechanisms for ‘introspection’. This allows us to discover something about the properties of a program as it is run. Interfaces to cultural heritage collections offer similar opportunities to peer inside and observe the processes that deliver resources to our browser. Perhaps the simplest example is the number of ‘total results’ that most search interfaces display. While we cannot take this at face value—among other things, it is dependent on the configuration of the search index—it does tell us something about the collection as a whole. And that is a convenient place to start.

Search engines lie I created the QueryPic (Sherratt, 2012a) tool to visualise searches in Trove’s digitised newspapers. You enter keywords as you would in the normal web interface. However, instead of viewing a list of search results, you see a chart showing the number of matching articles, year by year. QueryPic lets you look for patterns across the complete newspaper corpus. One QueryPic chart examines the question, when did the ‘Great War’ become the ‘First World War’. It is a good example of how the tool can be used to track changes in language. However, if you look closely, you will notice a small bump in the usage of ‘First World War’ around 1916. How could this be? If you dig down through QueryPic to the relevant articles, you will find that ‘First World War’ appears not in the newspaper text, but in tags added by Trove users. By default, Trove searches user tags and comments as well as the articles themselves. 119

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Digital access to cultural collections is not just delivered by websites. An increasing number of cultural heritage institutions provide direct access to collection data and images through application programming interfaces (APIs) or downloadable files. Such data are said to be ‘machine-readable’ or ‘machine-actionable’—instead of being displayed as a product for human consumption, like a web page, they are represented in a form that computers can understand and manipulate. Made available in this form, collection data can support the development of new research, applications and analyses. The Collections as Data (2017) project seeks to develop guidelines and requirements, and to use cases for the sharing and re-use of these sorts of data. QueryPic is built using the Trove API. It is a simple example of what becomes possible when cultural institutions make their data available for re-use. However, as the ‘First World War’ example reveals, machine-readable data inherit the limits and biases of the systems and processes that created them. Trove’s search indexes are tuned for easy discovery, not largescale data analysis. There is currently no way to exclude tags and comments from a search using the API. In some ways, this compromises the usefulness of QueryPic. It certainly highlights the need for visualisations to be carefully interrogated. You could also argue that this ‘blip’ or bug reveals features of the system that are otherwise difficult to see. Safiya Noble’s (2018) analysis of the ways in which search engines reinforce existing prejudices began with a simple Google search for ‘black girls’. Matthew Reidsma’s (2016) examination of bias in the related topic suggestions of the Summon discovery service began by simply logging user search terms against the topic suggestions. In both these cases, existing search interfaces were turned upon themselves. Through thoughtful observation and experiment, the interfaces offered information about their own biases. The accuracy of OCR is a major issue for services like Trove that offer full-text search across large collections of historical documents. Trove, unlike some commercial services, does at least expose the results of its OCR processing so you can get a feeling for how messy it is. But how does this messiness affect your search results? Here is a simple experiment to try right now. Go to Trove’s digitised newspaper interface and search for ‘tbe’. How many results are there? A little browsing will quickly reveal that ‘tbe’ is a failed OCR attempt at ‘the’. When I last tried this search, ‘tbe’ was found in 14,996,286 articles (about 7 per cent of the total). You could easily repeat this search across particular newspapers, locations or periods to see how error rates compare. The ‘truth’ of search engines is formulated within the limitations of technology and content. Yet they express no doubt and offer no qualification. They encourage us to believe that they are comprehensive and accurate. The proceedings of Australia’s Commonwealth Parliament from 1901 onwards are all available online. The original volumes of Hansard have been scanned, and the text marked up in XML—one file for every sitting day. All this content is searchable through the ParlInfo database, but the interface is not easy to use. For example, it is difficult to simply browse a day’s proceedings. In 2016, I wrote a computer script to search ParlInfo and download all of the underlying XML files from 1901 to 1980. The harvested files were shared through a GitHub repository (Sherratt, 2016b), enabling researchers to undertake large-scale analysis of political language and events. However, there was a problem. The filenames of some XML files did not conform to the standard pattern, and when I looked inside, I found they were empty. This meant that some sitting days did not appear in search results—they were effectively invisible. After further investigation, I discovered that 94 days were missing (Sherratt, 2016c). The gaps were most pronounced in the Senate between 1910 and 1919. For example, 21 of 47 sitting days in 1917 did 120

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not appear in search results. Anyone relying on ParlInfo for research into political responses to the First World War would have missed significant slabs of content. The Parliamentary Library has since replaced the empty XML files and is undertaking further analysis. On another occasion, while trying to update details of Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) surveillance files that I had previously harvested from the NAA’s online database, I discovered that about 400 files had disappeared from the public search interface. The NAA explained that this was an unintended consequence of a recent reorganisation of their holdings. These things happen. Complex processes fail. The point is not to apportion blame, but to recognise failure as an inevitable part of the experience of online access. While it is unlikely that the missing files would have been noticed by someone using the standard search interfaces of either system, traces remained. These traces tripped up my harvesting programs. Just like the blip in QueryPic, they pointed to anomalies—they helped me ‘size up the absence’. Search interfaces to cultural heritage collections are not simply services to be consumed; they construct our experience of access. But they also offer glimpses of their inner workings that we can observe and change. What happens when we approach search engines as sites of experimentation and play? Or when we read them as historical documents awaiting close analysis?

Not everything is digitised What do 200 million newspaper articles look like? Or 300 km of government records? Part of our problem in understanding access is the difficulty of grappling with the scale of our cultural collections. As Mitchell Whitelaw (2015) argues, the view offered by search boxes is a narrow, miserly slice of our rich collections. He and others have been exploring the possibilities of ‘generous interfaces’ that encourage exploration by putting collection items up front. Such experiences are no less constructed than a set of search results and can just as easily deceive their users. However, they offer a different approach to the challenges of scale—trusting users to interpret big, abstract pictures, instead of just consuming a stream of bite-sized chunks. Big pictures can prompt us to ask different types of questions, to address the meaning of a collection as a collection. Figure 10.1 shows one way of seeing 200 million newspaper articles. This chart simply shows the number of digitised newspaper articles per year in Trove. You can make your own version of this chart using QueryPic. Simply paste ‘http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/ result?q=+’ into the ‘Query url’ box and select the ‘number of articles’ view. Of course, depending on when you undertake this experiment, your results might be quite different. New articles are added to Trove all the time. Has the picture changed? In 2017, when I constructed this version, there was a significant spike in the number of articles around 1915. Why? Did something notable happen in 1915? No—it is not a result of the war … or at least not directly. It is a product of funding and priorities. In the lead-up to the centenary of the First World War, collaborating libraries decided to focus digitisation dollars on newspapers from the war period. Eventually, the spike should flatten out as other gaps are filled, but it is a useful reminder of how online collections are shaped by politics and practicalities. Creating a big picture of the NAA’s holdings is rather more challenging. Currently, the NAA only provides API access to some First World War service records—once again in support of the Anzac centenary. To obtain any other data from RecordSearch, the NAA’s online database, it is necessary to reverse engineer the interface and extract structured information from web pages. This process is known as screen scraping. Over the years, I have scraped large amounts of data and digitised page images from RecordSearch, sharing both the results and the code (Sherratt, 121

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Figure 10.1 Number of digitised newspaper articles available in Trove by year. Source: Tim Sherratt.

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2012b, 2016d). Screen scraping is inefficient and prone to error, but it is also an example of how access can be negotiated and changed from the outside—web pages can be transformed into data; online collections can be opened to computational analysis. In late 2016, I harvested data from 63,711 series in RecordSearch and aggregated information about the numbers of files described and digitised in each series. About a third of all series have at least some item descriptions and about a fifth have some items digitised. But how is this distributed across the whole collection? Item descriptions make records findable. Digitisation provides instant access. Together they determine the shape and texture of the collection as it is experienced online. Total series

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To explore the way access is distributed across the National Archives, I categorised each series using top-level government functions (Sherratt, 2017). These functions are defined in a thesaurus maintained by the NAA, and include things like transport, employment and immigration. In RecordSearch, functions are associated with government agencies rather than individual series, so there is some fuzziness in my groupings. Nonetheless, it is possible to create some collection-level snapshots. If we view the subject groupings by the amount of records in each (measured in shelf metres) as in Figure 10.2a, the distribution seems fairly even. But the picture changes when we focus on the number of items described or digitised, as in Figure 10.2b. ‘Defence’ becomes particularly prominent, while areas such as ‘community services’ and ‘cultural affairs’ seem to shrink. The prominence of defence is really no surprise. Service records are heavily used by family historians, and in 2007 the Australian government funded the digitisation of all 375,000 First World War service records in what was branded ‘A Gift to the Nation’. This one investment has had a significant and enduring impact on access to records held by the NAA. There will always be priorities in digitisation programs. There will always be short-term funding opportunities related to specific initiatives or events—and there is nothing wrong with that. It is just that these biases and distortions are not obvious to someone typing queries into a search box. Marilyn Lake (2010), Carolyn Holbrook (2017) and others have described how Australian government funding of educational resources related to the First World War has promoted a particular vision of Australian history. Digitisation of war-related collections needs to be examined in this context—what perspectives are privileged by easy online access? In many countries, the boom in family history has had an impact on digitisation priorities, encouraging new collaborations with commercial providers like Ancestry (Kriesberg, 2017). Access to certain collections has a distinct dollar value, a capacity for on-sale to eager genealogists. As Barbara Reed (2014) asks, do organisations understand the compromises they are making by entering commercial arrangements? Do we understand how such priorities affect the range of stories we can tell about the past? Digitisation shapes our perceptions of reality. The more we have in digital form, the easier cultural heritage collections are to find and use, the more likely we are to assume that everything (or at least everything important) is online. Researchers are used to asking 123

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Figure 10.2a Top-level functions in the National Archives of Australia by quantity (shelf metres). Source: Tim Sherratt

questions about context and completeness when working with historical sources, but the power and scale of digital technologies draws attention away from their limits. To overcome this, we need to take scale seriously and analyse digitisation priorities in the context of a bigger, unknowable whole.

Access is not always open The first of January in Australia each year has become an annual celebration of access. Both national and state archives release previously closed files for public scrutiny, and the media fills a slow news day with secrets from governments past. The opening of a new batch of cabinet records by the NAA attracts particular attention. However, the media coverage generally overlooks that this is a routine bureaucratic process governed by archives legislation. With each new year, the ‘open period’ (now set at 20 years) creeps forward, and many more records are potentially available to the public. The cabinet documents are given a head start, pushed through the process of access examination in preparation for their big day. But most records have to wait for a researcher to request them before they are considered for

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Figure 10.2b Top-level functions in the National Archives of Australia by number of items digitised. Source: Tim Sherratt

release. Access examination checks the contents of a record against a list of exemptions defined by the Archives Act. These are reasons why files should not be made public (e.g. privacy or national security). Most records pass this test and are opened, or partially opened, for all to see. But a small percentage remain closed. Here is another experiment to try. Go to RecordSearch on the NAA website and select the ‘Advanced search’ for ‘Items’. Go to ‘Access status’ near the bottom of the search form and choose ‘Closed’. RecordSearch will display details of the records you are not allowed to view. Since 2016, I have been undertaking my own new year’s ritual—harvesting details of all files in RecordSearch with the access status of ‘closed’. In January 2018, there were 11,235 closed files (Sherratt, 2018). How many did your search return? I also compile and share lists of files that were newly closed in the past year. It seems only fair that the celebrations surrounding the cabinet release should spare some time to remember the files that did not make it through. Access is about what we cannot see as well as what we can.

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You might have noticed that RecordSearch not only records the access status of a file, but the date of and reasons for the decision. Usually the reasons are specific exemptions defined by the Archives Act, but there are some additional categories. I used the 2016 harvest to create a new interface that lets you look for patterns and connections in a way that is impossible within RecordSearch itself (Sherratt, 2016a). Figure 10.3, for example, shows the number of closed files associated with each ‘reason’. The most commonly cited reason is Section 33(1)(g) of the Archives Act, which relates to individual privacy. Two other heavily used categories, ‘Pre access recorder’ and ‘Withheld pending adv’, are not defined anywhere in the Act. ‘Pre access recorder’ was used on records that had been closed before the introduction of the Archives Act in 1983. It all but disappeared from the 2017 harvest, as the NAA changed the access status of these files to ‘Not yet examined’. ‘Withheld pending adv’ tells a more complex story. It is used when records are referred back to the government agencies that created or controlled them for advice on whether they can be made public. This process can take months or even years, so ‘Withheld pending adv’

Figure 10.3 Reasons cited for closing files in the National Archives of Australia. Source: Tim Sherratt 126

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is used as a marker to indicate that a file is part way through the examination process. It is closed, but not finally closed. The use of this marker is evidence of a glitch in the system. The Act states that access decisions will be made within 90 days—there is no provision for extended consideration by agencies. This will be changed by proposed amendments to the archives legislation; thus, the category might disappear from future harvests. How closed is ‘closed’? Files marked as ‘Withheld pending adv’ sit in a sort of archival limbo—neither open nor closed. Using data from the 2018 harvest, I was able to identify which files were finally released to the public in 2017 and calculate how long they had been waiting. The average was three years and 77 days (Sherratt, 2018). They might not be finally closed, but they are effectively closed. In the case of the NAA, the meaning of access is defined by legislation. It is assumed that records older than 20 years will be opened to public scrutiny—the justifications for withholding access are called ‘exemptions’ for a reason. But that is not the end of the story. Access examination is a complex process involving bureaucratic practice, individual interpretation and the public right to access. By making regular harvests, I am hoping to expose this as a historical process—to identify changes over time in the way access is constructed. The data I am harvesting is all publicly available through RecordSearch. However, the existing interface does not allow you to aggregate information about sets of files. Like Trove, its purpose is discovery, not analysis. When we free data from existing collection interfaces, new possibilities emerge. The NAA holds many thousands of records documenting the workings of the White Australia Policy—a system of immigration control designed to keep Australia ‘white’. By extracting portrait photographs from identification documents in the NAA, I was able to create The Real Face of White Australia, showing the faces of people who lived under this racist system of surveillance and control (Sherratt & Bagnall, 2019). It is both a visualisation and a discovery interface—a way of navigating the records though the people inside. The History Lab at Columbia University has assembled a huge database of declassified government documents. Many of these include redactions—sections of text blacked out for security reasons. By identifying redactions and comparing redacted and non-redacted copies of the same documents, the History Lab team is revealing new patterns in state censorship (History Lab, n.d.). Similarly, I extracted many thousands of redactions from the surveillance files of ASIO and turned them into a discovery interface (Sherratt, 2016e). The redactions became a gateway to the files they were intended to obscure. One way of exploring the meaning of access is to see what collections look like when we turn them inside out. What happens when we focus on what is closed or censored, when we look at what we are not allowed to see?

Hacking access It is easy to get excited about the possibilities of online access for cultural heritage collections— new audiences, new uses and new opportunities to demonstrate value and relevance. But there will always be limits. The idea that our efforts are aimed towards a ‘seamless’ online experience that brings everything together is a dangerous mirage. In The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, Trevor Owens (2017) warns ‘whatever discovery system or interface you use today is temporary’. Instead of relying on a single point of access, Owens argues for ‘multimodal access and use’, where collection data is shared in a variety of forms, and new interfaces are created both by GLAM institutions and their users. 127

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This approach engages with the complexities and contradictions of access. There is no solution, no off-the-shelf system—all we can do is create, play, build and critique to explore access in the making. As Bethany Nowviskie (2016) suggests in her talk on ‘speculative collections’, there is an opportunity to shift the temporal orientation of our libraries and archives away from a closed and linear past towards an exploration of what might be. This is not a job for cultural institutions alone. Collection users need to view themselves as more than simply the beneficiaries of access. Researchers generally accept that their use of primary source material comes with an obligation to critically engage with its context and meaning. Why should such obligations diminish online? Contexts are multiplied through digitisation, aggregation and indexing. We should treat interfaces as archaeological sites, digging down through layers of technology, descriptive practice and institutional history to understand what is delivered so conveniently through our browsers. This chapter has provided some examples of how these sorts of excavations might start— from simple experiments using the search box, through to large-scale data harvests, and the creation of new interfaces. This is not intended as a structured research program, but as an invitation to start hacking. Mark Olson (2013) describes a ‘hack’ as something that ‘transforms the effectivities of socio-technical systems, making them work, or un-work, often in new and unexpected ways’. Olson explores how adopting a hacker ethos can enlarge the field of humanities practice: A hack can be elegant or kludgy, authored from scratch or patched together and remixed—the important thing is getting things done, pushing the boundaries of what the humanities can do, what effects it can have in the world, and where. (p 245) Hacking the systems that construct and control access to our cultural collections is at the core of humanities practice in the early 21st century. As online collections continue to expand, we need to carve out spaces that resist the weight of scale and foster alternative perspectives. As interfaces grow in sophistication and complexity, we need to stage playful and pointed interventions that reveal their limits and empower critique. We do not all have to be coders, but we do have to take code seriously. We have to take what we are given by collection databases and change it. Hackers might work inside or outside a cultural institution—this is not about us and them. This is about recognising that for all the resources, intelligence, skill and care that institutions invest in their online resources, these resources will never be perfect, they will never be finished, they will never be open. Owens, Nowviskie and others have situated work on digital collections within an ethics of maintenance and care. We are in this for the long haul. Once we give up the dream of universal access, we can admit the limitations of our systems and set about the never-ending work of repair.

References ATSILIRN. (2012). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander protocols for libraries, archives and information services. Retrieved from http://atsilirn.aiatsis.gov.au/protocols.php. Ayres, M. (2013, July). Singing for their supper: Trove, Australian newspapers, and the crowd. Paper presented at the IFLA WLIC 2013, Singapore. Retrieved from http://library.ifla.org/245/1/153-ayres-en.pdf. Cameron, F. & Robinson, H. (2007). Digital knowledgescapes: Cultural, theoretical, practical, and usage issues facing museum collection databases in a digital epoch. In F. Cameron & S. Kenderdine (Eds.), Theorizing digital cultural heritage: A critical discourse (pp. 165–191). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 128

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Carter, R. G. S. (2006). Of things said and unsaid: Power, archival silences, and power in silence. Archivaria, 61(Spring), 215–233. Retrieved from https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/ 12541. Christen, K. (2012). Does information really want to be free? Indigenous knowledge systems and the question of openness. International Journal of Communication, 6. Retrieved from http://ijoc.org/index. php/ijoc/article/view/1618. Collections as Data. (2017). Home. Retrieved from https://collectionsasdata.github.io/. Department for Culture, Media and Sport. (2016). The culture white paper [White paper]. Retrieved from www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachmentdata/file/510798/DCMSTheCulture WhitePaper3.pdf. Department of Industry, Science and Tourism. (1995). Innovate Australia. Retrieved from webarchive .nla.gov.au/gov/19961102131909/www.dist.gov.au/events/innovate/itt.html. Hitchcock, T. (2008). Digital searching and the re-formulation of historical knowledge. In M. Greengrass & L. Hughes (Eds.), The virtual representation of the past (pp. 81–90). Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing. History Lab (n.d.). Retrieved from http://history-lab.org/. Hitchcock, T. (2016, 6 July). The digital humanities in three dimensions [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://historyonics.blogspot.com.au/2016/07/the-digital-humanities-in-three.html. Holbrook, C. (2017). Adaptable Anzac: Past, present and future. In Editors: David Stephens and Alison Broinowski, The honest history book (pp. 48–63). Sydney, NSW: New South Publishing. Kapsalis, E. (2016). The impact of open access on galleries, libraries, museums, & archives. Smithsonian Emerging Leaders Development Program. Retrieved from http://siarchives.si.edu/sites/default/files/pdfs/ 20160310OpenCollectionsPublic.pdf. Kriesberg, A. (2017). The future of access to public records? Public–private partnerships in US state and territorial archives. Archival Science, 17(1), 5–25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-016-9268-6. Lake, M. (2010). How do schoolchildren learn about the spirit of Anzac? In M. Lake & H. Reynolds (Eds.), What’s wrong with Anzac: The militarisation of Australian history (pp. 135–156). Sydney, NSW: New South Publishing. Ling, T. & McLean, A. (2004). Taking it to the people: Why the National Archives of Australia embraced digitisation on demand. Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 35(1), 2–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00048623.2004.10755253. Milligan, I. (2013). Illusionary order: Online databases, optical character recognition, and Canadian history, 1997–2010. Canadian Historical Review, 94(4), 540–569. https://doi.org/10.3138/chr.694. National Archives of Australia. (2016). Annual Report 2015–16. Retrieved from www.naa.gov.au/aboutus/publications/annual-reports/2015-16/index.aspx. National Archives of Australia. (n.d.). Access to records under the Archives Act–Fact sheet 10. Retrieved from http://naa.gov.au/collection/fact-sheets/fs10.aspx. Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York, NY: NYU Press. Nowviskie, B. (2016, 27 October). Speculative collections. Retrieved from http://nowviskie.org/2016/ speculative-collections/. Olson, M. J. (2013). Hacking the humanities: Twenty-first-century literacies and the ‘becoming other’ of the humanities. In E. Belfiore & A. Upchurch (Eds.), Humanities in the twenty-first century: Beyond utility and markets (pp. 237–250). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Owens, T. (2017). The theory and craft of digital preservation. LIS Scholarship Archive. https://doi.org/ 10.17605/OSF.IO/5CPJT Putnam, L. (2016). The transnational and the text-searchable: Digitized sources and the shadows they cast. The American Historical Review, 121(2), 377–402. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.2.377 Reed, B. (2014). Reinventing access. Archives and Manuscripts, 42(2), 123–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01576895.2014.926823 Reidsma, M. (2016, 11 March). Algorithmic bias in library discovery systems. Retrieved from https://mat thew.reidsrow.com/articles/173 Ridge, M. (Ed.). (2014). Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing. Robertson, T. (2018). Not all information wants to be free: The case study of On Our Backs. In P. D. Fernandez & K. Tilton (Eds.), Applying library values to emerging technology: Decision-making in the age of open access, maker spaces, and the ever-changing library (Publications in Librarianship #72) (pp. 225– 239). American Library Association. Retrieved from http://eprints.rclis.org/32463/ Sherratt, T. (2012a). QueryPic. Retrieved from http://dhistory.org/querypic/

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Sherratt, T. (2012b). recordsearch_tools. Retrieved from https://github.com/wragge/recordsearch_tools Sherratt, T. (2013, October). From portals to platforms: building new frameworks for user engagement. Paper presented at the LIANZA 2013 Conference, Hamilton, New Zealand. Retrieved from www.nla.gov.au/ our-publications/staff-papers/from-portal-to-platform Sherratt, T. (2015a). Asking better questions: History, Trove and the risks that count. In Phillipa McGuinness (Ed.), Copyfight (pp. 112–124). Sydney, NSW: New South Publishing. Retrieved from http://discontents.com.au/asking-better-questions-history-trove-and-the-risks-thatcount/ Sherratt, T. (2015b). Seams and edges: Dreams of aggregation, access, and discovery in a broken world. Presented at the ALIA Online 2015, Sydney. Retrieved from http://discontents.com.au/seams-and-edgesdreams-of-aggregation-access-discovery-in-a-broken-world/ Sherratt, T. (2016a). Closed access. Paper presented at DH2015, Hobart. Retrieved from http://discon tents.com.au/closed-access/ Sherratt, T. (2016b). hansard-xml. Retrieved from https://github.com/wragge/hansard-xml Sherratt, T. (2016c). Investigating the Hansard black hole. Retrieved from http://timsherratt.org/researchnotebook/historic-hansard/notes/investigating-the-hansard-black-hole/ Sherratt, T. (2016d). recordsearch-series-harvests. Retrieved from https://github.com/wragge/recordsearchseries-harvests Sherratt, T. (2016e). Redacted. Retrieved from http://owebrowse.herokuapp.com/redactions/ Sherratt, T. (2017). Viewing the NAA through functions. Retrieved from http://timsherratt.org/researchnotebook/aggregated-archives/notes/naa-functions-view/ Sherratt, T. (2018, February 2). Withheld, pending advice. Inside Story. Retrieved from http://insides tory.org.au/withheld-pending-advice/ Sherratt, T. & Bagnall, K. (2019 ). The people inside. In K. Kee & T. Compeau (Eds.), Seeing the past: Experiments with computer vision and augmented reality in history (pp. 11–31). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9964786 Terras, M. (2015). Opening access to collections: The making and using of open digitised cultural content. Online Information Review, 39(5), 733–752. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-06-2015-0193 Whitelaw, M. (2015). Generous interfaces for digital cultural collections. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 9(1). Retrieved from www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/1/000205/000205.html

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11 From planned oblivion to digital exposition The digital museum of Afro-Brazilian heritage Livio Sansone

All over the Global South, communication has developed much faster than ‘physical’ opportunities have. In fact, one of the aspects that characterises the Global South vis-à-vis the Global North, besides poorer indicators of quality of life, is scarce access to physical libraries, archives and museums rather than access to communication technologies or conspicuous consumption more generally. In the meantime, together with the communication revolution, new claims for representation have emerged from subaltern groups that also want to become part of the performance of diversity by being portrayed positively in museums, archives and heritage exhibits. Over the last decade, new communication technologies seem to have changed and broadened the horizon for museum exhibits and heritage preservation more generally. A process that began in the more technologically developed nations has begun to make inroads into the Global South. It is within this two-fold trend that our project of a digital museum has developed. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the Digital Museum of African and AfroBrazilian Memory.1 The museum began in 1998 at the Center for Afro-Asian Studies, Candido Mendes University, in Rio de Janeiro with a collection of newspaper and magazine articles in the Brazilian press about a Black movement, racism and Africa. The pieces were initiated under the coordination of Carlos Hasenbalg and received initial funding support from the Mellon Foundation and later, the Sephis Program for the rescue of archives in danger. Since then, our Digital Museum has received support from important national and international groups, including the Prince Claus Foundation, the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, the Co-ordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel, Financier of Studies and Projects and the Research Support Foundations of the States of Bahia, Rio de Janeiro and Maranhão. Our digital museum (see Figures 11.1 and 11.2) is a concrete intervention in the geopolitics of knowledge, an attempt to reverse the tradition of dividing the world into places where research is performed, and popular culture is produced, and places where information 131

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Figure 11.1 Poster of the museum. Source: Livio Sansone.

and artefacts are kept, archived and ‘secured’. This tends to be where ‘Art’ (with a capital A) is created and enshrined. This is particularly relevant in Bahia, the Brazilian state with highest percentage of population of African descent, which as from the 1930s, has taken a central place in the transnational process of making of African-American studies and of the notion 132

Figure 11.2 Folder of the museum. Source: Livio Sansone.

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of Africanism.2 Despite this, Bahia has never been the site for a major or national museum of Afro-Brazilian heritage—a museum that, in fact, does not exist in Brazil at all. The Digital Museum initiative is important to the knowledge and memory of African art and culture more generally in two ways. First, it concerns the rediscovery or perhaps the reinvention of Africa in its own diaspora. Second, through several collaborative projects with African institutions (Mozambique Historical Archive, INEP-Guinea Bissau, IFAN-Dakar and University of Cape Verde), it relates to the establishment of a digital heritage for Africa and the rest of the Global South, emphasising a critical and yet positive perspective on digitisation and its preservation and circulation on the web. Our project has emerged from the currently contradictory cultural and multicultural politics of Brazil, where a new configuration is beginning to define itself by interaction between new communication technologies, state intervention within the sphere of the production of culture and identity, and new demands by historically subaltern groups that are now being recognised. Over the last two decades, heritage recovery and preservation has produced a whole new economy and culture.

Background: Brazilian cultural politics In Brazil, at least since its independence in 1822, the State and elites have defined certain national characteristics and celebrated them by recourse to use of the term ‘the people’ (Sansone, 2012b). Since the 1930s, the categories of ‘people’ and ‘popular’ have been settled through the production of a list of artefacts with the prospect of patrimonialisation, by the National Foundation of the Arts, the National Historic and Artistic Heritage Institute (IPHAN) and museums (Santos, 2003; Williams, 2001). Although the people were distanced from power, in a complex process, popular culture became an essential component of the nation’s ideals. Within that process, ‘the African’ assumed a symbolically central position, followed by ‘the Negro’ and ‘the Indian’. As Lilia Schwarcz (1996) demonstrated, after 1830, the national debates of the Historical and Geographical Institute rewarded and celebrated the contribution of those ‘Others’ to ‘Brazilian-ness’. It was an incorporation of excess, more cultural than social and economic, in a process that created expectations between the subordinated and the racialised (Sansone, 2003). However, it is worth mentioning that the first register of material culture developed by the recently funded IPHAN (in 1938) concerned a large set of objects associated with Afro-Brazilian religions (drums, amulets, religious clothing etc.) that had been confiscated by police raids in the three preceding decades.3 Over time, the symbolic process of inclusion of Afro-Brazilian culture as representative of the nation has increased greatly, albeit in a context where, for decades, the State has been less obviously present and there has been more involvement by other agents, both physically present and virtual. Incorporation of the popular into the national began during Vargas’s nationalist-populist government in 1932–1945, when certain features associated with Africa were incorporated and the expression ‘Afro-Brazilian’ was invented. We can point to the concrete cases of samba and carnival, but also to capoeira, cuisine and even the variant of Portuguese spoken in Brazil. The second phase occurred from 1994–2002, during the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was the first president to acknowledge and denounce racism as a national problem. However, it was during the centre-left Lula–Dilma era from 2003–2016 that new conditions and actors emerged, and with them, possibilities for modern identity politics. I will mention just a few: television and commerce discovered the Negro (although not yet the índio); the institutionalisation of the ideas and icons of multiculturalism, including the implementation of Law 10369/2003, which made the teaching of ‘History and Cultures of Africa and Afro-American Populations’ compulsory at all 134

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levels of education; the policy of university quotas for poor and Black students, and other measures inspired by affirmative action. Further, a focus on programmes of bilateral collaboration known as a Sul-Sul (South– South) perspective in external politics inspired the celebration of Africa and aspects of the African origins of the Brazilian people. There was a slow but steady growth in African studies, especially of the continent’s history and anthropology, in Brazilian universities. For the first time, universities recruited specialists in these fields—many of whom were junior scholars. Attention was given to collective land rights on ethno-racial bases, to maroons, riverines (traditional populations living along the Amazonian rivers) and traditional indigenous populations. At last, a new cultural politics sprang up, whose guiding principle can be expressed concisely as the inclusion and patrimonialisation of both concrete and abstract—or tangible and intangible—culture, especially of traditionally subaltern groups and communities. The Brazilian Ministry of Culture and the State Secretaries of Culture launched a series of projects using completely new terminology within the sphere: Creative Commons, a new museum policy, cultural sites, territories of identity, ethnic tourism and so forth. As a result, the term ‘diversity’ has now become a fixture in the Portuguese language, as something positive that should be maintained; it is now perceived as a bonus for Brazil. For the first time in the history of the country, old ‘problems’ such as Africa, the Negro and the Indian, have become, albeit gradually and contradictorily, a bonus. To that, we add the development and popularisation of the notion of abstract or intangible culture, with a growing list of artefacts— such as samba de roda, the carnival parade of the Sons of Gandhi in Salvador, the Brotherhood of the Good Death in Cachoeira (Bahia), and musical instruments and traditional rhythms that had previously been defined as essentially regional. It is a list that tends to grow at an exponential rate, particularly when local governments discover that their culture ‘has value’. This was the case with the municipality of São Francisco do Conde, the richest of the State of Bahia (because of the royalties from the large oil refinery in its territory), which, in 2006, proclaimed itself the ‘Capital of Culture’. New questions of the social verticality of a historically unequal country, with the emergence of more sophisticated and more specific demands of citizenship, create new sensitivities in the fields of authorship and intellectual property, image rights, authenticity, reparation demands and willingness to become a subject and to speak for oneself. These sensitivities limit the freedom with which, when seeking to legitimise themselves, the various elites can appeal to the general category named ‘the people’ (o povo). Currently, often, the various groups that comprise ‘the people’ want to speak for themselves. All such novelties, sometimes at odds with each other, enable a new configuration, not only of the constructive process of collective identities, but also of memory. This is because many of the subaltern groups of the nation, which alter and broaden the range of symbols within which identities are recreated, are as much sectional as they are national. As mentioned, the process complements the rediscovery and reinvention of Africa—the semantic transformation of the trope African from an historical onus, because it had been considered that the so-called backwardness of the Brazilian population was largely due to its African descent—into a bonus. This is because for many voices, the African roots of Brazilian popular culture help to make it special and attractive.4 To patrimonialise Afro-Brazilian heritage also implies, in some form, defining what that culture is and from which elements it is composed. The need to determine the individual traits of a culture is in tension with the dynamic notion of culture that is today canonical in all the social sciences. We need to build a consensus around what we might call the common denominator of Afro-Brazilian culture (Sansone, 2007). Other challenges are 135

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offered by the vast size of the Afro-Brazilian population, which, far from being a minority, comprises more than half the total population of Brazil, and the huge variety of cultural expressions associated with the Black population. The dilemma is that, since we are aware that we are unable to reflect such grandeur and complexity, our Digital Museum must necessarily select expressions, themes and areas case-by-case and region-by-region.

Preserving African and Afro-Brazilian memory The Digital Museum of African and Afro-Brazilian Memory began as a digital version of an anthropological archive and was, therefore, initially called the Digital Archive of Afro-Bahian Studies. As it developed, it incorporated historians, curators and library scientists into its team and network. The term ‘African’ was included in the name to reflect the establishment of a series of exchanges with African archives and museums operating within a context that enriches the project in two ways. First, these archives have a great deal of documentation and material stemming from the colonial and—unfortunately to a much lesser extent—postcolonial imagery of Africa and Black people. Second, these archives are eager to develop new approaches and technologies for preservation, to ensure accessibility of documents and create digital exhibits. Often, those institutions receive various equipment from foreign donors and the local staff are just trained in how to digitise, but not in what or why to digitise (e.g. because information might have some use in the future even if it seems to have little use now). Also, there is hope concerning the production of an open-source prototype of a digital museum that could be used by African researchers to create their own museum. Such a digital museum could also be the engine for joint semi-presential training and even graduate courses—in which Portuguese, the official language of five African countries—represents a useful tool. Distance learning at graduate level, in association with our digital museum galleries, is a new frontier that could be of special interest in much of Brazil and Africa. The idea of constructing an archive and museum of living memories, transmitted on the internet, demands a meaningful dialogue on matters related to both tangible and intangible ethnic heritage involving different users, while also permitting a younger audience—the primary consumers of new technology—access to cultural benefits as a strategy to create new sensibilities and knowledge. The preservation of the intangible heritage of the Afro-Brazilian population and the question of image rights represents a pressing issue. In Brazil, little has been done to preserve the memory of the conflicts and daily life of the Afro-Brazilian population; indeed, their museums, galleries, archives and centres of documentation are few in number and poor in condition. The effort required to preserve such memory is still lacking within the large institutions that should perform that function, above all the National Library (BN) and the National Archive (AN). The Digital Museum project also aims to raise the awareness of these institutions, in the sense of getting them to address among their priorities the ‘Black issue’, meaning race relations, racism and Afro-Brazilian culture. This entails reviewing their collections and changing their indexing systems to include terms such as race or colour, racism, Negro, Afro-Brazilian and Africa. Finally, priority must be given to those topics in their exhibitions and publications.5 The Digital Museum deals with race relations and racism. The testimony of both Blacks and whites will be as important as records found in documents, processes or newspapers. To place racism into the context of a museum, even a digital one, naturally demands that we reflect on what it means to contemplate pain and evil. Therefore, reflections on the holocaust and slavery, and museums of apartheid are a source of inspiration. Although it can be difficult and painful to recall the time of slavery, particularly when it has left its long-lasting mark in contemporary inequalities such as racial discrimination and still affects most of the 136

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population, it is now positively necessary to do so (Sansone, 2000). The federal law of 2003 that demands the teaching of African and Afro-Brazilian cultures as a part of the social sciences cannot be implemented effectively without the preservation of collections of documents, visual images of all sorts and audiovisual materials including interviews with Black mães/pais-de-santo—who are the priestesses and priests of Afro-Brazilian religions— activists, politicians and intellectuals; or sound recordings of samba de roda groups, congadas, ternos de reis and so on. Along with the need to preserve memories, sounds and images, other developments in Brazilian society must be confronted fully and openly. In the recent years in which the consolidation of democracy in Brazil has been threatened by the silent conservative coup of 2016, the notion of citizenship has been expanding in the sense of incorporating the desire for greater control by the individual over public use of the image of the citizen—above all, the Black citizen. What then, is the best way to understand and overcome the dilemma that seems to set the duty to preserve the collective memory of the Afro-Brazilian population’s experience against their growing demand for the right to control how photographs, images, lyrics, songs and recipes produced by or associated with Blacks are published and circulated? New communication technologies have a profound impact on the construction of collective memory and its relationship with the process of identity as well as in the development of heritage infrastructure. They have produced a new visual culture, which has benefited from the print-to-online transition of news and that of photography from film to digital image— resulting in a proliferation of user-friendly resources for making online filmed self-portraits and visual (auto)biographies through platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and so on.6 I dare say, most contemporary Afro-Brazilian, cultural traditions and of course music genres are now generously represented on social networks. The rapid shift from oral culture to mobile telephones and then smartphones—quickly leaving the written paper culture behind and lacking a transition through telephone landlines and desktop computers as experienced in the Global North—begs reflection. The relationship between the means (oral, printed or digital) and the workings and politics of memory is not self-evident and needs to be researched in specific contexts. Does digital writing make things more uniform and carry the same authority as the printed word? Digitalisation also affects identity politics since digital and online archives have a considerable impact, not only on the politics of storage of documentation, but also on the politics of the past, memory and the future of traditions. If we are to establish new and more equal lines of international cooperation, trying to stimulate new comparative perspectives among different colonial traditions and new methodologies focused on dialogue and sharing, the question of how much and how freely documents ought to be digitised and made available in this format and possibly online needs to be considered. The key issues are identifying the giving and receiving end in this process, or who retains the original document and who receives the digital copy. Further, who earns or pays the most must be determined. Different points of view emerge, those of local and visiting scholars, archivists, funders, ordinary visitors to the archive, virtual visitors and so forth. In general, the archivist community is largely concerned with conservation, while the research community with access and circulation. I do not believe digital technology to be the solution; however, without any doubt, it provides a new context and offers new possibilities. The digital medium is a means, not an end in itself; in fact, we could say it is rather like learning a foreign language—useful only if you have something to say in it. More than an antidote, the internet reflects inequalities. It makes them clear for others to observe and interpret. Information passed via digital media, in its quantity and organisation—or disorganisation—indicates that knowing how to choose defines one of the principal characteristics of 137

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the new intellectual elite. Before concluding this part of the chapter, I assert that although virtual or digital museums should not be viewed as substitutes for physical museums, and digital and physical visits—or tactile and digital experiences—should be viewed as complementary, one has to be aware of the irony by which digital museums, and intangible heritage, seem in some way to be the ‘solution’ to the historic lack of museums in the Global South. It is the Global North that focuses more on tangible heritage and physical musealisation. In sum, it is necessary to reflect more closely on the interface between technology and the way we remember, celebrate, choose and organise our ideas as much in our own minds and thoughts as in relation to those of others. The Digital Museum project considers these changes in communication technologies and the new set of tensions arising in the field of copyrights, authorship and privacy. It works by a code of conduct that safeguards the individual’s right to images while realising the need to exhibit them, and listen to recordings and read texts produced by Blacks. How do we cope with the new tensions that result from the process by which certain cultural forms, finally ‘discovered’ and, at times, defined as intangible heritage, pass suddenly from invisibility to hyper-visibility, such as when, for example, a hitherto very ‘local’ samba de roda group is introduced to play in the media spotlight (samba de roda is a genre of samba recently registered on the list of intangible heritage maintained by the IPHAN)?

A museum without owners We are participants in the Brazilian Virtual Memory Network of the National Library (BN) and, through the Dspace platform, the BN will be our digital repository. With continually updated resources, it will hold high-definition (HD) digital copies (300 dpi) of all documents our Digital Museum makes available.7 The documents in our Digital Museum can be used freely for educational and research purposes; it is sufficient to cite the original text and our Digital Museum. Anyone requiring HD copies, perhaps for publishing purposes, will be able to obtain them from the appropriate sector of the BN.8 Our collection is as much ‘inherited’ from already extant archives as it has been created from scratch through new research and document acquisition. Inheritance of documents refers to the digital copy recuperation process, total or partial, from collections already present in the archives—copies that we can exhibit in themed galleries composed of documents from various archives. Our Digital Museum is, indeed, desperately keen to acquire a large network of reception antennas. To describe what is involved in the creation of our collection, it is useful to refer to four policy concepts that guide our work.

Digital repatriation We suggest to foreign archives that they continue to conserve original documents. However, we urge them to be altruistic with the digital copies, which we believe should be circulated freely without any significant cost of reproduction, permitting researchers to analyse documents without necessarily having to interrupt their work to travel abroad.9

Digital donation We intend to inspire a policy and practice of making documents available that were previously difficult or impossible to access. We aim to achieve this through our homepage, via an already available digital transfer tool, and indicating the National Library as a digital 138

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repository. We do not wish to retain original documents or items. Rather, we seek only to digitise, archive and display them as museum pieces in our virtual galleries. The originals will be returned to their owners. Ultimately, we aspire to be a museum without owners. In certain cases, especially when there is a risk that original documents might be lost or suffer damage, perhaps through poor earlier preservation or because they might be sold abroad or lost to private collections, retention of such items can be mandated within an archive or public library as documents of public interest, to avoid their being sent abroad—as often happened in the past—and to facilitate the sourcing of resources for proper conservation.

Digital ethnography That is, doing research in the field by means of a mobile digital scanning station and, later, a sort of travelling digital museum gallery, permanently under development and never seeming to be complete, searching out its audience and creating moments of drama (e.g. about memories of slavery in the Bahian Recôncavo).

Digital generosity Hypertext is already penetrating our research practices and the daily exchange of opinions between colleagues. Few bother to save their emails, which are frequently grammatically imperfect and full of jargon, invented terms and dialect. Conversely, in its exploration of new methodological frontiers, the internet could become a great new way to share research experience. Learning to share secondary data—and primary data when possible—suggestions, tips, questions, answers and annotations is all possible through the internet. In some cases, perhaps as a way of becoming the subject instead of just the object of research, our own sources will have a presence on the Digital Museum’s homepage. At a minimum, the key ones and those who care most about maintaining contact with others who are researching their subjects’ individual and collective reality will have a homepage presence. In that sense, a prototype portal has been developed through which researchers can exchange their experiences within a sort of chat room inside our Digital Museum; collective curatorship benefits from the opportunities created by the internet for new forms of crowd sharing and crowdsourcing. With respect to copyright, we believe in the philosophy that guides the Creative Commons movement; citation is necessary, but payment is not. As part of our Digital Museum’s work, questions of copyright arise with the use of software in accordance with image rights, the safeguarding of privacy, and the digital reproduction of a document and its subsequent availability on the internet.

Documents in the digital museum We began the museum with a series of collections featured in the United States and France. Until then, the collections had not been available to a wide Brazilian audience because they were either not digitised or were unavailable online. The virtual ‘repatriation’ of those records, in cooperation with foreign institutions that provide digitisation and availability through the internet, has been the first stage of our project. However, it is still incomplete because many pieces remain in the collections of foreign researchers, which are more difficult to access. It is important to specify what we mean by a document in the context of our Digital Museum. It is, of course, well known that the term ‘document’ is polysemic and that every document can become a monument (Foucault, 1969). As far as digitisation is 139

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concerned, the documents we select are chosen based on the results of policy, decisions and processes of monumentalisation and patrimonialisation. Specifically, the documents to which we give priority are taken from a wide range that obviously includes written sources but is not limited to the written record in the narrower sense. We are interested in printed material such as newspaper articles, minutes of meetings, unpublished original texts, private documents, letters, poetry, traditional recipes (culinary and medicinal), photographs, iconography, sound recordings and music scores, testimonials (prerecorded or produced ad hoc by our own team), prayers, tunes, reproductions of cultural objects or artefacts, and film footage and recordings of cultural or political events. Above all we consider: 1 Documents, whether already in archives or private collections. That is, as much the files ‘about’ the Afro-Brazilian population as, to a lesser extent, the records produced by Afro-Brazilian anthropologists, intellectuals, artists, activists, religious leaders and so on. We can be a Museum of Museums and an Archive of Archives; for example, we can hold temporary exhibits alongside pieces from different archives or museums—pieces that could then be exchanged through a digital lending policy. 2 Documents secured or produced by researchers, which we then circulate online, authorising either their partial or full publication during or after the completion of research. 3 Documents created from scratch. These may be testimonies, photographs, music recordings and so on. They might also refer to previously produced documents, and be recordings of a determined group or community receiving our project and researchers—as people receive, comment and sometimes dramatise images and documents about their own reality that we present for them. For the recovery of the Afro-Brazilian memory, well-known figures in the social, political and intellectual life of Brazil interest us as much as do the anonymous and unknown ones (e.g. mães/pais-de-santo, or the first classes of students admitted to a public university as a result of the new quota system). The site, with dynamic ideographic screens, is continually updated as new material is produced so that subjects and researchers can communicate about documents already online and add others according to the principles of generosity and digital donation. In that sense, our project provides constant research and the updating of software or more adaptable platforms (such as a smartphone application that we are developing) to facilitate content management and the creation of digital repositories. In the first instance, we consider documents and materials produced by people who identify as Black or Afro-Brazilian, because that is where the main need resides. Alongside them, we seek material on Afro-Brazilian religious leaders, Black activists, trade unionists, classical and popular musicians, capoeira schools and teachers, maroon community leaders, non-government organisations (NGOs) concerning the Afro-Brazilian population, the Catholic Church (especially the pastoral care of the Negro) and some Pentecostal churches, and the personal archives of components of the Black elite. Also important are unpublished records, or endangered records (often in a state of decay), records produced ‘about’ or ‘for’ Blacks or Afro-Brazilians, records of race relations or racist episodes, and more general material about a variety of figures, either from the professional or the intellectual worlds. Further, works from travellers, missionaries, diplomats, faith workers, essayists, journalists, anthropologists and other social scientists are of interest. Collaboration can take various forms. Digital material can be donated, suggestions and criticisms can be made, or someone can construct and curate a virtual gallery consisting of a set of documents focusing on a specific topic made available to the museum from various

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sources. Our policy is to ask individual researchers to be responsible for the construction of ‘their’ gallery.

Challenges Our first phase of activity has brought with it a series of enormous challenges. We had to make quick decisions about managing authenticity (what is an authentic document?), originality (which documents to choose within frequently quite large groups?), property (which property to recognise or reject? And to what extent?), exclusivity (that phenomenon finding expression among historians as the category ‘my documents’ and among anthropologists as ‘my informants’), copyright, image rights and privacy (can everything be made public? What is public or private; why, for what purpose; and whom to ask for authorisation?), the status of the researcher (what to do with self-taught researchers?), whether and how to incorporate the archives of social movements, associations and NGOs; the type of exchange to interweave with other virtual or digital museums, the relationship to maintain with projects of archive digitisation. For example, in Africa, it must be for the exchange of technology or documents on subjects of transatlantic importance, such as miscegenation, elites or colonists of colour and racist iconography. Finally, it must be considered how to induce digital generosity and crowdsourcing or collective curatorship in a world in which individualism and even selfishness has influenced the character of the curator and the scholar. In closing, our project is also challenged by having to develop new forms of virtual musealisation, creating galleries that take advantage of documents and pieces of our own and other digital archives, to make them dynamic and somehow spectacular. In short, how does one make a contemporary virtual museum thrilling to a wide variety of audiences and especially to young people? The Digital Museum, ultimately, is as much a public service as it is a tool for research that aims to stimulate reflection upon a new, more critical and less ‘natural’ conservation policy—one that will question the current relations of power surrounding the process.

Notes 1 Parts of this chapter were published in Sansone (2014). 2 The discussion ever the ‘origin’ of black matrifocal families in the America as well as on the centrality of African heritage in present day forms of African American culture was largely unleashed by fieldwork in Bahia carried out first by E. Franklin Frazier and soon afterwards by Melville Herskovits (Sansone, 2011). 3 This collection of over 300 objects has since been kept in the Rio Police Museum and has recently been the target of a reparation and repatriation movement by Black activists, who want to repatriate these objects to the terreiros (shrines) from which they were confiscated. This claim raises many questions that are now associated with demand for physical repatriation. Many of those terreiros no longer exist or have moved and merged with others. 4 On this process of the patrimonialisation of aspects of popular culture, together with a new reinvention of Africa, see, among others, Sansone (2012a, 2012b). 5 The special issue of the National Archive’s magazine, Acervo, published in 2010 and dedicated to the Negro, is indicative of a positive change. 6 With YouTube everybody can be a filmmaker just for a day, although not so much for money but for likes. 7 Initially, we planned to post them in low resolution (64 dpi) to allow quicker navigation, or due to copyright restrictions. However, we have been overtaken by technology: even cheaper smartphones now record (moving) images in HD and Facebook and YouTube pages are jammed with 141

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photographs and short films in 300dpi or HD, which has become the canon and preserving copyrights through tricks such as using low resolution or placing a watermark on each document has proven a lost game. 8 The Afrodigital Museum is a network of five stations in Brazil and one in Portugal that function in relative independence from each other and are based at the Federal University of Bahia (which started the project), the Federal University of Pernambuco (www.museuafrodigital.com.br/paginazero/), the Federal University of Maranhao (www.museuafro.ufma.br/site/), the State University of Rio de Janeiro (www.museuafrorio.uerj.br/), the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (www.facebook.com/ patrimonio.RN/) and the University of Coimbra in Portugal (https://museudigitalafroportugues.word press.com/). It is worth stressing that the first access to our stations occurs largely via our Facebook pages. 9 We already have received copies of documents (see www.museuafrodigital.ufba.br), either repatriated or donated, with the support of the Smithsonian Institute, the Archive of Traditional Music at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University, the UNESCO Archives in Paris and the AEL at UNICAMP, Campinas, Brazil.

References Foucault, M. (1969). The archeology of knowledge. London, UK: Routledge. Sansone, L. (2000). Remembering slavery from nearby. Heritage Brazilian style. In G. Oostindie (Ed.), Facing up to the past: Perspectives on the commemoration of slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe (pp. 83–89). London, UK: Ian Randle/James Currey. Sansone, L. (2003). Blackness without ethnicity. Creating race in Brazil. New York, NY: Palgrave. Sansone, L. (2007). Que multi-culturalismo para o Brasil. Ciência e Cultura 59, 24–29. Sansone, L. (2011). Turner, Franklin and Herskovits in the Gantois House of Candomble: The transnational origin of Afro-Brazilian studies. Black Scholar 41(1), 48–63. Sansone, L. (Ed.). (2012a). Memórias da África. Patrimônios, museus e políticas das identidades. Salvador: Edufba. Sansone, L. (Ed.). (2012b). A Política do Intangível. Museus e patrimônios em novas perspectivas. Salvador: Edufba. Sansone, L. (2014). Challenges to digital Patrimonialization. Heritage.org/Digital Museum of African and Afro-Brazilian Memory. Vibrant 10(1), 324–386. Retrieved from vibrant.org.br Santos, M. S. (2003). Museums without a past: The Brazilian case. International Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (2), 180–201. Schwarcz, L. (1996). The spectacle of the races: Scientists, institutions, and the race question in Brazil, 1870–1930. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Williams, D. (2001). Culture wars in Brazil: The first Vargas regime, 1930–1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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12 Shared digital experiences supporting collaborative meaning-making at heritage sites Sara Perry, Maria Roussou, Sophia S. Mirashrafi, Akrivi Katifori and Sierra McKinney

Introduction A growing body of research testifies to the capacity for archaeological and other cultural heritage sites to generate wonder, attachment, personal transformation and restoration, family bonding and community building among their visitors. However, these aspects of heritage site visits are underexplored, especially in the design of digital tools and experiences. The social dimension of the museum in particular has received little attention. Even if it is well known that museums and heritage sites are primarily visited by groups of people rather than individuals, the digital experiences created for them are often inadvertently designed for the individual. In the context of two related European Union-funded research projects, CHESS1 and EMOTIVE,2 we set out to develop mobile-based emotionally engaging digital stories for groups of visitors to diverse cultural heritage sites (Perry et al., 2017). The collaborative projects have brought together the resources of participating organisations from at least five different European countries in each case, and from different sectors (i.e. industrial partners, academia and research institutions, and representatives of the gallery, library, archive and museum sector), ranging from world-renowned museums, such as the Acropolis Museum in Athens (Greece), to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage sites, such as the Çatalhöyük archaeological site in Turkey. Our evaluation studies feature detailed observations of visitors onsite, as well as post-experience questionnaires and interviews, providing us with rich data on several axes (e.g. in relation to interactive story plot and narration, staging and wayfinding in the physical space, personalisation and social interaction). This chapter focuses on shared experience and the impact that digital technology can have in promoting the cultural site as a social space. On the one hand, our findings testify that digital empathic stories can evoke narrative transportation, and in some cases, personal attachment and critical (self-)reflection. This leads us to consider how their enchanting capacities might be pushed even further into the building of broader, collective social conscience. At the same time, the findings reveal the challenges, both conceptual and practical, 143

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of designing a shared digital experience in which visitors engage with the site and each other in meaningful ways. A critical next step in our ongoing and future work will be to develop even deeper means for visitors to meaningfully speak and interact with one another. Ultimately, it will also explore the broader global implications of enhancing meaningful shared digital experiences in museums by drawing out differences and similarities in the way social groups interact in different global contexts.

The museum as a social space Visitor studies research confirms that visitors to most sites and museums come in groups (Dierking, 2011; Petrelli et al., 2017; Petrelli & Not, 2005) and that museum visits tend to be driven by a social agenda (Perry, 2012). According to Dierking (2011, p. 202), about 60–70 per cent of museum visitors in the United States (US), United Kingdom and Australia are families, and 25–35 per cent are school or adult tour groups. Only five per cent or less are individuals visiting by themselves. Even among these individuals, vom Lehn et al. (2001) underlines that peripheral awareness of other strangers within museums shapes how visitors move through an experience. However, existing approaches to museum displays of information often do not seem to cater to groups, while very few studies explicitly attend to how people engage with museum exhibits in groups (Davies & Heath, 2013; Tolmie et al., 2014). Even in contexts in which sociality has been accounted for, it can often seem narrowly conceived, ignoring pre- and post-visit experience and the complexities of the visit itself, which may entail both shared and independent encounters (e.g. López Sintas et al., 2014). Indeed, visitors themselves may still hold expectations that prompt them to quietly absorb information individually, rather than challenge and engage with it as a group (Chang, 2006; Katifori et al., 2016). Digital technology in museums and archaeological sites, if appropriately designed, provides the potential to support groups and social interactions among their members. The social aspects of a mobile-enhanced visit have been explored by several researchers (Damala et al., 2008; Massung, 2012; vom Lehn et al., 2001), yet social interaction is an aspect that many mobile guide technologies fail to encourage (Othman, 2012; Woodruff et al., 2001). The design of digital applications for visitors has to date been geared towards the individual rather than the group, primarily because it is difficult to conceive and implement shared experiences with and around personal devices. This is evident in the wide use of headphones and small screens to learn from, plugging the visitors into their own individualised experience (Hindmarsh et al., 2002). Further, instead of connecting the visitor to the site, often mobile applications create more distance between the two, with ‘little or no physical relevance’ to connect them to the historical space (Perry, 2016). When it comes to opportunities for human-to-human interaction, isolation between different members of a group of visitors when using electronic guides has also been cited as a disruption to the social aspects of a museum visit. Massung (2012) observed that such isolation seemed self-imposed by the visitor rather than the technology. Even when co-visitors have been made to stand side-by-side to listen to the same commentaries via mobile technology, discussion between visitors was rarely observed to occur. In the early steps to bring digital applications to the world of heritage, the fostering of collaboration and dialogue was a main concern (e.g. Holtorf, 1999; McDavid, 1998). Arguably, however, their deployment through personal mobile media heightened the problematic qualities of such media by focusing users inward. To encourage external-facing social 144

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interaction, we argue for a prioritisation of the human-to-human experience. Herein, digital platforms are woven in to enhance the experience, rather than drive it.

Issues with group experiences While there are many reasons social experiences in museums are beneficial, they come with their own challenges and problems. For instance, groups may not act like a single unit, with group members going through museums at their own pace, each with their own expectations and goals. Trying to preserve group coherence can be a challenge, as it is common for people to get ‘dragged away’ from exhibits or information that they find interesting (Tolmie et al., 2014, p. 1051). When constructing group experiences, a certain degree of flexibility must be considered. Children often offer another challenge, breaking expectations of collaborative learning and ultimately taking on the role of decision-maker in a larger group (Hope et al., 2009). If a child is unwilling to participate, their parents will more likely than not compromise in the child’s favour for the coherence of the group at large (Rennick-Egglestone et al., 2016). Conversely, children acting as the primary decision-makers in a group could be interpreted as an asset to experience construction, encouraging the accompanying adults to get involved. Moreover, some visitors are simply not interested in speaking with each other. There is often an expectation of individual experience at a museum; to subvert this may not always be a welcome change. Forced interaction can hinder rather than enhance a visitor’s experience. As an example, a follow-up to the CHESS project, which worked to take steps forward (with mostly positive effect) in the introduction of collaborative digital storytelling in museums, was not without its critics. One user of the experience pointed out the awkwardness in forced interaction with a companion, stating that it was not natural because conversation would have occurred after the experience, not during (Katifori et al., 2016). While there is much work being done in shifting the perception of museums from a solitary to a group-centric space—thus, more accurately reflecting the demographic of people who visit—there is still room for improvement. Open-air museums and art museums make a distinct effort to encourage people to interact and question what is in front of them. As noted, a great many articles discuss the importance of collaborative experience in museums, while relatively few offer real ways in which to create them.

Previous work in designing group experiences with digital technology in cultural sites Successful digital collaborative experiences must effectively work to enhance the space that visitors inhabit, rather than drag them out of it. The ‘eavesdropping’ technique, proposed by the pioneering electronic guidebook application of Sotto Voce at Filioli (a historic house in California), encourages group communication in a museum environment (Woodruff et al., 2001). Essentially, a synced device is given to each visitor with content they choose themselves, as well as a volume controller that determines the loudness of the audio from their companion. If one visitor chooses a clip, the other can either choose to hear what their companion selected or listen to their own. The team discovered that when visitors could hear their companions’ audio guide, they were much more likely to engage with each other over objects, regardless of whether those objects were mentioned directly in the guide (Aoki et al., 2002). Fascinatingly, the researchers found that the shared experience shifted the 145

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importance from the objects to the space around them, allowing visitors to self-navigate the museum rather than being led (Grinter et al., 2002). This is an interesting method to ‘increase awareness’ of the interests of other group members (Tolmie et al., 2014, p. 1053). Indeed, it is not uncommon for pairs of people to want to synchronise their experience, especially if the purpose of the outing is to spend time together (Fosh et al., 2013). Another approach involves goal-directed tasks in which the speaker and listener engage with each other to achieve a particular goal (Yule, 1997). An example of this was tested at the Mackintosh Interpretation Centre in The Lighthouse in Glasgow, where a group of onsite visitors shared their location and orientation to offsite partners (i.e. virtual visitors on the internet), communicating with each other via a voice channel. Through the audio channel, they ‘navigated around a shared information space’, learning and sharing different aspects of the site with each other based on their location (Brown et al., 2003, p. 577). The trials found that while much of the conversation between onsite and online visitors was devoted to reporting where they were, there were also instances of reading text aloud, sharing opinions and connecting the space around them to their everyday lives (Galani & Chalmers, 2003). These experiences utilise gaps in knowledge to encourage collaboration between individuals. Thus, the interconnectivity of the physical and digital surroundings can open paths of interaction between museum visitors. The previous examples offer ways in which visitors can experience a curated exhibition together without interacting with it directly. Interactive storytelling could be another effective way of developing social engagement between visitors, while giving them a chance to participate in the narrative. Such initiatives have been of particular interest to our work in the CHESS project (Roussou & Katifori, 2018). A number of experiences were authored for the Acropolis Museum in the course of the CHESS project, each based around a central character who tells a story around a set of objects in the museum. Each experience is delivered via a browser-based interactive application run on a tablet. The content is largely communicated through voice narration, ideally experienced with a set of headphones (see Figure 12.1). Users

Figure 12.1 The composition of the pairs experiencing the CHESS stories varied. Here, peers and parent–child pairs experience stories at the Acropolis Museum. Source: Maria Roussou.

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are directed to observe objects in the museum that form part of the narrative. In addition to the narration, images and animations are shown at times on the tablet’s screen. Although not particularly designed to foster collaborative museum visits, the evaluation of the experiences revealed a group of challenges associated with the requirement to assist the predominantly social nature of visits. More than 50 visitors (including 12 pairs) were observed while using the mobile storytelling guide at the Acropolis Museum in Athens and were later asked for their opinions regarding individual versus group experiences (see Figure 12.1). Their responses varied, depending on their personal visiting style; while some visitors preferred a mostly individual visit (with the possibility to exchange impressions at some points), others desired a constantly shared experience (Roussou & Katifori, 2018). Similar to other studies, our research found that practical encumbrances (e.g. the need to tie everyone together with headphones on a single device) limited conversation between members. Nevertheless, visitors adopted non-verbal techniques, expressions and body language strategies to communicate and share the experience. Further, our observations from previous ethnographic studies (Tolmie et al., 2014) were confirmed. In particular, the role that one group member takes can affect that member’s, or even the whole group’s, engagement with the content. For example, in the case of parents visiting with children, the experience was mainly led by the latter (who usually carried the device); parents acted mainly as content mediators, sacrificing their own experience for the sake of facilitating their children’s (Rennick-Egglestone et al., 2016). In subsequent iterations, we made the interaction and navigation structures clearer so that adults could modify, assist and direct children’s experiences to fit the immediate local social concerns, but also to facilitate synchronised experiences. Finally, adding a playful element to storytelling was viewed as another way to engage groups of people (Vayanou et al., 2016). Collaborative games in museums, where there are a mix of characters to manipulate and explore, allow the visitor to step into the narrative via a proxy (Klopfer et al., 2005). It is not difficult to encourage people to interact with each other when asked to play a game, as gaming brings with it the assumption of collaboration and questioning. Based on the findings from CHESS, we have been exploring the design and development of applications that aim to engender engagement between groups of visitors at the archaeological site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. Located near Çumra, Konya in central Turkey, Çatalhöyük is a UNESCO World Heritage-listed site, taking the primary form of two mounds, containing at least 18 levels of continuous occupation dating from 7100 to 6000 BC. Occupied by thousands of individuals 9,000 years ago with little evidence of social hierarchies or inequality (Hodder, 2011), Çatalhöyük sparks great interest in how these people may have lived. To investigate how to author and evaluate digital stories that promote social interaction, in summer 2015 we restructured and extended a storytelling experience designed for individual visitors to the site (Katifori et al., 2016). Fictional characters narrated their stories in an interleaved way, providing two different perspectives on every main topic covered throughout the experience. Several interaction points for visitors, including information gap, reasoning and opinion gap tasks, were added and visitors were explicitly prompted to communicate or/and collaborate when an interaction point was reached. Our main purpose was to study user reactions and emotions towards such prompts, narrative variations and different types of interaction. The experiment took place in late July to early August 2015 at Çatalhöyük with 16 participants, who evaluated the experience (see Figure 12.2). Interviews and observations with these participants indicated that they positively received the use of system-driven interpersonal interaction. Participants suggested that social interaction enhanced engagement, understanding and reflection. It also gave a feeling of active participation. Asking users to select an 147

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Figure 12.2 Visitors pairing their devices during early evaluation studies of a group experience at the archaeological site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. Source: Sara Perry.

object for their companion’s burial was one of the most successful and engaging activities. It fostered reflection on each other’s character, guiding the selection of the most appropriate object, which led to a deeper understanding of the process of grave goods offering in the past. One of the issues that the users raised was that, in some of the cases, the prompts for conversation did not feel natural; rather, they felt constructed and forced. This was especially true of the information gap prompts, for which users had to exchange information that was given individually to one of them. As a general guideline, if social activities are to be included in a mobile experience, they should be explained to users from the outset. For example, introductory collaborative activities should be added at the beginning of the experience to ‘break the ice’ and familiarise the participants with the interpersonal interaction elements they will later encounter. As noted during the experiment, users seemed to appreciate clear instructions in relation to such interaction, even in cases in which the assigned task was to reflect about the content. Our intent with this mobile-mediated experience was to help break down some of the interpretative barriers experienced (and often reproduced) by visitors at Çatalhöyük and beyond. The following section describes our latest experiment, implementing a more experiential approach to social interaction onsite.

An emotive shared digital experience at Çatalhöyük The layout of Çatalhöyük paints a detailed picture of how tightly knit the community must have been. A variety of evidence suggests little to no social hierarchy, implying an egalitarian

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sociopolitical organisation. Such an egalitarian structure offers a fascinating contrast to many current societies, including those of the main visiting audiences to Çatalhöyük (Turkish nationals followed by Japanese, US and Australian visitors, among others), offering an opportunity for a group experience to be developed echoing this Neolithic mindset. Below, we present an overview of the conceptualisation and implementation of this experience, highlighting the main findings from its first evaluation with visitors. A more detailed report on methodology and collected data can be found in Mirashrafi (2017). When setting out to design a collaborative experience at Çatalhöyük, we considered it critical to develop an approach that enables the rich conceptualisation of users, both as individuals and members of touring parties, who engage socially with cultural sites before, during and after a visit. Therefore, we began our experience design by identifying and describing our visitors in the form of personas. A method utilised in the design and evaluation of digital products, personas are essentially fictitious individuals constructed by designers to represent a typical end user (Roussou et al., 2013). Traditionally, the persona is an individual with a unique combination of characteristics. However, as discussed, research shows that people visiting museums usually do so in groups; using a singular persona in these situations ignores the social complexities of their experience. Over 15 years of observational and demographic data from visitors to Çatalhöyük show that most fall into the three categories: local parents with children, international and local families or a mix of the two, and larger bodies of people like school or tourist groups. Thus, we extended the model of the ‘persona’, introducing group personas to better reflect the group-based nature of most visits to the site, and the synthesis of the visitor groups we were targeting.

Overview of the experience The primary aim for this collaborative experience was to allow visitors to Çatalhöyük to explore what it might be like to exist in an egalitarian society, encouraging them to collectively reflect on their own socio-economic practices in the present, while also considering the everyday lives of past people from this Neolithic town. The onsite experience provides visitors with three-dimensional (3D) prints of selected Çatalhöyük artefacts that they personalise as their own, before a mobile application guides them through four of the site’s replica houses, where they are prompted to swap and, eventually, leave those objects behind. By physically exchanging and leaving behind artefacts, visitors are asked to question modern assumptions around material ownership and community. Central to this experience is the underlying goal of sparking empathy in the visitor. Wolfe (2006) suggests that this kind of handson learning is more likely to be emotionally engaging and memorable to a visitor. Before arriving, the pre-visit phase of the experience asks visitors to establish an online profile wherein each visitor is assigned (via a form of personality quiz) a different role relevant to life at the Neolithic site (a hunter, storyteller, artist etc.). Each role corresponds to a small set of artefacts, of which the user is asked to select one. Consequently, the visitors arrive at the site with a ticket containing the information about their role and the artefact they chose. This is delivered to them as a 3D-printed object once they arrive and check-in at the Visitor Center. (Note that for the formative evaluation, we were required to use laminated cards as proxies for the 3D prints.) Along with the objects, visitors receive a mobile device to use in small groups. Currently, the application is designed for two companions (although we are extending it for three users) and introduces them to how egalitarianism may have operated on a daily basis as they make their way through the houses together. The application first guides them to ‘personalise’ their object through painting it or attaching stickers, ribbons and other decorative elements, 149

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thereby making it ‘their own’. They are then prompted to use the near field communication (NFC) tag glued onto their object to register it in the application. Given that the object is related to their visitor profile, as they are prompted to swap, take and leave behind these artefacts in each house, the items slowly become layered with the profiles of different participants every time they change hands (Mirashrafi, 2017). At the end of the onsite experience, visitors are asked to decide among themselves which object to leave behind for good. This means one of the party leaves their experience with nothing at all. The pair, however, takes home a single object that they may keep as a souvenir. However, asking one of the participants to leave behind an object altogether reinforces the theme of fluid ownership in Çatalhöyük. Finally, the third, post-experience phase seeks to connect strangers digitally through layers of profiles embedded on NFC tags used throughout the experience. The users are able to log in with their profile and view the itinerary of the objects they held during the onsite experience, as well as the web of past and subsequent visitors that may have taken these objects home. Throughout the experience, users are prompted to reflect on their decisions and feelings. Such reflection allows ‘an opportunity for emotional engagement’ within the experience itself (Sakr et al., 2016, p. 63). The script aims to encourage discussion over the course of the experience, provoking understanding through movement and conversation. In this way, visitors not only connect with the past people of Çatalhöyük by going through the motions of their lives, but so too with people participating in the present.

Evaluation process and participants A formative evaluation of the pre- and onsite experience was conducted in Turkey in the summer of 2017. Six pairs completed the evaluation, both international and Turkish (see Figure 12.3). The data collected during the evaluation included: audio recorded through dictaphones, lapel microphones and in some cases, video cameras; standardised observational notes produced by a researcher during each tour; and 30–60-minute audio-recorded interviews conducted with each pair immediately following their tour.

Figure 12.3 Pairs of users touring Çatalhöyük’s replica houses as part of a collaborative digital experience centred around reflecting on egalitarian ways of life. Source: Sara Perry.

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Summary of findings Broadly, the user feedback collected during the evaluation can be divided into two categories: process (usability and functionality of the mobile experience) and experience (emotional and social engagement). With respect to the former, users found the application to be immersive, with the few identified distractions lasting only short periods. However, users were split regarding the role of the mobile experience in connecting them to the environment. Some indicated it limited their interactions, prompting them to focus more on the device than they did the room. Others identified multiple instances of engagement with the physical environment through their visual and physical examination of the space. With respect to experience, users developed feelings of attachment to the items used in the activity. These items were commonly referred to as ‘mine’, ‘my’ or sometimes by a given name (i.e. ‘Grandma’). Users also discussed reluctance in parting with the objects, and their connections to what the objects represented. Their comments (see below) indicated a strong personal bond with the items, which was key to their overall experiences. The concept of personal attachment was also discussed in the context of personalisation or ownership of belongings. Many users connected strongly with their assigned role in the pre-visit stage. Users referred to their role multiple times throughout the interviews, often as a defining characteristic of themselves (i.e. ‘I am a storyteller’). This was also connected to periods of selfreflection, as users discussed whether the role accurately or non-accurately reflected how they viewed themselves. The experience promoted social engagement, both immediately between the two participants and with the larger global community through the users’ expressed interests in engaging in the post-site experience. (Note, however, that at the time of the formative evaluation, the post-site experience had not yet been implemented.) The true impact of this can be observed most strongly in the frequency of visitors’ comments indicating self-reflection and being affected or changed by the experience. Many users were prompted to engage in self-reflection. This included direct statements about being compelled to become self-reflective, but also through descriptions of connections to personal experiences, both real and imagined. Most positively, there were frequent statements identifying that users related to the space in one way before and another after participating in the experience, including expressing higher levels of empathy with the people of Çatalhöyük.

Sharing emotive experiences Of particular interest to our team is the frequency with which users reported to have experienced strong feelings (of various forms) during their participation in the onsite experience (87 per cent of participants), and their positive views of the shared, collaborative nature of the experience (100 per cent of participants). ‘I’m amazed. I feel [long pause] emotional. It was a lovely thing for me’, one Turkish user offered after completing the onsite portion of the experience. ‘It was the [most] perfect thing I have ever [felt] in these houses’ he explained. ‘I mean I left my [object] over there, and if I see someone else from some other part of the world [has] that object it means just, you know, you feel it.’ Some users described very specific emotional reactions in relation to certain aspects of the experience, including a final revelatory moment wherein it becomes clear that Çatalhöyük’s residents would have likely also communally raised their children. As one British participant noted, ‘It made me realise the gravity … of their family life.’ Her teammate agreed with how the experience encouraged the participant to step into the minds of past people, stating

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‘because obviously you can have all this talk about how they used to share, but until you’re actually doing it yourself, you don’t really put it into your own personal context’. Another US user noted ‘I do feel like I understand them more as actual people now.’ This connection to past individuals was articulated by several pairs in their interviews: I feel in touch with the people … like, you can actually begin to imagine what their life was actually like … The whole purpose of archaeology is to connect to the past, but now I do feel like I can almost imagine what their day-to-day life was. She went on to describe the overt bond she had developed, not only with the people of the past, but with her object in the present (to such an extent that she anthropomorphised it): Giving away one of ours [objects] it was like, Ah! But then it was like, Oh, somebody else might come along and pick that up later so they’ll be fine. A British participant also spoke (unprompted) in anthropomorphising fashion about her object: I didn’t expect to get such a connection to either [of our] objects and feel that possessiveness. Nor did I feel the want to leave her [the object] behind afterwards because I didn’t want her to be taken away from the site … And I didn’t expect the experience to make me feel that way, but it does … which is surprising. Comparably, a Turkish participant, reflecting on his original object, described that ‘The bear stamp made me feel powerful.’ He later noted, ‘I was really committed to the bear stamp’ because he drew something on it and it became his own, leaving him regretful to say goodbye. There is no question that the shared nature of the onsite experience was critical to its success. Sometimes collaboration was mentioned explicitly by users. For instance, in one case, a pair specified that they were learning together ‘but not like a classroom environment … it was like we were bouncing off each other’. In other cases, this is implied, as pairs regularly had to compromise to decide which of their objects to leave behind. The tactics deployed to reach such compromise (from games of ‘rock-paper-scissors’ to more nuanced debates over attachment) are in themselves worthy of further research. While our formative evaluation was constrained by many factors, including a small sample size, use of printed cards in place of 3D prints and lack of a fully operational post-visit experience, the results hint at several opportunities as we move into the next stages of design and development. First, digital media were fundamental to the connectivity (personal and social, to the past and the present) at the core of the experience, yet their implementation was incredibly straightforward, necessitating only basic web design, NFC tags and simple authoring (text-only) of the application via the EMOTIVE project’s Storyboard Editor (developed for the most novice of users). Second, the experience relied on a relatively simple set of strategies to facilitate groupbased meaning-making, which are arguably replicable in other contexts. These include (1) the pre-visit quiz, which profiles visitors, linking their present day personality to one of the past; (2) the visitor-selected object, which is connected to users’ personalities and is personalised by them via physical modification/decoration; (3) embodied group exploration of a concept (in this case, egalitarianism) while onsite, where the purpose is not to force factual 152

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information on participants, nor to demand that they explicitly imagine themselves as inhabitants of Neolithic Çatalhöyük, but rather to collaboratively perform actions in the present in ways that may seem unfamiliar to them. It is through reckoning with this unfamiliarity as part of a group that meaning-making and connectivity come about. Indeed, as one participant noted in interview: [I] felt it was more about us, … placing us in the situation, and making us think about each other and our opinions and our thoughts. I didn’t really think factually. I didn’t think archaeologically … I felt, like you [her partner] said, like I was exploring myself in that situation.

Conclusions The possibilities for developing meaningful, shared digital experiences in museums and other cultural contexts are tremendous and still mostly untapped. Although our research is in its early phases, the data hint at levels of emotional impact and potential for personal transformation that are highly encouraging. It is worth considering, however, that our results indicate that the better participants know each other, the more they derive from their experience. Studying this relationship between known and unknown visitors—and developing means for strangers to meaningfully speak and interact with one another—is a crucial next step in our studies. Not only would such research address a major gap in the literature (vom Lehn et al., 2001), it would also help these types of shared digital experiences reach their full potential. Herein, networks of people could be joined in fostering a larger collective conscience or, at a minimum, in reflecting on their own assumptions and taken-for-granted beliefs around ‘normal’ ways of life. As one participant described, ‘I connected with a human being on another level, that I’d never met before and I also appreciated people a lot differently.’ Such collaborative digital experiences can encourage participants not merely to identify with the past, but to rethink their place in the present and future, imagining the world and its inhabitants in a more complex and malleable fashion. To conclude, in the words of one user: Having to actually force myself to give something away, having to negotiate with someone about what we give and the reasons why we give away, it increased my connection to the object … I felt like I had been taken to the past, and sort of really made to connect with the object and connect with the people in a way that isn’t knowledge … In terms of immersion, in terms of feeling, that is one of the best experiences I’ve had.

Acknowledgements This research has evolved across multiple projects funded through various grants, including two research grants from the British Institute at Ankara (2014, 2015), the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Grant EMOTIVE (no. 727188) and the FP7 CHESS (no. 270198). We are indebted to Katrina Gargett for her assistance in many aspects of data collection and transcription at Çatalhöyük in 2017, including observing and interviewing participants. We extend great thanks to all who graciously agreed to participate and share their views on the experience at Çatalhöyük.

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Notes 1 www.chessexperience.eu/ 2 www.emotiveproject.eu/

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Animating the archive

13 Neither a beginning nor an end Applying an ethics of care to digital archival collections Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor

Introduction: the impossible ethics of digitisation In a 2016 Archivaria article, Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor challenged archivists to shift their thinking about archival ethics from an individual, rights-based model to a feminist ethics model. In a feminist ethics approach, archivists are viewed as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users and communities through a web of mutual affective responsibility based on radical empathy. This chapter examines how a feminist ethics approach can be applied to digital archival projects such that digitisation is just one step (neither a beginning nor an end) in an ongoing ethical relationship between records creators, subjects, users and communities. Such relationships must interrogate, address and repair structural power inequities. We will use two case studies to illustrate this shift. First, the South Asian American Digital Archive’s attempts to document Islamophobia point to the importance of centering privacy, trust and empathy when working with targeted communities. Next, Visual AIDS’s digitisation of records documenting the work of artists living with HIV and AIDS from its Archive Project is analysed. This case highlights concerns around privacy and disclosure, expands understandings of preservation and exposes the complexities of ongoing relationships with records creators and subjects within a grassroots community archives context. As these cases illustrate, a feminist ethics approach to digitisation calls for culturally situated, mutually dependent, ongoing relationships between stakeholders of digital archival projects. As a volunteer archivist for the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) (www. saada.org), an independent community-based online-only, post-custodial archives, the first author of this paper, Michelle Caswell, recently faced an impossible dilemma: Should we digitise and make freely accessible a historic collection of newsletters from a South Asian American LGBTQ organisation from the 1990s? The newsletters are brimming with the names and faces of queer South Asian Americans. Not digitising the materials would mean silencing an important aspect of the community’s history, furthering the rampant historic erasure of queer people of colour. Yet, digitising and granting access to the materials would risk outing some community members, with potentially life or death consequences, especially 159

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for those who maintain close ties to their families in South Asia. Obtaining the consent of every person named or photographed would not be practical or possible, given time and staffing constraints. Redacting personal information by blocking out names and faces seems to enact a kind of epistemic violence, censoring those who might want to be included in the record. Embargoing the collection for a set number of years also does not solve the problem, but merely delays the dilemma, pushing the ethical burden onto our successors. When faced with such impossible ethical dilemmas—the stuff of everyday labour for archivists—where can we turn for guidance? As David Wallace (2010) and Verne Harris (2011) have each noted, the deontological principles provided by the ethical codes of professional associations like the Society of American Archivists (2011) and the International Council on Archives (1996) offer little guidance on facing such context-dependent dilemmas. Further, the ethical dilemmas posed by the public versus private dichotomy, which have always permeated archival labour, have been exacerbated further by digital technologies. There has long been ‘public’ in archives in the sense of making materials accessible in a physical repository for those who have the resources to travel and the expertise to negotiate archival systems. The digital age has brought about a new kind of ‘public’ in archival contexts, one that makes materials freely accessible to anyone in the world with an internet connection from the privacy of their own home or their smartphone. Clearly, the trope of ‘equal access for all’ as an ethical good that we, as a field, have inherited from dominant Western strands of library and information science does not work for communities from whom knowledge has historically and contemporaneously been extracted as a means of exploitation and domination (Christen, 2011; Robertson, 2016). Further, archival studies scholars are only now embarking on meaningful explorations of the power dynamics involved in digitisation decisions and the impact of those decisions on source communities (Punzalan, Marsh & Cools, 2017). In contrast to prevailing deontological and decontextual ethical principles, we propose that a feminist ethics of care guide us in making impossible digitisation decisions. In a recent Archivaria article (Caswell & Cifor, 2016), we challenged archivists to shift their thinking about archival ethics from an individual, rights-based model to a feminist ethics model. In this approach, archivists are understood as caregivers, tied to the records’ creators, subjects, users and communities through relationships of mutual affective responsibility based on radical empathy. We defined empathy as the ‘the ability and willingness to place oneself in the perceptions and viewpoints of others’ (Sevenhuijsen, 2003, p. 186) and posit that such empathy is radical if it critically and consciously shifts existing power relations in favour of those who are marginalised. Building on our initial provocation, this chapter explores how a feminist ethics approach can be applied to digital archival projects such that digitisation is reconceptualised as more than a singular event, but rather becomes perceived as part of a larger series of steps to developing an ongoing ethical relationship between records’ creators, subjects, users and communities. Further, an approach rooted in feminist care ethics asserts that such relationships catalysed by the digitisation of archival records must interrogate, rectify and repair structural power inequities rather than replicate them in the digital realm.

Feminist care ethics and archival relationships For decades, feminist scholars have rightly criticised dominant ethical frameworks for failing to consider women’s lived experiences. For example, Alison Jagger (1992) posits that prevailing constructions of ethics fail women in five overlapping ways: disregarding issues that affect women, devaluing the private realm, positing that women are less moral than men, 160

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overvaluing traits that have been constructed as masculine and privileging rights over relationships. As Jagger’s typology delineates, ‘feminist ethics’ is a wide net that catches many different (and sometimes incompatible) strands of thought, including but not limited to an ethics of care. A feminist ethics of care posits that people are linked to each other and to larger communities through webs of responsibilities (Gilligan, 1982; Card, 1991; Cole & CoultrapMcQuin, 1992; Frazer, Hornsby & Lovibond, 1992). Care ethics emerged, in part, out of the work of Carol Gilligan, whose 1982 book In a Different Voice questioned dominant theories of morality, in which, Gilligan (1982) argued, ‘men’s experience stands for all of human experience’, resulting in ‘theories which eclipse the lives of women and shut out women’s voices’ (p. xiii). Instead, Gilligan found that women who are socialised into caregiving roles navigate moral decision-making in deeply relational, context-dependent and emotionally resonant ways. We want to stress here the word socialised, and caution against reductive claims that essentialise women as biologically prone to caring; we make no such claims and, in contrast, stress the availability of a feminist care ethics approach across gender formations. Feminist ethics overturn dominant assumptions about the universality of masculinist conceptions of morality, and, as articulated by Gilligan, centre concepts of care in our moral constructions (McEwan & Goodman, 2010; Robinson, 2013; Held, 2014). This approach emphasises ‘particularity, connection, and context’ rather than abstract moral principles (Cole & CoultrapMcQuin, 1992, p. 3). It rejects liberal moral assumptions about individual choice and free will— which it posits is not how most women have experienced the world—in favour of empathy in the face of situational demands; it draws to the fore women’s lived experiences as caregivers. A feminist ethics framework posits interlacing and ongoing relationships of mutual obligation that are dependent on culture and context. In a feminist ethics framework, subjects are constructed relationally, intersecting structures of violence are interrogated, and injustice is viewed as both structural and personal, both public and private, and always already political (Robinson, 2013). Feminist ethics in our estimation also resist neoliberalist rhetoric that views individuals primarily as free agents in a market economy, that deflects attention away from systemic oppressions, that positions chronic underfunding, disaster and state failure as excuses for privatisation, and that obfuscates or renders invisible forms of labour that are deemed undesirable (Held, 2014). In the archival studies context, we began envisioning what feminist ethics of care would look like by asking the following questions: What if we began to see archivists not just as guardians of the authenticity of the records in their collections, but as centerpieces in an ever-changing web of responsibility through which they are connected to records’ creators, records’ subjects, records’ users, and larger communities? What happens when we scratch beneath the surface of the veneer of detached professionalism and start to think of record keepers and archivists … as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through a web of mutual responsibility? (Caswell & Cifor, 2016, p. 25) We then proposed that, through fostering relationships of radical empathy, archivists shift their focus from the records to centering the people most affected by archival interventions, namely record creators, record subjects, record users and larger communities, all the while trying to acknowledge, confront, rectify and repair oppressive power structures. Our 161

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resulting framework detailed specific cases culled from our own experiences as archivists making difficult decisions, such as: not digitising a century-old suicide note; honouring a record creator’s self-described gender identity in descriptive tools like finding aids; restricting information culled from oral histories that relied on personal relationships between interviewer and subject; stocking tissue at the reference desk as a way to acknowledge the emotional responses users may have to records; and situating archival labour as an ongoing responsibility within the changing dynamics of community (Caswell & Cifor, 2016). Our provocation has since been taken up by several other feminist archivists in their practice and scholarship. In a case study of the Women’s March documentation efforts, Gina Watts (2017) successfully applied the ethics of care framework to advance a more pluralistic and equitable approach. For the Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting in 2017, Shannon O’Neill, Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez, Molly Brown, Dinah Handel, Rachel Mattson, Holly Alicia Smith, Giordana Mecagni, Jasmine Jones and Kelly Wooten assembled a panel on ‘Radical Empathy in Archival Practice’ (https://archives2017.sched. com/event/ABGy/301-radical-empathy-in-archival-practice). In their presentations and subsequent work, these feminist archivists have addressed radical empathy in the selection of materials and archival work in contexts including human rights archives (ArroyoRamirez, 2017), zine librarianship (Wooten, 2017; Fox, McElroy, Vachon & Wooten, 2018), digitisation initiatives (Handel, 2017) and racial justice efforts (Mecagni, 2017; Smith, 2017, 2018). These panelists crucially extended our conceptualisation to include the significant relationships of care between archivists, including interactions between colleagues in archival education (Brown, 2017) and professional mentorship (Mattson, 2017). O’Neill has also argued that it is radical empathy that prompted her to reject the common practice of using unpaid interns in the archives (‘Shannon O’Neill: Movers & Shakers 2018—Innovators’, 2018). In 2018, the Society of North Carolina Archivists Annual Conference continued building on an ethics of care in professional contexts with the theme ‘Navigating the web of community: Archivists and the ethics of care’ (www. ncarchivists.org/meetings/2018-annual-conference-durham-nc/). Moving from a general theoretical framework to specific examples, the next two sections provide case studies of how a feminist ethics of care is guiding two different digital archival projects: The South Asian American Digital Archive’s Documenting Islamophobia Project and Visual AIDS’s digitisation of its Frank Moore Archive Project.

The case of the South Asian American digital archive’s Documenting Islamophobia project SAADA (www.saada.org) is an independent, community-based, online-only archive that documents and makes accessible the history of immigrants to the United States (US) and their descendants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and the many South Asian diaspora communities across the globe. The first author of this chapter co-founded the organisation in 2008 together with Samip Mallick, who is its executive director. SAADA is a post-custodial archive, which means rather than accepting physical custody of materials, we borrow materials from individuals, families, organisations and repositories, digitise them, describe them using language the community uses to describe itself, make them publicly accessible online and then return them to their owners. Everything in SAADA’s collection is freely accessible online. Although this online-only, postcustodial model is clearly not appropriate for many communities, we have found that it works for the South Asian American communities we represent and serve given the 162

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dispersed geography of diasporic communities, the multiplicity of the community itself and the emotional value community members place on materials, because of which they are not always willing to give up physical custody, but are excited to share digital copies with others. In 2017, SAADA was awarded a small grant from the German federal government via its economic development agency (GIZ) to launch an exploratory project called ‘Documenting Islamophobia’.1 The project is an attempt to move beyond a feeling of being stuck as an organisation documenting the past in the middle of an urgent political crisis. We are inspired by other digital projects that link archival collecting to activism against racism and police violence, such as A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland (www.archivingpoliceviolence.org/) and Documenting the Now (www.docnow.io/). For us, the project is a complicated one; all South Asians, regardless of religion, are subjected to Islamophobia due to the perception or misperception that they are Muslims. At the same time, Islamophobic thinking is also common among South Asians who are not Muslim. How do we create a project that does not create further divisions within the vast and artificial umbrella of ‘South Asian American’? It is also an enormous task. Where to begin when Islamophobia is so prevalent? Who or what gets included? Do we start at 11 September 2001, or with the Trump presidency, or much earlier? Is ‘Islamophobia’ a contemporary category that we are imposing on the past, and if so, so what? And the ethical issues are daunting. How do we create a project that does not invite further surveillance on communities that have already been subject to intense surveillance since 2001? And what is the role of the first author of this chapter as a white woman outsider? When to listen and when to act? Thinking about the project through a feminist ethics of care lens helped us unstick ourselves by guiding us to focus on our place as archivists within a web of relationships. It enabled us to think through our obligations to care for records creators, subjects, users and the larger South Asian American community. In so doing, we have begun to design a participatory pilot project by assembling an advisory board of those most affected by Islamophobic violence—activists, artists and academics who have been targeted—and asked them to help us answer these questions. We used the grant money to compensate them for their labour, an arrangement informed by decades of feminist scholarship and activism around acknowledgement and fair compensation. The process is painstaking, and we have only just begun. However, what we have discovered so far has questioned many of our prior assumptions and led us to realise how illfated the project would have been had we not consulted those most affected by Islamophobia. For example, we embarked on this thinking that 11 September 2001 would be a major focus, and soon learned the advisory board thought that too much attention had already been given to that event; that it was already being documented by other organisations; and that it should be contextualised via a century-old trajectory of racialised xenophobia against South Asians in the US. One advisory board member discussed Islamophobia in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis as an important precursor; another noted the 1946 Luce-Celler Act, which limited immigration from India to a mere 100 immigrants a year, as a precursor; another noted the 1923 Bhagat Singh Thind case, which overturned South Asian citizenship on racial grounds, as a precursor. It soon became clear that instead of catalysing community members to generate new records documenting contemporary experiences, we need to find a way to contextualise and activate historic records already in SAADA’s care. Indeed, we need to put these historic acts of Islamophobia in conversation with and in relationship to contemporary Islamophobia. 163

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As a result of these crucial conversations, we are building a different kind of participatory project, one in which community members will be asked to create short video narratives contextualising historic records documenting Islamophobia, responding to them in light of their own experiences and trying to make sense of them in our current political moment. If the project proceeds, these videos will be available for other community members to watch, respond to and comment on. The project places the records in SAADA’s care in relation to events that came before and after them; it places our community members in relation to each other both contemporaneously and across space and time. In this deliberate insistence on caring for past and future generations, on building slow relationships marked by trust and empathy and on centering those most affected by violence, we have baked feminist ethics into the project. We have entered an ongoing obligation of care with the community we serve and represent.

The case of visual AIDS This section examines Visual AIDS’s (VA) digitisation of its Frank Moore Archive Project to form the Artist + Registry (www.visualaids.org/artists). The second author, Marika Cifor, has worked with Visual AIDS as a researcher.2 This community archives’ digitisation, including concerns about privacy, disclosure and preservation, and its relationships with records creators, subjects, users and the larger community, are shaped by an ethics of care. The project documents, collects, arranges and describes, and makes accessible the records of artists with HIV/AIDS. Since 1988, Visual AIDS, a New York City-based non-profit has been committed to fighting AIDS through preservation and presentation of artworks, events and publications (Visual AIDS, ‘The Archive Project’ and ‘About Us’). Digitisation offers a means of community healing and survival amid the presence of the ongoing AIDS epidemic in service of building a just and livable future. The Archive Project was founded in 1994. It was initiated by painter Frank Moore and critic David Hirsh (Moore, 1996, p. 21). From the beginning, artists living with HIV/AIDS, many of whom lacked adequate resources to ensure that their estates would survive them, shaped and built the archives. They were acutely aware that, in a time when prognoses were dire and treatments ineffective, two deaths were imminent. The first death was that of the physical body, and second, that of an artistic practice (Visual AIDS, 2012). Widespread health and financial issues meant that many artists stopped creating works, and, after their deaths, work was lost or thrown out. The project collects the work of any person who both self-identifies as HIV-positive and as an artist. Using HIV status as a collecting parameter means that the archives hold a wide range of works, materials and artists. In turn, being unjuried means that the collection ranges from canonical to emerging artists. In the 1990s, before inexpensive digital photography, documenting work was out of reach for many. The project recruited volunteer photographers to shoot donors’ work (Visual AIDS, 1995) and provided slides to artists and archives. Within the first year, 75 artists donated (Pines, 1996, p. 6). Visual AIDS’s office houses slides, clippings, artist statements, invitations, small artworks, papers and other records. Its building is not climate controlled, providing inadequate conditions for long-term photographic preservation. As early as 1995, board members proposed digitisation for preservation and wider access (Visual AIDS, 1995). Starting in 1999, digitised images have been featured in monthly web galleries (Visual AIDS, n.d., ‘History’). With a three-person staff, VA does not have a full-time archivist. With the aid of interns in the early 2000s, it initiated a digitisation process, selecting a few slides from each donor to scan and describe in-house with the aim of breadth and speed. Large-scale digitisation efforts 164

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began with a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation a few years later. The registry launched in 2012 and features digitised slides and new work uploaded by artist members or staff (Visual AIDS, n.d., ‘Archive Project’). Digitisation raised significant access and privacy concerns. Many artists had donated materials only once, whether it was because they lost interest, forgot, were ill or not creating art anymore (personal communication, 2016). Visual AIDS spent years obtaining donors’ consent before its online launch, ensuring that individual and collective needs of the community were given primacy. This was sometimes impossible, especially for estates of artists who had died (personal communication, 2016). The staff had to make difficult ethical decisions on a one-on-one basis about whether to post the work of these artists. Their solution for artists who had died was creating ‘memorial pages’ that note, ‘This tribute page was created by Visual AIDS’ (personal communication, 2016). Through digitisation, they aspired to bring artists who had passed ‘back through showing their artwork … if someone died in ’89 or ’91, they don’t really have a web presence’. ‘Mining’ the archives to put that work online, as Programs Director Alex Fialho (personal communication, 2016) described, brought artists ‘back from obscurity, if not complete historical amnesia’. Staff determined that erring on the side of inclusivity best met the needs of records creators, users and the broader community. As former Executive Director Nelson Santos said, the mission ‘is that we preserve this history and if the history isn’t visible, then what’s the point of that?’ (personal communication, 2016). Difficult ethical quandaries also extend to digitising living artists’ work. For some artists, having their work digitised and accessible online simply presented an exciting opportunity. The inclusion of their images in the digital archives was a validating experience for many donors, especially those who do not work as professional artists and whose work would otherwise be inaccessible online. However, not all donors wanted to have their work digitised. The privacy of the archives within VA’s office is in sharp contrast to the online registry. Previously, in instances such as exhibitions, in which an artist would be widely and publicly identified as HIV-positive, they were contacted for permission. For many, disclosure of their stigmatised HIV status is highly personal. Inclusion in the registry transforms that serostatus permanently into public knowledge. These privacy concerns were particularly acute for artists who work with the public. For example, some donors were teachers, ‘who worry that their students might Google them’ and ‘they didn’t want the first thing their students to learn about them was that they are HIV positive’, worrying that it ‘would influence their first opinion of them’ (personal communication, 2016). One teacher noted that he comes out as gay and HIV-positive to his students every semester, but that he wants this disclosure to happen on his own terms (personal communication, 2016). Similarly, there were artists with commercial careers who do not want customers’ biases to keep them from working (personal communication, 2016). Despite the real risks, most donors opted to participate (personal communication, 2016). Digitisation is often framed narrowly around preservation of the past. Visual AIDS’s conception of digitisation as part of an ethic of care is distinct. ‘It’s not preserving it like its dead, its history and it’s gone,’ founding contributor and artist Eric Rhein (personal communication, 2016) said, ‘we’re preserving it because there is a life and essence there that goes beyond that time and that place, that goes through us and beyond, that wants to inform what we were, what we are and what we want to become.’ If there is no present and future value in these records he concluded, ‘just bury it and let it rot’ (personal communication, 2016). Visual AIDS’s understanding of archiving as part of a web of relationships means that digitisation is a means to intervene in contemporary structural 165

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power inequities that shape the lives and life chances of people living with HIV/AIDS. For example, in ‘Radiant Presence’ (Visual AIDS, 2015, a digital video produced with 10 community curators), they creatively re-use digital records to bring public attention to the gross racialised and gendered injustice of widespread HIV-criminalisation laws in the US. Its lead image is of a shirtless Keith Haring. The face in the photograph might be famous, but the photographer, Juan Rivera, is largely unknown. Using Haring’s image attracts social media users, who then observe 50 images from the registry in a narrative that transitions viewers’ focus to taking action against the stigmatisation and discrimination HIV-positive people face today. By considering first the privacy, survival, evolving needs and desires of its most marginalised records creators, subjects, users and community, VA uses digitisation as a powerful tool to acknowledge, address and fight social injustices.

Conclusion: centering webs of relationships in the digital As these two cases illustrate, a feminist ethics approach to digitisation calls for culturally situated, mutually dependent, ongoing relationships between the stakeholders of digital archival projects. A feminist ethics of digitisation looks different in different contexts but is united by its grounding in an insistence on care—particularly caring for those most marginalised— across space and time. Care might take the form of active listening, acknowledgement and compensation. It may take the form of respecting privacy, honouring shifting contexts around consent and being empathetic about levels of disclosure. In the digital realm, an ethics of care approach expands understandings of access and preservation and exposes the complexities of ongoing relationships with records creators and subjects. It also takes seriously the relationships built within a grassroots community archives context, but it is not limited to such contexts; university and government repositories can learn much from community archives’ commitment to developing relationships of care with communities, particularly communities from whom knowledge has been extracted as a form of oppression, who have been silenced, or ignored entirely. Re-establishing and repairing relationships with these communities is an ongoing process that demands an ethics of care approach. In a feminist ethics framework, digitisation of archival materials is neither the start nor the end of a relationship, but just one moment in an ongoing series of obligations between archivists and records creators, subjects, users and communities. The ethical obligations of those in the archival field do not end with pressing of the scan button or the creation of the item’s URL; they are catalysed by the creation of the record and its inclusion in an archive but extend infinitely into the future. And, like all relationships, they may shift over time. Further, to be truly radical, such empathetic relationships must interrogate, address and repair structural power inequities. To do so requires centering the voices and needs of those pushed to the margin to ensure that the archives is working for its community. This means paying due attention to the long histories of racism, xenophobia, homophobia and sexism, but also addressing how these concerns manifest and are reified by new technologies, spaces and relationships. Returning to the opening dilemma of deciding whether to digitise the South Asian American LGBTQ newsletters from the 1990s, a feminist ethics of care helped guide our impossible decision. We placed ourselves into a relationship of care with those portrayed in the newsletter but potentially not-yet-outed and decided not to digitise the majority of the newsletters. People’s lives eclipse the stuff of archives; their safety supersedes any archival impulse to preserve and make accessible a more complete historic record. 166

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Sometimes, a feminist approach to the ethics of digitisation means learning to accept ‘no’ as the answer.

Notes 1 SAADA was able to secure the grant because the first author of this chapter participated in a Nelson Mandela Foundation dialogue series for memory workers that was funded by GIZ and that offered additional seed money for participants to launch new projects. For additional information, see: www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/reflections-from-the-2016-mandela-dialogues. 2 VA was one of the primary sites for Cifor’s (2017b) dissertation research on affect, activism and AIDS archives and is a community partner in her ongoing book and digital project. Cifor (2017a) has also curated a web gallery for VA about the history and present of the Archive Project.

References Arroyo-Ramirez, E. (2017, July). Radical empathy in the context of human rights archives: Mutual relationships to suspended grief and trauma. Paper presented at Archives 2017 Conference, Portland, OR. Brown, M. (2017, July). Integrating empathy: How feminist ethics of care can be included in archival education. Paper presented at Archives 2017 Conference, Portland, OR. Card, C. (1991). Feminist ethics, Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press. Caswell, M. & Cifor, M. (2016). From human rights to feminist ethics: Radical empathy in archives. Archivaria, 81, 23–43. Christen, K. (2011). Opening archives: Respectful repatriation. American Archivist, 74, 185–210. Cifor, M. (2017a). Towards an AIDS archive. Retrieved from www.visualaids.org/gallery/detail/1188 Cifor, M. (2017b). ‘Your nostalgia is killing me’: Activism, affect and the archives of HIV/AIDS (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of California, Los Angeles, CA. Cole, E.B. & Coultrap-McQuin, S. (1992). Explorations in feminist ethics. Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Fox, V., McElroy, K., Vachon, J. & Wooten, K. (2018). Each according to their ability: Zine librarians talking about their community. In K. Nicholson & M. Seale (eds.), The politics of theory and the practice of critical librarianship (pp. 211–223). Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press. Frazer, E., Hornsby, J. & Lovibond, S. (1992). Ethics: A feminist reader. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Handel, D. (2017, July). Negotiating digitization partnerships: Applications of radical empathy in the context of a media preservation collective. Forum held at Archives 2017, Portland, OR. Harris, V. (2011). Jacques Derrida meets Nelson Mandela: Archival ethics at the endgame. Archival Science, 11, 113–124. Held, V. (2014). The ethics of care as normative guidance: Comment on Gilligan. Journal of Social Philosophy, 45(1), 107–115. International Council on Archives. (1996). Code of ethics. Retrieved from www.ica.org/en/ica-codeethics Jagger, A. (1992). Feminist ethics. In L. Becker & C. Becker (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Ethics (pp. 363–364). New York: Garland Press. Mattson, R. (2017, July). Horizontal mentorship: Radical empathy and professional development. Forum held at Archives 2017, Portland, OR. McEwan, C. & Goodman, M. (2010). Place geography and the ethics of care: Introductory remarks on the geographies of ethics, responsibility and care. Ethics, Place and Environment, 13(2), 103–112. Mecagni, G. (2017). ‘Why don’t people just get over it?’ Bringing the archives to Boston’s conversation on resilience and race equity, Forum held at Archives 2017, Portland, OR. Moore, F. (1996). ‘Frank Moore’. In W. E. Hoot (ed.), Estate Planning for Artists: Will Your Art Survive? Columbia-VLA Journal of Law and the Arts 1(1). 19–23. Pines, L. (1996). Foreword. In Boston Center for the Arts and Visual AIDS, Arts communities, AIDS communities: Realizing the Archive Project (pp. 6–7). New York: Visual AIDS.

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Punzalan, R., Marsh, D. & Cools, K. (2017). Beyond clicks, likes, and downloads: Identifying meaningful impacts for digitized ethnographic archives. Archivaria, 84, 61–102. Robertson, T. (2016). Digitization: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Retrieved from http://tarar obertson.ca/2016/oob/ Robinson, F. (2013). Global care ethics: Beyond distribution, beyond justice. Journal of Global Ethics, 9(2), 131–143. Sevenhuijsen, S. (2003). The place of care: The relevance of the feminist ethic of care for social policy. Feminist Theory, 4(2), 179–197. Shannon O’Neill: Movers & Shakers 2018—Innovators. (2018). Library Journal. Retrieved from https://lj. libraryjournal.com/2018/03/people/movers-shakers-2018/shannon-oneill-movers-shakers-2018innovators/#_ Smith, H. (2017). Building community: The Spelman Archives and documenting black women, Forum held at Archives 2017, Portland, OR. Smith, H. (2018). Radical love: Documenting underrepresented communities using principles of radical empathy, Society of North Carolina Archivists Conference, Duke University, Durham, NC. Society of American Archivists. (2011). SAA core values statement and code of ethics. Retrieved from www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics Visual AIDS. (1995). The First 10 (pamphlet), Visual AIDS Organizational Files. Visual AIDS. (2012, November). The multitudes of Frank Moore. Retrieved from www.visualaids.org/gal lery/detail/104 Visual AIDS (2015). Radiant presence. Retrieved from www.visualaids.org/projects/detail/radiantpresence Visual AIDS. (n.d.). History. Retrieved from www.visualaids.org/history Visual AIDS. (n.d.). The Archive Project. Retrieved from www.visualaids.org/projects/detail/the-archiveproject. Wallace, D. (2010). Locating agency: Interdisciplinary perspectives on professional ethics and archival morality. Journal of Information Ethics, 19(1), 172–189. Watts, G. (2017). Applying radical empathy to Women’s March documentation efforts: A reflection exercise. Archives & Manuscripts, 45(3), 191–201. Wooten, K. (2017, July). Zine librarianship: Radical empathy in action. Paper presented at Archives 2017 Conference, Portland, OR.

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14 Digital archives in Africa and the Endangered Archives Programme Graeme Counsel

Introduction The gallery, library, archive and museum (GLAM) industries in sub-Saharan Africa represent a developing sector of the cultural economy that is recognised as central to sustainable development. Capacity building to strengthen Africa’s cultural sector and its infrastructure is a priority of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), whose Creative Economy Report (2013) identified rapid growth in the creative and cultural industries. Access to funding in the local GLAM industries, however, can be highly competitive. While agencies responsible for the oversight of cultural patrimony exist in all African nations, many continue to be hindered by fundamental problems such as ageing equipment and a lack of technical expertise. Thus, while a focus on the institutionalisation of national and local folklore and art is underway, the documenting and archiving of local and national collections of cultural material remain works in progress in many regions. Capacity building aside, the difficulties in moving forward are more than economical, for in Africa the GLAM industries are widely viewed through a lens that ascribes to them an unfortunate history of colonialism, elitism and racism, ostracising the very communities whose works they hold and exhibit (Okello Ubungu, 2006, p. 388). An ongoing concern, this situation has been largely attributed to former colonial policies, acknowledging that the first exhibitions of African art and culture were held in the mid-19th century, not in Africa, but in Europe. There, Africa was restaged in events that highlighted its exotica, and with African art en vogue at the turn of the century, exhibitions of Africana reached their zenith in Paris with l’Exposition coloniale internationale, a six-month event held in 1931 which was attended by over 30 million people (Chandler, 1992). Early cultural collections on the African continent continued this theme of presenting artefacts that highlighted otherness and primitiveness. These were often curated from collections held by missionaries or European settlers and administrators. Such exhibitions served as entertainment for the colonialists, and local African communities were excluded and disengaged. 169

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Africa’s independence leaders recognised the importance of culture in rebuilding and galvanising their nations. During the 1960s, funding to the arts sector was greatly increased, particularly in nations such as Ghana, Tanzania and Senegal, where progressive arts policies were adopted (Botwe-Asamoah, 2005; M’Bengue, 1973; Mbughuni, 1974). National galleries, libraries, archives and museums were constructed to celebrate African identity through art and culture, though the enterprises were invariably based upon European models of organisation, display and public use. These artefacts from the early days of independence are still in operation, and many of the institutions continue to reflect and practice outmoded models that are a legacy of the era. Many are underfunded, have limited public appeal and are imperilled to becoming relics themselves. As they hold important collections of material that have, in many cases, remained hidden from the public eye for decades, a fundamental challenge for the cultural sector in Africa is to rejuvenate these collections into new interactive spaces that are programmed for local communities. Within this context, the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) funded three major projects to preserve, archive and digitise the National Sound Archives of the Republic of Guinea. In examining these projects as a case study, the wider work of the program will be situated within the context of creating digital archives as centres for research, innovation and interaction.

Guinea: forward into the past Guinea is located within the Mandé heartland of West Africa, a broad savannah region that extends from the Atlantic shores of Senegal to Burkina Faso. The Mandé are descendants of the Empire of Mali, which flourished from the 13th to the 15th centuries CE. Mandé musicians, who have several local names, are widely known as griots, a French term, and are the recognised oral historians of their culture. Griots are responsible for passing down their knowledge of genealogies and historical narratives from generation to generation, usually through songs. Master musicians, they perform at the key life ceremonies of the Mandé where they entertain and edify patrons and their guests. European contact in this region of West Africa dates to the 15th century, culminating with the ‘scramble for Africa’ in the late-19th century and its reckoning through the Conference of Berlin (1884–1885), which annexed Guinean territories into ‘French West Africa’. In 1958, after more than 60 years of colonial rule, Guinea became the first of the Francophone colonies in Africa to gain independence. Guinea’s inaugural president, Sékou Touré, set about revitalising Guinean culture through direct policy intervention. Of the arts, Touré’s government focused on music. To promote African music, he banned Western music from airplay on the nation’s sole broadcaster, and locally he disbanded many popular music acts. To rejuvenate Guinean music, a new cultural policy called authenticité oversaw the creation of dozens of new musical groups who represented the regions and towns of Guinea. The government provided modern musical instruments to these groups at no cost and the musicians were placed on the monthly government payroll. Authenticité tasked these young musicians with presenting a modern style of Guinean music while encouraging them to seek inspiration from local folklore and traditional sources: We should go down to the grassroots of our culture, not to remain there, not to be isolated there, but to draw strength and substance therefrom, and with whatever additional sources of strength and material we acquire, proceed to set up a new form of society raised to the level of human progress. (Touré, in Amoah, 1989, p. 37) 170

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Thus, a new contemporary style of Guinean music was constructed during the presidency of Touré. His policy of authenticité ultimately created over 50 orchestres moderne, who were groups of over a dozen musicians that featured electric guitars and brass sections. National culture and regional representation were further developed through the creation of statesponsored theatrical troupes, dance ensembles and traditional music groups. Guinea’s national arts festivals, held every year and then biannually, provided opportunities for the ‘staging’ of the nation, whereby the various ensembles who represented the diversity of Guinea’s ethnic groups were celebrated in national unity through music, dance and theatre. By the mid1960s, the Guinean government had further developed its cultural industries through the creation of publishing, photographic and film monopolies, with the government music label, Syliphone, responsible for recording, producing and distributing the music of Guinea’s statesponsored groups. Guinea’s radio network, a further monopoly of the government, featured one of the largest transmitters in West Africa; thus, Guinean music via Syliphone was listened to throughout the region, where it was celebrated as a new and progressive style of popular African music. The Guinean government had assumed guardianship of the nation’s cultural heritage, with the public informed of this through annotations on Syliphone recordings: The People will see, will know, that art and culture was transformed in Guinea to be not only a weapon against any obstacle in the awakening of the conscience of the Guinean People, which was in darkness, but that which will enable them to be affirmed in the voice of progress in order to achieve the goal which aims at the cultural transformation of the social background. (Kan ni mankan. Sons et echos, c. 1967, translation by author) After nearly three generations of colonial rule, authenticité reclaimed and revalorised culture as that which was central to the nation’s progress. Artists were elevated to the role of civil servants, employed in the service of the state and anointed as ‘honorary militants, engaged in reconstituting the inexhaustible heritage of Africa’ (Guinean National Commission for UNESCO, 1979, p. 74). For several decades, the greater part of West Africa’s cultural industries functioned within the apparatus of an official state ideology, with Authenticité replicated in various forms by many intraregional governments. Indeed, the very practice of creativity was subservient to the governments’ socialist motivations, which claimed ownership of culture while rejecting the role of the individual. Mali’s president explained: Culture is the alpha and omega of all policy … We openly affirm that we are party men and we will resolutely take part in every domain of life, even art. We reject art in itself – art for art’s sake. (Keita, cited in Cutter, 1968, p. 75) Thus, the cultural economy was placed in the service of the state, who chose its actors, shaped its contexts and owned its products. Guinea’s Syliphone recordings captured the authenticité movement and were mastered locally on high quality quarter-inch magnetic tape in the Voix de la révolution studios housed next to the national radio station. Of the many thousands of recordings made during the presidency of Touré (1958–1984), over 750 were officially released by Syliphone on 33.3 rpm and 45 rpm vinyl format and distributed throughout West Africa. Thus, Syliphone represents an important example of an early African recording label. It expressed not only 171

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the ideals of authenticité, but also encapsulated the evolution of a new African popular music style from its genesis to its peak. With the death of President Touré in 1984, authenticité and its revolutionary approaches to art and culture were abandoned. Government funding for Guinea’s cultural industries was reduced to a fraction of former spending, a situation that has scarcely been remedied. Syliphone recordings, however, are much in demand. The original vinyl releases can sell for several hundred dollars each, depending upon condition, and compact disc compilations of Syliphone material number over 50 in total. Interest in the Syliphone catalogue guided my applied research projects in West Africa and led me to the sound archives of Radio Télévision Guinée (RTG), which house the original Syliphone recordings. In 1985, a year after President Touré’s death, an attempted coup resulted in widespread plundering and ransacking of government buildings. The offices of the RTG were bombed in an attempt to occupy the national broadcaster, which resulted in the partial destruction of the Syliphone archive. I proposed a research project to catalogue what remained of the collection and archive its materials. In 2008, I received major project funding through the EAP to preserve, digitise and archive the Syliphone collection and to recreate the complete catalogue of its vinyl recordings. The project partners included the British Library, the Direction Nationale des Archives des Medias in the Ministère de la Communication and the Ministère de la Culture et Patrimonie. I worked directly with ministers and their staff and was given unprecedented access to the government’s sound archives. The initial EAP funding facilitated several months’ research in Guinea, where Syliphone vinyl recordings were sourced locally and from international private collections. Fortuitously, Guinea’s fiftieth anniversary of independence coincided with the successful completion of this project. Thus, the entire Syliphone catalogue of vinyl recordings was presented to the Guinean government and displayed as the centrepiece of a week-long exhibition held at the National Museum. The success of this project permitted access to previously ‘off-limit’ areas of the RTG, namely several rooms that housed thousands of reels of audio tape. These were the master recordings of not only the Syliphone vinyl discs, but also the full complement of recordings made during the authenticité years for broadcast on the national radio. Full access to Guinea’s national sound archives was granted. However, due to the size of the archival collection and the challenges of archiving during domestic political crises, three EAP major research projects spanning several years would be necessary to complete the project.

The Endangered Archives Programme and Guinea’s national sound archives Arcadia is a charitable fund that promotes open access to knowledge ‘without barriers of cost or distance’ (Arcadia, 2018). In 2001, Arcadia’s initial funding for the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme led to the establishment of the EAP in 2004. The EAP’s stated aim is ‘to contribute to the preservation of archival material that is in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration world-wide’ (Endangered Archives Programme, 2018). Proposals for archival projects are considered by an international advisory panel, with project funding allocated for the creation of digital copies of materials and the depositing of copies with local institutions and the British Library. The EAP seeks to enhance local capabilities through project funding for the professional training of staff, while ensuring that project equipment remains with the host institution of the country in which the project takes place. In its first 10 years, the EAP allocated over GBP 6 million for the funding of 246 archival projects. The scope of these projects is impressive. While focusing on pre-industrial 172

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collections, the vulnerability of materials is also a mitigating factor. Thus, paper and photographic collections from the 20th century are in evidence (e.g., the preservation of Truth and Reconciliation Commission documents in East Timor, photographic collections from Myanmar, Bulgaria, Georgia, Iran and Mongolia, and periodical and press publications from Peru, Turkey and India). Since 2014, the EAP has funded approximately 30 archival projects per year. In Africa, many institutions hold rich archival collections that are largely unknown to scholars. Endangered Archives Programme grants have funded over 75 archival projects in 30 African nations (Endangered Archives Programme, 2018). In 2008, I contributed to this body of research when I commenced my EAP project Syliphone: An early African recording label (EAP187) at the offices of the RTG in Boulbinet, Conakry. Previous efforts to gain access to the RTG’s sound archives had been thwarted by bureaucratic delays and obfuscation. That year, Transparency International (2008) Corruption Perception Index had ranked Guinea 173 from 180 nations, and regardless of the success of the project that recreated the complete vinyl catalogue of Syliphone, it took several months to gain access to the sound archives. Upon access, a survey of the main archival room revealed approximately 750 reels of quarter-inch magnetic tape, perhaps 30,000 minutes of music, with the earliest recordings dating to 1963. With only a few weeks’ funding remaining, it was impossible to transfer this amount of material to digital format; having digitised just 69 audio reels, the project was concluded. I applied for a further EAP grant to focus on the preservation of the RTG sound archive collection, and in 2009, I returned to Guinea to commence the new project: Guinea’s Syliphone archives (EAP327). In Guinea, 2009 was a tumultuous year. Following the death of Touré in 1984, a military coup installed Col. Lansana Conté as president. With his death in office in December 2008, Guinea’s army again took control and installed Captain Moussa Camara as president. Protests against Camara’s regime and its vague promises to transition to democratic elections culminated in a rally at the capital’s football stadium on September 28, the anniversary date of Guinea’s independence. Speeches at the rally had barely commenced when several hundred fully armed soldiers stormed the stadium, firing into the crowd, bayoneting individuals and raping dozens of women. Between 150 and 200 demonstrators were killed and over 1,000 injured, and the International Criminal Court (2011) ruled that the actions constituted a crime against humanity. These events took place during my EAP project at the RTG offices, which are located within a fortified compound close to the centre of the capital. The entrances are guarded by soldiers in armed vehicles, and Camp Koundara, a military base some 100 metres from the RTG buildings, protects the site. Following the stadium massacre, security in Conakry deteriorated markedly. The army was increasingly divided, and lootings, theft and arbitrary arrests by soldiers posed a significant risk to locals and foreigners alike. Events culminated in an assassination attempt on President Camara, whereby the commander of Guinea’s Republican Guard shot the president at close range. This occurred at Camp Koundara, and while the president survived the shooting, he fled Guinea, leaving his nation in a leadership vacuum. The seriousness of the situation, coupled with the proximity of the archives to an active military camp, led to the Australian and British governments strongly recommending that the archival project be abandoned. It was resurrected in 2012 via a third EAP grant (EAP608) and was completed in 2013. The three archival projects had succeeded in preserving and digitising 9,410 songs or approximately 55,000 minutes of music. The entire collection was transferred to external hard drives, which were made available to the public at Guinea’s Bibliothèque Nationale and later as digital files available on the internet via the British Library website (British Library Sounds, 2018). 173

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A survey of the RTG audio archive’s recordings reveals the extent of Guinea’s cultural policy of authenticité. In seeking to craft the nation, to create an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1998), the government of Touré established performing arts ensembles in all of the nation’s regions to represent the full diversity of its national culture. The Syliphone archive revealed, however, that this representation was a façade, for it was apparent that the president’s own ethnic group, the Maninka, were disproportionally recorded over all others. The Maninka account for approximately 30 per cent of the population, yet over 5,000 songs, more than half of the entire sound archive, featured Maninka performers. Guinea’s majority ethnic group, the Fulbé, who challenged Touré’s authority and were a target of his regime’s oppressive rule, were represented in just over 1,000 songs, many of which praise the president and his cultural policies. In imagining the nation, the Guinean government broadcast music that portrayed Guinea as a proletarian paradise built upon respect for tradition. The government presented new styles of Guinean music that drew from folklore and grassroot music traditions while not ‘remaining’ or being ‘isolated’ there. Syliphone recordings, particularly those performed by the orchestres moderne, were progressive, even avante garde, and served to raise the Guinean nation to a desired level of human progress. As acknowledged by Schwartz and Cook (2002), archives are a social construct. From 1958 until 1984, the RTG sound archives were at the centre of a broadcasting apparatus monopolised by a one-party state. A major site of political power, the sound archives were a central depository of the nation’s collective memories and imagination. The archive’s materials were essential to the formation of a national identity and to the promotion of the ideals of unity during Guinea’s 1st Republic. Following the death of President Touré, the archive was essentially off limits, and many of its thousands of recordings were banned from broadcast for over 25 years. If archives are sites of power (Schwartz and Cook, 2002), then archivists are wielders of that power and are charged with several fundamental concerns. Central among these is the question of who will have access to the collection. This is particularly germane in Africa (Britz and Lor, 2004), where the sites of political power are frequently manifest in the central artifices of the GLAM sector, namely its national institutions. The EAP is focused on providing free and open digital access to its collections, which can raise concerns inside government ranks. Few governments wish to raise the spectre of a founding and populist president, whose glories were sung in praise by the nation’s most revered musicians, as this may serve as a contrast to the less-utopian realities of modern life. The projects to preserve and digitise Guinea’s national sound archives extended over several Guinean governments and its cultural ministers, and as Guinea lurched from crisis to crisis, the role of the archive and its accessibility to the public was far from clear. In 2010, reforms to privatise the local broadcasting sector were enacted amid the nation’s first free democratic elections. The music of the Syliphone archive was picked up by local radio stations who circumvented the national broadcaster’s uncertain position on its censorship and access; thus, public access to the digital collection had expanded organically beyond the corridors of the Bibliothèque Nationale. The archive was thus open to the public for the first time. In 2015, after two years of negotiations with musicians, musicians’ unions, commercial stakeholders and the Guinean government, the British Library launched the Syliphone sound archive via its British Library Sounds website. The entire collection was made freely available via the internet, achieving the objectives of the EAP. The public broadcasting of an archive, its digital access and the potential for the downloading of materials from an internet site, are important considerations for an archivist, particularly within the African context. The first of these is the issue of equitable access to the 174

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internet, a problem that affects many communities. Essential infrastructure such as electricity is often in short supply, thus, many citizens, particularly those in rural areas, are unable to access the internet even if they could afford to. A further issue is that of ownership of the material. Identifying the intellectual property rights of authors is particularly problematic in communities that share a common heritage and culture. Such communities typify African societies, whereby a community’s intangible cultural heritage, for example its songs and music, can be claimed by individuals, groups and, in the case of Guinea, by governments. Thus, while new archival practices such as digitisation and open access to collections can benefit local African communities, they nevertheless necessitate familiar considerations concerning the ownership of materials and their associated copyright. In Guinea’s pre-colonial era, for example, the mantle of ownership and protection of cultural materials was clearly structured by authority contained within and emanating from local societies, castes, families and nominated individuals. Among the Mandé in West Africa, the griots are the sole retainers of large canons of narratives, songs and music. Since the early 13th century CE, griots have performed songs in honour of the Mandé nobility. Under colonialism, these structures were ruptured through policies that demoted local Mandé chiefs and gave rise to new elites. The griots’ authority was challenged, with further contestation occurring in the post-colonial era. Under authenticité, the songs of the griots were used as propaganda to advance ideologies and party leaders, and the government owned the rights to the griots’ recordings through Syliphone and the offices of the RTG. In the digital era, the protection and ownership of cultural materials has been further challenged through piracy, weak institutions and a competitive GLAM sector, all of which contribute to the contestation of rights and ownership of cultural heritage. In the West, the genealogy of copyright, to borrow from Ute and Diawara (2016, p. 22), is marked by the primacy of identifiable authors. The reproduction of any core elements, for example the melody or musical phrase of a song, would constitute an infringement of copyright. In Africa, however, such ‘borrowing’ is common and emanates from within the community itself and its rich sources of material. The imposition of copyright law, or moreover the lack of appropriate copyright laws, is a significant issue in Africa and one that is addressed by local actors in creative ways according to the opportunities and limitations present. Thus, the archivist can be presented with unexpected and unforeseen issues that challenge established methodologies and orthodoxies while also being offered workable, local solutions. Pickover (2009) suggested that the digitisation of heritage materials represents a site of struggle, where the real challenges are not technical or technological, but ethical, social and political. Navigating the complexities of legitimate ownership, access and dissemination of cultural artefacts is challenging in the African context. It demands an adaptable and flexible approach to archiving that is collaborative and inclusive, and that reflects the aims and purpose of the archive itself.

Conclusion Archiving in Africa can present many challenges. In problematising the issue, I have raised several ethical and practical concerns. In the public eye, archives in Africa are often relegated as artefacts of a colonial era, yet they are located at the centre of, and often operate amid, power struggles. The archivist is thus tasked with building the archive in the public imagination while negotiating multiple layers of bureaucracy and meeting occasional resistance. Archives are potent and powerful sites where national culture and identity are contested. While the repatriation of archival materials to their communities of 175

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origin is facilitated by digital access and preservation, this too is problematic due to the lack of infrastructure. Rights to use and access, exploitation and the application of copyright, research practice and practical issues in developing archives to their fullest potential necessitate an inclusive and flexible approach to archiving. In these contexts, the archivist, as an important conduit for the transmission and dissemination of archival materials, often acts as an intermediary between the public and their representatives in government, adding a layer of complexity that may not have been anticipated. This is underscored by the project’s ethical principles, to engage and ‘give back’ materials to their communities of origin, yet the question of ownership is founded upon Western concepts of best practice, which are not always appropriate in African contexts. These complexities have been recognised through the efforts of organisations such as the International Library of African Music (2009), whose Guidelines for Reproduction and Sale of Digital Heritage and Guidelines for Repatriation of Digital Heritage provide an African-centric viewpoint and basis from which to plan. The guidelines address fundamental issues and realities pertaining to the emerging role of music archives in Africa, focusing on sustainability, archiving practice and ethics in research. These principles are supported by organisations such as the EAP, whose projects have made a significant contribution to the preservation of the world’s cultural heritage.

References Amoah, O. (Ed.). (1989). A political dictionary of Black quotations reflecting the Black man’s dreams, hopes, visions. London: Pawtucket. Anderson, B. (1998). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Arcadia. (2018). What Arcadia does. Retrieved from www.arcadiafund.org.uk/about-peter-baldwinlisbet-rausing/ Botwe-Asamoah, K. (2005). Kwame Nkrumah’s politico-cultural thought and policies. London: Routledge. British Library Sounds. (2018). Syliphone record label recordings from Guinea. Retrieved from http:// sounds.bl.uk/World-and-traditional-music/Syliphone-record-label-collection Britz, J. & Lor, P. (2004). A moral reflection on the digitization of Africa’s documentary heritage. IFLA Journal, 30(3), 216–223. Chandler, A. (1992). Empire of the Republic. The exposition coloniale internationale de Paris, 1931. Retrieved from www.arthurchandler.com/paris-1931-exposition/ Cutter, C. H. (1968). The politics of music in Mali. African Arts, 1(3), 38–39, 74–77. Endangered Archives Programme. (2018). About. Retrieved from https://eap.bl.uk/about Guinean National Commission for UNESCO. (1979). Cultural policy in the Revolutionary People’s Republic of Guinea. Studies and documents on cultural policies (Vol. 51). Paris: UNESCO. Human Rights Watch. (2009). Bloody Monday. The September 28 massacre and rapes by security forces in Guinea. Retrieved from www.hrw.org/report/2009/12/17/bloody-monday/september-28-mas sacre-and-rapes-security-forces-guinea International Criminal Court. (2011). Report on preliminary examination activities. Retrieved from www.icc-cpi.int/NR/rdonlyres/63682F4E-49C8-445D-8C13-F310A4F3AEC2/284116/OTPRe portonPreliminaryExaminations13December2011.pdf International Library of African Music. (2009). Home. Retrieved from www.ru.ac.za/ilam/ Kan ni mankan. Sons et echos. (c. 1967). Syliphone GUI 1. 33.3 rpm disc. M’Bengue, M. S. (1973). Cultural policy in Senegal. Studies and documents on cultural policies. Paris: UNESCO. Mbughuni, L. A. (1974). The cultural policy of the United Republic of Tanzania. Studies and documents on cultural policies. Paris: UNESCO. Okello Ubungu, G. H. (2006). Africa and its museums: Changing of pathways? In B. T. Hoffman (Ed.), Art and cultural heritage: Law, policy and practice (386–393). New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Pickover, M. (2009). Contestations, ownership, access and ideology: Policy development challenges for the digitization of African heritage and liberation archives. Paper presented at the First International Conference on African Digital Libraries and Archives, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Schwartz, J. M. & Cook, T. (2002). Archives, records, and power: The making of modern memory. Archival Science, 2, 1–19. Transparency International. (2008). Retrieved from www.transparency.org/research/cpi/cpi_2008/0 UNESCO. (2013). Creative Economy Report. 2013 Special edition. Widening local development pathways. Retrieved from www.unesco.org/culture/pdf/creative-economy-report-2013.pdf Ute, R. & Diawara, M. (2016). Copyright Africa: How intellectual property, media and markets transform immaterial cultural goods. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing.

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15 The Alan Vaughan-Richards archive Recovering tropical modernism in Lagos Ola Uduku

Introduction In 2011, with a small project grant from the British Academy and further assistance from the University of Edinburgh and the Goethe Institute in Lagos, plans were made to digitise a number of drawings created by to the late Alan Vaughan-Richards, a British–Nigerian architect who had practiced in Lagos, Nigeria, from the 1950s until his death in the 1980s. Vaughan-Richards had been an influential character on the Lagos architectural scene. He married Lagos socialite Ayo Vaughan and had worked first for the Architects Co-Partnership in Nigeria before establishing his own practice and later working with Nigerian architect Alex Ibru. His works include university campus plans, individual houses and industrial buildings. He was also one of the first Nigerian architects to discuss architectural heritage and conservation, contributing to the writing of and producing the drawings for Building Lagos (Akinsemoyin & VaughnRichards, 1977). The funding enabled not only the digitisation of the drawings, but also the development of an exhibition that attempted to capture Vaughan-Richards and his family’s life in 1960s Lagos. This chapter discusses: the challenges of architectural drawing conservation and digitisation in Africa; the context and development of the Alan Vaughan-Richard Archive exhibition in Edinburgh, which focused on digitisation outcomes and 1960s African modernism; architecture and culture in West Africa to a 21st-century Western audience; and a consideration as to whether this project and others are the best vehicles by which to engage ‘other’ cultures in archival projects that necessarily engage with wider non-Western cultural contextual and pragmatic concerns. It concludes by evaluating the successes and failures of the current adopted model of heritage conservation. Further, it suggests changes that might make the model more effective in an emerging world context.

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Context and setting The departing British colonial government left an interesting legacy for future historians of Ghana and Nigeria in West Africa. This was because the British administrations in each country had recently built new regional archives across Nigeria and Ghana and invested in creating and establishing national archive services from the late 1950s (West Africa Builder and Architect [WABA], 1963). The motivation for this would seem to have been the desire to leave a documented record of the century of colonial administration in these countries for use of the emerging local administrators. Duplicated copies of the most significant material were, however, lodged at the British National Archives in Kew. The future maintenance and curation of these West African archives became limited or non-existent after the initial set-up period. This was because from the mid-1960s, both Nigeria and Ghana were engulfed in states of political and civil crises, including military coups d’état and civil war. This continued well into the 1970s. Fortunately, beginning in the late 1990s, and particularly over the last decade, there has been a reignited interest in architectural history in line with the re-evaluation of the body of architecture and social infrastructure projects produced by early post-independence architects, from mainly Western and Eastern European countries. Despite this, there remain many smaller unknown and essentially hidden archives that are yet to be viewed and made public due to limited post-independence investment in archival resources and the cost of developing and maintaining these resources. The British Library-funded ‘Hidden Archives’ programme (British Library, 2004) and the work of universities such as Yale (2018) in collaboration with the University of Ghana, have successfully initiated the creation and restoration of African cultural archives. These institutions and others have helped kickstart and fund post-1960s archival projects such as these across Africa. This was the context within with the Alan Vaughan-Richards Archive Project was initiated. It started as a chance meeting between a friend and distant relative, Remi VaughanRichards—whose father, Alan (Richards) had spent most of his architectural life as an architect in Lagos. He had been married to Ayo Vaughan, from a renowned Lagos family, who had a pioneering career in nursing, and raised Remi and her three siblings in Lagos during the heady early Nigerian independence era—the mid-1950s to the 1970s. Alan Vaughan-Richards was most architecturally active during this period of his career (AVR Archive, 2012). Vaughan-Richards was trained in England and initially worked in Northern Iraq with the Iraqi Development Board. He went on to gain a Diploma in Tropical Architecture from the Architectural Association (AA) in 1955, and was employed by the Architects Co-Partnership (ACP) in Lagos in 1956. However, he worked in the London office on St Anne’s College Oxford, which won a RIBA Bronze Medal. He then returned to Lagos and worked with ACP in 1957 (Grove Dictionary, 2003). He was involved in several projects, including the Bristol Hotel (WABA, 1963) and Investment House in Lagos (WABA, 1962). On the departure of ACP from Nigeria just after the nation’s independence in 1960, Vaughan-Richards bought out the firm’s business interests in Nigeria and set up practice. Aside from private commissions and his own house design, he is most known for his work on the masterplan and design of the University of Lagos from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. He continued to live and work in Nigeria until his death in 1989. His architectural drawings papers and other materials—which now comprise part of the archive—were left very much as they had been 20 years after his death, in his home office in Ikoyi, Lagos. The Alan Vaughan-Richards (AVR) archive project’s objective was threefold: to identify the drawings and other material that remained in Vaughan-Richard’s office;

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(a)

(b)

Figure 15.1 (a): Ola Oluwakitan house. (b) Architect’s house. Source: Ms. Remi Vaughan-Richards.

to digitise the most important drawings from the physical archive; and to develop a plan by which to conserve the architect-designed house and the remaining archival drawings and artefacts (AVR Archive, 2012; Uduku and Le Roux, 2012) (see Figure 15.1). This chapter seeks to review the project’s objectives and its ultimate impact on different audiences.

Funding the Alan Vaughan-Richards archive An initial British Academy Small Projects grant was received for the project in late 2010: the sum of £7,450. It was a small beginning but enough to enable travel to Lagos by the author and Hannah Le Roux from the University of the Witwatersrand, who had been instrumental in identifying and connecting with Vaughan-Richards’s daughter Remi, who is the guardian of the estate. Further small grants, to the sum of £5,000, were received from the University of Edinburgh personal research fund and the Faculty Research and Knowledge Exchange (RKE) Fund.

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Figure 15.2 AVR Exhibition (2011). Source: Ola Uduku.

This enabled the project to continue; the remaining funds were made available for the staging and setting up of the well-regarded AVR Archive exhibition in 2011, which displayed the digitised artefacts (see Figure 15.2). Through the use of earlier research and material acquired at the architect’s house in Ikoyi and from his daughter, the background to Vaughan-Richards’s life and work in West Africa in the 1960s and 1970s was also integrated with a timeline in the exhibition.

The process The initial visit established which drawings were extant and their condition. Further funding from the University of Edinburgh and RKE funds enabled the funding of two further visits by the author and two postgraduate students. This visit was to document and record the drawings, artefacts and the architect-built house in which they remain. It became clear early on that while some drawings were in a poor and rapidly deteriorating state—due to the cross-ventilated and elevated location of the office—most drawings had survived in good condition for more than 40 years in some cases. The task considered what might be possible in terms of drawing conservation and the conservation and repair of the Alan Vaughan-Richards House (AVR House), in which the drawings and studio were located (see Figure 15.3). There were no available funds to upgrade and restore AVR House and we were unable to identify viable schemes to undertake the refurbishment via fundraising. We approached cultural institutes in Lagos, including the British Council and Alliance Français, for funding.

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Figure 15.3 AVR House with Remi Vaughan-Richards in foreground (2011). Source: Ola Uduku.

The Goethe Institute in Lagos, via its director, was able to assist with funding proposals. A key issue related to the ownership of the property. Through the director of the Goethe Institute, Remi Vaughan-Richards was introduced to the researchers and able to work with a lawyer to help resolve these issues (see Figure 15.3). This process, however, exceeded the duration of the project. The delay in the resolution of land ownership issues and lack of funding a meant that the proposed upgrade could not take place; this objective remains unfulfilled.

Digitisation The popularity of digital systems made the option of the digitisation of key drawings and artefacts a possibility. The problem, however, was the cost of digitisation in Nigeria. Local printing and scanning firms were expensive, even with the positive currency exchange rate between GB pounds and Nigerian naira. The best option was to explore taking drawings out of Nigeria and having them digitised at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. The logistics associated with this were considerable; we had to determine whether removing the drawings—which could be considered precious artefacts from Nigeria—would be allowed. The mode of transportation of the larger drawings was also cause for concern; the fragility of some of the drawings prompted concerns about whether the climate difference would trigger further deterioration.

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Further, there were the ethics to consider. In the 2000s, the idea of taking historical artefacts to Europe, albeit for preservation, is a particularly colonial concept. There was also the added issue that the proposed preservation and digitisation would mean that the copyright related to the material would be held outside of the country of origin (Nigeria) and effectively held in trust by an institution (the University of Edinburgh). The entire project also depended significantly on a working trust relationship between the project lead and Remi Vaughan-Richards. The practical considerations to be considered were whether customs officials at Murtala Mohammed International Airport would allow the documents through. This proved easy, as the archive of drawings had been packed in both hand and hold luggage. These were waved through by customs on the trip back to Edinburgh. The ethical issues of digitisation were resolved in several ways. We modelled the copyright issues involved via a trust status, in which the digitisation and initial storage of digital images of the AVR Archive were undertaken by the technical lab at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Architecture on behalf of Remi Vaughan-Richards, the copyright holder and legal administrator of the Alan Vaughan-Richards estate. The digitised images—which can be found on the archive page—are watermarked and low quality. This means that authors and publishers wanting to use the images are able to email the curator (the author). She in turn connects would-be users with Vaughan-Richards, who decides whether to grant permission to use the high-resolution images with due acknowledgement to the AVR estate. Once permission is granted, the curator sends the images, as digital files, to the users. This might seem a convoluted process, but it has been in place for more than five years and works very well in practice. It is envisaged that ultimately, the digital archive will be transferred to a Lagos location and managed by Vaughan-Richards and the AVR estate.

The product Once the material for documentation had arrived in Edinburgh, the process of digitisation took two weeks. At its end, the remaining funding was used to stage the AVR Archive exhibition. The final logistical challenge was taking the drawings and a number of large, A1-sized, acid-free cardboard plan boxes with acid-free tissue paper sheets of the same size back to Lagos. The plan boxes and paper sheets had been recommended as the best way to keep extant drawings in the AVR office in Lagos protected from the elements, in the absence of mechanical cooling and temperature control systems. The solution to this was the purchase of a large hard-shell cycle case, which could take both the drawings and flat-packed cardboard plan boxes and acid-free sheets. Travelling with a well-known intercontinental airline proved to be unproblematic, with no additional charges for the unusual-sized load. Thus, the entire process was possible on the small budget due to careful planning ahead of the task. Unfortunately, we were able to make little progress in redeveloping the AVR House as an accessible or ‘visitable’ site for West African modern architecture enthusiasts. As project organisers, we had thought this would have been the best way to increase public awareness about Vaughan-Richards’s role in developing West African modernism. Instead, the University of Edinburgh’s Architecture School exhibition AVR Archive was the most successful publicity RKE output of the project. This was paradoxical, as its outreach or impact was more felt by an audience in northern Europe (Edinburgh, where the exhibition was held) than it was in Lagos, Nigeria, where Vaughan-Richards’s house is located. The digitisation of the archives was particularly successful and will hopefully ensure that some key buildings and works of the late Vaughan-Richards are now secured for digital posterity (current formatting permitting). 183

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Thus, despite the aforementioned successes, the objective to make the work of AVR more accessible to local Lagosians was not achieved. Digitisation has made the drawings accessible to a global audience, including technically able and educationally able Nigerians and other Africans, but not the average African in Lagos or West Africa, at whom the impact and publicity was initially aimed. The exhibition had been successfully received in Edinburgh and carefully taken down and packed up to be displayed elsewhere. However, despite attempts to organise future venues for the exhibition, particularly in Nigeria, there was neither the interest nor the exhibition space in Europe or Africa when the project funding came to an end.

The challenges Undertaking the AVR project generated a number of key questions and challenges: • • •

For whom is the current archival project process focused? Is the current digital archive process really innovative in its curation of material? How can we engage non-‘Western’ publics in appreciating heritage through digital processes that will have cultural relevance and significance to different local contexts?

For all its successes, the digitisation of archives can be argued to be a continuation of the traditional archival curation process, albeit within the digital domain. While a significant proportion of the world has access to internet-ready computers, tablets and smartphones, some communities cannot access digital archives. This is an obstacle to would-be users in emerging economies, where formal educational structures are yet to catch up with digital investigative research methods. This is due both to less ubiquitous free access to wi-fi /internet on campus and in public settings, and the current relative cost of tablets, smartphones and laptops for average African students. While the price of these hardware requirements for access to digital material is rapidly reducing, they are yet to become affordable for most African students. The model of curation and display also remains situated within a framework that works well in the Western educational–cultural mode, in which the exhibition usually takes place in an institution or place of note. To encourage wider participation from African audiences, there is a need to break down the notion of the exhibition as an item of ‘high culture’ which one has to attend the academy to view. Instead, there is the need to take the exhibition to ‘the people’, which is arguably a more difficult feat. There are now a few examples of this approach. The Market Theatre in Johannesburg is located in a locally accessible location in the city centre, making it open to a mix of clientele from all social classes and racial groups (see Schwartz, 1988; Fuchs, 2002). Further, the District Six Museum Project in Cape Town is located in the old area that was part of District Six, making it accessible to Capetonians who still live and have links to the neighbourhood (see Rassool & Prossalendis, 2001). In Ghana, the ArchiAfrika project is located in Jamestown in downtown Accra, and regularly has art and other cultural exhibitions that are accessible to a wide mix of Accra dwellers of different social classes (see Timeout Accra, 2017). Currently, the author is engaged in developing this more ‘grassroots’ approach to community–local engagement with heritage, both the physical and the digital, through collaborative projects with local communities and publics who are more amenable to, or already focused on, exploring and engaging with their local heritage and traditions. This also responds to the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage 184

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(2003), which encourages the recognition of more ephemeral aspects of culture and also a wider engagement and appreciation of culture locally across the world. Therefore, digital archives within this framework are somewhat secondary to the deeper discourse on heritage and culture in emerging world contexts (Uduku & Wolff, 2018). The ability to create and develop access to these archival sources, however, is crucial to the re-establishment of a sustainable heritage culture in often challenging circumstances. In Nigeria’s case, the issues are related to poverty and access to education. However, in postwar nations such as Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Liberia, the politics of the archive and remembrance itself can hinder the creation of ‘neutral’ archival material for posterity. Basu (2008), De Jong and Rowlands (2009) and Ntunda (2014) have explored these issues in their texts examining Sierra Leone and Rwanda. The AVR Archive provides a key insight into early Nigerian architecture at the cusp of and just after self-rule or independence. It does, however, focus on this view from the somewhat rose-tinted gaze of the middle-class bourgeoisie populace. This still makes it an important snapshot view of cultural and social history of the time from this specific frame of reference. There is a challenge in being able to interpret historical records, such as archives, from more than one perspective. This often leads to an erasure or lack of interest in the views of the less-prominent actors involved in the architectural ‘scene’ in Nigeria in the 1960s and 1970s. The other challenge is that the archive, due to its curation and focus, remains mainly the preserve of academe and those associated closely with this. It is hoped that eventually it would contribute to a more accessible digital archive of social history. This would mean that the archive would be of interest not only to academics and postgraduate students, but also to the Lagosian public. This is very much the case with the archival material found at the British Library or Smithsonian Institute. In both institutions, there are programmes that are targeted at encouraging the public to view archival material that has particular interest to different groups. An example of this would be the British Library West Africa Exhibition (British Library, 2015), and the Smithsonian Report, Exhibitions and Their Audiences, Actual and Potential (2002), which examines this from an American perspective. For this reason, it is important to help expand and create the conditions required for the digital archive to become more accessible and appealing to wider audiences in Africa. As the ubiquity of internet connections begins to penetrate further to more remote parts of Africa and less-affluent audiences, and there is a continued decline in the price of computer hardware, more Africans will be able to gain digital access to archive sites. Further, the development of more pop-up sites, such as the ArchiAfrika project site in Ghana, will bring an involvement with the physical archive, through locally focused exhibitions and related events. Thus, the archive is a good example of how one can develop a decentralised access system to material in the challenging educational conditions found in much of Africa.

Conclusions The AVR project successfully demonstrated the possibility of developing an archive with relatively limited funding, in an emerging country context in which establishing the funds, will and ability to produce this result on a more formal traditional basis would have been difficult. The exhibition, which took place at the University of Edinburgh, was particularly successful and created a greater awareness of West African modernism among architects and other audiences in Edinburgh. The model of ensuring copyright and ownership of the 185

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material remained with the architect’s estate, via his daughter Remi Vaughan-Richards, also demonstrated how the reframing of past precedents could be used to ensure that work remains ‘in country’ and hopefully accessible to a wider local audience than might have been the case decades ago. Despite this overall success, it is acknowledged that a key objective of the project, the upgrading and development of Alan Vaughan-Richards’s house as a cultural centre and digital archive in its own right, remains unrealised. However, it is hoped that as the internet increases in ubiquity and the ‘cost’ of the hardware—smartphones, tablets and laptops follows Moore’s law in cost reduction—there will be a significant increase in internet access by the public in emerging country contexts such as Nigeria. Similarly, it is expected that the higher education system and public awareness activities are beginning to engage with outreach heritage projects that incorporate the recognition and use of digital archives, to which the AVR project would belong. This, as discussed, ties in with international moves by heritage organisations such as UNESCO to make heritage more accessible and relevant to a wider global public: in all its forms, tangible and intangible. The future looks potentially positive for digital archives and the associated local and institutional economy in emerging countries in Africa and farther afield. The successful development of the AVR Archive and the continued support for and funding of projects such as the British Library (2004) Endangered Archives-funded Accra Metropolitan Archives project, proves this. There is a growing interest in the creation and production of digital archives from not only an academic perspective, but also from within community groups that recognise the potential value of these resources to a wider audience. Further, adaptations and innovations are afoot that should ensure that new digital archives and resources are better integrated with local audiences through targeted outreach activities. This should help make explicit the direct connections communities can have with archives and support how access to the archive can complement and support local and community research-knowledge, engagement with and championing of heritage issues in all contexts. It also enables the sharing of this information via the visual international interactive platforms on which today’s digital archives are built. As the African villagers knew in the past: When one hears the talking drum, its message spreads to all parts of the village, only the foolish do not heed or respond to its call. (adapted West African proverb)

References Akinsemoyin, K. & Vaughn-Richards, A. (1977). Building Lagos. New Jersey, NY: F & A Services. AVR Archive. (2012). Alan Vaughan-Richards Archive. Retrieved from http://sites.ace.ed.ac.uk/ avrarchive/ Basu, P. (2008). Confronting the past? Negotiating a heritage of conflict in Sierra Leone. Journal of Material Culture, 13(2), 233–247. British Library. (2004). British Library endangered archives. Retrieved from https://eap.bl.uk/ British Library. (2015). Word symbol and song, October 2015–February 2016. Retrieved from www.bl.uk/ events/west-africa-word-symbol-song De Jong, F. & Rowlands, M. (2009). Reclaiming heritage: Alternatives imaginaries of memory in West Africa. London, UK: Routledge. Fuchs, A. (2002). Playing the market: The Market Theatre Johannesburg, 1979–1986. New York, NY: Routledge Harwood.

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Grove Dictionary. (2003). Alan Vaughan-Richards biography. Retrieved from www.oxfordartonline.com/ groveart/search?siteToSearch=groveart&q=Alan+Vaughan+Richards&searchBtn=Search&isQuick Search=true Ntunda, J. (2014). Investigating the challenges of promoting dark tourism in Rwanda. Verlage: Anchor. Rassool, C. & Prossalendis, S. (2001). Recalling community in Cape Town: Creating and curating the District Six Museum. Cape Town: District Six Museum. Schwartz, P. (1988). The best of company: The story of Johannesburg’s Market Theatre. Johannesburg: A. D. Donker. Smithsonian. (2002). Exhibitions and their audiences: Actual and potential. Retrieved from www.si.edu/ content/opanda/docs/rpts2002/02.09.exhibitaudience.final.pdf Timeout Accra. (2017). Design for life. Retrieved from www.timeout.com/accra/art/design-for-life Uduku O. & Le Roux, H. (2012, August). The Alan Vaughan-Richards Project: A conservation challenge. Paper presented at Docomomo 12th International Conference, Espoo, Finland. Uduku, O. & Wolff, I. (2018, August). Challenging modern movement heritage conservation in Africa. Paper presented at Docomomo Biennial Conference Ljubijana. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). (2003). Convention for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage. Paris: UNESCO. West Africa Builder and Architect (WABA). (1963, September/October). National Archives, by the British Firm Design Group, in the cities Ibadan, Enugu and Kaduna, 82–87. West African Builder and Architect (WABA). (1962, November/December). Investment House Lagos (Architects: Architects Co-Partnership, Engineers Ove Arup), 112–116. West African Builder and Architect (WABA). (1963, July/August). Bristol Hotel, 62–65. Yale. (2018). Yale Africa initiative. Retrieved from https://africa.yale.edu/

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16 Museum crowdsourcing— detecting the limits eMunch.no and the digitisation of letters addressed to Edvard Munch Joanna Iranowska

Introduction This chapter provides insights from the process of running a crowdsourced manuscript project in a middle-sized, one-artist museum: the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. This museum is devoted to Edvard Munch (1863–1944), the prominent Norwegian expressionist artist and painter of the famous The Scream. The museum team conducted the project, which aimed to produce an electronic scholarly edition of the artist’s letters, literary works, notes and diaries, today available at www.eMunch.no. The ‘Edvard Munch’s Writings’ research project was established in August 2007.1 Four years later, on 20 January 2011, the digital archive ‘www.eMunch.no’ was launched. The digital archive presents facsimiles and encoded transcriptions of the manuscripts as a flexible and searchable historical source for scholars, researchers, students and others. Between 2011 and 2012, a selection of texts was translated into English, German and French. The aim of the third phase (2012–2016), which is the focus of this case study, was to publish the artist’s incoming correspondence (Bøe, 2015). Considering the substantial workload, employees’ limited capacity and the newest trends in digitisation of the cultural heritage (personal communication, Digital Collection Manager Hilde Bøe, 27 June 2017), the project editors decided to experiment with asking the audience for help with proofreading and encoding a collection consisting of nearly 6,000 letters. These letters were received by the painter between 1876 and 1944, sent by his friends, family and acquaintances, among them lovers, patrons, doctors and many prominent figures of European modernism. The museum established a wiki workplace, a digital Wikimedia platform that was open between May 2014 and June 2016, which was expected to accelerate the proofreading and encoding process and minimise production expenses for the online edition. However, the project gathered fewer volunteers than expected and did not deliver spectacular outcomes in terms of the number of completed transcriptions. This is hardly an isolated incident when experimenting with crowdsourcing within galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs). Therefore, I believe that investigating this new model of collaboration from the theoretical viewpoint of actor network theory (ANT) as a trail of associations 188

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between heterogeneous elements (Latour, 2007) can offer new, valuable insights concerning the challenges that GLAMs are frequently faced with in relation to crowdsourcing. Thus, in this short case study, I read the eMunch.no crowdsourcing project as a group of human and non-human actors assembled and mobilised to produce an online edition of Munch’s writings. To explore that network, I followed and characterised the crucial actors who performed in the making of the scholarly edition: eMunch.no, the letters, editors, wiki workplace and crowd. Using ANT as an analytical tool enabled me to trace relationships among the actors and shed light on the threats and limitations of engaging volunteers in a scholarly edition transcription project. To follow the actors, I used different investigation techniques: interviews with the editors, analysis of documents, participant observation of the volunteers, online questionnaires and technical walkthroughs of the wiki workplace and eMunch.no, which resulted in hundreds of screenshots. In addition, between 2012 and 2015, I was an eMunch.no research assistant, which allowed me an insider’s perspective.

eMunch.no The online edition of Munch’s writings, eMunch.no (see Figure 16.1), is my point of departure, since it emerged as an agent mobilising the editors, and the establishment of a wiki workplace and crowd for the realisation of the crowdsourcing project. The aim of the crowdsourcing was to supplement eMunch.no with facsimiles of letters addressed to Munch, accompanied by transcripts and equipped with editorial commentaries (Bøe, 2015). The eMunch.no was where most of the crowd met Munch’s related documents for the first time; it was the gate to the wiki workplace in which crowdsourcing took place. In contrast to hardcopy books, eMunch.no is a dynamic digital publication which is ever growing and ‘allows new research to be continually included as we add reference data and new documents that have been unknown or unavailable to us’ (Henrichsen and Ydstie, 2011, p. 5). The digital versions of letters established multiple connections with each other, both within the archive via hyperlinks (they are searchable and encoded according to names, places and dates) and outside the archive (to the editors, volunteers, software and hardware). Every month, about 1,574 users visit the archive.2 Being the result of a collaborative effort, the transcripts embody what textual scholars and book historians propose to call ‘social text’ or ‘social edition’ (Robinson, 2016; see also McKenzie, 1996; McGann, 1983). The transcripts in the digital archive are shaped and transformed by many other factors than Munch’s sole authorship. Moreover, ‘the social’, in the light of the material semiotics and ANT, is composed of multiple human and non-human actors—the editors, volunteers, underlying technology and negotiations between them—that together have brought eMunch.no into existence.

The letters The letters’ cultural importance prompted the launching of the ‘Edvard Munch’s Writings’ project. Following theorists interested in ANT and materiality, I read the letters as objects with a certain degree of agency (Petch, Larson and Gosden, 2007; see also Latour, 2007) that were capable of assembling an actor network of museum professionals, volunteer workers, hardware and software around them. Throughout the years, the letters provoked researchers’ interest, encouraged research grant proposals, the hiring of specialists and finally, the establishing of a wiki workplace. As expressed by the Munch Museum’s director and 189

Figure 16.1 eMunch.no. A letter from Emanuel Goldstein to Edvard Munch (MM.K.1497-01). Source: Munchmuseet, Norway.

Figure 16.2 Wiki workplace transcription desk. Transcribing of a letter from Emanuel Goldstein (MM.K.1497-01). Source: Munchmuseet, Norway.

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chief curator Ingebjørg Ydstie, ‘Munch’s letters, notes, journals and a number of other documents have always been a key wellspring for the comprehension of his art’ (Henrichsen and Ydstie, 2011, p. 5). The painter had a habit of preserving papers, letters and documents. In 1943, a year before he died, in a letter to a good friend he explained how he kept most letters while living a nomadic life: ‘I have never used a waste bin but my suitcases.’3 Today, the archive in the Munch Museum in Oslo houses and preserves about 90 per cent of the writings related to the painter. A considerable part of the collection is the correspondence that Munch received—nearly 6,000 letters from 556 senders—between 1876 and 1944. This large and heterogeneous collection consists of long letters, postcards, picture postcards, greeting cards, envelopes, invitations, telegrams, visit cards and so on. Hundreds of different handwriting styles and many languages are represented (Norwegian, German, Danish, Swedish, French and English). The letters provide unique insights into the artist’s life and career. They contain information about pictures that he was working on, commissions, exhibitions and sundry information regarding the artworks. They occasionally give us a good overview of where he was staying and the people he met (Woll, 2011, p. 67). The collection of letters informs the research of art historians, philologists, cultural historians and other scholars. In addition to the original manuscripts, the archive maintains typed versions of the letters that have been transcribed systematically from the 1940s until today by museum librarians (personal communication, librarian Inger Engan, 20 March 2018). In 2012, in the initial stage of the third phase, the fragile and vulnerable manuscripts of letters to Munch were handled carefully by research assistants. They were taken out of a filing cabinet, unfolded and examined. They were given museum registration numbers, recorded in the museum’s database and placed in protective acid-free sleeves and folders. The folders were moved from an archive study room to the repository of prints and drawings. Almost 70 years after the painter’s death, the letters became officially registered museum objects—their cataloguing resulted in stabilisation of the chaotic archival material and transformation of its ontology. It was estimated that the collection consisted of about 3,000 letters addressed to Munch (Haugsland, 2011); as it turned out, when the registration was complete, it was twice as many. All 6,000 letters were scanned and saved on the Munch Museum’s hard drive. On a screen, letters were flattened into two-dimensional images and deprived of their material features. They could not be touched, smelled or physically turned around; their ‘materiality is translated into a sequence of zeroes and ones’ (Müller, 2010, p. 300). After the digitisation, the volunteers and editors started to rely mostly on the digital versions of the letters and only rarely consulted the originals resting in the archive. The digital versions took over. Next, the digital facsimiles were uploaded to wiki workplace. As a result of turning the letters into digital facsimiles and embedding them in the global internet network, new actors, the networked objects, were brought into being (Cameron and Mengler, 2011). The networked objects juxtaposed digital images with OCR-transcripts and metadata (see Figures 16.1 and 16.2).

The editors We are used to thinking about a museum as containing a collection of objects gathered by people, but, as Petch et al. (2007) interestingly observed, it is possible to reverse this thinking: ‘Certain kinds of objects attract certain people’ (p. 65). In the case at hand, ‘Since the Munch Museum opened in 1963, the Museum’s professionals have continually worked with 192

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the extensive handwritten material’ (Henrichsen and Ydstie, 2011, p. 5). The creation of the online edition of letters mobilised the forming of a ‘text project’4 group consisting of an edition philologist (the project leader), a curator, a research librarian, a librarian and one or two newly recruited research assistants with backgrounds in philology or literature (one of them the author). Between 2012 and 2016, the project group held weekly meetings. However, only two project workers worked full-time with proofreading and encoding, and the two librarians were contributing when their duties allowed them. Since the museum keeps typed transcriptions of the letters from the 1970s, the crowdsourced task did not require transcribing the manuscripts from scratch. It consisted of comparing the digital facsimiles of letters with text captures (optical character recognition [OCR]-scanned transcriptions from the 1970s), inserting of break lines and extensible mark-up language (XML) code (encoding tags, elements and attributes) so that the text layout would resemble the original manuscript. Typically, in each OCR-scanned page, approximately 10 to 15 mistakes were found (e.g. ‘!’ scanned as ‘l’, ‘rn’ as ‘m’, or ‘0’ as ‘O’). Statistically, one project worker could process 10 to 20 medium-long letters a day, which is quite limited considering the total workload of 6,000 letters. Although the technology did a considerable amount of the work recognising the text and creating text files, the time-consuming quality control was necessary: ‘Handwritten records in particular are currently difficult or impossible to digitise and process using computers, so human input may be necessary to transcribe or verify their content’ (Blaser, 2014, p. 49). Despite the technological progress, the making of an online scholarly edition takes thousands of hours of human labour (Eggert, 2016). Traditionally, proofreading used to be conducted by textual scholars, but considering the vast amount of material, limited funding and the newest trends in digital humanities (personal communication, Digital Collection Manager, 27 June 2017), the project group decided to establish an online transcription desk, modelled after the broadly known and prominent ‘Transcribe Bentham’5 project. Reliance on voluntary labour potentially meant a power shift in the relations between editors and the museum public relations and encouraged a change of attitude towards traditional museum custodianship. Editors managed the collections at large and arranged the letters into categories: ‘family’, ‘friends and enemies’, ‘portraits and models’, ‘biographers, art historians and critics’ and ‘artists’. Displaying digital images of letters was a form of online curation. Nevertheless, the potential power shift is challenged by the fact that transcribing is never purely mechanical copying—there is much space for interpretation (Eggert, 2016). Thus, to obtain a high-quality edition, the project group took scrupulous control—two editors checked each delivered page. This precision, together with detailed guidelines, created a sense of authority that clashed with the flexible idea of participatory culture. While crowdsourcing usually means loosening control (Westberg Gabriel and Jensen, 2017), the editors remained facilitators of the participants’ interaction with the networked objects, which means the power shift was not as drastic as one might think. Unfortunately, my material does not illustrate how the crowd responded to this oversight. However, I did discover that some experienced volunteers were inserting encoding tags manually rather than following the guidelines and using an integrated toolbar; while some newbies found tagging too difficult and gave up quickly, not feeling ‘academic enough’ (personal communication, anonymised user, 5 July 2017). Nevertheless, the editors invested considerable time in creating the wiki workplace and building the network of volunteers. They provided feedback after each contribution and explained guidelines. However, it was not enough to sustain interest and attract enough users, which I will address in ‘The Crowd’.

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Figure 16.3 Wiki workplace homepage (www.emunch.no/wiki/). Source: Munchmuseet, Norway.

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The wiki workplace The wiki workplace was an online platform, a workspace for open collaboration with people from outside the museum and academia. This is where facsimiles of letters were mediated via internet on the volunteers’ screens so that, one by one, they could be proofread and encoded by the crowd. The facsimiles embedded in wiki performed as material through which the volunteers learned to transcribe. Volunteers’ transcripts were proofread by the museum’s editors, who added philological commentaries and linked to people, institutions, places and dates already in the digital archive. This collaborative model was described as ‘editing without walls’ by Robinson (2010), who observed that there were ‘no walls around this workspace: its edges will merge with the whole internet’ (p. 61). The editors chose to rely on open-source wiki software6 developed by a global stakeholder, Wikimedia Foundation, which aimed to use the collaborative power of the internet and support creating and sharing knowledge of all kinds (MediaWiki, 2017). The simple graphical user interface (see Figure 16.3) was familiar to the millions of people who use Wikipedia every day. Once volunteers entered the page, the interface, filled with project descriptions and menu systems, guided them. The transcription desk (see Figure 16.2) consisted of a zoomable high-quality image of a manuscript on the right and a text data entry box with a toolbar on the left. Selecting a button on the toolbar (line break, page break, heading, paragraph, addition, deletion, questionable, illegible, marginal note, underline, superscript, unusual spelling, foreign, ampersand, long dash and comment) generated the appearance of TEI XML code. The toolbar was supposed to simplify the text-encoding process; however, occasionally, as a result of a browser error, the buttons were duplicated and shown twice (see Figure 16.2), which could have confused and discouraged the volunteers. Moreover, some crucial metadata from the museum database were shown underneath the transcription box. The navigation menu on the left consisted of links to guidelines (available in video and text form) and different manuscripts. All these particular elements of the wiki workplace interface worked as Latourian mediators, providing the volunteers with agency. The letters in the form of digital facsimiles were transported from the museum’s archive to the participants’ homes, where they were mediated on their computer screens. They could be read, copied from one hard drive to another, manipulated or shared in social media with a couple of clicks. The digital facsimiles (networked objects) provided information about the original letters—in other words, they acted as informational copies (Christensen, 2017). Drawing on ANT, specifically performativity of nonhuman actors, Bratton (2015) suggested that ‘platforms are what platforms do’ (p. 40); they ‘centralize and decentralize at once, drawing many actors into a common infrastructure’ (p. 46). The wiki workplace acted as an online repository through which the local collection of letters was globally distributed and multiple new connections were established—with each other, different webpages and the volunteers. It resulted in crossroads of countless attachments, impossible to trace. The eMunch’s wiki commenced on 21 May 2014 and was open until 5 July 2016. The project leader admitted that a longer time span could possibly have improved the number of completed letters, but its duration was determined by short-term, project-based funding (personal communication, Digital Collection Manager, 27 June 2017).

The crowd The mobilisation of human actors was crucial for the network to function: ‘for crowdsourcing to be successful, it must rely on a robust, active, motivated crowd’ (Brabham, 2013, p. 126). As in every crowdsourcing project, the editors aimed to build a sense of community among users

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through delivering systematic feedback and creating room for discussion. Over one and a half years, the project gathered 342 registered users who transcribed 384 pages in total (ca. 6.6 per cent of the letter collection). Of the users, only 17 volunteers were significantly active and contributed on a daily basis, transcribing between 1 and 100 pages each. More than half of the project participants were German—the wiki workplace was available in Norwegian and German, since these two languages constituted a vast majority of the material. Consequently, the target group was smaller than those of projects directed towards English-speaking people. Another 16 users established an account but had not started transcribing. Surprisingly, as many as 296 out of 342 were spam accounts. Twenty of them were creating spam pages, which, in light of ANT, can be read as disturbing and useless connections. The spam users were probably mechanically generated and appeared in clusters, as the project leader explained. The editors had to devote time to tracing and banning the fake users and erasing the spam pages. This unexpected controversy was resolved by introducing more advanced user registration, which resulted in a new challenge—a decrease in the number of new volunteers. Overall, the project’s crowd turned out to be rather tiny. The editors from ‘Munch’s Writings’ and ‘Transcribe Bentham’ admitted that their initiatives did not appeal to a crowd like the word ‘crowdsourcing’ suggests. It is more accurate to speak of ‘niche-crowdsourcing’ (personal communication, Digital Collection Manager, 27 June 2017) or ‘crowd-sifting’ (Causer and Terras, 2014, p. 73). However, participants who were involved were highly qualified and delivered good-quality transcriptions. Most were middle-aged females with higher degrees and some experience in transcribing, and who spoke at least two foreign languages (Bøe, 2016; online questionnaire).7 They became involved ‘for fun’, to ‘keep their editing/text coding skills fresh’ or simply because of ‘curiosity’ (online questionnaire). In a survey, volunteers said that they felt appreciated by the museum staff and they benefited from volunteering by ‘learning about socially important persons in Munch’s times’8 or by having had an opportunity to ‘work with Munch material’. Some emphasised their interest in the technological aspects of the project that offered them an opportunity to obtain ‘insight into a different transcription platform’. The editors attempted to establish connections with volunteers through advertising the project on the museum’s social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and a blog), publishing press releases (which resulted in coverage on national radio NRK P2, Kulturnytt) and distributing flyers. When running a crowdsourcing project, sustaining the interest is as crucial as attracting new users. The project leader from the Munch Museum described the volunteers’ tendency to lose interest after a while: ‘most people did a bit and vanished’. When asked about the reasons for dropping off, the participants mentioned work duties, illness or lack of beginners’ enthusiasm (online questionnaire). The project’s editors admitted that after one and a half years of running the project, their experience was not entirely positive: We worked hard and got some attention, but recruitment turned out to be difficult. We did not manage to build a community of volunteers … We have a feeling that we should have used our own time to work with the material. (Bøe, 2016) Those who participated admitted that while they had a sense of team spirit, it was not strong. The users have not spoken or made friends (Bøe, 2016; online questionnaire). The project leader estimated that roughly 10 systematically contributing volunteers, each delivering 250 pages, would have been sufficient to execute the project in just 15 months.

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Conclusions In this short case study, I followed and characterised some central human and non-human actors in the ‘eMunch.no’ crowdsourcing project. The crowdsourcing projects create a few planes of reference that are shifting out (Latour, 1999): one in which the editors are active, a second in which the action is delegated to another character, a non-human—the wiki workplace—and finally, a third in which volunteers take actions. Tracing of the online edition eMunch.no, the letters, editors, wiki workplace, crowd and associations among them revealed that when conducting a manuscript crowdsourcing project, the biggest challenge was to evenly mobilise all the actors in the actor network. Recruiting new volunteers and sustaining interest turned out to be more difficult and time-consuming than expected. As a result, the relationships between existing actors were imbalanced and disrupted. This controversy was resolved by distributing the proofreading tasks to the editors (specifically research assistants and librarians), which prevented the potential power shift and intended emancipation of the audience. Fewer transcripts were completed than had been anticipated, which means that in the case at hand, crowdsourcing did not improve effectiveness of editing and did not solve the workload problem. As the analysis emphasised, it was not solely the technology but rather an imbalance in the interplay between the actors that was problematic. As Latour (1996) observed, innovative technologies are weak, fragile and ‘hypersensitive to variations in its environment’ (p. 291). Perhaps the biggest challenge is that crowdsourcing is a model without clear lines of authority. By opening the archive and involving volunteers, the dynamic of the editing work dramatically changed. As this case study has illustrated, adhering to the traditional institution-dominated model (Robinson, 2010, p. 59) might delay the project or discourage the volunteers. Several suggestions arise from this analysis that might improve participation in other projects. The first is to attempt to abandon the traditional editors–users power relations through ensuring space for creativity, comment and discussion. Second, secure enough means and resources to work with advertising, recruiting volunteers and sustaining their interest—mobilising the crowd takes more than one might initially think. Third, an interesting approach could be to consider how much quality control of the transcripts is absolutely necessary— publishing of unready, imperfect transcripts could save the editor team considerable time. Finally, long-term planning and the project’s longer duration increases the chances of its profitability. We are witnessing a participatory turn in GLAMs, and there is probably no way back. Therefore, it is crucial to learn how to use innovative and experiential modes of collaboration effectively and learn from positive and negative experiences, to which this short chapter has aimed to contribute.

Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Brita Brenna, Hilde Bøe, Janne Werner Olsrud and Thea Aarbakke for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. Thanks also to my reviewers, whose suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Notes 1 The project was funded by The Freedom of Expression Foundation (Fritt Ord), Arts Council Norway (Norsk Kulturråd), The City of Oslo Art Collections’ Institute for Scholarly Research (Kunstsamlingenes Institutt for Vitenskapelig Forskning), Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tate Modern and the Munch Museum. 2 Statistics for 1 January–31 December 2017. 3 A letter from Edvard Munch to Christian Gierløff, 1943, MM N 3027, Munch Museum. Author’s translation.

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4 An informal name of the project used frequently by the museum staff. 5 The Transcribe Bentham project deals with transcribing the difficult handwriting of the English jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). See www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk. 6 See www.mediawiki.org. 7 Online questionnaire, ‘Volunteering in Edvard Munch’s Writings Project’, June 2017, available from https://goo.gl/forms/7PJUzKkuOTnT7Lju2. 8 In quotes from the survey, the original syntax and spelling has been used.

References Blaser, L. (2014). Old weather: Approaching collections from a different angle. In M. Ridge (Ed.), Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage (45–56). Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Bøe, H. (2015). About the digital archive project. Retrieved from www.emunch.no/ENG_project.xhtml Bøe, H. (2016, January). Experiences from the work with eMunch.no. Paper presented at the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Brabham, D. C. (2013). Crowdsourcing. A model for leveraging online communities. In A. Delwiche & J. Henderson Jacobs (Eds.), The participatory cultures handbook (120–129). New York and London: Routledge. Bratton, B. H. (2015). The stack. On software and sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Cameron, F. & Mengler, S. (2011). Activating the networked object for a complex world. In G. Styliaras, D. Koukopoulos & F. Lazarinis (Eds.), Handbook of research on technologies and cultural heritage: Applications and environments (166–187). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. Causer, T. & Terras, M. (2014). ‘Many hands make light work. Many hands together make merry work’: Transcribe Bentham and crowdsourcing manuscript collections. In M. Ridge (Ed.), Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage (57–88). Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Christensen, H. D. (2017). The art of copying: Five strategies for transforming originals in the art museum. Culture Unbound, 9(1), 85–107. Eggert, P. (2016). The reader-oriented scholarly edition. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 3(4), 797– 810. Haugsland, Å. (2011). … this chaos of letters I have collected …. Edvard Munch, the letter writer. In M. B. Guleng (Ed.), eMunch.no—Text and image 53-65. Oslo: AIT Otta AS. Henrichsen, S. O. & Ydstie, I. (2011). Preface. In M. B. Guleng (Ed.), eMunch.no—Text and image (5–7). Oslo: AIT Otta AS. Latour, B. (1996). Aramis or the love of technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1999). From fabrication to reality. Pasteur and his lactic acid ferment. In Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies (113–144). London: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor network theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. McGann, Jerome J. (1983). A critique of modern textual criticism. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. McKenzie, Donald F. (1996). Bibliography and the sociology of texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MediaWiki. (2017). Differences between wikipedia, wikimedia, mediawiki, and wiki. Retrieved from www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Differences_between_Wikipedia,_Wikimedia,_MediaWiki,_and_wiki Müller, K. (2010). Museums and virtuality. In R. Parry (Ed.), Museums in a digital age (295–305). London and New York: Routledge. Petch, A., Larson, F. & Gosden, C. (2007). Objects collect people: Past perspectives on the mind and the material world. In Knowing things: Exploring the collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884–1945 (64–91). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Robinson, P. (2010). Editing without walls. Literature Compass, 7(2), 57–61. Robinson, P. (2016). Social editions, social editing, social texts. Digital studies/Le champ numérique, 6. 10.16995/dscn.6. Westberg Gabriel, L. & Jensen, T. (2017). Who is the expert in participatory culture? In H. RouedCunliffe & A. Copeland (eds.), Participatory heritage (87–96). London: Facet Publishing. Woll, G. (2011). The administration of an artistic career. A few glimpses from Edvard Munch’s correspondence. In M. B. Guleng (ed.), eMunch.no—Text and image 67-75. Oslo: AIT Otta AS.

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17 Digital and hybrid archives A case study of the William J. Mitchell collection Thomas Kvan, Peter Neish and Naomi Mullumby

Introduction William J. Mitchell was an internationally renowned scholar of urbanism and digital design. The William J. Mitchell archive, now held at the University of Melbourne, offers an insight into the complexities of processing and conserving hybrid paper/digital collections from the recent past. Despite the now common aspiration to digitise and make widely available archives, as this chapter suggests, there remain very significant challenges in identifying and organising archival materials, accessing their often rapidly archaic formats and considering how to conserve these in their purposeful and native digital forms. This unexpurgated case study describes the collection and forensic work undertaken to catalogue it. It is a resource for the study of Bill Mitchell, and the emergence of global scholarship in the digital urban realm, through his work as one of the pioneers in thinking about digital tools and digital living. This chapter reports in detail on major issues posed by the nature of a hybrid paper/digital collection and the management of such hybrid archives.

William J. Mitchell, digital pioneer When William J. (Bill) Mitchell died in 2010, he left an archive of his work as a pioneer in the field of computer-aided design and a leading thinker in the emergence of digital urbanism. Although most of his career was spent in leading US institutions, his family donated the collection to his alma mater, the University of Melbourne, where it was supplemented by items found in the university archive related to Bill’s time as a student and visiting academic. The collection comprised handwritten papers, published materials and a substantial collection of digital material in a variety of formats and media, tracing the development of computer systems and tools. To catalogue the digital materials, an extensive forensic inspection of the media was undertaken, requiring discontinued hardware to be sourced to use the archaic media and software tools applied to read the bits. Therefore, the collection represents a distinctive case study 199

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in its intersection of subject matter (computational examination of architectural design and urban futures), as it was explored on evolving computational platforms. Computer-aided design in architecture emerged in the 1960s. Foundational work was carried out at several universities and initial systems were operational by the 1970s. The field was given definition in Mitchell’s 1977 survey, ‘Computer-Aided Architectural Design’. In the following three decades, Mitchell published another 10 books in addition to many journal papers and articles in popular and professional publications. Although his primary focus was architecture and computation, his publications ranged broadly. Titles included The Poetics of Gardens (1988), which was co-authored by Charles Moore and William Turnbull, The Reconfigured Eye (1992), a critical and early analysis of digital images, and Reinventing the Automobile (2010). His career took him from Melbourne to Yale University, the University of Cambridge, University of California Los Angeles, Harvard University and finally, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was Dean of Architecture, Alexander W. Dreyfoos Jr. Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences and directed the Smart Cities research group at MIT’s Media Lab. Throughout his substantial academic career, he taught a vast number of students, supervised many doctoral candidates, published frequently— including a column in every issue of the RIBA Journal (London) from February 2003 to April 2006—and was a highly sought lecturer who travelled extensively to speak on the many topics on which he wrote. A skilful leader, he was also a visionary who surveyed the world in which we live and anticipated the impact of digital technology in many aspects of our lives: as designers offering professional services, citizens experiencing cities, travellers using transport and consumers of culture. An erudite writer with a keen eye, he created and retained material on a wide range of topics. George Stiny, Mitchell’s colleague at UCLA and MIT, noted in his remarks at a memorial held at MIT in November 2011 that Mitchell had a remarkable ability to convey the most complex issues in appropriate chunks ‘so that we could all grasp the marvel yet not be left bewildered by the technicalities’ (G. Stiny, memorial address, Cambridge, MA, 10 November 2011). Mitchell was a skilful artist and photographer. He collected the work of students across many decades and used this with attribution in his lectures, often showcasing their emerging work. The archive is a thorough record of the evolution of early digital works in architecture and visual arts, contemporaneously documenting experiments and research that later led to standard practices and commercial applications. He used the latest technologies to produce and store the material. Working as he did at the forefront of the field, the archive documents the evolution of technologies.

The Mitchell collection The Mitchell collection was the University of Melbourne’s first significant architectural hybrid physical/digital archive. At the time of its donation to the University of Melbourne in 2012, there were no roadmaps for handling such archives, nor examples to follow. This case study tells the story of an institution encountering the complexities of a hybrid archive and the lessons learnt (and stumbles experienced). Given the nature of technology, this is certainly not the end story. The archive contains an astonishing array of materials, hand drawings, transparencies, slides, film, videos, books, manuscript revisions, printouts of emails, software, iOmega Zip disks, 3.5 inch floppy disks, 8 mm data tapes, compact discs (CDs) (recordable), digital video discs, audio and video cassettes—the inventory of Mitchell’s MIT office at the time of his death. 200

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In 2012, a shipment arrived in Melbourne containing one hundred 24″ x 10″ boxes and twenty-nine 16″ x 10″ boxes. Consisting of floppy discs, magnetic tapes, videos, slides, manuscripts, student work, plans and books, it was the largest archive ever donated to the Architecture Building and Planning (ABP) Library. The university archive was closed (it had temporarily stopped accepting new donations) and with the ABP library in its temporary relocation site, there was no space to house the collection within the library. Instead, the container load was delivered to the library’s offsite store, where it was unpacked and shelved, and the librarians could discover its contents. The university hosts many cultural collections; many fall outside the purview of the university archives. The ABP library collection reflects this through the number of significant bequests from the estates of architects and alumni, of which the Mitchell archive is a recent example. The research value of materials within the archive was immediately evident, as was their potential to attract a global audience and enable new research collaborations for the university. Any plans for processing the archive would have to consider how to facilitate access to the materials. The possibility of bringing the hybrid archive into the digital realm was presented, although it was unclear how this would be undertaken, or what it would look like.

The slide collection A major component of the collection are images in the form of physical slides. This arrived in Melbourne packed in 15 boxes and was found to comprise approximately 30,000 slides. With limited resources available in the ABP library, work was undertaken incrementally. A pilot digitisation project, undertaken in 2013, aimed to establish a workflow that could be applied to the complete collection should resources be available to uncover potential issues with the rest of the collection. In 2017, an inventory project calculated the number of slides to understand the size of the collection and to predict associated costs: in particular, the creation of metadata. Translating the physical slide collection into digital form will make it more accessible to researchers and students. The current workflow for digitisation projects at the University of Melbourne is informal but usually follows a standard progression: establish copyright, secure funding, create metadata and undertake digitisation. In our first attempts to move the Mitchell archive into the digital realm, our pilot project that predated workflow conventions, the workflow was reversed (digitise, metadata, establish copyright) to suit staff resourcing and be conducted at a time before the establishment of guidelines. A library staff member began a work placement at the university’s digitisation centre, where they digitised a select group of slides. From these files, metadata records were created. Nine folders were deemed suitable for the existing knowledge and interests of the staff member, and representative of the slide collection content. The content of folders selected for the pilot project encompassed three areas as representative of the archive and were considered likely to be of high interest to users: Australia (Uluru, landscapes, country, some buildings and Aboriginal rock paintings, representing a general collection), England (large garden estates documented for the book on gardens) and a design studio (representing the teaching dimension). These were considered aligned with the staff member’s general knowledge and ability to develop the cultural, physical and theoretical descriptors. During the pilot project, supplementary metadata were created through visual recognition and research (here, the staff member’s knowledge and interest became crucial). Working on a screen displaying the image and the empty metadata fields, the staff member created 4,260 records of varying levels of completeness. The selected workflow suited the task. Digitising 201

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the slides first made them easier to view than in their original format, which facilitated research into their content for metadata creation. Through this work, it was discovered that some slides were annotated while others were blank. Working with slides poses challenges; because the slides are individually annotated on the slide mount, it can be difficult to decipher not just the annotations, but what they mean, and their context to the overall collection. The scribe used undefined acronyms. When there was no understanding of the content of the slide image, a unique identifier was assigned. While labour intensive, the level of analysis required for the metadata creation also highlighted many of the issues involved in moving physical materials into the digital realm. Once the content started to reveal itself, it became uncertain whether Mitchell had taken all the photographs. Discussions have considered whether copyright ownership for the photographs within design studio albums belongs to Mitchell, a studio leader, students, or professional staff from MIT. The images of the Aboriginal rock paintings required us to seek advice from the University of Melbourne’s Copyright Office regarding cultural sensitivities around publishing indigenous works. Before this part of the collection is made public, each image will have to be individually assessed for cultural sensitivities. The pilot project clarified that we were unable to anticipate the timeframe for managing copyright concerns and ethical issues. This has been lengthy and is still underway. Future work will require us to build a register to track the progression of copyright clearance. Only then will we begin to understand the complexity of this task and its associated costs. The pilot project also raised questions around how to best do this within the university. Who is best positioned to undertake this task: the collection manager, Copyright Office, or the staff undertaking metadata creation? The skill levels of staff must be considered to identify and resolve issues. Does this work need to be undertaken by one person, or is it better suited to a team comprising members with complementary expertise? Can the workflow for one section be applied to the entire slide collection or does each subsection have its own needs? Copyright needs are unique in each subcollection. Mitchell’s travel slides should be straightforward, as presumably he took all his own photographs (he was a skilled photographer). The student work requires clarification of the copyright situation; is student work in the United States (US) the same as it is in Australia? That is, does the student retain the rights to their own work? If so, permission must be sought from every student (it should be noted that from what is known of the slide collection, it is often difficult to identify students). Would we also be required to secure permission from the institutions in which the work was created? The university administration/campus development slide collection would require permission from the institutions in which Mitchell produced the work. Finally, digitising the manuscript collection would require permission from Mitchell’s co-authors and publishers. The level of detail required in the management of copyright is significant, so an alternative approach is being considered: to digitise the collection and store it in a dark archive. From there, work could be undertaken in collaboration with scholars to identify high-value research areas of the collection and prioritise these for copyright clearance. As the work to resolve the copyright questions is underway, we have had to consider how to host these files. The project was conceived as requiring resources for short-term storage, but has only required mid- to long-term storage. Future storage options would need to assess the feasibility of the digital files being accessible to university staff who need to work with the records. Ideally, the copyright clearance process could be embedded into the metadata to track progress. Since the inception of the project in 2013, there has been ongoing discussion about the practice of metadata creation. Metadata was thought to be the best way to create access to 202

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the collection. However, there has been a shift away from trying to create complete records to prioritising access to the digital files and granting the user the tools to be able to curate these collections or add their own metadata. Creating metadata for 30,000 slides is a considerable task; therefore, planning was guided by exigencies: funding, the use of technology and/or platforms available, staffing and knowledge of the collection. Ultimately, it was agreed that we should place greater emphasis on providing the tools to enable co-creation of metadata and identify ways to encourage scholarly engagement with the collection to help guide priorities. A second phase was initiated in 2017; it created an inventory capturing the following details: box number, folder name, sheet number and number of slides. Seventy folders were counted, revealing 2,385 sheets of slides and a total of 29,465 individual slides. The inventory revealed the themes of travel, studios, student work, manuscripts (articles, books and book chapters), university administration and campus development. The images provide insight into Mitchell’s research interests and intellectual explorations. The travel images are eclectic, reflecting Mitchell’s many journeys; the largest sections are of China and the US. Dates on the slide mounts extend from 1982–1985, although not all slides have date stamps. The US collection has an intriguing duality; alongside built structures and landscapes, Mitchell photographs patterns made in nature. There are also folders from trips to Singapore, Fiji, Mexico, Australia, Israel, Morocco, Spain and Japan. The studio collection charts the progress of Mitchell’s teaching. For example, 12 folders document the iteration and development of the design studio ‘Palladio’. Through the names, it is clear that Mitchell took the studio subject Palladio from UCLA, to Harvard and then to MIT. The student work slide collection inventory reveals little of the content. The descriptions provided are frustratingly sparse. The folders of design studios and student work are anticipated to have significant research value. This part of archive is known to contain images of computer-generated works over decades, charting the intellectual endeavour, design approaches and development in computational technology and evolving computational platforms. The programs from which these are generated may be on digital media (described below) but are likely to be lost, so these images of the outputs may be the only records that trace an important history of computation in design.

The manuscript collection The manuscript collection consists of 11 boxes of materials related to Mitchell’s book manuscripts. Several projects have been undertaken for the manuscript collection. The priority for these projects has been to ensure the physical preservation of the materials. It has attracted student volunteers with an interest in cultural collections and conservation. Five students under the Cultural Collections Projects Program, a 12-week volunteer placement program, have worked on two of the publications—City of Bits and Poetics of Gardens. Inventories of these collections were created along with notes on condition to assess their maintenance and storage needs. Mitchell’s published books became a reference resource for students working on both projects. Students working on The Poetics of Gardens began the project using a spreadsheet developed at University of Melbourne Archives. The variety of formats of the materials of this collection (‘B&W photograph of negatives printed on Kodak paper’, ‘B&W photograph of negatives’, ‘Printed CAD (?) illustration’, ‘Drawing on paper’, ‘Drawing on paper, photocopy’, ‘Transparency’ and ‘Digital surface elevation model—topographical’) meant it had more pressing and obvious conservation issues. Rehousing was necessary, as the size and condition of the materials varied widely. 203

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The City of Bits collection consists of photocopies, printouts, newspapers and articles. The student rehoused and labelled each document with a number. This numbering system maintained the order in which they were found in the boxes in case that was significant in any way. The details collected included keywords or handwriting notes. The student also made notes when creating the inventory to provide a synopsis of the content (e.g. ‘A printout of an email to an email list regarding the internet, with questions about the NSFNet ceasing to exist and what this means for the internet’). Within this collection are printouts of 337 emails (roughly 30–40 per cent of the full collection). The significant number of emails in this archive shows an attempt at curation, foresight and/or possibly an out-of-date practice. Finally, there are annotations made by either Mitchell or researchers for the book Anne Beamish. These annotations offer the researcher an insight into Mitchell’s and his colleagues’ interests. There are 289 instances of keywords and 90 distinct keywords. ‘Telecommuting’, ‘Games’, ‘Cities’, ‘Electronic funds transfer’ and ‘Internet’ are the most frequently used keywords. ‘Gender’, ‘Communication history’, ‘Telecommunications’, ‘Privacy’ and ‘Telephone’ are the next most common keywords.

Film/video collection Inside two of the boxes donated to the university were 125 films/videos in VHS format. In a first attempt to make a record of this collection, the films/videos were photographed as they sat on the shelves at the library’s store. Some titles in this collection suggest the breadth and historical importance of the material, such as CAD at Nikken Sekkei (1987), Prof William Mitchell ‘Globalization of Design’ (25 January, 2002) and The Graham Foundation presents E-topia: Telecommunications & the city of the 21st century (n.d.). In February 2017, a researcher identified the tapes she wished to view but then had to locate a working VHS player on which to view the recordings. As the university begins to divest itself of obsolete technologies, the ability for researchers to work with such formats is becoming increasingly limited. Digitisation of audiovisual by 2025 is the recommendation of the National Film and Sound Archive, as tape that is not digitised by then will be ‘most likely lost forever’ due to diminishing system support and technical skills.1 More of these challenges are discussed later in this chapter. A more thorough list of titles of the film/video collection has been created by the researcher. The next steps are to undertake a preservation assessment and digitise videos for which preservation needs are greatest. Changes to copyright law in late 2017 allow for a digital copy to be made for preservation purposes. Once digitised, the next stage will be to analyse the collection for areas of high research value, and work to obtain rights to enable open access. A key selection priority would be original materials created by Mitchell or those in which he was the subject. Decisions must be made regarding how and where to store these files while this work is undertaken. Ideally, any technological solution would allow researchers to add metadata to the files to expose the content of the collection.

Personal library—books, collected journals and other work Mitchell’s personal library collection when unpacked amounted to 57 shelves of books. Processing this volume of material had to be undertaken onsite at the store. A student of the Faculty was employed to create an inventory database using the International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) to minimise manual handling and create an efficient workflow. Of the 204

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2,331 items, 1,747 records were created using the ISBNs to generate data from the Library of Congress catalogue. Additional notes were added to the Excel spreadsheet (e.g. ‘unopened’, ‘2 copies’ and ‘Signed by Duvvuru Sriram’). The approach, while lacking in precision, had the advantage of speed and efficiency. Since then, a second version of this database has been created using reference management software, Zotero, harvesting richer data via the inbuilt ISBN feature. As the software develops, there are greater possibilities for enhancing and sharing the database records. Future work planned involves further analysis of the subject coverage of Mitchell’s library using APIs and analysis tools. As the work with Mitchell’s library already required manual handling of the items, this reconceived workflow would use a mobile telephone camera to quickly document any annotations, attaching these images to the records in the database. This additional element in the database would allow future researchers to access to these images, offering them a more in-depth experience than reading a transcription of the annotation. Working towards the hybrid archive, we plan for interactivity with the archive—building new ways for the researcher to interact directly with the digital elements of the archive and add their own annotations. In this reconceived project, we will investigate technological and cultural ways to engage researchers. Through accessing the images within the database, the researcher can view the original inscription/annotation, deciphering it for themselves. Ideally, they would be able to add their description of the annotation into the database.

Born digital collection: the need for digital forensics Thirty-one CDs, 52 8 mm data cartridges, 236 discs and three reels of file were delivered, comprising a range of media and dates when created (as determined by inspecting the data stored—see Table 17.1). This portion of the archive presented some challenges. Magnetic and optical media are subject to degradation and corruption over time, especially if they have not been stored under proper archival conditions. Left untreated, they will continue to degrade until they are completely unreadable. The process to rescue and preserve the contents of the media involve a number of steps, outlined in the data curation workflow (see Figure 17.1). A technologically challenging part of this workflow involves capturing a digital ‘image’ of each disk or media item. A digital image is a single file that can store the entire contents of a physical disk, including files and structural information. For the Mitchell collection, we utilised a system called the forensic recovery of evidence device (FRED) to create disk images. The FRED is more commonly used by police and

Table 17.1 Data inventory Type

Number

Date Range

iOmega zip disks

103

1995–2001

3.5 inch floppy disks

242

1985–1993

8 mm data tapes

49

Unknown

CD(R) DVD

34 2

1992–2003 1999–2003

Audio cassette

3

Unknown

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Figure 17.1 Data curation workflow.

other investigators to preserve a trail of digital evidence in criminal or civil proceedings. However, it is now being used in an archival context, where it is used to preserve both the original disk contents and the associated metadata. An important part of the system is the write-blocking hardware that ensures that any disk or media connected will not be written to and will therefore be a true bit-for-bit copy of the original. Once the identical copy has been made, further curation work can be done on the digital copy instead of the fragile original item. As an innovative thinker, it is unsurprising that Mitchell was an early adopter of technology, and in particular, Apple computers. The Apple Macintosh was first released in 1984 and was particularly suited to visual and design tasks through its innovative graphical user interface and mouse. The Mitchell archive contains almost exclusively Apple formatted floppy disks and software from the mid- to late-1980s. Early Macintosh disks are particularly challenging to preserve, as they use a filesystem called HFS that is not readily readable by modern computers. To read these disks, an additional piece of hardware—a Kryoflux—was required to act as a bridge between the floppy drive and the FRED. The Kryoflux was developed by the software preservation society to enable the preservation of older magnetic media. It does this by creating a raw bit stream from the disk that can then be processed to create the disk image. In this way, many different filesystem types can be accommodated. The Kryoflux was able to create disk images successfully from nearly all of Mitchell’s floppy disks. From the mid- to late-1990s, iOmega zip disks were the removable media of choice mainly due to their considerable storage capacity. Mitchell used more than 100 zip disks up until 2001. Zip disks present their own digital forensic challenges when it comes to creating disk images. Working zip drives are no longer sold and sourcing working second-hand zip drives is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive, especially for drives that connect 206

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through modern USB interfaces. Also, because of the age of the technology, the drives were unreliable and would sometimes fail under continued use. Processing over 100 disks put quite a strain on the old drives and we needed to replace the zip drive twice. A potentially large cache of material in Mitchell’s archive is present on magnetic tapes, although this material has not yet been successfully processed. The required tape drive was purchased, and initial tests show that data is present. However, without knowing the parameters used when recording the information on the tape, it is not straightforward to extract the data. We have tried all commonly used configurations, but none have yielded results— this is a work in progress. All successfully recovered disks had their contents loaded and indexed using Forensic Toolkit (FTK) software; this can load disk images, and identify and extract known and unknown file types on the disks. Having all of Mitchell’s digital media in FTK meant that the collection could be viewed as a whole, timelines could be established and duplicate files identified. It also allowed powerful search ability across all files to identify those of potential interest to scholars. Copying files off the disks is only the beginning of the story; we also need to understand the contents of the files and determine how the files can be preserved on an ongoing basis. This is not such a problem for simple file types, such as text or data files that can still be opened with modern programs. However, many file types are incompatible with modern software. Even some ubiquitous programs like Microsoft Word are not backwards compatible with files this old. To open and preserve these files, one option is to migrate each file to a newer or more preservable format. Usually this will involve creating a version that uses an open standard, such as PDF for documents, or CSV for spreadsheets. However, this kind of migration is not always possible. There may be no modern equivalent open standard, or the system or software might be so old or have a very small user-base and there is no migration path. In fact, many of Mitchell’s files represent source code and original software that was experimental and not developed on an ongoing basis. They represent a snapshot in time of Mitchell’s work process during this period. In the case of bespoke software like this, one option is to find a computer from that era with the right hardware and operating system capable of running the software. An alternative is to run an emulation of the original computer (an emulator is a program that recreates the original computer environment on a modern computer). Sourcing and running older hardware is unlikely to be viable in the long term; second-hand computers are becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to source. A more sustainable option is to run virtual machines that can emulate the processes and operating systems of older Macintosh computers. There are many emulators written for Macintosh systems and we have successfully run some of Mitchell’s earliest computer programs. Emulation as a preservation strategy is advantageous, as it allows us to focus on preservation of the container that runs the emulator. By preserving the emulation environment, we can theoretically preserve and access any file or program written for that environment. The downside is that the emulator may not work as well as the original does. It needs to be tested comprehensively to ensure it runs the software correctly. We are now investigating how to run a web-based emulation service to provide access to this material. Building this digital forensic capability at the University of Melbourne has allowed us to apply what we have learnt to subsequent digital collections—most notably the Germaine Greer archive. The Greer archive was acquired by the University of Melbourne in 2013 and contains just under 600 items of digital removable media including floppy disks, CD-Rs and 207

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USB sticks dating from 1985 to the present, as well as a number of whole computers. Like Mitchell, Greer was an early adopter of technology. Overall, Greer’s files were more straightforward to read and extract. However, there were still some unique challenges. Her word-processing software on her earliest IBM computer was quite obscure and saved files in a non-standard way. Like Mitchell, she adopted the Apple Macintosh as her computer of choice soon after they became available. Using the same workflow and technology developed during the Mitchell project, we were able to successfully process all Greer’s legacy media. The Greer archive is also a hybrid of analogue and digital material and presents the same challenges of linking this material together. Due to the interest in recovering data from legacy media, we are now extending this service to the wider university community through a self-service forensics machine based in the university’s digital studio. Staff and students will now be able to use this facility to recover material from their own digital archive to prevent potentially important digital files from being lost forever.

Conclusion The William J. Mitchell Archive project represents a significant investment by a university in making their first foray into recovering digital information from obsolete media and making it available to researchers. The project aims to emphasise digitising original materials when there is a research priority to do so, consider how researchers can discover connections and understand the archive, be responsive to researcher needs to ensure technologies, tools and platforms are investigated and trialled as per researchers’ needs. This case study illustrates that processing a hybrid archive in this context is as much about accessing expertise and building collaborative relationships as it is about resourcing, funding and project planning. At this point, the authors would like to acknowledge the staff who have contributed to this valuable work. Because of the scale and diversity of the collection, the aim in this hybrid archive is not to digitise everything at once and consider the project complete, but rather to constantly adapt and rethink the way the materials are presented as we gain greater insight into the contents and their potential uses. After four years, the work of processing the archive and moving it into the digital realm is still in progress. While the university has well-established roles, processes and funding for physical infrastructure projects such as buildings, the construction of a digital archive is not yet well understood. The university has a long history of developing significant collections, but is still in relatively early days for digital archives. Since receiving the archive, the librarians have been involved in initiatives to establish workflows, access expertise within the university and build capacity for developing digitised collections. Practices are being tested and there are many unknowns. Thus far, the work on the Mitchell archive has divided the archive into small subsections, taking advantage of scholarly interests, fluctuating resource levels and the availability of professional expertise. Projects have been developed around Mitchell’s personal library, manuscripts and his collections: slides, film and digital media. This approach has the added advantage of resourcing the smaller projects and learning lessons quickly. The alternative of attempting to create one giant project to cover the entire volume of materials and the incumbent issues that come with each format would have produced a very different outcome. We are also challenged to consider how a collection might be prepared for archival purposes. What materials should be packaged? Should paper and digital duplicates be included? Should you have the foresight to also include the software packages? Should old hardware 208

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be included in case they are difficult to source (and what about the cables)? How should the collection be described (e.g. to reduce the need to forensically inspect each piece to determine its presentation)? The appraisal criteria for such collections have not yet been written. With so many unknowns, it would have been difficult to build feedback loops into a large project and be responsive to them. Through the smaller dissected approach, many people have become involved with the Mitchell archive, bringing their professional expertise and enthusiasm for the project. Understanding the requirements for each smaller project has evolved out of an understanding of the characteristics of the physical materials or the born digital component and in considering how researchers can discover connections and understand the archive by providing digital inventories. Ultimately this case study has outlined the approach taken with the Mitchell archive and plans for building a digital presence. The challenges outlined in this chapter open further questions regarding how cultural and academic institutions can engage proactively with technological solutions, solicit ongoing resourcing and prioritise accessibility of complex archives that draw together the myriad of physical and digital formats used routinely by scholars over the last forty or more years.

Acknowledgements The project has been a collaborative effort and we wish to acknowledge the many individuals who have contributed to the project from several organisations. Most importantly, we recognise that the opportunity to work on this collection was offered to us by Jane Wolfson, Bill’s wife, when she asked if we could care for the archive. Jane has been readily available to assist in several aspects of the relocation and organisation of the archive. Within the University of Melbourne, colleagues from Collection Access and Delivery, Copyright Office Digital Scholarship, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning—in particular colleagues in the ABP library— University of Melbourne Archives and the University Digitisation Centre have all contributed key knowledge, procedures and efforts. We also recognise the contributions from the RMIT University design archives and State Library of Victoria, Picture Collection.

Note 1 Deadline 2025: Collections at risk (2015) National Film and Sound Archive www.nfsa.gov.au/collec tion/curated/deadline-2025

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18 Preserving Chinese shadow puppetry culture through digitisation Tin-Kai Chen

Introduction An archive may be thought to contain materials of great cultural significance, yet it will fail to realise that significance if it cannot be brought to life for the people of that culture. This was the challenge facing the Kaohsiung Museum of Shadow Puppet in Taiwan around 2010, when I became involved in an effort to digitise and bring to life its collection of puppetry artefacts and recordings for the visiting public; in a different sense, but echoing the way displayed puppets had previously been brought to life by generations of puppeteers. This chapter therefore reports our attempts at preserving the traditional Taiwanese cultural practice of shadow puppetry through digitisation in collaboration with the Kaohsiung Museum between 2010 and 2014. The aim was to modernise shadow puppetry practice to better appeal to the contemporary public and entice them to experience, engage with and learn about shadow puppetry practice. To do this, we employed an approach based on digital performance and produced three working prototypes that acted as case studies for this project. Before turning to the digital project with the Kaohsiung Museum of Shadow Puppet, I will briefly provide some historical context. While shadow puppet theatre is often cited as one of the intangible cultural heritages in China, the cultural legacy it has carried for centuries is at risk of ending. Also named shadow play, piying or pihouxi in Taiwan, the practice traces back in print to the Song dynasty, while certain legends point towards an origin in the Han dynasty. As its name suggests, shadow puppetry is a practice of storytelling conveyed through the shadows produced by flat, articulated puppets held between a light source and a translucent screen. While originally highly popular in the capitals of the Song dynasty, in the late Ming dynasty, shadow puppetry began to spread from Chaozhou and Guangdong then diffused through Zhangzhou and Xiamen to southern Taiwan. The Kaohsiung area of Taiwan became an important centre from which the tradition expanded north to the Erchenhan River and south to villages in the Pingdong plain. Plays were performed on festive occasions and the scripts included histories and legends using Chao tunes. 210

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During the Japanese colonial period, Taiwanese shadow play performances focused on the traditional repertoire with little interference from the colonial government. The many shadow plays written during this period are a testament to their popularity among the Taiwanese population. However, after the Pacific War (during the Second World War) broke out, the Japanese government’s indifferent stance towards shadow puppet theatre shifted. The ‘Drum Ban’ was carried out and the Kaohsiung Zhou Shadow Painting Association was established to force Taiwanese shadow play performers to perform an official repertoire written in Japanese script that would promote the Kominka Movement (Kaohsiung Shadow Play Museum, 2018). Shadow plays did not regain popularity among regular folk until Taiwan was restored to the Republic of China, when they again grew prosperous. In addition to temple fairs and celebrations, shadow plays were performed in commercial theatres and became a national craze, only to decline by the mid-1960s with the introduction of television, broadcasting and cinema. Although shadow puppet theatre managed to survive at temple fairs into the 1970s, dance shows and film theatres eventually became more popular attractions, driving shadow puppetry out of its remaining bastion and into further decline. While there were around 60 shadow puppetry troupes in Taiwan’s greater Kaohsiung city at the beginning of the Republic of China, only three currently remain: the Yongxingle Shadow Play Troupe, the Hungxingge Shadow Play Troupe and the Donghua Shadow Play Troupe.

New digital practices at the Kaohsiung Museum of Shadow Puppet In 1994, the Kaohsiung Museum of Shadow Puppet was established and opened to the public as a multifunctional museum by the Kaohsiung County Government under instruction of the Council for Cultural Affairs of the Executive of Yuan and the Provincial Education Department. First conceived in 1986, the museum was intended to promote, preserve and research the historic practice of shadow puppetry. Besides displaying the history and evolution of Taiwan’s shadow puppets and the origins of different types of shadow puppets across the globe, the museum also preserves various old shadow puppets, including an exquisite series from around the world with different traditional instruments and elegant shadow puppet props. In this sense, the museum serves as a link between the past and the future. Since its construction, the museum has undergone multiple renovations, incorporating new hardware and software upgrades to aid in its founding aim of educating the public on shadow puppetry and theatre. Following an extensive renovation in 2010—due to engineering concerns and flooding by typhoon Fanapi—the museum reopened in 2012 with features designed to encourage interactive communication. The updated museum is equipped with many contemporary technological facilities to help visitors to interpret and better appreciate this traditional art and its place in Taiwanese culture. The new display content and redesigned experience not only promote traditional culture, they also allow the museum to host puppet play study camps, competitions and national tours, and develop traditional troupes. Shadow puppet shows are also held regularly in the museum for those keen to experience it for themselves. In addition, the museum also further emphasises shadow play education and experimentation while seeking paths to future innovation. The original objectives of promoting traditional art and culture have remained, while the research and collections of shadow puppets have also been preserved following the renovations. Digital puppetry has been added as a part of the museum’s sustainable development strategy. 211

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As a part of the 2010 renovation, I was invited by the museum to devise ways of preserving various old shadow puppet paraphernalia under a National Science Council (NSC) project to design, implement and promote digital puppetry and present the beauty, variety and uniqueness of Taiwanese shadow plays. Due to the relationship between digital technology and cultural communication, the existing digital collection of puppetry was mostly digitised historical data. However, it is difficult to attract people through static data browsing. Therefore, to make traditional art more known, we need to help people understand digital technology. To achieve this, we tried thinking about how the existing digital film collection, alongside science and technology, could work in tandem to aid in the exhibition of new media arts. This task was proposed as ‘New Digital Practices in Chinese Puppetry Culture’ by Dr Chen (2010, 2014, 2011) from the Kaohsiung Museum of Shadow Puppet and divided into three key stages: (1) digital archives of puppetry culture, (2) development of digital puppetry and (3) promotion of digital puppetry.

Stage 1: Digital archives of puppetry culture In 2009, an industry–academic cooperative project between Shu-Te University and the Kaohsiung City Government led to the 2010 Kaohsiung International Puppet Theatre Arts Festival. We designed the digital display and contents for the exhibition in the hot summer of 2009 and stumbled upon many video home system (VHS) tapes in the Kaohsiung City Puppetry Museum. As a result, I applied for funding from the NSC as the first stage of New Digital Practices in Chinese Puppetry Culture (Chen, 2010). During the project, my team not only had to deal with the digitisation of the VHS tapes of the shadow plays, but also the construction of metadata materials, the management and maintenance of the website, various administrative tasks, fine arts and editing—especially for the audio and video collections. The metadata and post-production construction work proved complicated and time-consuming. Despite being the first step of the plan, it was the most important part of preserving these cultural assets. Although the process was busy, it was very fulfilling; it revealed things that have not been touched in the past and acted as a valuable growth experience for all staff involved. This NSC project aimed to digitise the video collections hosted by the Kaohsiung Museum. Two main studies were produced from this project. The first project cooperated with the museum to digitise the films kept there, while also constructing a Web 2.0 interactive online platform to promote the culture of shadow plays. In total, 204 digitised archives and associated metadata were produced. The website existed at the Department of Animation & Game Design in Shu-Te University under the NSC project (NSC 99–2631H-366–001). This website was able to present the beauty and variety of unique Taiwanese shadow puppets, while 98 of the digitalised films that have Creative Commons (CC) licenses are also hosted on the national archives website: Digital Taiwan—Culture & Nature.1

Stage 2: Development of digital shadow puppetry As previously mentioned, the decline of shadow puppetry is often attributed to the rise in popularity of new media like television and films. For shadow puppetry to receive more contemporary attention, new approaches to performance are needed. A digitised performance method appeared to be an appropriate approach in the context of the Kaohsiung City Puppetry Museum. With modern gesture interaction methods and technologies, we have reached a point at which interactions with screens are no longer necessarily one-way; 212

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audiences can now interact with and influence visuals on the screen through natural communicative body gestures. This has some promising implications for shadow puppetry, as the spirit of traditional shadow puppetry performance is to express rich stories and emotion through changes in action controlled by the artists. By combining human-controlled puppetry practice of shadow plays and modern forms of human–computer interaction like gesture interaction, the cultural legacy can be retained through digital forms of shadow puppetry characters and performance. Such innovative digital interfaces allow people to interact with the visual characters instead of simply watching screen animations (Chen et al., 2010). This can be based on multitouch technology where a small group of controlling points are mapped to corresponding points on the digital character. Innovative mapping rules decrease the complexity of the finger controls. The so-called ‘digital scene’ is a multitouch LCD screen that allows people to use their fingers to directly operate a pair of touchscreens and combine performance techniques with music and other elements, just like performing realistic shadow plays. This allows the presentation of the dramatic tension between the virtual characters in multimedia scenes with sound effects and more. Digital shadow play is one attempt to combine the narrative, traditional shadowgraphy and modern interactive technology. To stimulate creativity, a user-centred design process— the Narrative Media of Shadow Play—was proposed through understanding the cultural context of the shadow play. It is also a process of evolution based on the rapid development of interactive technology (Chen, 2014): 1) 2) 3)

4)

5) 6)

Digitisation: The first step was to cooperate with the museum and digitise the collections kept there. Metadata: Each digitised case was studied and categorised. In total, 204 digitised archives and associated metadata were produced by this project. Context of use: The understanding of the context of use became one of the main stages within the user-centred design process. Context of use is defined in ISO 9241–9 (which provides guidelines regarding the ergonomics of using physical input devices with interactive systems) as consisting of ‘the end-users, tasks, equipment (i.e. hardware, software and materials) and the physical and social environments in which a product is used’. This definition is incorporated into ISO 13407 on human-centred design. In this study, the term ‘end-users’ is defined as the stakeholders involved in the environment from a macro viewpoint. Immersive design: The design of the digital shadow play is not only a user interface, but a narrative medium for expressing cultural heritage. It is the design process dealing simultaneously with virtual and dimensional environments, including communication with the museum and stakeholders, to utilise the design requirements for the user interface and to produce a narrative. Design integration: A prototype of the digital shadow play needs to be designed and improved based on an iterative design process. Visitor study: Visitors’ feedback, both quantitative and qualitative, was collected.

Based on the user-centred design process, the first design case study was developed and exhibited at the Kaohsiung Puppet Festival, from 14–22 February 2010 (see Figure 18.1), displaying the first version of the digital shadow play Wu-Song and the Tiger. It was developed based on an 80″-infrared-based multitouch display and an open-source software library that allowed the touch sensitivity of the display to be modified. The advantages of this design are the pointing accuracy and a screen size wide enough to allow at least two people to play. However, the installation of the device is costly and requires manual calibration by an 213

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Figure 18.1 The first version of the digital shadow show Wu-Song and the Tiger as demonstrated at the Kaohsiung Puppet Festival 2010. Source: Photograph by Kang Li.

engineer, which is undesirable in a performing arts context and further raises personnel costs. Further, the hardware and associated equipment is difficult to transport (Chen, 2010). The second design case study, illustrated in Figure 18.2, was exhibited at the Exhibition of Shadow Art and Culture at the National Museum of History in Taiwan, from 8 July– 30 September 2011. Attempting to overcome the problems identified in the first case study, this design case was based on the story Nezha Conquers the Dragon King. It was developed based on a 3M 23″-multitouch screen, with its interface projected on a wall. This design was advantageous, as it was more cost-effective and easier to maintain. Through the exhibition of new media arts, we consider the combination mode and cohesive power of the digital film collection and technology. Different from the usual single-touch or twotouch screens, the body movements of the digital puppets can be flexibly manipulated through operating the shadows of Wu-Song or Tiger on the screen with multiple points of touch; all aspects of the digital shadow play were employed to achieve the most dramatic theatrical effects. The third design case study was exhibited at the Kaohsiung Puppet Festival inside Kaohsiung Shadow Play Museum, from 31 March 2012–15 April 2014. The design uses a Microsoft Xbox Kinect sensor to display and allow a single user to control two-dimensional (2D) virtual characters on the screen using their body movements, in particular their palms and legs (Chen et al., 2010; Chen, 2014). 214

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Figure 18.2 The second version of the digital shadow show Nezha Conquers the Dragon King, as demonstrated at the Special Exhibition of Shadow Art and Culture 2011. Source: Photograph by Kang Li.

Stage 3: Promotion of digital puppetry Through an ‘edutaining’ atmosphere, the audience participated in the exhibition to create a new audience experience. We established five digital puppet exhibitions outside the Kaohsiung Museum of Shadow Puppet from 2010–2014, including: •

National Museum of History and Illuminations—Cultural Arts Exhibition, displayed in the National Museum of History in Taipei in 2010 215

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• • •

•

FTP: Unexpected—Even New Couples of the Future—Tradition Puppet, displayed in Kaohsiung National Museum of History in 2010 CREATE 2010, international creative exhibition and symposium in Edinburgh, UK (Chen, 2010) Digital Shadow Theatre exhibition, displayed in the Taishe Branch of Kaohsiung City Library. To promote Taiwan puppetry culture to a larger community, the Taishe Branch of Kaohsiung City Library cooperated with Dr Chen and students of the animation and game design department of Shu-Te University to hold the Digital Shadow Play event at the library from 7–22 August 2012 Digital Drama and Puppets for a digital drama design class for primary school students in 2012.

Among them, CREATE 2010 deserves special mention. This three-day exhibition and seminar organised by Edinburgh Napier University under the theme ‘Creative and Innovative Interaction’ drew many researchers and industrial experts from around the world, including the UK, Taiwan, Japan and various European countries. This provided us with the opportunity to learn from foreign artists about their opinions and suggestions on the artistic expression of digital puppets to achieve cultural and academic exchanges between people from different cultures. Since Digital Shadow Play is a practical and functioning multitouch technology designed to digitalise traditional shadow puppetry, we were the only participant at the seminar to display our work (Chen, 2010).

Discussion Due to the impact of modern media, shadow play theatres have been disappearing in contemporary society. Nowadays, there are only four shadow show troupes left in Taiwan and they are considered a priceless cultural asset. Based on the user-centred design process, I have described how digital shadow plays have been designed to bring new energy to Taiwan’s traditional puppet theatres. Currently, the design is simple but has been shown to be versatile and feasible for a digital shadow theatre. In recent years, due to the global economic recession, government subsidies have decreased, forcing museums in various countries to re-evaluate their management and marketing strategies. The incorporation of design exhibitions and educational promotions that involve the study of visitors has become an integral part of successful modern museum operation. It is against this backdrop that the work reported here was carried out to facilitate the promotion of shadow puppetry culture; visitors are able to enjoy and experience the exhibition in new and more efficient ways thanks to this approach. Whether such ‘edutainment’ is fun for visitors depends on usability assessment and audience research. The design principles and creative design framework presented here are intended to stimulate research in creative computing, immersive design and social interaction through understanding the culture and history of shadow plays. Since current developments in interactive technology have opened new possibilities for the design and integration of gesture interfaces, it is necessary to develop a new approach to evaluate the usability of this new interaction style through future research. In the detailed design of the digital shadow play, there are many complex issues such as interface design and programming. The display design covers the use of display technology, the creation of a display space atmosphere, the interior design of the exhibition space, and the use of possibly overly complex interactive models. Usage issues, such as lack of positive guidance and long visitor 216

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queues due to line guidance can cause misunderstandings, frustration and dissatisfaction among viewers. The value of the content will be reduced, affecting the revisit rate and the viewer’s stay. Thus, the museum will likely eventually experience the complaints of many people. An effective digital display should pay attention to the most fundamental problem of design: how to use it smoothly. An excellent interactive digital display should guide the user correctly to achieve the desired goal. This is the task for designers and the creators of productions. There should be a common consensus among the people involved. Based on our experience with the digitisation of shadow puppetry, we drew some valuable practical lessons that might be considered in future projects: 1)

2)

3)

4)

Due to the many limitations of the indoor exhibition space, it is suggested that the exhibition project should consider the height of the physical display and lighting for different visitor ages. These could improve user experience, safety and the richness of educational value. The content of the digital display is mostly based on the digital collection in the shadow museum. Since most of the audience consists of parents with their children, designing exhibition contents, ebooks, posters and other supporting materials must be age appropriate. For instance, children’s reading ability and comprehension should be considered in the design. The shadow play is a kind of integrated art that combines the achievements of literature, music, painting, crafts and drama. The Digital Shadow Theatre is a design involving interactive new media art works. It is an artistic expression developed for traditional puppet shows. A multimedia teaching class can consider the concept of the digital shadow play and integrate the teaching materials in the arts and humanities. Such course content could combine visual arts, music, performing arts and digital multimedia design while requiring training courses for non-professional teachers. The curriculum should include the design process of the traditional shadow puppets in the visual arts, the matching of musical instruments and sound effects, the preparation of the script, the performance of the shadow puppet show, and the animation principles and the interactive technology that combine experience and practical new media art courses.

Conclusion Based on our work, we have learnt that digital science and technology are not the focus of the audience. Instead, the focus is digital content and related metadata. Digital technology, content and sustainable management strategy are like the relationship between cups, beverages and a tea shop. If the cups are attractive but the beverages they hold are not tasty, they will not attract people to spend money. For the Kaohsiung Museum of Shadow Puppet, the digital technology can be considered its ‘cup’; no matter how attractive or innovative it is, the content ‘beverage’ is what will draw visitors.

Acknowledgements This programme was supported financially by the NSC (NSC grants 99-2631-H-366-001 and 100-2221-E-366-013) and 3M, Taiwan. In research of this kind, I must extend thanks to many individuals and many sources. We particularly thank the Cultural Affairs Bureau, 217

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Kaohsiung City Government, for permission to use the digital archives of the traditional puppets. We thank the students from the Department of Animation and Game Design, ShuTe University for their support at the exhibitions.

Note 1 http://digitalarchives.tw/

References Chen, C.-C., Chu, C.-C., Chen, T.-K. & Yang, H.-J. (2010). An investigation into the effect of gesture interaction in relation to human performance for identifying possible design failures. International Transactions on Systems Science and Applications, 6(1), 1–12. Retrieved from http://siwn.org.uk/press/itssa/ Chen, T.-K. (2010). User-centred design guidelines for complex visual content: A design case study of an innovative digital shadow theatre in Taiwan. In The Proceedings of CREATE 10—Annual conference of Institute of Ergonomics & Human Factors, Edinburgh Napier University, pp. 97–98. Chen, T.-K. (2014). A case study of a digital archives programme: The development of digital shadow plays in Taiwan. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 8(1), 38–48. https://doi.org/ 10.3366/ijhac.2014.0098 Chen, T.-K., Fang, H.-P., Tian, Y., Fang, H.-L., Li, Y.-J., Tseng, S.-H. & Miao, S.-E. (2011). Design and evaluation of social interfaces for cultural exhibitions of Chinese shadow puppetry. In The Proceedings of Computer Software and Applications Conference, Munich, 18–22 July, pp. 346–347. Retrieved from http://https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6032362/ Kaohsiung Museum of Shadow Puppet. (2018). Major historical milestones of the museum. Retrieved from http://kmsp.khcc.gov.tw/

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19 Be engaged Facilitating creative re-use at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision Gregory Markus, Maarten Brinkerink and Brigitte Jansen

Introduction Cultural heritage institutions have always accumulated and preserved knowledge, artistic vision and cultural representations. These historical documents served as the stimulating catalyst and necessary reference for progressing research and creativity. The role of galleries, libraries, archives and museums as both protector and provider was immoveable for centuries. If one wanted to take a painting out of the museum, it required 11 people and a cinema-worthy heist scheme or financial means available only to the wealthy. Books were only allowed outside the library for a set period and archives simply had viewing rooms. Because digital reproduction was not available, artefacts that entered the institution remained in the institution; it was considered safe. As digital reproduction became possible, and (much) later, collections started appearing online and outside the institute walls, it became apparent that heritage institutions would have to adapt or be left behind. This coincided with a shift in the artistic landscape, whether it was the mainstream popularisation of remix culture by avant-garde composers in the 1950s and hiphop artists in the late 1970s, or the ushering in of file-sharing in the internet age. Some heritage institutions began to realise that not opening for public viewing or using open-culture initiatives like Creative Commons and Wikimedia Commons would do more harm than good because that is what people were beginning to expect. People were exploring new topics at faster rates and the artistic appetite (and capability) to start mashing together diametrically opposed cultures to express new ideas or just to see what would happen was growing. The belief that repurposing (remixing) heritage materials in an artistic way could open new avenues for cultural understanding began to take root (e.g., as observed in the New York Public Library laboratories and British Broadcasting Corporation’s creative archive initiatives). Forward-thinking efforts in the Netherlands, like the Images for the Future project and the Rijkstudio, clearly saw this necessity for institutes to digitise collections and make them as freely available as possible. However, to signal this shift to the creative communities, community engagement efforts were required. 219

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Nine years ago, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision created the Open Images platform (www.openimages.eu) to provide access to audiovisual heritage that is available under an open licence. Along with the Sound of the Netherlands platform, users were now able to consult the digitised audiovisual heritage as well as download content and re-use it for creative purposes. The original intent of these open media platforms and was to stimulate the creative re-use of audiovisual heritage, resulting in new works. Nine years later, there are over 7,000 videos available, but only a small portion is used to create new works. Instead, we have observed various forms of what you could call more ‘informational’ types of re-use. One example is the re-use of our open content in thousands of Wikipedia articles, spread across more than one hundred language versions, reaching millions of people each month. Sound and Vision has tried to stimulate creative re-use of its open collection in the past— through remix contests, artist collaborations and hackathons, where our institute functioned as a content provider. To this end, we initiated two different projects in recent years that took two different approaches towards the same goal—fostering the creative re-use of heritage materials. This time, we explicitly positioned heritage institutions as co-producers of new works. These two projects, Open Media Art (OMA) (2016) and RE:VIVE (2015) will be explored below and their approaches, concepts, methodologies, philosophies and results will be shared along with core lessons learnt and plans for the future. It is the hope of Sound and Vision and this article’s authors that cultural heritage institutions will understand how important it is to actively engage, associate with and familiarise themselves with their (local) creative communities to ensure a more healthy and fruitful collaborative experience.

Open media art Insight in different approaches When institutes commission work from an artist, they have a certain expectation about the final result. You brief the artist, maybe visit them once or twice in their studio to observe brief snapshots of their progress. Then the deadline hits, and you have finished work that may or may not be entirely what you expected based on your briefing and the few snapshots. Meanwhile, you miss all the incredibly important insights into how the artist has approached your collection and the choices they have made. Commissioning an artwork the traditional way gives the artist certain constraints, which means they cannot find their own vision or story in the material. That is why OMA has sought to co-produce new works with artists through a collaborative process. This way, OMA can offer more than simply a heritage collection; it can grant artists access to software developed by Sound and Vision’s research and development department, share information about the collection and its place in media history, and bring the artists into contact with experts from the field or enthusiastic volunteers. In return, Sound and Vision gains a deeper understanding of its collection, insight into the artistic process behind creative re-use and experience with new ways of presenting archival material.

Learning from each other In the form of a talent development trajectory, Sound and Vision collaborated with five young artists through the OMA project. For eight months, the artists had time to research, experiment and create using a part of the audiovisual collection that is available for re-use

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under an open licence. Every month the artists came together at the institute to collaborate on their projects with experts from Sound and Vision and an external coach (Figure 19.1). During this time, they learnt about various aspects of open culture such as searching through vast audiovisual collections, working with open data, re-use of material and copyright, and producing a physical exhibition Each meeting was accompanied by a different external coach in the field of media and art. The coaches shared insight about their own practice and showed the artists relevant examples and inspiration. The group of young artists also showed the progress they made with their own projects and received feedback from everyone present. To ensure that artists received useful feedback, OMA selected external coaches in the fields of media and art and in-house experts based upon the phases of the creative process. In the meetings, OMA showed and discussed several topics concerning the re-use of archive material. The artists had access to the digital archives and physical storage rooms, and external coach Farah Radman shared her way of searching the digital catalogues of archives. Further, there were several discussions about copyright and open licensing in artistic practice. As Sound and Vision, we wanted greater insight into what our collection means to young multidisciplinary artists. To capture the experience and make it visible for others, we created a dedicated website (www.openmediaart.nl). The artists wrote a monthly update on their progress in blog form, and the OMA project reported on the monthly collaboration meetings. Several editorials were produced to focus on one aspect of the project; for instance, one artist shared her experience with using open licences in an artistic context. At the end of the OMA trajectory, four new works were created (Figure 19.2):

Figure 19.1 Coach Dirk Vis offers feedback on the artists’ projects. Source: Photographs by Tomas Mutsaers CC-BY-SA.

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Figure 19.2 Upper left—Unfolded Cinematography from Superposition. Upper right—0800SUNSETS from Anna Klevan. Lower left: Select Your Memories from Tereza Ruller. Lower right side: What Images Have You Seen So Far? from Elki Boerdam. Source: Photographs by Tomas Mutsaers CC-BY-SA.

1) Unfolded Cinematography Artists Bram Bogaerts and Robin Smits wanted to trace the movement of the camera. With their application, you could follow the position of the camera by moving your tablet. 2) 0800-SUNSETS Artist Anna Klevan was intrigued by the popularity of filming and photographing sunsets. By opening a sunset hotline, people could call in and audibly record a sunset. 3) Select Your Memories Artist Tereza Ruller focused on the archive as the formation of a national identity as well as a personal memory. With an interactive website, you could create your own set of distinct memories using videos from the collection. 4) What Images Have You Seen So Far? Artists Elki Boerdam posits archive footage with footage found online. The original historical context is stripped in favour of focusing on the visuals shown in the video.

More than opening up the collection The value of working with artists and designers lies in the production of new perspectives of the collection and new stories that provide new context. To reach this level of meaningful contribution, greater efforts are required by the institution, beyond simply opening the collection. In these kinds of collaborations, we want to be surprised by the creation of new applications and works that 222

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we could have never imagined. It may sound whimsical and like a great deal of fun, but for an institute like Sound and Vision, it is challenging. We love our collection and cherish it in its historical context. We want our visitors to understand what they see, and we want to know all the logistics beforehand. This is not the most creative and out-of-the-box atmosphere to be working in as an artist. Creating a place where artists can explore the archive and their own artistic vision, and create new works using the archive demands a devoted project team, a group of skilled and passionate artists, a beautiful collection and some love. Resulting in a very fruitful trajectory, both the artists and Sound and Vision learnt a great deal from this hands-on approach to re-using archival material. Four works were realised during the project and displayed in an expo at Sound and Vision. We are very pleased with the diversity of the resulting works, showing the various artistic views of participants on our collection. The project demonstrates how visual and digital arts can be a new viable artistic medium for exploring collections; however, visual arts is only a small portion of the creative sector. To explore even more avenues and capitalise on different community dynamics, Sound and Vision formed RE: VIVE, an initiative that specifically targets the global electronic music community.

RE:VIVE Motivation RE:VIVE is an initiative by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision that specifically targets the electronic music community to encourage, facilitate and promote the re-use of heritage material. The RE:VIVE initiative was born out of the lessons learnt from participating and observing numerous creative re-use-centred, cultural heritage institution-led projects. RE:VIVE aims to collaborate with rather than target communities. It is the opinion of RE: VIVE that to properly engage a creative community as an outsider, one must strip away the outsider perception by building a reputation and strong relationships of mutual respect within the respective community. Equally as important, RE:VIVE avoids investing in new technologies; rather, it capitalises on pre-existing ones to reduce costs and maintain a limited scope. Innovative re-use of heritage materials can take many shapes but emerging and new technologies like apps, AR, VR, interactive browsers and others receive considerable attention because they have the potential to expose entirely new ways of exploring heritage. These projects can have large scopes, be resource-intensive and require regular maintenance once completed to avoid obsolescence. Due to RE:VIVE’s limited financial and personnel resources, the project does not create new technologies or ways of access and exploration. Rather, the project works to integrate its own concept into the solidified methodology and business models used in the electronic music community. Doing so allows the project to fit neatly into the community, and rather than make a big splash, stimulate little ripples that continue to expand. The amount of new music released daily is staggering but due to the initiative’s introduction of fresh parties (i.e., heritage institutes in the community and willingness to explore all genres and styles), RE: VIVE has been able to stand out from the crowd.

Formation of concept The RE:VIVE concept—the production of musical works composed from and inspired by thematically curated sets of heritage material—is inspired by the longstanding musical and cultural trends in which conceptual musical works take inspiration from historical 223

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occurrences and work with limited sonic source material (Figure 19.3). Primary examples include Titus Andronicus’s The Monitor, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Matthew Herbert’s Bodily Functions and Matmos’s A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure. Capitalising on the popularity of these works and audiences’ interest in contexts surrounding creative works, RE:VIVE delivers opportunities to artists to collaborate with heritage and higher education institutes, and challenges the artist to create a new record within restraints.

Approach RE:VIVE, for the most part, keeps a very clear approach towards generating outputs. The following is a highly condensed version of the RE:VIVE process. Step 1: Thematic curation and artist research followed by artist selection and collaborative decisions on the final theme. Further, initial contact with potential record labels is established. Step 2: Blind bulk delivery of content with no context or detail. Step 3: Initial artistic response and RE:VIVE consulting experts relevant to the artistic response to the selected theme (i.e., contacting researchers whose expertise would exceptionally inform the artistic process underway). Step 4: Residency and consultation—during this time, artists are invited to meet in-person with the experts to shine a light on the content and add context to further inform and inspire the musical work. Step 5: Bulk working time for the artist, during which they take all content and context and compose the work. During this time, regular contact is maintained between RE:VIVE and the artist to keep the work within the scope and context of the theme, curation and context. Step 6: Delivery of finished musical material and final discussion regarding the album’s artistic concept, approach and ideas. During this time labels become more heavily involved. Step 7: Development of public relations (PR) strategy and release details. Step 8: Deployment of PR strategy pre-release. Step 9: Release through all viable channels (physical and digital) and post-release PR. Step 10: Continued PR, concert promotion, speaking engagements and so on.

Promotion of results Public relations is crucial to the success of outputs. Thankfully, there is a vast and engaged community of blogs, magazines, newspapers and other outlets that report on, contextualise and promote electronic music. Therefore, RE:VIVE invests considerable efforts in connecting and building relationships with this community to increase the odds of generating widespread dissemination of project results. The personnel resources that would have otherwise been spent on internal communication have been directed towards external PR. The bulk of the writing is done by the publications’ authors and not members of RE:VIVE; this has saved resources and reduced pressure on RE:VIVE to grow its own social network. Moreover, RE:VIVE makes use of the artists’ and labels’ networks as well. Of course, relying solely on PR and the reach of others is treacherous because there are never any guarantees. Therefore, it is important to maintain realistic expectations and be prepared to pivot editorial efforts and understand that the core goal is to promote the new works and not RE:VIVE itself.

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Figure 19.3 Damrak album cover. Original photo, Rijksmuseum, Public Domain. Source: Original image courtesy of Rijkswaterstaat Beeldbank.

Pivoting for new audiences and collaborations For the first two years, RE:VIVE’s core focus has been the transformation of audio recordings into new musical compositions. However, the arts of resampling and sound design are not of interest, nor a capability, of every electronic music producer. Equally, audiovisual collections are still predominantly under copyright, which limits artistic interest and skill set, and the amount of material that can be used. RE:VIVE is pivoting, exploring new ways for electronic music to be utilised for new explorations of cultural heritage as well as to engage new audiences and new horizons. This includes exploring possibilities with generative music, machine learning and film scoring. All these avenues open new possibilities for partnerships and creativity, and allow RE:VIVE’s community-centred approach to re-use to reach institutes that have no audio content in their collections.

Lessons learnt and conclusion Cultural heritage institutions are (slowly) surrendering control, moving from a guardian of cultural heritage towards a provider of access to these objects. This is already quite the paradigm shift for a traditional sector. In some rare cases, cultural heritage institutions also position themselves as co-producers of new creations based on open heritage objects, but these examples are still quite rare.

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If the heritage sector is truly committed to positioning itself as a relevant stakeholder for the creative industries—and artistic production in particular—it requires moving beyond simply becoming comfortable with surrendering control. It also requires actively reaching out to creative communities and constructing models for co-creation. This means being both a facilitator and an actor in the creative process. As observed through the OMA project and RE:VIVE, the heritage sector has a great deal to learn from the creative sector, such as fluidity of the creative process, autonomy and artistic expression. Conversely, the heritage sector provides invaluable expertise and context for artists, and heritage can serve as a meaningful bridge between research, academia, political and societal bodies. Cultural heritage institutes exist to help populations better understand the past. They are not academic ivory towers and they should not appear or present themselves as unapproachable. By welcoming creatives and artists with open arms and assisting them through their creative process, museums both show their willingness to be part of contemporary culture and present collections in ways that resonate with new audiences. Traditional museum exhibitions, databases and galleries will always exist, but Sound and Vision is quickly learning that these avenues for presentation do not reach every address; to find the right routes, occasionally, you must let outsiders show you the way.

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20 Cultural antinomies, creative complicities Agan Harahap’s digital hoaxes Alexandra Moschovi and Alexander Supartono

Introduction A teenage girl in traditional Javanese kebaya and batik sarong poses smiling timidly against a nondescript, interior background (see Figure 20.1). The snap, saturated by the characteristic magenta hue of old, colour photographs, first appeared online in 2015 as an objet trouvé on the blog Melman and the Hippo, which belongs to Indonesian artist Agan Harahap. The caption states that this is a photograph of young Rihanna celebrating Kartini Day, Indonesia’s Women’s Day. For those in the know, a closer look reveals that the girl in the fading photograph is indeed pop idol Rihanna. Harahap (2015) informs his readers that this is an authentic photograph of the singer as a child taken when she was still working as an umbrella taxi kid (ojek payung) in the streets of Yogyakarta to help her family make ends meet. The artist quotes an interview of a tearful Rihanna who explained in fluent Javanese how her pop chart hit Umbrella was inspired by one of her childhood friends, a co-worker who was struck by a lightning while providing umbrella services to passers-by on a stormy day (Harahap, 2015). Some respondents to the post who saw through the falsity of the artist’s claims played along; others seemed confused: ‘Is this really true?’ one reader asked.1 The photograph belongs to the series Our Memory Album (2015–2018), in which the artist digitally inserts the faces of international celebrities into old family snaps from Indonesia. Harahap sources the snaps from local social media accounts, taking advantage of the ignorance of social media users who do not know how to resize their photographs or set the privacy settings on their accounts, thus making publicly available high-resolution photographs of their family life (Harahap, personal communication, 2018). Along with the photographs’ files, Harahap also appropriates the personal stories attached to them to provide a truthful context for the Indonesianisation of the celebrities in his digital reworkings. Our Memory Album was presented in physical form in the group exhibition Why Are We Doing What We Are Doing? at Mizuma Gallery in Singapore in 2016. In this re-imagining of the work beyond the online, live context of social media, Harahap presented the images in different sizes in elaborately decorated, domestic frames. The artist’s original idea to present 227

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the images arranged in a photographic album was deemed impractical in the context of a commercial gallery exhibition; instead, an ‘academy-style’ installation was employed to mimic displays of family photographs in domestic settings (Harahap, personal communication, 2018). The photographs continued to exist in digital form online, available as a series via the portfolio platform Bēhance with a laconic artist statement describing the project as the artist’s longstanding pursuit to ‘collect and reveal the connections between celebrities and their relation to [his] homeland, Indonesia’ (Harahap, 2018).

Figure 20.1 Agan Harahap, ‘The young Rihanna on stage during Kartini day in 1994,’ from the series Our Memory Album, 2015 (original in colour). © Agan Harahap; courtesy of the artist. Source: Agan Harahap.

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This chapter explores how creative repurposing of networked photographs and online interactivity may open new channels and networks for the critical re-evaluation of mainstream culture and subcultures, identity politics, history and power structures. The analysis focuses on the work of Harahap, who uses strategies of appropriation, digital manipulation, allegory and irony to make unexpected visual and contextual interventions in popular and archival imagery, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, and public and private. Over a decade, Harahap built an international reputation and social media following as a visual appropriator/pasticheur and cultural provocateur. His work draws on cultural and political antinomies in postcolonial Indonesia, shifting cultural and social behaviours in contemporary networked societies, and the impact of media and celebrity culture on people and communities, using the malleability of digital photography, the fluidity of the networked image and the architecture of participation of Web 2.0. His visual hoaxes are distributed nationally and internationally, taking advantage of, and at times hacking, the instrumentality of a range of different online platforms to ignite public dialogue. The audiences’ participation in sharing and commenting hints at the endless realm of possibilities for how these networked images, stored in the über-archive of Google images, may be circulated, recontextualised and repurposed. The online public interaction reveals different levels of subject awareness, trust and engagement; some users are totally deceived by Harahap’s skilful hoaxes, while others react to his absurd scenarios by openly challenging his claims or searching the web to source the original material he appropriates. Harahap’s digital interventions purposefully interrupt the authority and integrity of the archival record and challenge the authenticity of the personal snaps by calling viewers to think twice about what they see while raising questions about the validity and veracity of the photographic image as evidence and historical record.

Against the documentary grain Harahap began exploring the mutability and malleability of the digital photograph in the context of his professional practice as digital imaging artist at Tarzan Photo Studio in Jakarta, where he mastered the skills of digital retouching and layering of photographic images. Having trained in painting and illustration during his studies in graphic arts at the Design and Art College in Bandung, Harahap drew upon his knowledge of pictorial synthesis and graphic design to create his first surrealist tableaux entitled Octopus Garden, which earned him the prestigious Indonesian Art Award and a place on the wall of the National Gallery in Jakarta in 2008. It was not long before Harahap’s fabrications captured the imagination of curators and gallerists beyond national borders, through participation in transregional photography festivals and exhibitions across South-East Asia, Japan, Europe, Australia and South America. Harahap’s self-evident but seamless digital manipulation, which accentuates the artificiality of the photograph, marked a rupture with the stagnant tradition of documentary photography that dominated the photography scene in postcolonial Indonesia for over half a century. With its roots in Japan’s propaganda photographs, circulated by the news agency Domei during the 1942 Japanese occupation of Indonesia, documentary photography became the visual parlance for the country’s revolution and independence since 1945, a vehicle to capture and disseminate the picture of the new nation. The boom of print media in 1970s Indonesia, fuelled by oil economics, offered local photographers a new professional platform but did little to advance photographic practice in the country, primarily favouring sensational content over experimentation and 229

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reflection. Like red-baiting in McCarthy’s United States (US), the censorship imposed by the military directorship of Suharto (1966–1998) in all aspects of public life, indelibly affected Indonesian photography, which became largely apolitical and detached from artistic experimentation and self-expression (Supartono, 2006, pp. 10–12). The advent of the political upheaval of the Reformasi, the riots and mass demonstrations in the country’s urban centres leading to Suharto’s resignation in 1998, signalled the beginning of a new era in which Indonesian photographers would, at last, enjoy political and creative freedom exercised in the context of newly emerging photography festivals, galleries and clubs. Coming into age in the new millennium, Harahap used constructed imagery to problematise the established pictorial traditions and clichés that characterised documentary and commercial photographic practice in Indonesia in the previous century. His practice specifically went against the grain of classic documentary photography and the postwar humanist traditions as exemplified in the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Robert Capa and Eugene Smith that had influenced postwar photographic practice in the wider South-East Asian region, but also art documentary, the ‘new documents’ of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand that were celebrated as self-expression on the walls of the modern art museum (Rosler, 1989; Sekula, 1984). Harahap’s digital work marked a new direction for creative photographic practice that equally challenged the nation’s cultural preconceptions about race, gender, national identity, sexuality, faith and class. Such a tentative movement towards staged and constructed photography was diagnosed in the early 2000s across South and South-East Asia. The voluminous publication of the 2006 Noordelicht festival Another Asia attests to these changes, among classic humanist documentary series feature staged self-portraits in drag (Michael Shaowanasai, Thailand), surreal landscapes (Yee I-Lann, Malaysia) and studio explorations of femininity (Achinto Shadra and Pushpamala N., India; Wawi Navarroza, the Philippines) (Mellis, 2006). As Alexander Supartono (2014) noted, examining the workings of contemporary photographic practice in the region: The conscious, uniform departure by contemporary Southeast Asian photographers from the traditional genres and applied practices of the colonial period that first established the transnational Southeast Asian scene may well be the core of a new national identity in the postcolonial era. (p. 19) The 2000s witnessed the media convergence of the computer, wireless communication technologies and the camera phone as a connected image-making device. Ubiquitous and versatile, the smartphone signalled the beginning of a new ‘moment’ for photographic practice (Gómez-Cruz and Meyer, 2012), which was marked by the ‘mass amateurisation of photography and its renewed visibility online’ (Rubistein and Sluis, 2008, p. 10). It has also been instrumental in developing new forms of participatory culture, from sharing and annotating content to online activism, and a novel alertness to what may be deemed noteworthy that has shifted people’s perception of the everyday (Moschovi, McKay and Plouviez, 2013, p. 19). Harahap examines the currency of the networked snapshot in today’s visual culture and global information economy as a marker of status and evidence of presence as much as a type of sociality. The increasing ‘visualisation’ of everyday experience, which, as Martin Hand (2012) suggested, makes ‘the visualisation of public and private life bound up with relations of power, expertise and authority’ (p. 9), offers a fruitful ground for Harahap’s 230

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cultural critique. Exploiting the dynamic of the ‘network effect’ – the drive of individuals to be part of an information society, being constantly connected (Hassan, 2008, p. 2) – Harahap has been using the internet as a deterritorialised network to reach diverse audiences beyond the physical space of the art gallery and museum.

Through the glass of popular culture, darkly Since his first independent projects, Harahap had always demonstrated a particular interest in popular culture and the ways it permeates all aspects of social life. In 2009, inspired by the video games Call of Duty and Medal of Honour that drew on World War II battles and which, at the time, had become a fad for Indonesian youths, Harahap (2009) created historical paradoxes to comment on the commercialisation of history. The photographs in his series Superhistory are digital collages of historical photographs sourced online in which popular superheroes have been digitally inserted. Yet, these tampered records were not meant to be viewed as a parody of history, despite the humorous currency that was a key determinant in their virality and usability as memes. They were perceived and constructed as a hyperbolic critique of the ruthless appropriation and spectacularisation of history in mainstream culture, whether in television series, cinema or video games, whose narrative is often an odd hybrid of factual and plausible elements while historical events and references are fictionalised (Chateau, 2011). At the same time, the seamlessness of Harahap’s digital manipulation that blurs reality and artifice points to the elasticity of the photograph even before the advent of Photoshop. In the context of political propaganda, several iconic historical photographs had been manually retouched, such as Yevgeny Khaldei’s photograph of a soldier raising the flag of the Soviet Union over the German Reichstag Building, whose second watch was airbrushed from his wrist to conceal looting, or the disappearance of Nikolai Yezhov who was retouched out of a photograph in which he featured at the side of Joseph Stalin, after Yezhov’s execution in 1940 (Przybylski, 2017). Harahap’s absurdly doctored scenes – Darth Vader featuring alongside Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta convention in 1945 and Batman giving the order of the day to English paratroopers in the Greenham Airfield on 5 June 1944 – went viral when circulated on his Flickr page: 221,588 views as of March 2018 (Harahap, 2009). They also gained the artist international critical attention and recognition, giving these repurposed images an afterlife beyond cyberspace as physical objects in the museum’s white cube (‘Achtung … it’s Spider-Man!’, 2012; Denis, 2013). Following the lineage of appropriation art, which gained new momentum in the digital era, Harahap’s work is equally successful in the international art market: a large-scale copy (120 x 181.5 cm) of his digital reworking of a historical photograph of Iwo Jima – in which Hulk appears to inspect a war-torn landscape – was sold in a Sotheby’s Hong Kong auction well above the estimated price in 2012.2 Harahap is particularly critical of how Western mainstream culture has been adopted and adapted in Indonesia. His work often targets the public’s obsession with celebrities, which powered by tabloids, online news outlets and social media communications, affects people’s notion of self, race and national identity (Strassler, 2010). ‘For people who live in “third world” countries like me, Western celebrities are role models in many ways,’ Harahap explained. ‘Their daily lives are followed and emulated by the public’ (Harahap, cited in Mallonee, 2015, para. 4). Referencing the Instagram phenomenon in the 2010s, Harahap decidedly concentrated on social media narcissism and the ways pictorial clichés, borrowed from celebrity culture, pervade the social media profiling of Indonesians. 231

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Building on the idea that celebrity status is achieved through the accumulation of ‘attention capital’ (Rojek, 2001) and taking advantage of the photograph’s evidential power, Harahap (2013a) circulated photographs of himself and James Hetfeld, the lead singer of heavy metal group Metallica, socialising at his home. The artist used the group’s long-awaited 2013 concert at the National Arena in Jakarta and the social media hype as a pretext to publish a series of photographs of himself and the group alongside an explanatory post on his blog Melman and the Hippo. Quoting the new forms of sociality and personal revelation that social media afford users, Harahap fabricated a ‘true-confession’ story about himself combining fictional narrative and factual information. He claimed that he too was a celebrity once, owing to high earnings from his artwork. This wealth enabled him to rub shoulders with many Western celebrities during his international travels, including Lars Ulrich, a known art collector, who introduced him to the other members of Metallica. After spending time with the group, living the high life of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, the ‘confession’ continued, Harahap went bankrupt and returned to Kebon Kosong in Jakarta to start life again. It was there in his humble dwellings that he allegedly received a picture message from Hetfeld asking him to meet (Harahap, 2013a). Harahap authenticated his story with a series of photographs of him posing with Hetfeld and Ulrich in 2010, a blurry camera phone portrait of Hetfeld holding a handwritten note asking for his address, and artless snaps of himself and the singer in the former’s home in Kebong Kosong as old friends catching up over cheap vodka. Arguably, Harahap’s story did not have the success that Amelia Ulman’s spoof selfie project – Excellences & Perfections, documenting her attempt to make it as an ‘It girl’ in Los Angeles – had on Instagram the following year, which became an internet and curatorial ‘sensation’ once her hoax was revealed.3 Although Harahap carefully appropriated the pictorial language of paparazzi flash photography, amateur snaps and iPhoneography, minute details in his story and images gave away the hoax causing widespread debate that expanded beyond the blog on the artist’s Twitter account and other online platforms (Harahap, 2013b). While several online users fell for Harahap’s ‘heartfelt’ story, many others successfully scrutinised the images for signs of digital manipulation. Within hours of the original post, users tracked Harahap’s original source photographs online and presented them in discussion threads as proof of the artist’s falsified evidence.4 For Harahap, this discussion is an organic part of the work in his effort to make viewers think how the self is constructed in social media: ‘We always want to be seen as more cool and more stylish,’ he stated. ‘And so we become our own celebrity photographers, letting people know what we’re wearing, where we’re hanging out, what we’re eating, and who our friends are’ (Harahap, cited in Mallonee, 2015, para. 6). The hyperbole of the story and the doctoring of the images point to the artificiality, staging and exaggeration of social media ‘everyday life’ narratives. Harahap treats Web 2.0 and social media as a kind of ‘social, economic, technological and intellectual “imaginary”’ (Marwick, 2013, p. 7) that affords cultural participation beyond social elites and allows users to be prosumers rather than mere consumers of cultural content. Social media offer the artist an insight into the demographic data (social background, race, ethnicity, gender and religion) of his audience and the ways people present themselves and interact with each other online, influenced by the attention economies and strategies used in marketing – self-branding and livestreaming among others – that can turn ordinary people into ‘micro-celebrities’ (Marwick, 2013, p. 10). It is upon observations of these social patterns and behaviours, which he knows only too well being a celebrated social media persona himself, that Harahap’s poignant critique of contemporary visual culture relies.

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Harahap expanded his punditry of celebrity culture in the series And Justice for All, a clin d’oeil to the abovementioned project, for the title of the series was borrowed from Metallica’s homonymous album in 1988. In these dystopian scenarios, media icons, international actors, singers and other celebrities visit Indonesia only to find themselves in unexpected settings, public toilets, squalid brothels and dubious healing shops. Some are caught misbehaving and are arrested by the local police: singer Rihanna is caught in an alcohol raid; actress Angelina Jolie is interrogated handcuffed, guarded by expressionless Jakarta police officers (see Figure 20.2); and boxer Mike Tyson poses behind bars, sharing a cell under the bewildered eyes of his local inmates. Here Harahap appropriated again the style of both paparazzi and police photography: the harsh flash, snatch aesthetic and compositional accidents. He sourced all photographs via Google images and various local police station blogs, which often feature, unknowingly, high-resolution photographs of officers’ daily activities. The series is part of the body of work Visit Indonesia (2012–2014), which was first presented in physical form at the Indonesian National Gallery in Jakarta in the exhibition Manifesto in 2014 and later that year in the survey exhibition Afterimage: Contemporary Photography in Southeast Asia in Singapore Art Museum, where the pseudo-paparazzi snaps featured as larger-than-life, colour-saturated digital prints. And Justice for All was presented on the online portfolio platform Bēhance on 14 December 2014, where it has been viewed by 26,046 users and liked by 976 as of March 2018 (Harahap, 2014a). This is Harahap’s tour de force as a digital artist; like a postmodern complicity gesture, the work he produces also exists in the very platform and format that he aims to subvert.

Figure 20.2 Agan Harahap, Untitled, from the series And Justice for All, 2012–2014 (original in colour). © Agan Harahap; courtesy of the artist. Source: Agan Harahap. 233

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In the context of the Indonesian presidential elections in 2014, Harahap fabricated a series of images picturing then-Indonesian presidential candidate Joko Widodo (known as Jokowi) and members of his team in the company of international celebrities, including artist Ai Wei Wei, former US president Barack Obama, former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, designer Karl Lagerfeld and celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. In a statement, Harahap explained that his interest in this particular political race for the presidential seat derived from a desire to expose the unreliability of new media spreading slander which, shared uncontrollably online, had divided the nation (Harahap, 2014b). Postcards for Jokowi is a parody of the employment of social media in election campaigning while voicing the artist’s support for Jokowi as a viable alternative to the military candidate. The series was disseminated online across different platforms, while the artist circulated printed postcards and made high-resolution files available to Jokowi’s team for use in the campaign and, through an online link, to the general public to print at will. He envisaged that ‘these works can be stored as memories that we have lived and engaged in the most festive democracy party in the history of the Indonesian nation’ (Harahap, 2014b).

Reinventing the colonial archive A young, Caucasian woman, wrapped in a long, batik sarong folded around her waist, assumes a venereal pose on an altar bed also covered with batik fabric (see Figure 20.3). The otherwise unadorned studio scene includes a basket filled with tropical fruits and a brass bowl, typical for chewing-betel. Studio and in-situ photographs of semi-clad Javanese women are a pictorial commonplace in European archives and museums with colonial collections. However, there is something odd about the depicted scene in the historical photograph. Western women who lived or spent time in the colonies often adopted local costume. However, being observed and photographed with bare shoulders and feet was a social faux pas. Using digital tools, Harahap changed the identity of the Javanese woman who was depicted in the original photograph by Fotax Photo Studio to that of a European, superimposing a Caucasian female head onto a Javanese female body with meticulous skin tone adjustment. By doing so, the artist aimed to reprehend how Western male sexual desire and imagination fed the commercial market of erotic photographs of indigenous women in the colonial period. The photograph is part of the series Mardijker Photo Studio, a fictional local studio supposedly active in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the 20th century, specialising in culturally intermixed portraits: Westerners appearing in local attire and postures and local folk assuming Western mannerisms. Mardijkers, a term derived from the Sanskrit word Mahardika (literally meaning liberated), was used to describe the baptised former slaves and their descendants in Batavia who, working for the Portuguese, converted to Catholicism and subsequently to Protestantism under Dutch rule. Those populations embraced Western culture and religion, but their skin colour prohibited them from accessing a higher social status in the colonial society (Bosma & Raben, 2008). Concentrating on portraiture, the studio platform allows the artist to creatively revisit attributes and changing traits of colonial representation in Java: from race to class; from the colonial agroindustry to colonial lifestyle; and from family portraits to exotic trophies. His hybrid portraits challenge presuppositions about race and class by reverting stereotypes in a similar manner that: •

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Maud Sulter’s 1980s series Zabat contested racial mythologies by presenting creative black women posing as Greek muses

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Figure 20.3 Agan Harahap, Untitled, from the series Mardijker Photo Studio, 2015. © Agan Harahap; courtesy of the artist. Source: Agan Harahap.

• •

Ingrid Pollard’s Pastoral Interludes reclaimed national identity and landscape for British black women in the 1990s Jason Evans’s series Strickly (1991) surprised visitors at Tate Modern’s exhibition Century City (2001) by featuring young black men styled as British country gents (Kinsman, 1995).

The series comprises more than 100 works that Harahap disseminates internationally via various online photograph sharing platforms and social media, with a total of more than 36,000 followers across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, under the name Sejarah_X. Each photograph is usually accompanied by a make-believe background story, in which Harahap combines folklore traditions, common local knowledge and historical facts (see Figure 20.4). These absurd scenarios vernacularise colonial portraits and events, making the photographs appealing to audiences who otherwise have little interest in photography and colonial history. Discussion threads, comments and reposts of and for the Mardijker series generate widespread debates and advance popular discourse on Indonesian colonial history beyond academia. This online interaction not only offers a demographic and social mapping of historical knowledge of the country’s colonial past, but more importantly, affords new perspectives on topics that Indonesian history books did little to address, as for example, the sexualisation of Javanese women in the colonial era. 235

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Figure 20.4 Screenshot of SejarahX Instagram post, accessed 2 April 2018. Source: Agan Harahap.

As was the case in other colonies, erotic studio portraits of local women were a significant source of income for commercial photography studios in the Dutch East Indies. In the era of the European conquest, taking studio portraits of naked, colonised female subjects was part of the process in which ‘the Orient was penetrated, silenced and possessed’ (Stoler, 2002, pp. 43–44). For instance, as early as the 1860s, Woodbury & Page, a wellknown studio with a long list of highly respected clients in Batavia (present day Jakarta) already included a studio portrait of a bare-chested reclining young Javanese woman, entitled ‘Woman of Java, ca. 1868’ in one of the firm’s ‘people and custom’ album (KITLV Leiden, Coll. Nr. 85,045). By the early 20th century, studio portraits of long-haired, young Javanese women in full nudity were available for general purchase from commercial photography studios in Java and were in great demand in the European market (Groeneveld, 1989, pp. 78–81). The original photograph that Harahap appropriated in Figure 20.3 is part of an album generically titled Album with Photographs from the Dutch East Indies, which was published by Fotax, a Surabaya-based photographic studio, in 1924. Part of the collection of the Netherlands National Museum of World Culture, the album (TM-ALB-0060) contains 177 photographs depicting mainly Java’s urbanscape including several outdoor portraits of local folk going about their daily life. The photograph in question is the only studio portrait. It is preceded by a photograph of a Javanese mother bathing her two children and followed by a photograph of riverside housing. The photograph is clearly at odds with the narrative of the album, a fact that explains its function in the album as a marketing gimmick, thus highlighting its popularity and versatility. By posting the appropriated version of the photograph 236

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on various online platforms, Harahap mimics the circulation of such photographs and their recontextualisation in different photographic albums in colonial times. Harahap’s archival hoax presents an out-of-kilter representation of women in the colony to encourage viewers to pay attention to the details of the photograph. One Instagram user commented upon the unusual size of the ‘white woman’s toes’. The remark points to the fact that Harahap purposefully orientalised the Occident in the Orient by localising the Western female rather than Westernising the Javanese body. The face of the Caucasian female was sourced from a photograph from one of the many photographic albums of Dutch families who lived in the Dutch East Indies, now kept in the Netherlands. In doing so, Harahap simultaneously addressed the way in which Western pictorial traditions exemplified in well-known paintings such as Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque (1814), influenced aesthetically photographic portraiture in the colony. In the Mardijker series, Harahap challenges the notion of the colonial archive as an institution, a repository and a system of gathering, storing and exchanging knowledge that was used as an instrument of colonial power. He gives forgotten archival material a new life, one that equally contests the ideological apparatuses for knowledge production and the archive as the process that determines what may be said, classified and stored (Foucault, 1994). Capitalising on the momentum of social media in South-East Asia, Harahap utilises what Clay Shirky (2010) described as the public’s ‘cognitive surplus’ to extend the rewriting of colonial history from below and present collective narratives in which the formerly colonised are no longer excluded. The decentred production, dissemination and repurposing of digital material online not unrestricted by copyright creates a new popular archive and cultural community that visits, evaluates and recirculates the content. This participation creates cultural content that is of personal, communal, public and civic value (Shirky, 2010) to various online and offline communities in Indonesia and beyond. Such an active engagement with historical materials can have a transformative impact on people’s sense of identity and postcolonial ‘relational self ’ (McKay, 2010). Harahap’s interest in the colonial archive is part of a recent turn of Indonesian contemporary art practice towards colonial history.5 While colonial collections have been institutionally neglected after the country’s decolonisation, the accessibility and searchability of the digital archives of major colonial collections – such as KITLV (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) and the National Museum of World Culture, to name but a few – have offered a new uncharted terrain to Indonesian artists like Harahap, Abednego Trianto and Adytama Pranada to research and re-evaluate colonial records.6 Using strategies of appropriation, assemblage, digital manipulation and restaging, these artists reclaim colonial history, mining the colonial archive not for historical information, but for cultural clichés that informed the colonial imagining of the colony and its people, and which, as Stoler (2002) has suggested, often concentrated on race and sexuality. Gaining popularity in the virtual world, the Mardjiker series was exhibited in full for the first time, in 2015 in the Netherlands, in the exhibition Making Oneself: Postcolonial Photo Studio from South and Southeast Asia, part of the Noorderlicht photography festival. Unlike their online presentation on Instagram, in which each photograph is experienced individually accompanied by a background story, in their exhibition setting the photographs are usually presented enlarged and framed, devoid of contextual or other information, calling viewers to make connections between the different images and draw their own conclusions. In early 2016, the Mardijker series was presented by 2902 photography gallery in the high-profile, commercial art fair Artstage Singapore and later that year in the Singapore Biennale, the largest regional art event in South-East Asia. The series was shown in the context of Chobi 237

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Mela photography festival in Dhaka in 2017 and the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin the following year. It is notable that to date, all major exhibitions of the Mardijker series took place outside Indonesia whereas online discussions triggered by the series’ dissemination online are almost exclusively in Indonesian. The background story of each photograph, which is only available in Indonesian and exclusively provided online, plays a central role in Harahap’s subversion of Indonesian colonial history and in triggering discussion on a national level. International curators, critics and viewers seem to pay more attention to his creative intervention on the photographic representation of Indonesian colonial history and the ways he challenges the authority of the colonial archive. Harahap identified the knowledge base and behaviours of his diverse audiences and adjusted the nature of his work accordingly. For Indonesian digital natives and immigrants, who tend to socialise online, the networked images and their narrative offer a trigger for discussion and engagement in a way that no physical display of the work in a gallery context would achieve. For international audiences, he mutes the images, as such discussions could have little relevance outside Indonesia, and turns them into familiar pseudo-archival objects. By presenting them as generic types and silencing their political voice, the artist makes his images accessible to international viewers who may or may not be versed with postcolonial issues and debates. In Harahap’s hands, networked images, whether sourced from Google images, institutional archives or personal collections made public, become instruments of critique of past and present visual culture. By disseminating his work online, Harahap democratises art practice beyond the trammels and limitations of the art world and affords online communities the opportunity to participate in an active process of civil engagement that may offer new routes to counter power and ‘networked social movements’ (Castells, 2012). Initiatives like Sejarah_X become fora for public debate, proposing an alternative postcolonial archive in which notions of ownership, agency and authority are to be redefined collectively. Harahap’s digital hoaxes exaggerate cultural antinomies, clichés and behaviours only to make us stop and think, not only of the politics of visual representations today, but also about agency and ownership, asking how we consume digital context and how digital platforms consume us.

Notes 1 Nadia Assyifa, discussion thread (Harahap, 2015). 2 See Entry 258, Agan Harahap (b. 1980), Super-History Series: Iwo Jima, February 1945 (Hulk), UV Print on aluminium plate dibond, 120 x 181.5 cm. Executed in 2010. Estimate: 18,000–25,000 HKD. Lot sold: 35,000 HKD. Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Paintings catalogue, 2012. Retrieved from www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2012/modern-contemporary-seapaintings-hk0387/lot.258.html (Retrieved: 22 March 2018). 3 In winter 2016, 18 months after Ulman’s public revelation, the series Excellences & Perfections was included in two major group exhibitions: Electronic Superhighway, at the Whitechapel Gallery, a survey of the interface of computer technology and art since the 1960s; and Tate Modern’s Performing for the Camera, an examination of the fusion of performance and photography in contemporary art (Caplan-Bricker, 2016; Sooke, 2016). 4 See the post and discussion thread ‘Sisi Lain James Hetfield (Metallica): Ingat Teman Lamanya Dari Indonesia (The other side of James Hetdfield [Metallica]: Remembering his old friend from Indonesia)’ Kaskus, 29 August 2013. Retrieved from www.kaskus.co.id/thread/521f68a5f8ca17c902000004/sisi-lain-james-het field-metallica-ingat-teman-lamanya-dari-indonesia/. 5 Harahap had the opportunity to examine, for the first time, the actual prints of the photographic material he had been using in the Mardijker series in the collections of the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam and Leiden University Library in 2016. Although the artist admitted that first-hand experience of the original material made him consider anew the materiality of photographs, he continues to work with digital files available online (Harahap, personal communication, 2018).

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6 See KITLV collection at the Leiden University Library, available at https://digitalcollections.universi teitleiden.nl/search?type=dismax&islandora_solr_search_navigation=0&f%5B0%5D=mods_genre_ authority__ms%3A%22Photographs.%22&sort=mods_titleInfo_title_ss%20asc; and the National Museum of World Culture collection available at https://collectie.wereldculturen.nl/#/query/99916a0dbadc-478c-960c-1fe438dd59d0.

References ‘Achtung … it’s Spider-Man!’ Incredible photos reveal how Batman, Superman and friends helped the Allies win World War Two. (2012, 23 May). Daily Mail. Retrieved from www.dailymail.co.uk/ news/article-2148810/Its-Spider-Man-Agan-Harahap-photos-reveal-Batman-Superman-friendshelped-Allies-win-World-War-Two.html Bosma, U. & Raben, R. (2008). Being Dutch in the Indies: A history of creolisation and empire, 1500–1920. Singapore: NUS Press. Caplan-Bricker, N. (2016). The Instagram hoax that became an art-world sensation. Slate, 25 January. Retrieved from www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2016/01/the_instagram_hoax_that_became_ an_art_world_sensation.html Castells, M. (2012). Networks of outrage and hope: Social movements in the internet age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chateau, D. (2011). Le téléfilm historique postmoderne: Spectacularisation de l’ Histoire et ‘montage hystérique. Sociétés & Représentations, 1(31), 55–64. 10.3917/sr.031.0055. Denis, D. (2013). Superheroes at super moments in history. The Photo Blog. Slate, 30 January. Retrieved from www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2013/01/30/agan_harahap_using_superheroes_to_create_a_super history_photos.html Foucault, M. (1994). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language (Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith 4th ed.). London: Routledge. Gómez-Cruz, E. & Meyer, E. T. (2012). Creation and control in the photographic process: iPhones and the emerging fifth moment in photography. Photographies, 5(2), 203–221. Groeneveld, A. (Ed.). (1989). Toekang Potret: 100 years of photography in the Dutch Indies, 1839–1939. Amsterdam: Fragment Uitgeverij. Hand, M. (2012). Ubiquitous photography. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harahap, A. (2009). Supehero: I love history. Flickr. Retrieved from www.flickr.com/photos/ 31199746@N02/sets/72157622452249309/ Harahap, A. (2013a). Metallica—Kebon Kosong, Kemayoran 2013, Kamis. Melman and the Hippo, 29 August. Retrieved from http://melmanandthehippo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/metallica-kebonkosong-kemayoran-2013.html?showComment=1377788142973 Harahap, A. (2013b). Temen selebriti (My celebrity friends). Bēhance, 30 August. Retrieved from www. behance.net/gallery/10646091/James-Hetfield-Metallica-Jakarta-2013 Harahap, A. (2014a). And justice of all. Bēhance, 14 December. Retrieved from www.behance.net/ gallery/22053619/And-Justice-For-All Harahap, A. (2014b). Postcards for Jokowi. Bēhance, 8 July. Retrieved from www.behance.net/gallery/ 18194551/POST-CARD-FOR-JOKOWI-JK Harahap, A. (2015). (Album Kenangan) Rihanna: Masa lalu dan makanan favorit (Our memory album: Rihanna: Her past and her favourite food). Melman and the Hippo, 16 October. Retrieved from http:// melmanandthehippo.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/album-kenangan-rihanna-masa-lalu-dan.html# gpluscomments Harahap, A. (2018). Our memory album. Bēhance, 22 March. Retrieved from www.behance.net/gallery/ 63516037/OUR-MEMORY-ALBUM Hassan, R. (2008). The information society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kinsman, P. (1995). Landscape, race and national identity: The photography of Ingrid Pollard. Area, 27(4), 300–310. Mallonee, L. (2015). Too bad these celebrities aren’t really in Indonesian jails. Wired, 18 June. Retrieved from www.wired.com/2015/06/agan-harahap-and-justice-for-all/ Marwick, A. E. (2013). Status update: Celebrity, publicity and branding in the social media age. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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McKay, D. (2010). On the face of Facebook: Historical images of personhood in Filipino social networking. History and Anthropology, 21(4), 479–498. Mellis, W. (Ed.). (2006). Another Asia: Photographs from South and Southeast Asia, exhibition catalogue. Groningen: Noordelicht. Moschovi, A., McKay, C. & Plouviez, A. (2013). Introduction. In A. Moschovi, C. McKay & A. Plouviez (eds.), The versatile image: Photography, digital technologies and the internet (11–32). Leuven: Leuven University Press. Przybylski, R. K. (2017). Till the limits of the visible. In E. Kledzik (ed.), Comparisons and discourses (271– 282). Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne. Rojek, C. (2001). Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books. Rosler, M. (1989). In, around and afterthoughts (on documentary photography) (1981). In R. Bolton (ed.), The contest of meaning: Critical histories of photography (303–342). Cambridge/Massachusetts/ London: MIT Press. Rubistein, D. & Sluis, K. (2008). A life more photographic: Mapping the networked image. Photographies, 1(1), 9–28. 10.1080/17540760701785842. Sekula, A. (1984). Photography against the grain: Essays and photoworks 1973–1983. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive surplus: Creativity and generosity in a connected age. London: Penguin. Sooke, A. (2016, 18 January). Is this the first Instagram masterpiece? Telegraph. Retrieved from www. telegraph.co.uk/photography/what-to-see/is-this-the-first-instagram-masterpiece/ Stoler, A. L. (2002). Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Strassler, K. (2010). Refracted vision: Popular photography and national modernity in Java. Durham: Duke University Press. Supartono, A. (2006). Original photocopies: The history of Indonesian photography. In W. Mellis (ed.), Another Asia: Photographs from South and Southeast Asia, exhibition catalogue (10–12). Groningen: Noordelicht. Supartono, A. (2014). Afterimage: Is there such a thing as Southeast Asian photography? In A. Supartono & I. Sam (eds.), Afterimage: Contemporary photography in Southeast Asia, exhibition catalogue (14–19). Singapore: Singapore Art Museum.

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Part III

Designing engaged experience

21 On virtual auras The cultural heritage object in the age of 3D digital reproduction John Hindmarch, Melissa Terras and Stuart Robson

Introduction Making three-dimensional (3D) models for public-facing cultural heritage applications currently concentrates on creating digitised models that are as photo-realistic as possible. The virtual model should have, if possible, the same informational content as its subject, in order to act as a ‘digital surrogate’. This is a reasonable approach, but due to the nature of the digitisation process and limitations of the technology, it is often very difficult, if not impossible. However, museum objects themselves are not merely valued for their informational content; they serve purposes other than simply imparting information. In modern museums, exhibits often appear as parts of a narrative, embedded within a wider context, and in addition, have physical properties that retain information about their creation, ownership, use and provenance. The ability for an object to tell a story is due to more than simply the information it presents. Many cultural heritage objects have, to borrow an old term, aura: an affectual power to engender an emotional response in the viewer. Is it possible that a 3D digitised model can inherit some of this aura from the original object? Can a virtual object also have affectual power, and if so, fulfil the role of a museum object without necessarily being a ‘realistic’ representation? This chapter first examines the role of museums and museum exhibits, particularly their public-facing remits, and what part aura plays. We will then ask if digitised objects can also have aura, and how they might help fulfil museums’ roles. We will observe, in the case of the Science Museum’s Shipping Gallery scan, that a digitised resource can potentially exhibit affectual power, and that this ability depends as much on the presentation and context of the resource as the information contained within it.

3D models as digital surrogates The term ‘digital surrogate’ is commonly used when talking about 3D models in cultural heritage applications (Arnold & Geser, 2008, p. 67; Cameron & Kenderdine, 2007, p. 56; 243

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Hess et al., 2009, p. 44; Mudge, Ashley & Schroer, 2007, p. 1). Exploring the meaning of this term is highly valuable. The standard dictionary definition of ‘surrogate’ is ‘a thing that acts for or takes the place of another; a substitute’,1 and a ‘substitute’ is ‘an object … which takes the place of another; a replacement’.2 It follows that a 3D model is a digital surrogate if it can replace the real object; interacting (e.g. performing a measurement) with the model will provide the same results as interacting with the object. However, when a 3D model is described as a digital surrogate, there is clearly a missing clause; a digital model cannot serve as a substitute for a physical object for all purposes. Obviously, with current technology, you cannot pick up a digital surrogate, weigh it in your hands or ascertain its material properties through the sense of touch. There is clearly more to the concept of digital surrogate and different authors have attempted to define the term more rigorously. Mudge et al. (2007, p. 1) referred to the ‘essential scientific nature’ of the digital surrogate; these are digitised models created via repeatable methodology with a traceable connection between each point of data in the model and a corresponding point on the subject. This description is functional; it makes no claims as to the model’s quality or properties but discusses ‘goals’ and ‘purposes’. Arnold and Geser (2008) make the functional definition even more explicit, distinguishing between digital surrogates and ‘representations captured for illustration or entertainment’ (p. 67). The digital surrogate is ‘the closest fidelity to the actual object that can be achieved digitally’ (Arnold & Geser, 2008). This definition poses further questions. As technology changes, so too does the ‘closest fidelity’ that can be achieved. Does this entail that today’s digital surrogate is tomorrow’s ‘representation’? Different technologies may be chosen for distinct purposes. A model used for monitoring changes in an object over time may need to measure accurate geometry but no surface texture, while other professional purposes may require accurate colour recording but greater ambivalence towards geometric accuracy. One must choose which technology to use at the capture stage: one that records geometry to the highest level of accuracy or one that captures the best colour? In creating a single model with the ‘highest fidelity’ to reality, we must choose the particular aspect of reality in which we are most interested. Thus, a clearer definition for digital surrogate might be: the model is a digital surrogate if it can substitute for the object for the purpose of x. In the case in which ‘x’ is ‘professional curatorial purposes’ or ‘academic research’, even limiting the interaction to non-contact inspection of an object’s surface properties, it is still difficult to understand how any 3D model feasible with today’s technology could be considered a true digital surrogate. Apart from state-of-the-art methods of measuring complex surface reflectance properties at research centres such as CultLab3D (Singh, 2014) in Darmstadt and the Dome II project at the University of Bonn (Schwartz, Sarlette, Weinmann & Klein, 2013; see also Murat, 2018), digitisation technologies that rely on measuring reflected light at a single angle (whether by triangulating a laser spot or taking a photograph) will fail to accurately capture texture (and potentially geometry) for a wide variety of cultural heritage objects, including, but not limited to: [objects] that exhibit complex reflectance properties such as anisotropy or iridescence, ones that exhibit significant self-shadowing or mutual illumination, ones that exhibit significant subsurface reflection, objects that are highly specular or translucent, and objects with intricate surface geometry. (Hawkins, Cohen & Debevec, 2001, p. 1) All materials3 exhibit some amount of shine or specularity, and therefore, will cause problems in capturing accurate colour. Even the best scanning resolutions will fail to capture 244

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details that might be revealed by a camera with a telephoto lens or a curator with a powerful magnifying glass. Further, surface geometry does not have to be particularly intricate to threaten data integrity. Three projects conducted with the Courtauld Institute illustrate these problems. The objects digitised were a ceramic lustreware bowl, a miniature bible and the 14th-century silver and brass ‘Courtauld Bag’ (Hindmarch, 2016, p. 172, 238). The bible (laser scanned) and bag (captured with structure from motion) both featured polished metal with excessive specularity,4 while the bible also had areas of dark leather that did not reflect sufficient light—a case of a single object being simultaneously too bright and too dark to capture perfectly! The lustreware bowl was highly varnished, generating large specular highlights in the photographs used to create the structure from motion (SfM) model. While it was possible to create usable (and, in terms of the required use cases, successful) 3D models, there were inevitable gaps in the data and lack of accuracy in the models’ geometry and texture due to the objects’ material properties. Although these were particularly difficult objects to digitise, they illustrate just some of the problems cultural heritage objects can present (see Figure 21.1). This is not to say that digital models do not have utility. The E-Curator project (Hess et al., 2008, 2009a) and subsequent work by Mona Hess (2015) has demonstrated the potential for 3D scanning technology for professional cultural heritage (CH) purposes and there are clear advantages to working in the digital realm. Interrogating a virtual model does not require handling of friable objects or accessing objects in storage or on public display. The model can be examined remotely from (potentially) anywhere with an internet connection and allows for digital repatriation (e.g. see the Western Solomon Islands War Canoe [Hess et al., 2009b]). It can be simultaneously accessed by an unlimited number of people, and objects situated in different collections on different continents can be compared side-by-side. At least in terms of professional applications, we can abandon ambiguous criteria such as ‘closest fidelity’ or ‘essential scientific nature’ and define digital surrogacy by a digital model’s ability to substitute for the object for a specific, well-defined purpose. If this purpose is extracting information from the model, the model can indeed be deemed a digital surrogate if the

Figure 21.1 L–R—Lustreware bowl showing its extreme specularity; detail of the unprocessed 3D model of the bowl showing noise and artefacts caused by the specular highlights. Source: Lustred ceramic dish. Probably Valencia, Spain, about 1500–1325, 47 cm diam, The Courtauld Gallery, London, Gambier-Parry Bequest, 1966.

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information gleaned is the same, within specified parameters determined by the particular purpose of the measurement, as would have been extracted from the same investigation on the real, physical object.

The digital surrogate in public-facing applications Visitors to CH institutions—members of the public with no privileged access to the exhibits— will have a very different experience to that of a CH professional. Often the object will be behind glass, at some minimum distance from the visitor, only viewable from certain angles. Since the information the member of the public can extract from the real object will be of a presumably lower quality than that available to the professional with unrestricted access, the virtual model would have to do substantially less work to be considered a digital surrogate. In fact, there may be circumstances in which a visitor can extract more (or at least different) information from the digital surrogate (e.g. see visitors’ responses to the 3D model displayed alongside the Courtauld Bag in the Court and Craft exhibition) (Hindmarch, 2016, p. 290). Additionally, the digital model provides the same (if not greater) accessibility benefits as in the professional case. At this point, we fall into the same trap as earlier; we are discussing a digital surrogate for public-facing applications without considering its specific purpose, as if all museum visitors seek CH objects for the same reasons. The class of CH objects is exceptionally heterogeneous, defined by a series of polythetic properties or family resemblances. It is impossible to identify a single (non-trivial) property shared by all. Similarly, to define a single purpose for which people interact with them is equally difficult. To achieve a functional definition of a public-facing digital surrogate, we must approach it from another direction. What are the roles or remits of CH institutions? How may digital surrogates fulfil these specific purposes?

The museum’s dual remit Organisations such as the International Council of Museums (ICOM) (ICOM Statutes, 2007), UNESCO (1978) and the Museums Association (n.d.) all stress the two-stranded nature of a museum’s function, its professional and public-facing remits. While the former would include all activities related to the acquisition, conservation and preservation of CH and academic research conducted on it; the latter would include activities concerned with providing access and disseminating knowledge to the public. Although the public-facing role may seem subservient to the professional—without preservation, there will be nothing to display; without research, there will be no knowledge to disseminate—the primacy of the museum’s professional role in no way diminishes the importance of the public. All three organisations mentioned emphasise this; collections of cultural objects are ‘part of the common heritage of mankind’ (UNESCO, 1978) and are ‘held in trust for the benefit of society and its development’ (ICOM, 2004). The Museums Association states that museums should focus on public service and encourage people to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment. One could argue that the museum’s professional remit is to support the public one: that the preservation and understanding of CH is devalued if what is preserved and understood is inaccessible to the people for whom it is held in trust. The public-facing role of a museum is clearly vital, and if a 3D digitised model can help support that role, this would provide an argument for investing the necessary resources in 246

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their creation. There are intuitive reasons to believe that 3D models may indeed help museums fulfil their public-facing remit. Metallo and Rossi (2011) stated: Our experience with museum websites so far has shown that putting high resolution images of collections online just increases audience engagement and familiarity with collections … We expect 3D to do the same. (p. 68) However, institutions adopting 3D technologies risk what Pallud (2009) calls technological determinism, where the ‘implementation of [digital technologies] in museums is assumed will positively impact visitor satisfaction even while there is little verification of whether these technologies really achieve their goal’. As the barriers to 3D digitisation have fallen in the last decade, primarily due to advances in digital cameras and structure from motion software, there has been a concurrent rise in the availability of 3D models of CH through platforms such as Sketchfab (British Museum, n.d.). At the same time, we have not observed a similar increase in research into the utility or otherwise of 3D content. To avoid falling into the technological determinism trap, and ensure that 3D technologies really are achieving their goal, we need to clarify this goal. If it is to educate, engage and entertain, what are the properties a digital model needs? In the professional sphere, we can evaluate the success of a model by its ability to fulfil a specific purpose. However, the purposes in the public arena are perhaps harder to define and thus contrary to our earlier discoveries; the public-facing model may counter-intuitively have more work to do to prove its utility than its professional equivalent. Whereas a professional might accept gaps in the data provided they do not interfere with their specific purpose, this might be more problematic for someone used to consuming high-quality video game graphics and expensive computer-generated images on film and television. This consumer is likely expecting a realistic virtual rendering of the entire object. In many cases, the qualities that make an object beautiful and unique—the complex way that it interacts with light—is the very information the museum visitor may be searching for, and the one thing we cannot easily recreate in a digital model. But is there more to CH objects and museum exhibits than simply imparting informational content? To determine the purpose of 3D models of CH objects in greater detail, and thus the criteria by which their digital surrogacy may be judged, we must first examine the role of the objects themselves.

The purpose of museum objects Following Casey (2003), it is helpful to divide museum practice into three typologies: the legislative, interpretive and performing museum. Casey (2003) described the oldest type of museum, the legislative, as a pre-19th-century conception. Legislative museums aim to be ‘paragons of the aesthetic and intellectual pursuit … a venue for display not debate’, while the museum itself becomes merely ‘a container for collections of objects’. In this incarnation, the museum gained its authority through its collections: unique and special objects intended to be viewed with a passive, awe-struck demeanour. The interpreting museum is, perhaps unsurprisingly, closer to our modern conception of ‘museum’ and arose from the realisation that while we should, as Gurian (1999, p. 19) stated: acknowledge the power of some objects to speak directly to the visitor, for example, in the sensual pleasure brought about by viewing unique original objects of spectacular 247

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beauty, the notion that objects, per se, can communicate directly and meaningfully is under much scrutiny. As well as preserving CH, museums act as transmitters of the current prevailing culture by interpreting the past through their prism: Rather than having objects speak for themselves, museum professionals interpret cultural significance for visitors by structuring art and artefacts around easily identifiable chronologies, geographies, formal themes, and narratives. (Casey, 2003, p. 6) The third type, the performing museum, is in part a reaction to societal changes and the commercial pressures faced by museums. The museum has assimilated ‘commercial strategies to entertain audiences … the contemporary museum privileges the processes of display over the particularity of objects to convey information’ (Casey, 2003, p. 9) The performing museum places as much emphasis on how an object is displayed as it does on the object itself; the museum object is further removed from its legislative pedestal and becomes just another (albeit important) feature of the exhibit as a whole. Chakrabarty (2002) viewed the shift in museum philosophy in the 20th century as a reflection of the evolution of Western democracies away from a pedagogical model to a performative one, the change in museums reflecting the idea that we are no longer so receptive to information (or interpretations) handed down to us from an unimpeachable source. Instead, we place greater emphasis on constructivist learning. Messham-Muir (2005) described it as a move away from cognitive forms of interpretation to affective forms. We could view this trend as a move away from object-centric approaches. Objects are no longer to be appreciated for their own sake, as in the legislative museum. Stories, events and experiences become the primary components of exhibitions; the objects have become subservient to the narrative. Gurian (1999) asserted ‘in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the definition of museums always contained reference to the object as the pivot around which we justified our other activities’ (p. 5). MacDonald (2001) stated that today, museums’ primary role has become the dissemination of information. It could be argued that a museum’s activities (storytelling, education and entertainment) justify the objects. If exhibiting an otherwise unremarkable object is the best way to tell a story or impart information, that justifies its presence rather than any particular characteristics of the object itself. Instead of the museum gaining its authority from its objects, the objects gain authority from the museum. Ostensibly, this evolution supports the argument for the use of digital models. The object has changed from an end-in-itself to a means-to-an-end; if the value of a museum object is its ability to impart information or sustain a narrative, rather than intrinsic worth, then a digital model that could impart the information or support the narrative equally well could easily be substituted for the object. Would it follow, then, that we could replace all objects in our museum with digital copies (or indeed any other information containing object, such as a textbook) provided they support the story as effectively?5 The medium is irrelevant; only the message is important. And yet museums do contain objects. The reason for a museum visit may vary—recreation, entertainment, a social experience or learning—but museums’ enduring popularity is also related to their collections. As Falk and Dierking (2013) stated, museums’ continuing popularity is due to the public’s need for ‘reverential experiences’ (p. 46). Perhaps we have not moved far from the legislative museum after all. 248

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Aura and affectual power This idea of ‘reverential experiences’ is important. Not only is it somehow integral to what we might think of as the archetypal museum experience, it also marks a clear distinction between CH’s professional and public worlds. While a museum curator may feel reverence for the objects they handle, it is irrelevant to their interactions with them or their digital surrogates. However, if an element of reverence is part of a museum visitor’s interaction with an object, and what allows/encourages people to engage with CH, then what import does that have for a public-facing digital surrogate? While the requirements for digital surrogacy for both professional and public-facing models are the same (i.e. the model can substitute for the object for a particular purpose), the purposes differ. In both cases, the model can be considered successful if the viewer’s purpose is fulfilled; the professional acquires a measurement or some information, the member of the public engages with the model and perhaps learns something or is entertained. However, if the ability for members of the public to engage with a museum object is related to the ‘reverential experience’, we must examine how, or if, a digitised model can evoke this type of experience. This question is related to Benjamin’s (1939) concept of ‘aura’ (p. 61). His aura represents an ineffable quality inherent in the object, which is not captured by any form of mechanical reproduction.6 Whatever you think of his arguments, Benjamin’s concept as applicable to CH objects is useful and would seem to have an intuitive validity; these objects do seem to have a particular power to evoke emotional responses in viewers. This ability to elicit an emotional response can be described as the affectual power of an object. Witcomb (2007) described an object’s power to affect alteration as an emotional response to an object that through imagination and empathy allows us to ‘experience what it is to be “other”’ (p. 41) and thereby come to a greater understanding. Many other authors (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000; Messham-Muir, 2005; Muller, 2002) have referred to a similar power in museum objects, often framed in terms of the potential of an object to engender feelings of empathy in the viewer. Some objects may have affectual power due to their materials, craftsmanship or aesthetic qualities.7 However, for many objects, the aura is derived not from the object’s material and physical properties but its history, its unique biography, to borrow another of Benjamin’s terms. An otherwise mundane object becomes part of our heritage due to its connection with a historical figure or event. For an example of this affectual power in a real museum object, Messham-Muir (2005) recollected an exhibit of shoes, part of a larger Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. Focusing on a single shoe, the experience profoundly affected him, the ‘raw stark materiality’ of the object providing a link between the observer and the shoe’s owner, 60 years in the past. He discussed our relationships with objects and how they allow us to ‘enter into powerful empathic relationships that seem to transcend place and time’ (Messham-Muir, 2005, p. 6). But the author’s reverential experience is clearly due to more than simply the stark physical facts of the exhibit. It is a result of three things: the context of the exhibit itself, including the extra information imparted by the shoe being presented within the larger context of both the Holocaust exhibition and the Imperial War Museum itself; the context provided by the author’s knowledge and experience of the Holocaust; and ultimately, the shoe itself, the material object with a biography that intersects historical events. These three things work together to induce the empathic response and lead the viewer to a greater understanding. Another, perhaps less emotive example comes from the lead author’s experience and involves the Petrie museum’s ancient (c.2800 BC) Tarkhan dress.8 While damaged and

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decayed, it is still instantly recognisable and despite its condition, could easily pass for a modern article of clothing. On its own, the item invoked no particular emotional response. However, the context of the exhibit, in this case the label text, explains how the object was found inside-out on the floor of a dwelling, as if it had been taken off and thrown down.9 It was only after reading the label that an involuntary and powerful emotional response was experienced, as if the millennia had been compressed; the simple action of taking off a piece of clothing and throwing it, inside-out, on the floor is such a basic human experience that an immediate sense of empathy with the past was felt. Neither the label nor object alone were sufficient to elicit this response. Again, we observe the affectual power of an exhibit as a product of multiple sources: in this case, the context provided by the label information, individual experiences and the object itself.

The cultural heritage object in the age of digital reproduction So how does this concept of aura or an object’s affectual power relate to digital, virtual copies? On the surface, it would seem to argue against the utility of public-facing 3D models; if what makes a museum object special is its affectual power, a product of an aura which is in turn a product of the object, there does not seem much hope. As Messham-Muir (2005) stated, it was the object’s ‘raw materiality’ that induced the response. How could even a perfect digital model of the shoe evoke the same emotional response? Unless we are dealing with a purely aesthetic object, the aura seems to have little to do with its surface properties, and it is the surface, after all, that is the sole domain of current models of digitisation. Taking our digital model in isolation, the prognosis would be poor. It is difficult to determine where its aura, and subsequently its affectual power, will come from. However, as we have observed, modern museum objects are rarely viewed in isolation. Instead, they are presented in context, as parts of a narrative. There are good examples of this type of presentation in the 3D digitised arena—for example, the Smithsonian X3D project includes multimedia tours that combine interactive 3D models with other content, to create immersive narratives (e.g. the Repatriation and Replication of the Kéet S’aaxw [Killer Whale Hat, Smithsonian, n.d.]).10 Even on platforms such as Sketchfab, the ability to annotate models and add audio content11 allows for 3D models to be presented with a certain amount of context. Nevertheless, most public-facing models presented online are still viewed in isolation, divorced from a larger exhibition context or any overarching narrative. The purpose of these models is unclear; there is a hint of technological determinism about their provision. The shoe or shirt on their own, are mundane and unremarkable. In the contexts of their respective exhibits, collections and provenance, they have aura. Thus, the question is not does our virtual object have an aura, but can an entire exhibit have affectual power when one part of it, the object itself, is replaced with a digital copy?

Case study: the science museum’s shipping gallery scan Before its closure in 2012, the Shipping Gallery was London’s Science Museum’s largest single space and its oldest surviving exhibition. Opened in 1963 and containing over 1,800 individual exhibits, the gallery showcased maritime technology, the evolution of shipping and an array of model ships. Largely untouched since the 1960s, the gallery’s floorplan felt rather dense compared to the rest of the museum (for comparison, the gallery that now fills the space contains just 800 exhibits)12 and while the objects were arranged with a rough 250

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chronological flow, there was no clear path or obvious signposting. Labels on individual exhibits often featured long, manually typed chunks of text and there was little interactivity or attempt to place exhibits in a wider context. The ‘old-fashioned’ nature of the exhibition and its incongruity within the museum as a whole was reflected in attendance. Even during the museum’s busiest times, the gallery was often deserted.13 When the Science Museum decided to replace the Shipping Gallery with a new exhibition, the Making of Modern Communication, it approached UCL to discuss the possibility of using laser scanning to create a permanent record. ScanLAB,14 a company formed by two former UCL students specialising in large-scale terrestrial scanning, were engaged to complete the scan and produce a video from the data. The gallery was scanned over five nights using two Faro Photon 120 terrestrial laser scanners, capable of capturing up to one million points per second, with a maximum range of 120 m and an accuracy of +/–2 mm at 10 m. Colour was obtained from panoramic images taken by a DSLR camera attached to the scanner and projected onto the point cloud. Over four months, the 275 individual scans, comprising approximately 10 billion points, were colourised, registered and cleaned of noise. Due to software limitations, only 17 per cent of the total data was used in rendering a seven-minute fly-through video. The finished clip was sent to the gallery’s curator, David Rooney, to record a narration, and Box of Toys Audio15 composed incidental music and added sound effects. The finished video was published on 22 July, 2013 and can be viewed on the Science Museum’s website16 and YouTube channel.17 Research was conducted on the video via a survey linked on the Science Museum website, and through the analysis of comments left on social media and the various sites that embedded the video.18 The survey, comment analysis and quantitative analysis of likes on the Museum’s YouTube channel showed a strong positive reaction to the video (Hindmarch, 2016, p. 150). Despite its overall popularity, there were some common complaints (made in some cases by users who otherwise enjoyed the video and rated it highly), namely the lack of detail and poor informational content. Even with two billion points, the model’s resolution of a point every few millimetres meant that much of the detailing on the intricately featured model ships was lost (see Figures 21.2 and 21.3). With each point rendered as an individual pixel, the model appears translucent rather than solid; the exhibits are often suggested rather than shown explicitly. The scan neither approaches, nor attempts, ‘photo-realism’ and taken simply as a source of informational content is unsatisfactory. If the purpose of the Shipping Gallery scan was to allow users to extract detailed information about the exhibits in the gallery, it would have to be considered a failure, and yet by most metrics, the project was a success. At this point, we return to the concept of a digitised model not simply as a carrier of information, but as something viewed in a wider context as part of a narrative with the potential for affectual power. In this case, the context is provided by the narration and audio components and the wider narrative is the story of the gallery itself. Its affectual power can be perceived in the emotional language used in the comments submitted to the survey and websites, often referring to feelings of nostalgia and sadness at the gallery’s demise, and indeed the emotive responses engendered by the video (e.g. ‘I actually applauded at the end of that!’).19 The divisive presentation of the point cloud model also has relevance. One of the survey questions specifically referred to the ‘ghostly’ style, and therefore, could be construed as a leading question. However, commenters on other websites also used this and synonymous terms unprompted (‘That is at the same time beautiful and very very ghostly’, ‘ghost-like images’ and ‘The 3D model is very spooky’). Perhaps serendipitously, the rendering style, as 251

Figure 21.2 Render from the Shipping Gallery model. View from the southern end of the gallery showing the model’s point cloud rendering. Note the ghostly, translucent nature of the walls. Source: Hindmarch (2016, p. 145) with acknowledgement to ScanLAB.

Figure 21.3 Still from the Shipping Gallery video, showing the figurehead from HMS North Star. Again, note the translucent nature of the objects. Source: Hindmarch (2016) with acknowledgement to ScanLAB.

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much an aesthetic choice as a constraint of the available data, fits the narrative and mood of the video. It is, after all, a memorial to something that is no longer with us, and the elegiac tones of both the incidental music and narration complement the ‘ghostly’ nature of the translucent point cloud aesthetic. The power of the three aspects—visuals, narration and music—to come together and evoke emotion in the viewer is summed up by one comment: ‘Great. Now I’m feeling wistfulness over the non-existence of a place I never knew existed.’ We can also examine the context beyond the video itself. The survey indicates the video was most popular among those who already had familiarity with, and positive feeling towards, the Shipping Gallery. The digital resource is not the only factor to be considered when evaluating its success; the wider context includes people’s memories. The exhibition’s longevity had allowed it to become a focus for emotional recollections of family and childhood, with commenters reminiscing about visits many decades ago (‘You have made a 3D rendering of our 4D world. I wish that you could go the last step and bring my Grandad back so we could walk around together’). Other comments referred to the gallery’s context in terms of the history of shipping and its particular connection with British history, Empire and the recollection of a (real or imagined) golden age entangled with notions of sea power. These, for some viewers of the video, are in themselves emotive subjects. Thus, the Shipping Gallery itself, and to a certain extent, the scan and the video, become carriers of a much larger significance, in much the same way that Messham-Muir’s (2005) shoe carries the context of the Holocaust.

Conclusions and recommendations It certainly seems possible that the digitised version of the Shipping Gallery has inherited some of the gallery’s aura. Whether that aura is present in the data—the point cloud—or is a product of the visualisation, music and narration, or indeed of an even wider context that includes viewers’ own experiences and cultural baggage, is an open question. However, as we saw in the examples of museum exhibits, it is neither uncommon nor problematic for an object’s aura to be a product of the object-plus-context. While many 3D models of museum and other GLAM institution objects are currently created without clear purpose, it is important not to treat the output of the digitisation process in isolation, stripped of the context provided by the surrounding material. In a museum, an exhibit acquires context almost by default. There is its physical location among other, perhaps similar, objects which together tell a larger story. A digital model displayed in isolation is stripped of this additional context. A digital model of a shoe displayed in isolation will be a digital model of a shoe; a digital model of the entire exhibit, with the shoe presented in context, perhaps embedded in a larger virtual museum with additional sources of information, may look like something else entirely. Another reason for cautious optimism is that while we do not have a physical connection— there is none of Messham-Muir’s (2005) ‘stark materiality’—with the virtual object, neither do we have a physical relationship with the vast majority of museum objects anyway; we are usually separated by glass and/or distance. Pallud (2009) advanced a phenomenology-based argument that simply viewing an object is a flawed experience, and that the ability to touch or manipulate objects contributes to a better experience. Obviously, without the use of haptic technology we cannot ‘touch’ virtual objects, and in the case of the Shipping Gallery’s noninteractive video, we have no control. However, we can often spin virtual objects, zoom in and out and examine particular areas at will. This interaction may lead to a richer engagement 253

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with the digital model than we might perhaps have with an object in a display, and this engagement might in turn increase the virtual object’s affectual power. The limits of currently available scanning technology mean that no 3D model can be an exact replica of a museum object. While this raises issues around the copying of CH objects and the information-carrying purposes to which these models can be put, we believe digitised objects can still fulfil other purposes, but these purposes require considerations beyond the digitisation process itself. We propose that the purpose of creating a 3D model of a CH object is clearly stated before acquisition work even begins; only by clearly defining purpose and scope is a model useful, usable and understandable for advancing a museum’s remit.

Notes 1 OED www.oed.com/view/Entry/195052?rskey=I1ZpJY&result=1#eid. 2 OED www.oed.com/view/Entry/193078?rskey=W4uhUq&result=1#eid. 3 With the possible exception of specialist materials used in calibration devices, such as Spectrolon— www.labsphere.com/labsphere-products-solutions/materials-coatings-2/targets-standards/diffusereflectance-standards/diffuse-reflectance-standards/ (accessed 14/3/18). 4 ‘Specular’ (as opposed to diffuse) reflections are mirror-like reflections of light from an object’s surface, where the amount of reflected light seen by the viewer is highly dependent on the position of both viewer and light source; objects that exhibit strong specularity tend to show sharp, bright highlights. 5 See, for example, ‘Caravaggio: An Impossible Exhibition’, a multimedia exhibition including 65 high-resolution images of Caravaggio’s works. Retrieved from www.beniculturali.it/mibac/export/ MiBAC/sito-MiBAC/Contenuti/MibacUnif/Eventi/visualizza_asset.html_88273758.html. 6 For Benjamin, mechanical reproduction has a history as long as art itself; from copies of ancient Greek statuary through woodcuts and engravings and up to the new technology of the day, photography and film. One can only imagine what he would have thought of 3D digitisation. 7 These may still require some pre-existing knowledge in the viewer: the value of gold and other precious materials, the skills required to create something of beauty as well, perhaps, as aesthetic values inherited from their culture. 8 www.ucl.ac.uk/culture/petrie-museum/tarkhan-dress. 9 The ‘as if’ is important here, demonstrating that this is, of course, an interpretation of the facts—or simply speculation on behalf of the curatorial staff: an example of the importance of context and the malleability of an object’s ‘true’ biography. 10 Retrieved from http://legacy.3d.si.edu/tour/repatriation-and-replication-k%C3%A9et-s%E2%80% 99aaxw. 11 See for example items from the British Museum’s Sketchfab collection, such as their Rosetta Stone model with audio commentary: https://sketchfab.com/models/1e03509704a3490e99a173e53b93e282? ref=related (accessed 12/3/18). 12 https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2014/10/analysis-the-science-museum-information-agegallery/. 13 For example, a comment below the video on metafilter (www.metafilter.com/130281/Scrappedbut-not-forgotten): ‘This is sad also because the Shipping Gallery had a few benches where you could eat your lunch in complete peace, even during the school holidays … Always deserted.’ 14 ScanLAB is a terrestrial laser scanning company set up by two former students of UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture. They create point cloud models for a diverse set of clients including architecture firms, television productions, artists, Greenpeace and cultural heritage organisations. See scanlabprojects.co.uk for examples of their work. 15 www.boxoftoysaudio.com/. 16 www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/about_us/history/shipping.aspx. 17 www.YouTube.com/watch?v=gDTbFhFZl9I. 18 Hindmarch (2016), Chapter 4.9, p. 150. A total of 35 survey respondents and approximately 120 comments and tweets were analysed. 19 All comments, from both the survey and the web can be read in Hindmarch (2016), Appendix A, pp. 342–363. 254

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References Arnold, D. & Geser, G. (2008). EPOCH research agenda for the applications of ICT to cultural heritage full report. Budapest: Archaeolingua. Benjamin, W. (1939). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction In D. M. Kellner & M. G. Durham (Eds.), Media and cultural studies. Key-works (2nd ed., pp. 37–52). Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell. British Museum. (n.d.). Rosetta Stone model, Sketchfab collection. Retrieved from https://sketchfab.com/ models/1e03509704a3490e99a173e53b93e282?ref=related Cameron, F. & Kenderdine, S. (2007). Beyond the cult of the replicant: Museums and historical digital objects: Traditional concerns, new discourses. In F. Cameron & S. Kenderdine (Eds.), Theorizing digital cultural heritage: A critical discourse (pp. 49–75). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Casey, V. (2003). The museum effect: Gazing from object to performance in the contemporary culturalhistory museum. In X. Perrot (Ed.), International cultural heritage informatics meeting: Proceedings from ichim03, 2, 1-21. Chakrabarty, D. (2002). Museums in late democracies. Humanities Research, IX(1), 5–12. Falk, J. H. & Dierking, L. D. (2013). The museum experience revisited. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Gurian, E. H. (1999). What is the object of this exercise? A meandering exploration of the many meanings of objects in museums. Daedalus, 128(3), 163–183. Hawkins, T., Cohen, J. & Debevec, P. (2001). A photometric approach to digitizing cultural artefacts. In Proceedings of the 2001 conference on virtual reality, archaeology, and cultural heritage (pp. 333–342). New York, NY: ACM. Hess, M. (2015). A metric test object informed by user requirements for better 3D recording of cultural heritage (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1471114/ Hess, M., Millar, F. S., Ong, Y. H., MacDonald, S., Robson, S., Brown, I. & Were, G. (2008, July). E-Curator: 3D colour scans for object assessment. Paper presented at EVA 2008 London Conference. Hess, M., Robson, S., Millar, F. S., Were, G., Hviding, E. & Berg, A. C. (2009a). Niabara—The Western Solomon Islands war canoe at the British Museum—3D documentation, virtual reconstruction and digital repatriation. In VSMM’09 15th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia (pp. 41–46). DOI: 10.1109/VSMM.2009.12 Hess, M., Were, G., Brown, I., MacDonald, S., Robson, S. & Simon Millar, F. (2009b). E-Curator: a 3D Web-based archive for conservators and curators. In Ariadne online magazine for information professionals in archives, libraries and museums in all sectors. Issue 60. www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/hess-et-al. Hindmarch, J. (2016). Investigating the use of 3D digitisation for public facing applications in cultural heritage institutions (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1527400/ Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2000). Museums and the interpretation of visual culture. London: Routledge. ICOM. (2004). Code of ethics, section 2. Retrieved from https://icom.museum/wp-content/uploads/ 2018/07/ICOM-code-En-web.pdf ICOM Statutes. (2007). 21st General Conference in Vienna, Austria. Retrieved from http://icom.museum/ the-vision/museum-definition/ MacDonald, S. (2001). Behind the scenes at the science museum: Knowing, making and using. In M. Bouquet (Ed.), Academic anthropology and the museum: Back to the future (pp. 117–140). Oxford: Bergahn Books. Messham-Muir, K. (2005). Affect, interpretation and technology. Open Museum Journal, 7(1). Metallo, A. & Rossi, V. (2011). The future of three-dimensional imaging and museum applications. Curator, The Museum Journal, 54(1), 63–69. Mudge, M., Ashley, M. & Schroer, C. (2007, October). A digital future for cultural heritage. Paper presented at the XXI International CIPA Symposium, Athens. DOI: 10.1.1.222.4779 Muller, K. (2002). Museums and virtuality. Curator, The Museum Journal, 45(1), 21-33. Murat, K. (2018). A survey of BSDF measurements and representations. Journal of Science and Engineering, 20(58), 87–102. DOI: 10.21205/deufmd.2018205808 Museums Association. (n.d.). Code of Ethics for Museums. Retrieved from www.museumsassociation.org/ ethics/code-of-ethics Pallud, J. (2009). The application of a phenomenological framework to assess user experience with museum technologies. In ECIS 2009 Proceedings. https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2009/395

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Schwartz, C., Sarlette, R., Weinmann, M. & Klein, R. (2013). Dome II: A parallelized BTF acquisition system. In Proceedings of the Eurographics 2013 workshop on material appearance modelling: Issues and acquisition (pp. 25–31). Switzerland: Eurographics Association. DOI: 10.2312/MAM.MAM2013.025-031 Singh, G. (2014). CultLab3D: Digitizing cultural heritage. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 34 (3), 4–5. DOI: 10.1109/MCG.2014.48 Smithsonian Institute X3D. (n.d.). Kéet S’aaxw (Killer Whale Hat). Retrieved from http://legacy.3d.si. edu/tour/repatriation-and-replication-k%C3%A9et-s%E2%80%99aaxw UNESCO. (1978). Recommendation for the protection of movable cultural property. Retrieved from http:// portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13137&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201. html Witcomb, A. (2007). The materiality of virtual technologies. In F. Cameron & S. Kenderdine (Eds.), Theorizing digital cultural heritage: A critical discourse (pp. 35–48). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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22 Configuring slow technology through social and embodied interaction Making time for reflection in augmented reality museum experiences with young visitors Areti Galani and Rachel Clarke

Introduction The use of digital technology to create engaging experiences in museum settings has attracted the interest of museum professionals, digital technologists and designers alike. Significant investment and activity in this area of research and practice has resulted in a number of recent high-profile permanent gallery developments; for example, Gallery One—launched in 2013 and relaunched as ARTLENS Gallery in 2017 in Cleveland Art Museum—used ‘an innovative blend of art and technology’ to invite ‘visitors to connect actively with the art on view through exploration and creativity’ (Alexander, Barton & Goeser, 2013). This institution-led activity is further complemented by numerous temporary and event-based digital interventions in the museum space, spanning digital interactive art installations to augmented/mixed and virtual reality mobile experiences, gaming and guided visits by artificial intelligence-driven robots, to mention just a few. These technologies often aim to provide ‘an additional layer of content’ (Marshall et al., 2016) and an alternative way of storytelling for a variety of museum audiences by augmenting the museum space with digital information such as audiovisual materials, real and fictional representations of the past and future, and novel interactions. One area that has seen significant development in recent years is the use of augmented reality in museum and heritage contexts. Parry (2007) traced the use of immersive and ‘make-believe’ approaches in museums back to the 1800s to establish ‘performance, theatricality and “virtuality” as defining characteristics of the museum’ (p. 75). Augmented reality digital applications engaging children with both their natural and cultural/historical

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environment also have a long tradition; they span early experiments in using mobile and augmented reality technology to simulate the experience of savannah animals (Facer et al., 2004) to current uses of augmented reality technology to enable children to experience the natural environment (e.g. Rowe, 2014), art (e.g. Price, Sakr & Jewitt, 2016), the past (e.g. Hall & Bannon, 2006) and imaginary worlds (e.g. Snibbe & Raffle, 2009). Augmented reality has been associated with offering children enhanced opportunities for learning through an embodied, immersive, multisensory and playful engagement with the museum environment. Hall and Bannon (2006), reporting on children’s engagement with digitally augmented museum objects in the Hunt Museum, highlighted that ubiquitous technology that disappeared within the fabric of the exhibition led to prolonged and discovery-based engagement and learning among children; they also raised issues around the need for scaffolding children’s experience before and during the visit. Further, Snibbe and Raffle (2009), reflecting on their extensive experience of creating social immersive media displays for history, science and art museums, emphasised the role of the body as ‘an “input device,” unencumbered by electronic props’ and urged us to design for behaviours that prioritise social rather than individualistic experiences of immersion in museums (p. 1447, see also Hindmarsh, Heath, Vom Lehn & Cleverly, 2002). Scholars and practitioners, therefore, have shown an interest in technology that shifts from the traditional paradigm of augmented reality delivered on screen-based mobile devices and single-user interfaces, to adopt a more holistic approach to the augmentation of the museum environment that considers the physical, social and embodied dimensions of space. In this context, ideas borrowed from the concept of slow technology (Hallnäs & Redström, 2001), such as the distinction between technologies that are ‘tools explicitly used in specific situations’ to support specific tasks, and technologies that ‘are more or less continuously present as part of a designed environment’, are particularly useful in understanding experiences of dwelling, engagement and reflection among young museum visitors and their families (p. 201). In the philosophy of slow technology, the purposeful use of ‘slowness in learning, understanding and presence’ gives people ‘time to think and reflect’ (Hallnäs & Redström, 2001, p. 203; see also Odom et al., 2014). Drawing on empirical work from a research-through-design (RtD) augmented reality museum project in Newcastle upon Tyne (UK), this chapter reflects on the place and role of slow technology in engaging young audiences and their families during facilitated and non-facilitated museum visits. While empirical studies of augmented reality installations in museums exist, focused empirical work of museum digital interventions using slow technology and specifically encompassing young visitors, their families and museum facilitators are less forthcoming. By focusing on the work of museum facilitators with young people through technology, the chapter acknowledges that meaningful interactions in augmented reality museum spaces are co-constructed. This not only occurs through the interaction of young people with the technology, but also through interactions with learning facilitators, members of the family group, and the narrative and physical environment of each installation. Further, the chapter considers how assumptions, expectations, skills and working practices of museum learning facilitators shape the way slow technologies are embedded in museum experiences and the kind of experiences that these come to engender. The following sections introduce the digital interactive installation The Borrowers and outline the methodological approach of its study with young visitors, their families and museum facilitators. Drawing on vignettes from an ethnographic study with visitors and 258

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museum facilitators, we critically reflect on how the space of interaction is dialogically reimagined by facilitators and young people and how slow technology supports, or challenges, embodied engagement with the exhibition environment. The chapter concludes with a discussion of key emerging topics from the empirical study, specifically how slow technology encourages a reconceptualisation of museum dwelling. Further, it discusses how the social, spatial and artefact ecologies of these environments reflexively constitute augmented reality museum experiences and enable reflection around both technology and museum content.

The Borrowers display The Borrowers interactive installation1 was developed for the Nuffin’ Like a Puffin exhibition, a celebration of 70 years of Puffin books in Seven Stories, The National Centre for Children’s Books. The exhibition was organised chronologically, spanning from 1941 to recent Puffin publications, and opened to the public in June 2010 for 12 months. The exhibition space was partitioned into rooms dedicated to specific books, combining original material from the archive, child-size sets of selected scenes and activities based on each story. The Borrowers room was located at the beginning of the exhibition. The room was set up like a living room; it had three walls, which exhibited a small number of original framed illustrations, edited manuscripts and letters from the archive alongside a writing shelf with paper, colour pencils, a message board and a copy of The Borrowers by Mary Norton. On the large main wall, facing visitors as they entered the room, a grandfather clock with framed original illustrations either side provided the locus of the installation. The purpose of The Borrowers installation was to create a sense of immersion for visitors, akin to making a visit to the Borrowers’ home and catching the Clocks family, small people living under the floorboards and behind the walls of an ordinary house, going about their daily business. The nature of the interaction was expected to be both playful and engaging, where the visitor would be presented with a variety of possible experiences with the Borrowers. The interactive installation consisted of video-projected characters from the book, Pod and Arrietty, a small man and girl, each of around 10 cm in height. They would pop up and down above frames, run out from behind the grandfather clock, hide behind pieces of paper and carry pencils (see Figure 22.1). Characters appeared intermittently, replicating the hiding behaviour of the Borrowers described in the book. The projections of the Borrowers were triggered by the movement of visitors in the room via a face-tracking camera, embedded in the grandfather clock keyhole. The system was able to track people in the room and infer how crowded the room was, whether they were big or small based on their height, and how far people stood from the clock. This enabled the system to broadly distinguish between adults and children, as well as quiet and busy moments, and generate different projection patterns depending on the nature of visitor presence in the room. When children (i.e. small-in-height visitors) were sensed, the Borrowers would appear. If the tracking technology sensed taller visitors, the characters would disappear and remain hidden. Similarly, it was more likely for the Borrowers to be active when the room was less busy and, conversely, remain hidden or pretend to freeze when the room was crowded. The installation ran continuously; no buttons or other mechanisms were obvious in the room to trigger its operation. Therefore, it favoured ‘continuous interactions’ and ‘visceral interrelationships between multiple users’ (Snibbe & Raffle, 2009) rather than the more commonly adopted paradigm of ‘discrete interactions’ between users and technological interfaces in museums (p. 1449). 259

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Methodology: designing for and understanding slow interactions The Borrowers installation was informed by a mixed method RtD approach. This combined the development of an artefact, an augmented reality installation, to inquire into alternative forms of interaction for young people in museums. Frayling (1993) described examples of RtD as ‘development work … customising a piece of technology to do something that noone has considered before and communicating the results’ (p. 5). Zimmerman, Forlizzi and Evenson (2007) described the approach as creating artefacts that produce ‘novel integrations’ of research to make a product that transforms existing worlds ‘from a current state to a preferred state’, generating exemplars of theory and practice (p. 493). The RtD approach in the case of the Borrowers focused on demonstrating an alternative approach to current interaction design for museums, supporting young people, families and teachers to experience a slower, more open reflective engagement with the story. In December 2010, when the exhibition had been open to the public for six months, a study was conducted with visitors and learning facilitators using qualitative interviews and observations. These ethnographic methods were considered appropriate to capture people’s engagement with the installation and the Borrowers display. In this process, Bilda, Edmonds and Candy’s (2008) framework for understanding engagement with interactive spaces and exhibits as adaptation, learning, anticipation and deeper understanding was also useful. We conducted 16 hours of ethnographic observation and nine exit interviews with family groups

Figure 22.1 View of The Borrowers augmented reality installation with all projected states of the characters shown to demonstrate the spread of their visibility across the wall. Only one of these projected states would appear at any one time. Source: The authors (Copyright).

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of between two and four people, across two weekends. We observed five hours of school and family-based learning activities within the Borrowers room and across the exhibition.2 One-hour semi-structured interviews were conducted with the duty manager, assistant curator and three learning facilitators. Ethnographic field notes were taken from observations and discussions with eight front-of-house staff. The data collected were thematically analysed (Clarke & Braun, 2014) to understand how the technology supported particular kinds of social and reflective experiences with archival collections and museum settings. Drawing on this material, the following sections utilise excerpts from our ethnographic fieldnotes to outline two key themes that emerged in the study: the role of facilitation for intermittent and anticipatory interaction, and the role of slowness in embodied curiosity and co-constructed imagination.

Facilitation for intermittent and anticipatory interaction In their study of how children experience museum space, Hackett, Procter and Kummerfeld (2018) argued that the physicality of the museum environment plays a significant role in how families come to be together in the museum as the ‘material design of space becomes entangled both with children’s embodied explorations and their social encounters’ (p. 9). In the case of the Borrowers, augmented reality installation, the material design, and more specifically, its apparent lack of materiality, had a significant effect on occasional family visitors, who were observed to not fully engage, or, indeed, notice the installation unless prompted by a member of staff. Rather, young people and their families were immediately drawn to bright colours, sounds and highly stimulating analogue interactive content elsewhere in the overall exhibition space. Although moments of shared experiences, reflection and discussion among families were observed, these were brief, and the intermittent nature of the interaction was often missed. While the ubiquitous character of the technology and the sense of surprise were important aspects of the intended narrative of the installation, and accurately reflected the book’s main idea (i.e. the Borrowers only come out when they are least likely to be spotted), the subtle and intermittent nature of the projection, and the rather subdued design of the specific room, created a friction between the ‘imagined use of space’ and its ‘embodied experience’ (Hackett et al., 2018, p. 12) among casual family visitors. Conversely, the facilitated school and family sessions enabled a very different social and physical exhibition space to emerge through the interactions between young people, family participants, the installation and museum facilitators. Although there has been much recent work on the importance of involving and designing heritage experiences with young people (e.g. Hall & Bannon, 2006; Iversen & Smith, 2012), the role of museum facilitators in providing additional scaffolding and storytelling in augmented reality and calm technology installations in museums has been less explored. However, in the context of augmented reality technologies to support children’s learning in the museum, Hall and Bannon (2006) highlighted ‘the need for expert help present to assist children’ (p. 241), while Tscholl and Lindgren (2014), Taylor et al. (2015) and Price et al. (2016) acknowledged the role of parents, gallery interpreters and teachers respectively, in supporting children’s engagement through conversation and suggestions. In the Borrowers room, facilitators’ contributions were essential for crafting introductions and co-constructing meaning for young people to connect them with the archive and the story. While each session included an age-specific contextual introduction to the exhibition and the Borrowers’ story, they were each adapted to the specific expertise of the facilitators and required ongoing improvisation for the specific age group and their potential interests. This was considered important for staff who 261

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recognised that many children and adults would not necessarily know The Borrowers—which was initially published in the 1950s with very few contemporary renditions—and so the room may have not immediately engaged them or even made sense to them. In those facilitated sessions, the Borrowers room, as well as other adjacent exhibition spaces, was mobilised by the facilitators in storytelling and interaction-setting. For instance, learning facilitator Laurie3 utilised the space outside the Borrowers room and the slowness of the technology to conjure a sense of anticipation by encouraging the children to behave in a way so as not to frighten the characters that they had not yet seen. Working with a small group of nursery children between the ages of four and five, accompanied by five adults, she combined details in The Borrowers with references to Santa, to bring the characters into the here and now of the children’s lives. This balanced the suspense and excitement of something about to happen, with the immediacy of the particular seasonality, connecting it to the children’s familiar worlds: She brought the group into the main exhibition space and asked them to sit on a carpeted area near the Borrowers room as she sat on her knees facing the children, away from the view of the installation. Since the session was in December, she asked the children if they would be Santa’s little helpers because there were some presents for some little people and she needed help to give them out. She explained that the people were very small and carefully took The Borrowers book from a sack. Laurie gestured with her finger and thumb the Borrowers’ small size, and asked the children to do the same, describing and performing how they borrow people’s things and make them into new things, and how they might be frightened of people. As they headed into the room, she explained that if the children were careful and quiet, they might just see one, as she crept with fingers on lips encouraging the children to do the same. Conversely, learning facilitator Casey focused on more active detection of key features of the exhibition as a prelude to engaging with the Borrowers. For Casey, this was a way for ‘kids to get excited about manuscripts and illustrations … and excited about reading’, key objectives in the Seven Stories exhibition and facilitation strategy. She worked with a family group of 15 children between four and seven years old with adults including parents, guardians and grandparents. Here, the emphasis was much more on the use of props to encourage children to physically interrogate the rooms and their visual features: Before children entered the exhibition, Casey gave out magnifying glasses. Once in the exhibition space, children were asked to use their magnifying glasses to look for the Puffin logo, which was a way of accustoming children to looking closely for small details. When she led them into the Borrowers room and asked them to look out for some little people who might be hiding, almost immediately the children began to point and shout that they had seen them. They crowded around the specific places on the wall with their magnifying glasses where the Borrowers had been seen. Casey encouraged the children to look closer at the details of the framed illustrations with their magnifying glasses when they were waiting for further appearances from the Borrowers. These anticipatory aspects of facilitation also made use of the facilitators’ personal responses to the sense of uncertainty with the technology.4 Facilitator Beth highlighted the ‘unpredictability’ of The Borrowers installation as a defining characteristic: ‘you’re just not sure when 262

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they’re going to appear’. This uncertainty was described as a key benefit, mirroring the ‘secretive’ nature of the Borrowers and underlining the playful hiding aspects of the story. However, it also meant that facilitators felt they needed to play with the installation themselves and learn how to accommodate it in their facilitating practices. When discussing how they had developed their approaches, Laurie described how she had learnt that it was important to introduce the children to The Borrowers book before they went into the room itself and spotted the characters. She did this by encouraging children to start ‘perceiving themselves as giants’, a familiar character in stories that she hoped they could relate to, and help them ‘step into a picture, step into a character’. This highly curated framing prior to entering the Borrowers room was developed and individualised by facilitators who had learnt that to attempt to do this in the room would be, as Beth suggested, ‘fighting a losing battle … because you get lost in the whole craziness of excitement’ when the children spotted the Borrowers. In this respect, the variability of interaction afforded by The Borrowers installation enabled what Hackett et al. (2018) called ‘chance of space’ (after Massey) to be materialised differently each time through embodied physical and social interactions among the session participants, the facilitators and the physical environment and its augmentation.

Embodied curiosity and co-constructed imagination The connection between the story and the interactions afforded by the installation was clearly demonstrated when the Borrowers were noticed by visitors, which always led to an elevated level of shared excitement. Adults responded by pointing and encouraging their children to physically look for the Borrowers. Children responded to this by actively looking for them, using their whole bodies to interrogate the space, searching the physical aspects of the room implicated in the augmentation such as the clock and picture frames on the wall, or trying to peer underneath the floor (see Figures 22.2 and 22.3). Children’s intensive bodily interaction and physical engagement with augmented reality installations in museums is reported in many studies; Snibbe and Raffle (2009) and Price et al. (2016) delved deeper by providing suggestions on the design of specific aspects of the technology, such as the use of shadows and symbols to facilitate the mapping between actions and system responses to encourage physical engagement. Their insights, however, reflect their focus on whole-body interactive immersive systems that are designed to generate audiovisual feedback to explicit user actions rather than subtler forms of slow augmented reality systems such as The Borrowers installation, which did not explicitly aim to encourage intricate physicality. We also observed young visitors being carried away by their physical, embodied and immersive engagement with the space afforded by the installation: for example, when facilitator Laurie brought young children into the Borrowers room with finger on lips, creeping and crouching, encouraging them to follow her actions: Once in the room, she asked them to sit down and point when they thought they might have seen a Borrower. After a minute of children looking around, she told the group that the Borrowers might not come out because the group might be too loud, and she asked them to put an invisibility cloak over their heads, but to keep on looking. The attentive children copied Laurie’s action of putting the cloak over their heads while swivelling their heads round to keep watching. A child broke the hushed concentration and shouted ‘There. There!’ and pointed when he saw the Borrowers on the wall, to which the rest of the children began to squeal. Laurie asked them ‘what would you do if they stole your socks?’. The children were

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Figure 22.2 A child peeks under the floor of the exhibition space next to the grandfather clock near where he has observed a Borrower. Source: The authors (Copyright).

Figure 22.3 In the same session, another child searches behind a curtain to the side of the illustrations when he cannot immediately observe a Borrower. Source: The authors (Copyright).

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so fixated on the wall with the grandfather clock and on spotting Borrowers, shouting and pointing when they saw the characters, that they didn’t answer her question. These evidently embodied responses were also common in older children; however, they often focused on making sense of what was real and what was make-believe: After Casey’s facilitated session, discussed in the previous section, and once the group had left the Borrowers room, one of the girls aged seven returned to the room five times while the rest of the group were engaged with activities elsewhere. The girl continued to look for the Borrowers with her magnifying glass on the floor and walls and shouted to other children in another part of the exhibition when she had seen one. A couple of older girls came into the room with an older adult and tried to convince the younger girl that ‘they’re just a projector that’s making the pictures. They’re not real’, but the younger girl responded by saying ‘no, that’s just there to let us know that they’re there’. The two older girls continued to try and convince the young girl that it was not real, but she refused to listen, shaking her head and saying no. The researcher encouraged the younger girl to knock on the wall to see where they were hiding. Both the young girl and one of the older girls knocked on the wall where Pod was seen before; this brought the girls closer to the wall, and inadvertently outside the camera’s field of view. At that point both Pod’s and Arrietty’s heads popped up above one of the framed illustrations and the girls all gasped and laughed. Other observations captured more elaborate embodied explorations of both the projections in the installation and the overall physicality of the Borrowers room. These explorations often appeared to contravene the spirit of The Borrowers, but they aligned, we argue, with children’s curiosity towards unfamiliar and novel technology: On the same occasion discussed above, one of the older girls poked the top of the Borrower’s head with her index finger and her friend copied. They moved their fingers down so the projection was on their fingers and hands and they tried hard to push each other’s fingers out of the way—a behaviour also observed by Rowe (2014) in augmented reality projection mapping museum installations of creepy crawlies. The smaller girl stretched up to reach the Borrower with her magnifying glass to look at it more closely. Shortly after this, one of the older girls and the younger girl left. The older adult asked the remaining girl: ‘Do you want to go anywhere else? Do you want to have a look round?’. The girl replied ‘No. I want to stay here. This is good.’ Despite the apparent success of the engaged interactions during and after facilitated sessions, it is worth acknowledging that for some facilitators and family visitors, it was difficult to see how sensors and, consequently the projected animated figures, were responding directly to people in the room. Visitors were observed trialling possible trigger actions, such as knocking on walls. However, serendipitous interaction with the technology through unanticipated encounters proved particularly effective in supporting belief in the characters as sentient little beings going about their daily lives. This was evident from visitors’ actions beyond the immediate moment of interaction with The Borrowers installation. For example, some message board comments and drawings in the Borrowers room directly referenced specific aspects of the installation, such as Arrietty carrying a pencil. Further, museum staff noted that some visitors left small gifts for the Borrowers in the installation space. These 265

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often fleeting and more anecdotal insights further highlight how people engaged with the overall environment of the installation, reflecting and responding to what they saw through embodied curiosity, sociability and imagination.

Discussion—designing for dwelling and reflective augmentation The study of The Borrowers installation suggested that slow augmented reality technology in museums cannot be understood outside its social spatial and artefact ecology. For example, focusing only on the interactions between the installation and the young people would disregard consideration of the richness of the experience emerging from the initial anticipatory practices of the learning facilitators outside the room. Similarly, examining only the interactions of occasional family visitors would have obscured the sophisticated level of engagement that took place in the facilitated sessions, which encouraged many young people to step into the roles of the children in the story, returning repeatedly to see if the Borrowers were there and continuing to reflect on their miniature worlds once the sessions had finished. The study also highlighted the indivisible, and somewhat conflictive, relationship between the space imagined by the augmented reality installation design and the physicality of the Borrowers room, which was materialised through a parallel but separate design process from that of the installation. As Hackett et al. (2018) noted, the materiality of the exhibition is important for facilitating specific kinds of social encounters within physical space (see also Hindmarsh et al., 2002 on the idea of museum physical and technological assemblies). The study indicated that although the room incorporated opportunities to spend time in the space, in the form of a writing shelf and pens and paper, their arrangement facing away from the Borrowers projection did not necessarily offer opportunities for more social interaction and co-constructed reflection. In this respect, the Borrowers room gave the impression that it was designed for ‘use’ rather than ‘presence’, a key distinction in slow technology (Hallnäs & Redström, 2001). The facilitated sessions with the installation created the conditions for the materiality of the room to be re-imagined, as the floorboards, frames and skirting boards became the interfaces of the children’s imagined worlds, through the viewers’ embodied actions of looking, pointing, crawling, poking and stroking, sometimes for prolonged periods. In this complex ecology of abstract, physical, social and embodied dimensions (Hackett et al., 2018) of the Borrowers room, dwelling emerged as both a key challenge and an opportunity to understand visitors’ experiences with The Borrowers installation. Dwell time is often used to measure visitor engagement in museums, while interactive technologies have been shown to increase visitors’ dwell time without necessarily extending their engagement with the museum environment (e.g. Vom Lehn & Heath, 2005). In museum literature, dwell time is explained as the length of time visitors spend in the gallery. Hallnäs and Redström (2001, p. 203) also reflected on the idea of time in slow technology and suggested that the distinction between fast (i.e. task and/or activity oriented) and slow technology is not about ‘time perception’ but ‘time presence’ as the slowness of the technology extends ‘the moment of [its] explicit use to longer periods of time associated with dwelling’ (p. 201). Viewed this way, dwell time engendered by the slow and calm nature of The Borrowers installation is not the result of visitors spending time interacting with the installation but instead is the visitors’ way of making time for new reflective experiences of the Borrowers. Dwell time in the Borrowers room was also configured through embodied interaction. The installation itself required a slowing down of movement to come to its own, while at the same time, the physical design of the room—for example, lack of cushions and soft seats 266

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(see Hackett et al., 2018)—and the apparent invisibility of the augmentation encouraged quick moving behaviours among family visitors. In this context, experiences of ‘anticipation’ crafted by the learning facilitators gave permission to young visitors and their families to expand their accumulated ‘history of interactions’ (Hale, 2012, p. 198) with museum environments and museum technologies, often connected to task-oriented digital experiences, and negotiate novelty and familiarity necessary for ‘achieving emotional and intellectual impact’ (p. 199). Dwelling behaviours among children and their families emerged through the social and embodied interactions with the learning facilitators and the museum space, comprising both the physical architecture of the room and the interactional opportunities offered by the installation. Similarly, the augmented space of the Borrowers room emerged reflexively through the dwelling and movement behaviours of its visitors. In the case of The Borrowers installation, this was evident not only through the children’s physical dwelling in the room, but also through their repeat engagement with the room during their visit, to check the Borrowers’ whereabouts and to bring them gifts, suggesting a reflective and empathetic engagement with the Borrowers. Aside the moments of reflection among visitors, especially when young visitors’ dwelling enabled them to move from their initial intensively physical engagement with the space to different forms of engagement, dwelling had a significant impact on the reflective practices of the learning facilitators. Discussing the experience of working with The Borrowers installation for six months, facilitators reflected on highly situated ways of mobilising the characteristics of the technology in their practice. These very situated responses from facilitators were supported by what they recognised as qualitative novel differences between The Borrowers augmented reality interactive installation and other interactive technologies previously used in exhibitions. Beth described this difference as ‘its magic and its ability to captivate a whole group rather than support individual interaction. It’s truly interactive and useful as a way into the story.’ Casey highlighted the difference between previous large interactive installations that usually incurred damage because kids treated it as ‘soft play’ versus the elusive nature of the Borrowers: ‘they’re there and then they’re not, so they’re being secretive and so kids respect it. There’s an instant connection between the interaction and the story.’ McCarthy and Wright (2004) discussed how unanticipated events can prompt moments of reflection on what may have gone wrong, as a person seeks a sense of fulfilment from the experience. In this sense, introducing slow technology that momentarily disrupted the expectations of the facilitators prompted reflection on how to adapt and work with the technology to suit their needs and the needs of their visitors (see also Chalmers & Galani, 2004). Therefore, the use of ‘slow’ technology that was different and unfamiliar to previous experiences encouraged a more sustained interrogation and improvisation with its unpredictability. It also engendered what Odom et al. (2014) called, ‘deeper perceptions of value and meaning’ associated with museum technology at large (p. 1962).

Conclusion This chapter draws on the empirical study of The Borrowers augmented reality installation that used the principles of slow technology in a museum context to engage young visitors and their families with the story and materiality of The Borrowers by Mary Norton. Key aspects of slow technology, such as dwelling and reflection, were discussed in relation to social, spatial and embodied experiences of the installation. Our own experience and reflections on the study with young visitors and their families suggests that augmented reality 267

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technology that adopts principles from the philosophy of slow technology can support emerging trends in museum design that aim to engender reflective and empathetic responses to museum content. We suggest that this RtD investigation, which combined slow technology with augmented reality in the museum context, enables us to reconceptualise augmented reality technology not only as an additional, stand-alone, alternative layer of museum interpretation, but as a means of engendering rich embodied and contextually relevant interactions for young people, their families and museum facilitators that can expand their imaginaries of museum experiences and technology. However, this potentiality of the technology is likely to be materialised where slow technology is developed as part of a carefully designed environment that acknowledges its entanglements with visitors’ accumulated history of interactions, and the social and embodied experiences of museum spaces.

Acknowledgements We wish to thank all members of staff and visitors in Seven Stories, The National Centre for Children’s Books, for their participation in the study. The Borrowers interactive installation discussed in this research was developed through a Collaborative Innovation Partnership (CIP) between Newcastle University and Seven Stories, funded by One NorthEast.

Notes 1 The project was developed as part of a Collaborative Innovation Partnership (CIP) between Newcastle University and Seven Stories, funded by One NorthEast (now defunct). 2 Due to local institutional policies related to privacy, no photographs or audio/video recordings were taken during those sessions. The observations were recorded using field notes. 3 Pseudonyms have been used in this chapter. 4 Training on how the augmented reality interactive installation worked and the assumptions embedded in its design was provided to all learning facilitators by the research team at the time of the installation.

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Hall, T. & Bannon, L. (2006). Designing ubiquitous computing to enhance children’s learning in museums. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 22, 231–243. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2006.00177.x. Hallnäs, L. & Redström, J. (2001). Slow technology—Designing for reflection. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 5(3), 201–212. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/PL00000019 Hindmarsh, J., Heath, C., Vom Lehn, D. & Cleverly, J. (2002). Creating assemblies: Aboard the ghost ship. In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 156–165). New York, NY: ACM. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/587078.587101 Iversen, O. S. & Smith, R. C. (2012). Scandinavian participatory design: Dialogic curation with teenagers. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 106– 115). New York, NY: ACM. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2307096.2307109 Marshall, M. T., Dulake, N., Ciolfi, L., Duranti, D., Kockelkorn, H. & Petrelli, D. (2016). Using tangible smart replicas as controls for an interactive museum exhibition. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 156–167). New York, NY: ACM. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/2839462.2839493 McCarthy, J. & Wright, P. (2004). Technology as experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Odom, W. T., Sellen, A. J., Banks, R., Kirk, D. S., Regan, T., Selby, M., … Zimmerman, J. (2014). Designing for slowness, anticipation and re-visitation: A long term field study of the photobox. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1961–1970). New York, NY: ACM. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557178 Parry, R. (2007). Recoding the museum. London: Routledge. Price, S., Sakr, M. & Jewitt, C. (2016). Exploring whole-body interaction and design for museums. Interacting with Computers, 28(5), 569–583. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwv032 Rowe, A. (2014). Designing for engagement in mixed reality experiences that combine projection mapping and camera-based interaction. Digital Creativity, 25(2), 155–168. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14626268.2013.835737 Snibbe, S. S. & Raffle, H. S. (2009). Social immersive media: Pursuing best practices for multi-user interactive camera/projector exhibits. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1447–1456). New York, NY: ACM. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518920 Taylor, R., Bowers, J., Nissen, B., Wood, G., Chaudhry, Q., Wright, P., … Bearpark, R. (2015). Making magic: Designing for open interactions in museum settings. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition (pp. 313–322). New York, NY: ACM. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1145/2757226.2757241 Tscholl, M. & Lindgren, R. (2014). Empowering digital interactions with real world conversation. TechTrends, 58(1), 56–63. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-013-0721-6 Vom Lehn, D. & Heath, C. (2005). Accounting for new technology in museum exhibitions. International Journal of Arts Management, 7(3), 11–21. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/41064849 Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J. L. & Evenson, S. (2007). Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 493–502). New York, NY: ACM. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/1240624.1240704

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23 Exhibition design and professional theories The development of an astronomy exhibition Dirk vom Lehn, Kate Sang, Richard Glassborow and Louise King

Introduction Scientists, policymakers and science educators are concerned with people’s disengagement with and lack of interest in science. Since the late 1990s, science centres, museums and other science-related exhibitions have been developed all around the world to re-engage people with science and scientific debates (Hein, 1990). The case study examined here is an example of an exhibition created during this science exhibition boom. While a large body of research explores visitors’ engagement with science in these kinds of exhibitions (Falk & Dierking, 2000; Hein, 1998), there is a dearth of studies investigating the development of science exhibitions. This chapter is an important initial step to address this gap in research. It contributes to related research on exhibition design and curatorial work conducted in the context of art exhibitions (Acord, 2010; Acord & DeNora, 2008; Kreps, 2003). Our study focuses strongly on professional theories about the ‘imagined audience’ that underpins the work of the interactive designer and his team. These professional theories are critical tools and resources for the designer and his or her team when they generate ideas for exhibits that are supposed to engage the audience with scientific concepts of astronomy, such as light waves and gravity. At the time, when team members develop the exhibition, they do not yet know its audience. The uncertainty about audience is increased by the fact that the observatory is frequented not only by local people, but also by tourists from all over the world. As we will show in the analysis, the design team decided to develop interactive exhibits, some of which involved the use of digital technology. The team thereby was concerned about overshadowing visitors’ experience with digital features of the exhibition. The chapter explores the development of the exhibition from initial ideas through to the deployment of exhibits. We will investigate how members of the design team deployed professional theories about the imagined audience to inform the development of the interactive exhibits.

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Methods and data For the purpose of the research, the first author of this paper regularly met with the creative director and interactive designer during the design process and conducted informal narrative interviews, during which notes were taken and documents relevant to the design process were copied. The interviews lasted for about an hour each and were set up to obtain an understanding of the organisation of the design process and to identify challenges. In this sense, we followed what Holstein and Gubrium (1995) call an ‘active interview’. The interviewee is not considered a passive ‘vessel waiting to be tapped’; rather, the interviewer and interviewee collaborate in the interview. In interviews, participants were encouraged to specify their perspectives and explicate their views on the content of the exhibition. Within the interviews and discussions, participants used diagrams, sketches and reports by an external audience consultant to discuss their exhibition concepts and ideas. We used these visual and written documents to support our analysis of the design process and its relationship to the audience (Silverman, 2001, 2009). The content of the interviews and discussions, together with the visual and written material, was systematically examined to allow us to explicate how the creative director and the broader design team conceptualise the audience and its behaviour. The analysis initially examined the data for references to the audience and its behaviour. We then returned to the interactive designer and creative director for further informal discussions about their views of the visitors to further focus the analysis. The analysis allowed us to understand how the design team progressed with the design process up to the deployment of the exhibits in the observatory. The members of the design team were informed that they were participating in a research project. At the beginning of the project, the interactive designer introduced the researcher to the members of the team. The researcher explained the purpose of the project and informed participants of their right to withdraw from the research at any point. As we proceeded with the analysis, the interactive designer and creative director became increasingly interested in using the research process to reflect on their work. Their increasing involvement in the analysis led to the decision to co-author this paper, which enhanced the reflective process (cf. Schön, 1983).

From audience research to exhibition design There is hardly any product that is not tested with consumers or at least based on knowledge about consumers’ preferences before it is developed. The purpose of audience research with consumers prior to and during the process of product development is to ensure the market success of new products (van Kleef, van Trijp & Luning, 2005). This is true for new products in all industries, including tourism and museums (Hodgson, 1990). The audience research undertaken for the development of new exhibitions has methodological similarities to sociological research concerned with participation in the arts; it uses surveys and interview techniques to identify different segments of the population who are visitors or non-visitors of museums (Hanquinet, 2013; Hanquinet, Roose & Savage, 2013; Tolmie, Benford, Greenhalgh, Rodden & Reeves, 2014). However, it differs in purpose, as it is undertaken to inform the development of a particular exhibition rather than to investigate people’s interest and engagement in the arts generally. In this section, we explore how the design team used information about the audience to communicate its decisions about exhibition themes and content.

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Informing exhibition design through audience research When the managers of the observatory decided to renew parts of the exhibition, they employed a consultant with expertise in museum audiences to explore the socio-demographic composition of its current audience and investigate current visitors’ attitude towards and knowledge of astronomy. The consultant conducted a survey of visitors attending the existing exhibition in the observatory and undertook qualitative interviews with teachers, members of the local community and visitors in the present gallery. From her analysis, the consultant produced a report that created a typology of audiences: ‘local audience’, ‘overseas visitors’, ‘family visitors’ and ‘formal education groups’. The analysis of the interviews with audience members led her to suggest that people considered astronomy very ‘technical’, ‘scientific’ and ‘difficult to access’. The audience consultant’s report provided exhibition management with valuable information for the writing of the design brief that was used to tender for a design team. Management also used the information in the report to offer the successful tendering design team information about the likely audience of the redeveloped galleries, the anticipated audience’s motivations, interests, knowledge, attitudes and expectations towards astronomy, and the forms of audience engagement anticipated or desired in the new exhibition. Moreover, the discussions between management and design team, and the report itself, generated information used by the design team to develop the exhibition.

The design team and design approach The design team comprised an exhibitions manager and interactive designer, who worked with specialists from other companies for the production of the exhibits. The exhibitions manager had many years’ experience in exhibition design and was therefore able to mediate, manage and facilitate the specialists, who were from outside the museum, into a small core team. As part of regular meetings with the observatory’s management, the team presented ideas and progress reports on the redevelopment of the galleries. Communication about the project was underpinned by a general model, the design approach (see Figure 23.1). This approach allowed team members to present the project coherently to different audiences. The design approach used by the interactive designer—employed in several other projects—helps team members describe the relationship between audience, (exhibition) content and (exhibition) interpretation. Figure 23.1 shows the three components of the model and highlights variables that further specify them. Despite its generic nature, the model is sufficiently flexible to allow adaptations of its components regarding the specific requirements of design projects. While the three core components of the approach—audience, content and interpretation—remain unchanged, how the members of the design team refer to these components, relate them with each other and discuss them varies. This depends on the specific situation in which the design team discusses particular aspects of the project. Therefore, the model is a key tool to maintain and demonstrate the coherence of the project that is produced and advanced by the designer, exhibition managers, museum management, fabricators and museum educators. The malleability of the model for use in different contexts is ensured by its generic components that participants can specify in discussion to pursue their individual agendas while talking a common language. The model is of particular importance when, in meetings with management, the designer explains the reasoning behind his or her decisions. In the following, we will explore how the interactive designer used the design approach by interweaving it with information about the audience to communicate design ideas and decisions.

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Figure 23.1 The ‘design approach’: The key tool to communicate about the exhibition. Source: Photo by Dirk vom Lehn.

Interpreting concepts, designing exhibits: deploying professional theories The design team and museum management met regularly throughout the project. In initial meetings, the team used the audience consultant’s report to develop a ‘proposal’ for the galleries. Over the course of the project, this proposal was further developed and turned into a series of ‘content plans and scheme designs’, which were delivered in subsequent meetings. At these meetings, the interactive designer used the design approach as a template that was progressively turned from a generic model into a description of what the exhibits will achieve and how they will appear when deployed in the gallery. During the design process, plans and proposals were subject to changes but eventually, they resulted in concrete exhibits installed on the exhibition floor. These exhibits were developed regarding themes related to astronomy that the management had identified as key for the exhibition: ‘the universe’, ‘galaxies’, ‘stars’, ‘planets’, ‘gravity’ and ‘light’. From here, the design process involved decisions about the content of the exhibition. The team members conducted desk research to identify phenomena linked to these themes and explored ways these phenomena could be interpreted technically and intellectually for the expected audience.

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Throughout the design process, management and design team have information only about the current audience and people living in the neighbourhood. They use this information to speculate about the audience that will visit the exhibition and combine it with: • • • • •

their experience from other projects their academic training knowledge of visitor behaviour acquired from reading visitor research literature their own visits to museums hearsay and so on.

This helps generate professional theories about the identity and demographics of audiences, their innate interest and knowledge about astronomy, their agendas, expectations and motives, and their behaviour in the galleries. Regarding the development of the galleries in the observatory, the design team deployed three professional theories when accounting for their design decisions: ‘People want interactivity’, ‘interaction and collaboration enhance participation and learning’ and ‘people want to connect with experts’.

People want interactivity The decision for the development of an interactive exhibition originated in the audience consultant’s finding that interviewees felt astronomy was a very ‘abstract science’ that they find ‘difficult to access’. Although the design team’s decisions were not based on scientific research, in presentations and discussions the interactive designer referred to scientific research to account for suggestions and decisions about the development of interactives. In particular, the interactive designer drew on constructivist theories that argue hands-on activities are more effective in increasing people’s attention and facilitating learning than are more passive forms of engagement. In his presentations, he occasionally mentioned Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, and referred to contemporary discussions in visitor research and museum education, such as publications on learning in and from museums by Falk and Dierking (2000) and Hein (1998). Through these scientific arguments, the interactive designer underpinned decisions about the deployment of interactives that encourage people to actively engage with exhibits. He implied that ‘interaction with exhibits’ can reduce the intellectual ‘distance’ between the audience and the ‘abstract science’ of astronomy. Having decided to develop an exhibition that at its heart will be ‘interactive’, the design team and museum management had to make further decisions on how to interpret the ‘big issues’ of ‘the universe’, ‘galaxies’, ‘stars’, ‘planets’, ‘gravity’ and ‘light’ through interactive exhibits. One exhibit was concerned with the astronomers’ tools and ‘how they know what they know’. The Dice Interactive (see Figure 23.2) interprets ‘the computer modelling of gravity’ by offering visitors the opportunity to conduct experiments with and understand the workings of gravitational forces in space. The exhibit encourages them to arrange a number of dice with different symbols on them—each representing a planet or other mass—on a tabletop. The dice embody the variables relevant to the effects of gravity in one intuitive interface; the size of each dice indicates the mass of the object, and the number of arrows printed on each face of the dice indicates the speed and direction of movement. The distance between the dice represents distance between objects in space. An industrial vision recognition system captures the initial condition of the dice and the symbols on them, and a computer system translates and displays this information on a computer screen. When the 274

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Figure 23.2 The Dice Interactive exhibit. Source: Photo by author.

computer model is activated, the result displayed is a computer-generated model of how the objects would behave according to the laws of gravity—orbiting, colliding or escaping objects. A flipbook is provided to guide visitors towards interesting and revealing ways of arranging the dice or to facilitate their own experimentation. The interpretation of gravity through this interactive exhibit embodies the design team and management’s theory that ‘people want interactivity’ and that learning about the abstract concept of ‘gravity’ will be enhanced through interaction. They expect that people’s apprehension of astronomy as ‘abstract’ and ‘difficult’ (consultant report) can be refuted if they engage ‘hands-on’ with an exhibit related to this abstract concept. The exhibit allows people to play with the dice without needing to understand complex science. As they play, experiment, inquire and observe the exhibit’s response to their action, including reading associated information in the flipbook,

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there is, as the designer says, ‘hopefully a progressive closing of the gap between “difficult” abstract concepts and visitors’ knowledge and understanding’ (interactive designer). The flipbook provides a clear illustration of the role of theories in design. It was added late in the design process as a supplement to the exhibit, ‘not as instructions’ but as ‘prompts’ (interactive designer) designed to appeal to different types of user behaviour or learning style. As such, this simple device combines both academic and professional theories. Further, as a sequel to the exhibition under discussion, the visitor behaviour observed in summative evaluation of this device and its role in user engagement with the whole exhibit influenced further development of the interactive designer’s theories in support of subsequent projects. In another exhibit, the design team interpreted ‘light’ as a continuum of the electromagnetic spectrum, of which visible light is only a small part, using interactive exhibits such as The Infra-red Camera (see Figure 23.3). The exhibit comprises an infra-red camera mounted

Figure 23.3 The Infra-red Camera exhibit. Source: Photo by Dirk vom Lehn.

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above a table and directed down towards a plastic filter that is opaque to visible light but transparent to infra-red light. Visitors are directed by the design and the exhibit label to place one of their hands underneath this filter. Due to the physical properties of the filter, the hand cannot be seen with the naked eye. Yet, when they look up to a display screen next to the camera, they see an image of their hand captured by the infra-red camera (which can indeed ‘see’ through the filter). The exhibit offers a direct encounter with a phenomenon and first-hand ‘proof’ that information can be detected using ‘light’ outside the spectrum visible to our eyes. Like The Dice Interactive, The Infra-red Camera exhibit uses an activity by a visitor to encourage participation in and engagement with an abstract scientific concept. The idea for the exhibit is based on the design team’s professional theory that people want interactivity and that interactivity can be used to kindle visitors’ interest in science, maintain their attention on a scientific problem and support visitors’ understanding of abstract scientific concepts like light waves. The professional theories have been derived from information gathered at visitor studies conferences and from academic literature on visitor behaviour and learning. These two exhibits are exemplary for the interactives deployed in the galleries of the observatory. Their design starts with information about the audience from the consultant’s report and general themes in astronomy that the exhibition management considered central to the galleries and key to the exhibition. In discussion with the creative designers, the exhibition management, his team and the interactive designer interpreted the generic content and created ‘interactives’ that closed the intellectual gap between visitors and the academic discipline of ‘astronomy’ through ‘hands-on activities’. In addition to these two interactives, the design team developed exhibits that encouraged a range of different interactive exhibits, such as a telescope powered by a computer system that allowed visitors to explore a virtual night sky, and an interactive exhibit that enabled visitors to observe a selection of space objects using different frequencies of light. The design of these and other exhibits in the observatory were based on the theory that people want interactivity. In meetings, the exhibition management often referred to this theory to account for design decisions.

Interaction and collaboration enhance participation and learning From the interviews, it transpired that most visitors came to the exhibition with family or friends. In interviews with the audience consultant, visitors highlighted that they came to ‘spend family time’ and ‘have fun’. The interviewees’ emphasis on the social aspects of the museum visit, coupled with academic literature that highlights the importance of social interaction and talk for cognitive development and learning (Falk & Dierking, 2000; Lave & Rogoff, 1984; Vom Lehn, 2010; Vom Lehn, Heath & Hindmarsh, 2005), encouraged the designer to propose exhibits that facilitate and support collaboration and discussion. The designer knew from his experience with other exhibitions that such collaborative exhibits also needed to work for individual visitors. Together with his team, he proposed and developed a computer-based interactive, Space Probe, that allowed between one and three people to simultaneously engage in a game. This game simulated the collaboration among a team of space scientists and engineers working together to launch a rocket into space. Space Probe is a large installation comprising three individual workstations in front of a large screen equipped with loudspeakers that publicise information related to the activity throughout the gallery (see Figure 23.4).

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Figure 23.4 The Space Probe exhibit. Source: Photo by Dirk vom Lehn.

The design team intended for the game to be played by up to three players, each standing at one of the touchscreen systems; if there are fewer than three players present, the computer system takes on the role of the (missing) team members, allowing the exhibit to work for individuals or two visitors. The players each take a different role in a team—engineer, scientist and communications officer—that is given the task of equipping a probe with the correct instruments to explore outer space. The design of the exhibit interpreted the theme ‘space’ and demonstrated to visitors that knowledge about astronomy is critical for space travel and the launching of rockets. The design of the exhibit and the structure of the game enabled collaboration between unacquainted people who just happened to arrive at the exhibit at the same time. The design team drew on professional theories about interaction, academic literature and information from the audience report stating that people enjoy the social experience of museums to develop an exhibit that facilitates collaborative participation in a game related to the abstract concept of space and space travel. Moreover, the design of the exhibit shows the team’s response to information about the audience’s ‘wants’ and ‘agendas’ as voiced in interviews with the consultant. This information provided the designer and management with a rationale for the deployment of this exhibit, which allows small groups and families to jointly engage in the activity.

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Figure 23.5 Astronomy questions. Source: Photo by Dirk vom Lehn.

People want to connect with experts The consultant’s report stated, ‘the audience, overall, knows the observatory’s historic connection with time and space, but believes it to be an aloof and difficult place’. It also suggested the creation of a space in which visitors could ‘meet experts’ and learn about space through ‘talking with’ and ‘listening to’ actual astronomers. Seeing and hearing astronomers talk intelligibly about their discipline and its relevance to questions people have about space was considered by the exhibition management a way to make the discipline more approachable and further close the intellectual gap between the ‘difficult’ and ‘abstract’ discipline of astronomy and the audience. However, it was clear that to have actual astronomers in the galleries on a regular basis and respond to people’s questions about scientific concepts was too costly and impractical for the observatory. Moreover, some visitors’ questions could be answered by the knowledgeable staff in the planetarium in the same building, where films related to astronomy and the solar system were shown several times a day. Hence, management decided to structure the exhibition in a three-part way. In the first room, a short film was shown on a wall-sized screen that introduced the audience to the abstract concepts of astronomy in a gentle but inspiring way. The room and film were provided by a specialist design company. Having viewed this introductory film about

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stars, the Milky Way and astronomy, visitors continue their journey through the observatory in the interactive galleries (Gallery 2) and in the third and final gallery, where the design team— together with the creative designer and exhibition management—deployed an exhibit that allowed visitors to hear answers to astronomy questions from experts (see Figure 23.5). Astronomy Questions invites visitors to sit on a stool or stand at a large table that has a continuously moving star-scape projected onto the surface. By moving a hands-on ‘probe’, visitors can select a target space object within the star-scape. When an object is selected, a visual link is made between the table and a vertical screen behind it; a video shows an astronomer discussing the phenomenon. As the astronomer explains his or her work, key questions visitors might ask are displayed on the table. Questions selected by the visitor will then be answered by the scientist in a pre-recorded video. The table is about three metres long and has three movable stools. The screens are large enough and the audio sufficiently loud to allow people standing in the second and third rows to watch and hear the video. The design of the exhibit combines interactivity—the use of the probes on the table—with watching videos that show astronomers responding to questions about astronomy. The design and deployment of the exhibit embodies the design team and management’s theories about people’s behaviour in the gallery. Interaction with the exhibit gives people the impression that they control the questions asked at the exhibit. Further, the design of films features large headshots of astronomers, indicating that they are talking directly to the person at the screen. Thus, the pre-recorded responses to questions about astronomy are perceived as responses to the ‘user’ of the exhibit, although they really have been produced for a generic audience. The design of the gallery allows visitors to experience the exhibit differently. The people on stools at the table experience the answers directly. Others can follow from positions in the second row, where—as third parties—they view the videos that have been selected by those at the table. Thus, the design of the exhibit, together with its placement in the galleries, draws on the design team’s theories about the audience. From the consultant’s report and their reading of the literature, the designer and exhibition manager know that people usually come with others to museums. They also know that the exhibition, at least at times, will be very busy and not all visitors will be able to find a stool. Hence, they decided to create space in which people can stand and observe the events at the exhibit, and hear and learn about astronomy by watching the video. Third parties become an audience, not only to visitors’ use of the cones on the table, but also to the exhibit’s responses (i.e. the video showing an astronomer discussing a scientific question or phenomenon).

Discussion This chapter has discussed some intellectual resources used by design teams when creating an exhibition for an observatory. It shows how the team’s generic concept, the design approach (see Figure 23.1), is coupled with information about the current audience of the observatory, and knowledge about visitor behaviour and learning to assemble professional theories about the audience. We have discussed three such theories that were regularly used by members of the design team, who discussed the project and presented it to the observatory’s management. The audience referred to by members of the design team is an ‘imagined audience’, not the audience that visits the exhibition after its deployment in the observatory. The notion of the ‘imagined audience’, sometimes defined as ‘a person’s mental conceptualization of the people with whom he or she is communicating’ (Litt, 2012, p. 330; cf. Macdonald, 2002), 280

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originates in communication studies and research into face-to-face interactions (Litt, 2012). It often implies a psychological conception that is thought to help participants to align their conduct with each other in situations. Our study begins to reveal that the ‘imagined audience’ is socially constructed in the design process by all those participating. Its construction is derived from the consultant’s report about ‘the audience’ and from ‘professional theories’ about visitor behaviour and people’s experience of the exhibition assembled by the interactive designer and members of the design team. The professional theories that inform the communication about design ideas, proposals and decisions are social and collaborative attainments by all those involved in the development of the exhibition. This collaborative attainment involves the audience research consultant, her report about the ‘audience’ and discussions about the project between the creative director, interactive designer and design team. In these discussions, the designer and members of the team interweave information from the consultant’s report with their knowledge of visitor behaviour, which is drawn from academic literature and their personal experience in exhibitions. At this stage of the design process, the consultant, design team and museum management do not know the real audience; they rely on theories of visitors’ interest in and attitudes towards astronomy and science, and theories of visitor behaviour to make decisions about exhibits. The professional theories are not a stable construct; they are a flexible tool used in discussions, meetings and presentations. The participants are able to maintain coherence when talking about the design of the exhibition by linking the theories with their generic design approach, which captures the relationship between interpretation, content and audience. The visualisation is sufficiently generic and malleable to allow its use in communication with the various stakeholders in the project, thus maintaining coherence in the communication. It allows the designer to translate contingent information about the audience and the exhibition, as well as emerging ideas and requests communicated by the museum management into concrete design proposals and decisions. Moreover, by referring to the same visualisation in meetings throughout the project, the designer is able to present the process as coherent; there might be changes in the detail, but the general structure of the project is maintained. Thus, design proposals and decisions about exhibition content and the interpretation are legitimised by embedding them within a concept that, according to the designer, when used in meetings with the team and museum management, has proven effective and useful. By studying how the interactive designer and his team use professional theories in communications about their work, we begin to observe that these theories are not stable objects; rather, they are contingent and collaborative constructs that designers deploy for the practical purposes at hand. In this chapter, we have only touched on this link between professional theories and the work of designers. Future research will examine audio recordings and field notes from the design meetings to unpack the creative process and how it draws on professional theories. Save for these findings about the process of exhibition design, the chapter is an example of a multidisciplinary collaboration between a sociologist, the principal author, a marketing scholar and two members of the design team who were actively involved in the design project under scrutiny. Their design work has been the subject of the study. Therefore, the analysis has taken considerable time, as sociologists and designers have discussed the interpretation of the data. The interpretation process and the co-writing of the article have given the designers opportunities to reflect on their work and apply the learnings to their practice in this project (Schön, 1983). The co-analysis of other design projects will advance this reflective process, and we will determine if it influences designers’ work.

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24 Meeting the challenge of the immoveable Experiencing Mogao Grottoes Cave 45 with immersive technology1 Jeffrey Levin, Robert Checchi, Lori Wong, Garson Yu and Edwin Baker

Introduction The 2016 Getty Center exhibition Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road introduced the remarkable Mogao Grottoes to the United States (US) public. Dating from the 4th to 14th centuries, Mogao, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site near the city of Dunhuang in Northwest China, includes nearly 500 decorated cave temples excavated into a 1.6 km cliff face and comprises the largest surviving body of Buddhist art in China. This chapter explores the collaborative creation of this award-winning and highly innovative exhibition that included a gallery exhibition, physical replicas and a virtual immersive experience which aimed to take visitors on a journey that simulated the real experience of visiting the Magao Grottoes. Critical reflections on the process of designing and implementing new visual and virtual technologies present challenges and observations that can inform future internationally significant cultural projects and exhibitions. Cave Temples of Dunhuang was organised by the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), the Getty Research Institute (GRI) and the Dunhuang Academy (DA),2 with The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation as the presenting sponsor. The exhibition was sparked by the nearly 30-year international partnership between the GCI and the DA to conserve and protect Mogao. Since 1989, under a collaborative agreement with China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage, the GCI and the DA have worked together to address issues related to the conservation and management of the site. This landmark exhibition—the first major showcase in North America focused on Mogao—celebrated its art and history but also honoured the monumental role the DA has played in preserving the site. The Mogao Grottoes is located in the stark desert landscape of Northwest China near the ancient town of Dunhuang, a cosmopolitan hub on the Silk Road. From the beginning, a major challenge for the exhibition organisers was conveying to visitors in Los Angeles the 283

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physicality and magnificence, as well as the fragility and conservation needs, of a site located on the other side of the world. An innovative solution the exhibition employed to address this challenge utilised three-dimensional (3D) spherical stereoscopic technology to recreate Cave 45, one of the great artistic and religious masterpieces of Mogao. Digital technology enabled visitors to be immersed in a narrated guided tour of the stunning wall paintings and sculpture of Cave 45, similar to what a visitor might experience in a tour of the actual Cave 45. This replication of a visit to a Dunhuang cave temple was a highlight of the Getty Center exhibition.

Overview of exhibition The exhibition was designed with three major components. One component was an exhibit in the GRI galleries that featured over 40 artefacts discovered in 1900 in the famed Library Cave3 of the Mogao Grottoes. These works—including paintings, embroideries, sketches and ritual diagrams lent from the British Museum, the British Library, the Musée Guimet and the Bibliothèque nationale de France—illustrated for the visitor the cultural significance of the site and the diverse ideas, beliefs, languages, cultures, religions and artistic styles present along the Silk Road. Many of these objects had rarely, if ever, travelled to the US. The gallery portion of the exhibition also included videos and displays on the history and conservation of Mogao, including the efforts by the GCI and DA to preserve and protect the site. While the GRI galleries offered a scholarly approach to the material, the exhibition’s other components were designed to offer a physical sense and experiential encounter with the Buddhist cave temples themselves. Artists from the DA’s Fine Arts Institute provided full-size handpainted replicas of three Mogao cave temples. The replicas were installed in a climate-controlled enclosure on the Getty Center’s arrival plaza, and visitors were allowed a set amount of time in each replica; every visitor was given an information sheet highlighting selected elements in each replica. For logistical reasons, guided tours were not possible, and this precluded substantial interpretation of the wall paintings or sculpture groups. The Cave 45 Virtual Immersive Experience—the third exhibition component—filled this gap by presenting a ‘guided’ experience offering detailed description of the sculpture group and wall paintings by means of an audio narration, replicating a visit to this cave temple.

Replication The Cave 45 Virtual Immersive Experience embodied an important thread running throughout the exhibition—the theme of replication. In Buddhism, the duplication of sacred words and the replication of images was an expression of devotion and a means of gaining merit in the afterlife. Over the 1,000-year period in which Mogao was an active place of worship, the commissioning of cave temples was also undertaken as a devotional act, done to accrue religious merit. Many of the cave temples have strikingly similar decoration and iconography, evidence of a systematic production of caves, executed by workshops, which enabled hundreds of caves to be hewn from the cliff and decorated with exquisite painting and sculpture. Thus, the caves themselves were, in a way, ‘replicated’ in a practice central to Buddhism. The exhibition illustrates the theme of replication in each of its three components. Through original objects from the Library Cave exhibited in the main gallery—freehand sketches, pounces and woodblock prints of repeated Buddha motifs—concepts of originality and authenticity were examined. One of the highlights of the exhibition, the Diamond 284

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Sutra, a sacred Mahayana Buddhist text dating to the year 868, exemplifies the replication theme. Coming to the Getty from the British Library, the Diamond Sutra is the world’s oldest dated complete printed book. The technology of printing allowed for multiple copies of a sutra to be commissioned and quickly produced as a way of earning karmic merit (although this rare and exceptional copy is the only one known to have survived). While no longer done for religious purposes, the tradition of replication and copying was reinstated at Dunhuang in the modern era. Since the 1940s, the DA has created full-scale, handpainted cave temple replicas that offer visitors to Mogao a way to experience some of the cave temples generally closed for their protection. In China, the traditional view of replication differs from that of the West, as copying is considered critical for artistic training and educating the public. In the case of the Cave Temples of Dunhuang exhibition, replicas of Caves 275 (5th century CE), 285 (6th century CE) and 320 (8th century CE) were brought to the Getty. Two of these replicas, Caves 285 and 320, were commissioned specifically for the exhibition.4 Through the three components of the exhibition—the gallery exhibit, the three physical cave temple replicas and the Cave 45 Virtual Immersive Experience—the exhibition team was able to engage with visitors in three different ways and use the theme of replication as a connective thread. The gallery exhibit provided a traditional scholarly approach to the content with objects, labels and didactic panels, as well as large-scale graphics and videos to convey a sense of the complex site and introduce the religious practice of replication—of both objects and cave temples—as a means of earning merit. The handpainted replicas enabled visitors to physically enter three different cave temples and observe the beauty and grandeur of the painting and sculpture in a 360-degree environment. Finally, the digital experience offered a unique kind of immersive encounter that replicated in scope and delivery a guided tour of Cave 45 itself.

The virtual immersive experience One of the first challenges faced by the exhibition team was to determine which type of immersive experience would be appropriate for the Getty exhibition. The team examined previous digital presentations focused on Mogao as a guide to incorporating a substantive digital component into the exhibition. In 2012, the City University of Hong Kong’s Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment (ALiVE) presented Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and Pure Land: Augmented Reality Edition5 at the Hong Kong Art Fair. Each presentation featured technologically innovative applications, such as digital magnification, 3D video and animation and augmented reality to provide educational information about the wall paintings of Cave 220.6 Ultimately, the Getty team decided that the objective for the Cave Temples of Dunhuang exhibition digital presentation should be to create for visitors the experience of a guided cave tour. Because the exhibition would provide visitors a variety of educational opportunities within the GRI galleries and the replica caves installation, the digital presentation could offer a more experiential approach. The digital replication of a cave temple would also follow in the tradition of reproducing the caves physically by the DA and would complement the presentation of replica caves 275, 285 and 320 in the exhibition. Immersion is the experience of losing oneself in a manufactured reality. The most successful immersive environment is one in which the details and authenticity of the experience are so clear and convincing that participants feel they have been transported to another 285

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place and time. The exhibition team believed that this type of immersive experience would not only add to the replica caves component but also provide additional context to the overall exhibition. At initial brainstorming meetings, concepts such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality were discussed, as well as the merits of an interactive versus a passive experience. Neither augmented reality nor VR were considered appropriate for the immersive experience. Augmented reality would not provide a truly immersive experience and there were concerns about the individual isolation inherent in a VR headset. The exhibition team wanted a communal experience similar to visiting the actual cave temples. There were also serious concerns about the fragility of VR headsets when exposed to handling by over 100,000 visitors during the exhibition’s run, and that the time required to administer the headsets would limit the number of visitors that could participate in the VR experience. Ultimately, the digital immersive experience would need to accommodate groups of visitors similar to Mogao tour sizes, provide information about the cave temple comparable to the Mogao guided tours, and, most importantly, immerse visitors in an experience that would make them feel that they had entered another time and place. The possibility of digitally recreating a cave temple in one-to-one scale within the exhibition advanced when the GRI lecture hall—a room without permanent seating and large enough to accommodate the groups of 15 to 20 visitors contemplated for the digital experience—was made available for use by the exhibition. The location of the lecture hall, adjacent to the GRI exhibition galleries, offered a seamless connection between the exhibition and the digital experience. And with its furniture and seating removed, the lecture hall could be converted into a site-specific installation. At this point, the exhibition team felt that sufficient preliminary research had been done to understand the pros and cons of the technologies available, and requests for proposals (RFPs) were distributed to six media companies with demonstrated experience in creating engaging digital experiences for museums and non-profits. The exhibition team received a variety of proposals ranging from VR delivered through Google Cardboard to tablet-based augmented reality to interactive projection. After review and deliberation, the team settled on yU+co, a Hollywood-based digital media company with offices in China. Known for television and film titles, and with experience with interactive public spaces, yU+co proposed an immersive experience using 3D virtual technology. Visitors would wear battery-operated 3D glasses and stand in front of a large spherical curved screen while an audio narration guided visitors through the cave temple. yU+co also proposed projection mapping on a side wall in the GRI lecture hall foyer and using this space as a pre-show waiting area for entrance to the Cave 45 Virtual Immersive Experience. yU+co’s proposal solved many of the problems recognised during the exhibition team’s preliminary explorations. The digital experience would be a group activity that would allow the greatest number of visitors to participate. It would present a Mogao cave temple in an immersive digital 3D form similar to the replica caves, and through narration would impart cultural, religious, conservation and art historical information that would not be offered in the replicas.

Cave 45 selection In choosing a cave temple for the immersive experience, its historic, religious and aesthetic significance—as well as its size and state of conservation—were important considerations. A key factor for creating a truly immersive experience was to select a cave temple similar in size to the GRI lecture hall. A one-to-one scale would permit an interaction that felt true to the actual experience of standing inside the cave. While the nearly 500 decorated cave temples at Mogao range greatly in size and configuration, the dimensions of Cave 45 met this criterion, 286

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fitting within the available space in the lecture hall. In terms of content, the cave temple’s wall paintings needed to contain Buddhist themes and stories that would parallel material and objects found elsewhere in the exhibition. The wall paintings and sculpture in Cave 45, which was created in the 8th century during the Tang dynasty, resonated with material elsewhere in the exhibition in terms of Buddhist iconography, religious tales and aesthetic qualities. A key theme expressed throughout the wall paintings of Cave 45 is ‘deliverance from harm’. This theme echoed another message embedded in the exhibition—the collaborative work of the GCI and the DA to conserve the cave temples and to preserve the site. The central niche of Cave 45 contains a striking and well-preserved seven-figure sculpture group, including the Shakyamuni Buddha surrounded by disciples, bodhisattvas and guardian kings—a configuration common to Dunhuang cave temples of the time. The sculpture group would enhance a strong sense of 3D space, thereby achieving an effective 3D immersive experience. Thus, Cave 45 met all the major requirements set out by the exhibition team. The selection of Cave 45 was made by the Getty exhibition committee during a 2015 visit to Mogao by the exhibition team and yU+co staff. During that visit, the project team secured high-resolution images of the cave temple, previously captured by DA staff. These image files were created as part of the DA’s extensive documentation of the Mogao cave temples. Thus, the immersive experience was a direct result of the Academy’s digitisation efforts. Given the time frame, without the existence and availability of these images, it would have been impossible to successfully create the digital cave.

The GRI lecture hall foyer experience The digital experience was presented in two parts. In the first part, visitors waited in the GRI lecture hall foyer before entering the Cave 45 Virtual Immersive Experience, and while there viewed a two-dimensional, non-narrated prologue that served as an introduction to the Mogao site and its cave temples. The long foyer has a wide, curved wall that served as the ideal canvas for a projection that provided visitors with a sense of the environment in which Mogao is situated—at the edge of the Gobi Desert and surrounded by thousands of miles of harsh landscape (Figure 24.1). This poetic presentation also showed exteriors of the grottoes’ site, and environmental threats to the cave temples, including rain, snow, flood waters from nearby mountains and blowing sands from the desert. In addition, projection included details of some of the beautiful cave temple wall paintings, showcasing cave temple art that was not included elsewhere in the exhibition. In replicating the experience of visiting Cave 45, the lecture hall was kept dark, in contrast to the bright sunlight outdoors. With this in mind, the foyer presentation helped visitors acclimate to the dark, quiet and contemplative Cave 45 presentation, and set the mood and tone for the experience to come. Music and sound design in the foyer incorporated traditional Chinese instruments, which would also be heard inside the Cave 45 presentation, as well as a rainstick to evoke the sound of water to accompany the images of flooding. The music and sound design enhanced the visuals, providing an experience that was intended to be informative and impressionistic.

Cave 45 development To produce a truly immersive experience, Cave 45 was created using a spherical 3D projection (Figure 24.2). Traditional 3D technology that projects onto a flat screen has a single point of focus in the centre. Spherical projection uses a curved screen that wraps around the viewer, utilising infinite focal points, generating an immersive holographic 3D experience. The spherical 287

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Figure 24.1 Before entering the Cave 45 Virtual Immersive Experience, visitors were introduced to the Mogao site and its cave temples through a 2D, non-narrated prologue in the GRI lecture hall foyer. Source: yU+co, a digital media company based in Hollywood, which partnered with the Getty to produce the Cave 45 Virtual Immersive Experience.

curved screen simulates the environment of the actual cave due to the one-to-one scale of the projection environment. This particular technology was originally developed for theme park simulation rides and planetarium presentations but had not previously been used for a museum exhibition. It utilised battery-operated active 3D glasses with a shutter system that alternately presents the video frames to one eye while blocking the other in rapid succession, thus creating a simulated 3D image. The benefit of an active shutter over a passive system is that it has twice the resolution of the passive system, in that each eye is presented in full resolution. It was essential to the success of the presentation that the virtual cave duplicate the actual cave in every detail. Modelling the sculptures and architecture in 3D was made possible through the use of high-resolution photographs and measurements of the cave provided by the DA. The 3D model was created using Maya and Z-brush software to replicate the cave temple’s architecture and sculptures. Matte painters, computer-generation artists and 3D modellers reproduced the cave temple in great detail. Using the high-resolution 2D images provided by the DA as reference, the entire cave architecture and sculpture group was modelled in 3D (Figure 24.3). Once the sculptures and interior structure were modelled, the original 2D images were texture mapped onto the 3D figures and cave walls to create a realistic interior that matched the actual painted surfaces. Texturing with 4K images ensured high resolution when the animation ultimately would be rendered in 4K for projection. Digital matte painters filled 288

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Figure 24.2 The Cave 45 Virtual Immersive Experience was created using spherical 3D projection that utilised a curved screen to wrap around the viewer. The infinite focal points generated by the 3D projection created a truly immersive holographic 3D experience. Source: yU+co.

in details that were not clearly provided in the existing photographs. Animators refined camera movement and lighting effects to hone the narrative journey. The final animation was rendered in 4K resolution, which enabled the maximum resolution for a spherical format. Sound production included the recording of the narration and live music sessions of original compositions.

Cave 45 content The Cave 45 experience was designed to take the visitor on a visual journey intimately connected to the content of the cave temple. The goal was to replicate the experience a visitor would enjoy when visiting the Mogao Grottoes on a guided tour. In Mogao’s dark cave temples, a tour guide’s flashlight typically guides the visitor through the stories being told in the wall paintings and sculptures. This technique was employed in the Cave 45 immersive experience as a ‘virtual’ flashlight, following the voice-over narration and drawing attention to particular aspects of the sculpture group and the wall paintings. The effect of the ‘virtual’ flashlight sweeping across the interior was enhanced with a cinematic look, adding volumetric lighting with atmospheric dust and particles. Unlike the real cave

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Figure 24.3 Matte painters, CG artists and 3-D modellers reproduced the cave temple using high resolution 2D images provided by the Dunhuang Academy as reference. Once the sculptures and interior structure were modelled, the original 2D images were then texture mapped onto the 3D figures and cave walls to create a realistic interior that matched the actual painted surfaces. Source: yU+co.

in which the structure is fixed and visitors move within, the immersive 3D cave enabled the wall paintings and sculpture to be brought closer to the viewers. This feature of the technology was used to zoom in on selected sections of the sculpture and paintings highlighted in the narration. A goal in scripting the Cave 45 experience was to create a narrative that would illuminate the complex aspects of the cave temple’s art, including its iconography, in a way that was accessible to a general public unfamiliar with Buddhism. Development of the script for Cave 45 involved members of the Getty exhibition team, consultants and yU+co staff. The script development process included several drafts over a two-month period, with refinements to ensure accuracy and reduce length. Early drafts ran over eight minutes, but the final script produced a presentation that spanned five minutes and 20 seconds. The Cave 45 virtual journey begins with a wide view, centred on the seven-figure sculpture group (Figure 24.4). As the narrator describes the Buddha, his disciples and his bodhisattvas, the virtual camera draws closer in on the sculpture group, with the flashlight illuminating individual figures in turn. The final figure is one of the guardian kings, with his fierce expression and detailed armour. From there, the camera angles up to the ceiling where a scene from the Lotus Sutra is depicted, showing Shakyamuni and the Many 290

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Treasures Buddha preaching in a floating stupa. Next, the virtual flashlight guides us to the south wall, which depicts the Universal Gateway of Guanyin—the Chinese name for Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of mercy. The multiple scenes that surround Guanyin depict the deliverance of devotees from harm. The flashlight and camera move through several of these scenes, and then highlight the evident deterioration along the bottom of the cave wall. From there, attention moves to the north wall painting, which shows the story of Queen Vaidehi who, suffering greatly, prays to the Buddha for deliverance; her story begins on the right side of the wall and continues on the left. The queen’s meditations help her visualise her rebirth in the Pure Land of the West, which is depicted at the centre of the north wall. The flashlight guides us there, where the Buddha is making a mudra (hand gesture) of preaching, surrounded by bodhisattvas and acolytes. This is the last story explored before the camera returns to a wide view of the central niche and the presentation concludes. The virtual immersive experience used newly designed spherical 3D technology with 360 degree projection on a 180 degree screen. Initially conceived as a dome structure inside the lecture hall, fire safety regulations warranted the removal of the dome ceiling to ensure the ceiling fire sprinkler system would not be impeded by the installation. The remaining curved screen was sufficient for the stereo projection format to convey an effective immersive

Figure 24.4 The Cave 45 experience was designed to take the visitor on a visual journey intimately connected to the content of the cave temple. Visitors donned battery-operated 3D glasses and followed a virtual flashlight as an audio narration guided them through the cave temple. Source: yU+co.

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experience. Two 13K laser projectors were used with a customised fisheye lens. The 360° stereo format exaggerated the volumetric form of the seven figure statutes, emphasising their dimensionality and presence for the audience. The projection and screen systems for the Cave 45 experience were built and tested offsite prior to the Getty installation. This testing was used to not only refine the hardware and software systems, but also to test and refine the content. Once the system was disassembled and reconstructed at the Getty, refinement of the system continued as final touches were added to the space. yU+co’s technical team worked with Getty staff on the installation and programming of the foyer and Cave 45 projections, including technical support and automation assistance. The spherical 3D projection system was created by Micoy Corporation; yU+co worked with R&S Production Services to mount and install the system and screen.

Cave 45 installation The exhibition team worked closely with Getty Facilities to establish a general traffic flow and operational layout of the installation, and to ensure that the digital experience installation adhered to fire and safety building codes and was compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The projectors, audio system and media servers were placed to best serve the user experience while adhering to safety standards. Getty Facilities was responsible for infrastructure changes to accommodate installation, such as installing earthquake-safe mounting brackets for the ceiling-mounted projectors. The curved screen and black-out curtains were positioned to not impede exit corridors or block existing strobe lights or fire pull stations. While it would have been preferable to project on a full domed screen, sprinkler codes required that no screen be installed overhead. Emergency audio signal override was added to deliver alarms and instructions in case of emergency. The exhibition team worked with Getty Facilities on the hanging of curtains, plastering, painting and window coverings. Some of this was decided based on the Getty’s labour and safety regulations. Seating was introduced for the elderly and people with disabilities, as well as LED floor lights to reduce tripping hazards. An audio induction loop system was installed to assist visitors with reduced hearing. All these elements were provided to achieve the Getty’s goal for universal accessibility. Both parts of the Cave 45 exhibit required the installation of new hardware. This included the following for the foyer presentation: • • • •

three ultra-short-throw projectors 5.1 surround speaker set 5.1 audio interface media server.

For the Cave 45 experience, the following was needed: • • • • • • 292

13K Lumen HIGHlite Laser II projectors with Solid-State light source and full 3D capabilities 180 degree open-top dome negative-pressure vacuum screen 5.1 surround speaker set 5.1 audio interface media server Volfani Active Shutter 3D Glasses.

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It was important that the digital experience have the least possible physical impact on the lecture hall and that modifications to the space were easily reversible. The freestanding curved screen had minimal impact because it could be set up and weighted without anchoring to the floor or walls. The two 13K projectors were suspended overhead from a truss spanning the two ends of the curved screen. Black curtains were strung along the 15-foot high walls surrounding the screen to create a darkened space, but this modification only entailed minimal bolts anchored to the walls at the ceiling. The foyer space projection mapping necessitated mounting three projectors into the ceiling. To accommodate the weight of the projectors, steel plates had to be installed into the ceiling substructure. Electrical and data connections also needed to be pulled to each of the projectors. Because yU+co was able to projection map onto the curved wall of the foyer itself, the need for an additional screen and any additional modification to the building was eliminated. After the hardware deinstallation, patching and painting were necessary to return the foyer to its original condition. Overall, the impact to the lecture hall was minimal considering the space’s extraordinary transformation. The systems were automated to run each day with little technical support. Systems BIOS and timers were used for both computer and projector start-up. Because, over time, a projector will fall out of alignment—and because 3D projection is more prone to alignment errors—Cave 45 had an automatic alignment system that needed to be in place each morning to facilitate proper calibration on start-up. The foyer required projector recalibration only a few times to maintain picture alignment. A Getty technical attendant was available for start-up each morning to review and ensure quality playback for both systems and to remove calibration tools before arrival of visitors. Visual references were displayed for error checking and audio cues allowed for audio quality confirmation. Errors or problems were handled according to the manual created by yU+co, or a yU+co technician was contacted for instructions or dispatch either physically or remotely. Given that the immersive experience utilised technology that had never been used in this capacity, adjustments to the digital experience were necessary to keep the presentation running smoothly. A bug from the custom drivers of the specialised software for the graphics card created graphical glitches in the Cave 45 exhibit that required a periodic system reset. Maintenance checks with a yU+co technician/programmer to ensure update deployment and quality of content were scheduled each Monday morning (when the Getty Center is closed to the public). During this time, the tech confirmed operational standards and made any adjustments to the automation that were requested by the Getty.

Cave 45 visitor response Over the four-month exhibition, more than 182,000 visitors traversed the gallery portion of the exhibition, located in the GRI. Even more visitors—over 203,000—visited the three replica caves on the Getty Plaza. Unfortunately, no visitor tally was kept for the Cave 45 Virtual Immersive Experience. However, during the latter part of the exhibition’s run, the Getty conducted a survey of visitors to the Getty Center. Included in that survey were visitors who specifically attended the Cave Temples of Dunhuang exhibition. According to that survey, the number of visitors that went through Cave 45 was almost exactly two-thirds of those who visited the galleries. Based on that information, it can be roughly estimated that the Cave 45 experience had about 120,000 visitors. That same survey yielded additional information regarding the visitor response to the Cave 45 experience. Around 57 per cent of those surveyed said that they enjoyed ‘very 293

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much’ the Cave 45 experience (relative to 64 per cent with regard to the replica caves, and 51 per cent with respect to the gallery exhibition). Over 59 per cent considered the Cave 45 experience to be ‘very informative’ (relative to 50 per cent for the replica caves and 60 per cent for the gallery exhibition). Over 88 per cent stated that the Cave Temples of Dunhuang exhibition overall met their expectations.

Conclusion In retrospect, it is difficult to imagine the Cave Temples of Dunhuang exhibition without the Cave 45 component. While the replica caves provided visitors with an unparalleled opportunity to experience the magnificence of the art in three extraordinary Mogao cave temples located nearly 7,000 miles away, the Cave 45 experience offered what the replica caves component could not—a guided tour of a Mogao cave temple, similar to what visitors might receive at the Mogao site itself. While the Cave 45 exhibition component was not without its technical challenges, even after the exhibition opened, within a few weeks of the opening the technology performed smoothly. Visitors who took the time to see all three components of the exhibition received the kind of comprehensive view of Mogao’s setting, history, significance and art that no institution had previously attempted in an exhibition. The achievement of the exhibition was recognised by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM). In May 2017, Cave Temples of Dunhuang received two awards at the AAM Annual Meeting in St Louis, including an award for Special Achievement: Commitment to Comprehensive Research and Conservation, as part of the AAM’s 29th Annual Excellence in Exhibition Competition, and a Gold MUSE Award in the category of Multimedia Installations for Cave 45: A Virtual Immersive Experience. In selecting the Cave 45 experience for the Gold MUSE award, the judges noted: The usage of the large screen is highly effective for this immersive representation of the cave. The quality of the image is high enough that the visitor experiences it vividly enough as if they are in the real site. Generally, the main purpose of creating virtual reality is to provide real experience as much as possible, and this project successfully achieves the major goal and nature of such technology. (MUSE, 2017)

Acknowledgements The Cave 45 Virtual Immersive Experience would not have been possible without the support of the many individuals who were part of the Cave Temples of Dunhuang exhibition team. First, we would like to express our thanks to the exhibition curators—Neville Agnew, Marcia Reed and Mimi Gates—who championed the incorporation of digital technology from the beginning. We were further inspired by the leadership of Director Emerita Fan Jinshi of the DA and her successor Director Wang Xudong. The three-decade partnership between the GCI and the DA—recognised leaders in the digitisation of the art and caves of the Mogao Grottoes in their own right—were the ingredients that made the immersive experience a reality. Directors Tim Whalen and Thomas Gaehtgens, of the GCI and GRI respectively, provided essential leadership and support to an exhibition of a scale and complexity never before attempted at the Getty. The guidance and efficiency of Bob Combs, Getty Director of Security, and Lauren Friedman, Getty Campus Architect, helped the team 294

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navigate safety codes, plan visitor flow and enable the conversion of the GRI lecture hall into an 8th-century cave temple. Thanks are also due to the Getty Facilities staff and the Getty Visitor Services team, who swiftly and affably managed visitor flow safely in and out of the space for the duration of the exhibition. Finally, the authors want to acknowledge the behind-the-scenes contribution of the core exhibition team: from the GCI, Martha Demas and Anna Zagorski; from the GRI, Marlyn Musicant, David Brafman and Julia Grimes; from yU+co, Carol Wong and yU+co’s talented and creative team; long-time GCI consultant Po-Ming Lin, who, as a member of the Institute’s China team, has facilitated the GCI-DA collaboration for decades; and Michelle McCoy, exhibition researcher, who provided the art historical content on Cave 45 and advised on the script throughout the development process.

Notes 1 ‘Copyright 2018 J. Paul Getty Trust and yU+co. All rights reserved.’ 2 The GCI and the GRI are two of the four programmes of the J. Paul Getty Trust, a cultural and philanthropic institution dedicated to the presentation, conservation and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy. The DA is the institution in China responsible for the conservation, management and research of the Mogao Grottoes. 3 In 1900, a Daoist priest and self-appointed guardian of the Mogao Grottoes discovered a chamber packed with tens of thousands of documents, paintings and textiles. One of the great archaeological discoveries of the 20th century, the ‘Library Cave’ had been sealed and hidden a millennium earlier for reasons unknown. Although most of the cave’s contents were Buddhist, a wide range of languages, religions, cultures and art were also represented. 4 The replicas were created by artists from the DA’s Fine Arts Institute using a painstaking, multiyear process that includes photographing and printing images of the cave temples’ walls at their original scale, tracing the images with pencil, and then contour-line drawing atop the tracing. Clay from the local riverbed is used to prime the surface and then the intricate imagery is delicately painted using a wide range of pigments similar to the original paintings. The finished works are then individually mounted on a wooden framework crafted to the exact dimensions of the original cave temple. 5 See Kenderdine (2013). 6 It should be noted that the Dunhuang Academy itself has created digital presentations, including 360-degree VR cave temple views on their website, and a digital presentation in a domed theatre at the Mogao Grottoes Visitors Center that covers the major dynastic styles of the art of the caves.

References Kenderdine, S. (2013). ‘Pure Land’: Inhabiting the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang. Curator, 56, 199–218. doi:10.1111/cura.12020. MUSE (2017). www.aam-us.org/programs/awards-competitions/2017-muse-award-winners/

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25 Immersive engagement Designing and testing a virtual Indian Residential School exhibition Adam Muller

Introduction This chapter explains the Embodying Empathy (EE) project, a Canadian multidisciplinary public–private research and creative partnership that, thanks to funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the generous assistance and direction provided by a remarkable group of Indigenous Survivors, has produced a digitally immersive representation of one node in the network of institutions comprising Canada’s Indian Residential School (IRS) system. As a project, EE is both complicated and challenging. It has several aims, one of the more significant of which is to address some fundamental questions posed by recent developments in curatorial and commemorative practice, especially those arising from the so-called ‘experiential turn’ in heritage thinking and design. As exemplified by museums such as Washington, D.C.’s Newseum and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, this experiential turn designates curatorial strategies aiming to produce enriching interactions between museum contents and museum-goers rather than occasions for quiet reflection, aesthetic appreciation or education (per se). Increasingly, museums are relying upon sophisticated digital technologies to facilitate and sustain these interactions. Part of what EE has been designed to help settle is the matter of whether some major curatorial assumptions—such as that virtual experiences, through the feelings they elicit, contribute to altering durably people’s moral or political dispositions—hold any water at all. Embodying Empathy has also, however, been created to serve as a model of living and decolonised heritage practice. The project’s ownership, outcomes and uses have been only minimally determined by its three academic directors (of which I am one). Through this way of organising and structuring both the project and the interactions required for its growth and development, we have tried to perform a particular way of thinking about what it means to work with, and on, Indigenous experiences. Indeed, through our work on EE, we are attempting to model a highly robust form of ‘non-extractive’ scholarship that departs significantly in its fundamental orientation towards its objects from prior ways of working with Indigenous peoples and cultures. In an article on the importance of conversation to 296

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Indigenous research, Indigenous education professor Margaret Kovach (2010) proposes that truly decolonised research must adhere to: specific ethical guidelines that include, but are not limited to, a mutually respectful research relationship; that the research benefit the community; that appropriate permission and informed consent is sought; that the research is non-exploitive and nonextractive; and that there is respect for community ethics and protocol. (p. 46) Something like these guidelines have gradually become de rigueur in the ethics protocols required for receipt of funding from most major Canadian granting agencies, and to obtain smaller pots of money from Canadian universities seeking to ‘indigenise’ their research portfolios. However, EE has exceeded these specifications in pursuit of a new conception of what ethical ‘best practice’ means when working with/on Indigenous history and the traumatic legacies of settler-colonial (i.e. genocidal) violence.

Canadian settler-colonialism and the museum Institutions like museums face many challenges attempting to educate audiences about, as well as do moral and political justice to, the Indigenous experience of European settler-colonialism in Canada. Some of these challenges are inherent in any attempt to represent so-called ‘difficult’ knowledge, and involve the complexity of conceiving and making sense of the intense brutality and force of the events experienced by all victims of mass violence and atrocity. Although not all aspects of Canadian settler-colonialism were violently destructive or coercive, many were, and in ways that have harmed successive generations of Indigenous people across the country. Attempts to explain the nature, persistence, variation and depth of these harms, as with the damage done by other large-scale incidents of physical or cultural violence such as the Holocaust or the Crusades, seem doomed to yield little more than generalisations and approximations. Thus, they present a highly distorted picture of settler-colonialism and its legacies. Beyond matters of complexity and scale, the representation of settler-colonialism in Canada is further complicated by the twin facts that the history of Indigenous-settler relations is still being written, and too often this writing has been undertaken by scholars and others located outside of the lifeworlds they aim to depict. Since the 1970s, there have been significant gains in the quest to decolonise Indigenous historiography—in Canada and elsewhere in the world. Nevertheless, at the level of national or ‘official’ history, Indigenous perspectives and ways of understanding European settlement and its effects remain relatively marginal to more pervasive narratives of progress, civilisation, minority assimilation and the efficacy/rationality of the coloniser’s rule of law.

Indian Residential Schools Embodying Empathy seeks to shed light on the experience of Canada’s IRS system. This invidious attempt at cultural assimilation, belatedly acknowledged as culturally genocidal and apologised for by Canadian churches and universities, as well as by the federal government in 2008, was initiated by the Canadian government and left largely to Christian churches (primarily Catholic and Anglican) to administer. The IRS system was in place between 1879 and 1996, though in their later years, residential schools were much less violent and underregulated than they were prior to 1970. Over the course of their existence, more than 297

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Figure 25.1 vIRS chapel and cemetery. Source: Adam Muller.

150,000 students attended IRS, most of them receiving a substandard education while being denied access to their families for periods of up to eight months (some children stayed in IRS year-round). More than 6,000 students died in the schools, and many of their death certificates were falsified and their graves remain unmarked. Many children suffered sexual abuse and all were deliberately alienated from their traditional languages and folkways. Many more suffered from malnutrition and emotional and physical neglect. The purpose of the IRS was to ‘kill the Indian to save the child’, to use a well-known phrase often misattributed to the notorious Canadian Indian Affairs minister and Confederation Poet Duncan Campbell Scott (1862–1947). In this, the schools succeeded nearly too well. Reporting in 1907, government medical inspector Peter Bryce noted that 24 per cent of previously healthy Indigenous children were dying in an IRS, a number that did not include critically ill children who had been sent home to die. Disease was rampant in IRSs and Bryce noted that the schools were generally unsanitary. Although conditions improved through the 1970s and 1980s, and following the ‘Sixties Scoop’ that saw roughly 20,000 Indigenous ‘at-risk’ children removed from their parents and made wards of the state (in many cases only to be adopted out into non-Indigenous families, further alienating them from their traditional practices and values), residential schools continued to harm children. More broadly, together the IRS and the Sixties Scoop profoundly damaged Indigenous lives and cultures. Their toxic effects—chronic alcoholism, poverty, mental illness, physical disabilities and fragmented, dysfunctional Indigenous families—continue to be felt nationwide today.

Empathy and virtuality How can empathy for those who experienced Canada’s IRS system be ‘designed into’ a virtual environment? How long will the empathetic connections arising within virtual 298

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worlds last? Should psychological and affective contiguity between the virtual and actual be expected, or even desired? Embodying Empathy aims to help answer these and other foundational questions. The project has been created both as a standalone installation (it debuted formally in September 2018) and as a mobile non-immersive application suitable for use on tablets and mobile telephones in environments (such as remote Indigenous communities in Canada’s north) where broadband access is limited. It has three primary objectives. It seeks to: 1) make knowledge about IRS experiences widely accessible 2) promote reconciliation between IRS Survivors, their families and communities, and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians, by cultivating empathetic connections 3) test the hypothesis that immersive media can enhance the representation of complex experiences, including traumatic ones held to be ‘difficult’ in Deborah Britzman’s (2003) sense of the word as designating representational resistance. More broadly, the EE ‘storyworld’ hopes to contribute to larger discussions about the composition and function of empathy in virtual environments, how such empathy might be coded and evaluated, and the relation of virtual environments (VEs) to real ones. In recent years, scholarly interest in the potential of VEs to facilitate affective engagement has seen researchers from across the disciplines increasingly making use of ‘virtual laboratories’ to conduct a wide range of experimental inquiries, in the process helping overcome prevailing cynicism about the capacity of VEs to model and sustain real emotions. Ahn et al. (2013), for example, argue that digitally recreating and extending human sensory capabilities exploits our readiness to temporarily accept the illusion of sufficiently realistic experiences: The realism of virtual experiences is likely to produce mental schema about the simulated event as if he or she had firsthand experience of it, to be recalled later when necessary (p. 9). This outlook is shared by Mühlberger and colleagues, who claim that working exclusively within VEs can yield a ‘valid and reliable assessment of phobic fear’ and induce ‘true emotional responses’ (Mühlberger, Bülthoff, Wiedemann & Pauli, 2007, p. 340). The potential advantages of virtual spaces as sites of social inquiry and archives of traumatic memory now include spatial, sensory, behavioural and affective verisimilitude. The promise of immersive VEs includes the idea that they may exceed standard fictional worlds in terms of the range and availability of emotions they are able to provide. Tavinor (2005) observes that in video game play, it is possible ‘to feel guilty or ashamed for what one does in the fictional world’ since one is an actor rather than an observer within the fiction (p. 26). Immersive interactivity allows for those subsumed in a VE to potentially become personally involved with characters at a level that is unavailable with traditional fictions, while the requirement of personal (agential) intervention and narrative construction permits a host of previously unavailable emotional states to be directed towards characters and/or events in the VE. Therefore, the balance of evidence suggests that VEs represent an appropriate framework for studying the formation and persistence of empathy responses, even though they may exist at one or more steps removed from actual experience.

Methodology and ethics protocols The EE interface is being designed to allow users to interact dynamically and transparently with agents and objects throughout the storyworld. Within the world—which comprises 299

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such experiences as being separated from one’s parents, driven to school, and forced to adjust to alien disciplinary and domestic regimes, and experiences of sexual violence and corporal punishment—users will be confronted by characters and situations drawn from documented and publicly available testimony about the Fort Alexander school. The school was located on the Sagkeeng First Nation, near Powerview Manitoba, prior to being demolished in the early 2000s. The school itself has been virtually constructed in accordance with archival blueprints and floor plans detailing the specifics of the school. The tone of the VE’s visual appearance and the objects users will encounter there (which are user-manipulable and embedded into the storyworld’s narrative) have been derived from extensive consultations with IRS Survivors comprising the project’s Survivors Advisory Group (SAG). This group comprises six former students of the Fort Alexander IRS and is led by former Sagkeeng chief Theodore (Ted) Fontaine. Broken Circle, Fontaine’s (2010) memoir of his school experiences and their aftermath, remains one of the most critically wellregarded accounts of IRS life written by a former student. According to the terms of project’s ‘participatory design’ (PD) methodology, which understands the processes of digital creation and research production to be dialogical and consultative, the SAG is primarily responsible for determining the final form and contents of EE’s virtual storyworld. To this end, the research team and SAG have been meeting for the last four years, not to record testimony per se, but rather to obtain and discuss details of IRS life often missing from the available testimony. This is because they concern not so much the hardships and brutality of school life, but details about the phenomenological composition of that life— its colours, sounds, tastes, feelings and textures—that are required to render a plausibly textured virtual world.

Figure 25.2 External view of vIRS. Source: Adam Muller.

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The project’s PD protocols have been modified to conform to principles for working with and disseminating Indigenous knowledge developed by the Assembly of First Nations and known as OCAP (Ownership, Control, Access and Possession). The approach of the project’s directors is intended to do justice to the variety and particularity of Survivor experiences of collective suffering. It makes a great deal of room available for responding to Survivors’ desires and concerns, even as they change over time. In nearly every respect, EE is a Survivor-led undertaking. Survivors have had the final word on what the storyworld looks like, where it will be installed and how it will be used. In conjunction with our refusal to profit from any of the technology created through our efforts (we have ceded our intellectual property rights to things like the new code that has been written by the project’s technical team), EE’s consultative and fully participatory approach is intended to model a certain kind of reconciliatory praxis, one that takes Indigenous perspectives seriously. Through our discussions with the SAG we have been able to narrow and bring into clearer focus representations of the range of experiences within EE’s storyworld, and together we have explored a variety of ways of interacting in the world. Consequently, we have placed a heavy emphasis on ease of access and in-world navigation, modularity and scalability, and the possibility of using the world to inculcate long-term behavioural change of a kind that is most likely to be conducive to reconciliation. Users of the EE storyworld will have their activities anonymously tracked, allowing researchers to ascertain more precisely where and with whom in the world users choose to spend their time. Recent work in the psychology of interactions between human and virtual agents has shown that there is a direct correlation between the amount of time a user spends with a virtual object or character, the degree of interactivity between human and virtual agents, and the exhibition or demonstration of altruistic behaviour exhibited by humans within virtual worlds and the level of empathetic caring experienced by humans while virtually immersed. Users of EE will not just be able to interact with virtual agents in the storyworld, they will be able to manipulate that world, leaving enduring traces of themselves for others to encounter afterwards. So, for example, (human) users will be able to move objects and record messages on a virtual reel-to-reel tape recorder located in one of the schoolrooms, messages that can be replayed by other, later visitors to the school. The project has partnered with Canada’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR), one of the principal legacies of the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). One of the ambitions of the storyworld’s designers is to make the NCTR’s archive of Survivor testimony available through the vIRS (e.g. through interactions with virtual students modelled on actual children whose adult testimony was presented to the TRC and is now housed in the NCTR, from where it can be ported into the storyworld either as text or an audio recording).

Research questions One of the primary research questions EE proposes to answer concerns the ‘stickiness’ of the empathy experienced by users as a result of their time spent in the storyworld. This stickiness matters considerably. As far as museums and museum studies are concerned, vast amounts of money are currently being invested in novel digital technologies by museums committed to enhancing visitor experiences in the absence of a substantial body of empirical work that considers the longer-term effects of such technologies. The secondary literature on empathy and technology remains divided on whether digital immersion produces a corresponding increase either in empathy or indifference, and if so, how long such an effect lasts. This literature does show, however, that in some digital contexts, such as playing violent video games, users can essentially shut down empathetically, yielding an effect that has been 301

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variously termed ‘empathy fatigue’ or, as Sunstein (2009) puts it, ‘moral numbness’ (p. 33). However, the critical literature also suggests that users can come to care surprisingly deeply for those they encounter in immersive domains, even when these encounters involve nonhuman agents. Bailenson (2018), for example, has published a significant body of work documenting his ‘virtual cow’ project, which has revealed the deep feelings that arise in users experiencing a virtual farm from the perspective of a resident cow. EE might be able to contribute to an explanation of these kinds of results. The project aspires to build on work by Ahn et al. (2013), arguing that the kind of technology we are using: allows for a literal demonstration of climbing into another person’s skin to embody his or her experiences first-hand. Vivid, multilayer perceptual information simulated by digital devices enable individuals to see, hear, and feel as if they were undergoing the sensory experiences in the physical world—what we call ‘embodied experiences’ [that] allow the user to experience the closest realization of the portal to enter another person’s mind and body. (p. 8) The combination of this kind of embodiment, and the presence in the storyworld of IRSrelated documents and photographs, replica furniture and Survivor testimony, some made available through links we will be providing to the NCTR’s testimonial archive (once the Centre’s digital infrastructure has been suitably updated and refined), will deepen the immersivity of the EE user’s experience. Together with the complex topography and elaborate matrix of possible social interactions available in the virtual IRS, this immersivity should facilitate critical reflection on the reality of residential schools’ harms and their aftermaths. This will contribute to an increase in ‘unsettling’ behaviour. In Regan’s (2010) sense of the term, this refers to the means whereby Canadians confront and acknowledge the ways settler-colonialism has shaped their ways of seeing and knowing one another and the world. The persistence or contiguity of behavioural change between virtual and actual worlds has been extensively documented. According to Ahn et al. (2013), the kinds of technologies EE uses to facilitate the coming together of self and other within VEs ‘transfers to the physical world and translates into actual helping behaviour, even when the other person is a complete stranger’ (p. 31). These affective connections can and do endure. In his work on long-term interactions with relational virtual agents, Bickmore, Schulman and Yin (2010) note that: The use of social and relational behaviors [such as] empathy and social chat, can serve to establish a social bond with users that in turn serves to maintain engagement over time and keep users returning again and again (p. 661). The empathetic connections forged during a visit to the EE storyworld may contribute to the goals of reconciliation that are central to this and other attempts to reckon with the traumatic history of the IRS. This has proven a powerful motivator for the project’s advisors and extended network of partners and collaborators, including archives, community groups, commemorative agencies, Indigenous rights advocates and scholars. The storyworld we are creating requires users to experience it actively. Through such activity, empathetic bonds come to be forged, and the outlooks of IRS Survivors and secondary witnesses will (ideally) fall into alignment. We understand empathy to be a practice rather than simply a feeling. As a practice, it is something we can improve. According to Zahavi (2008), empathy: simply refers to our ability to access the life of the mind of others in their bodily and behavioural expressions; an ability that moreover can improve with familiarity, learning, and salience (p. 522). Empathy arises from constant assessments we make within and between various contexts, including virtual ones. Users operating as virtual agents 302

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within the EE storyworld should be capable of empathising with the virtual children they meet and interact with there. This empathy will tend to be either be ‘parallel’ or ‘reactive’, a significant distinction since, as McQuiggan and colleagues (2008) explain, ‘parallel empathy refers to mere replication of another’s affective state, whereas reactive empathy exhibits greater cognitive awareness’. The opportunities to experience reactive empathy modelled within and actively encouraged by EE are intended to ‘unsettle’ not just secondary witnesses to IRS trauma, but residential school Survivors themselves. In this way, the vIRS seeks to foster a much more nuanced and richer awareness of our shared humanity, vulnerability and capacity for moral and political agency.

Conclusion Can a well-designed virtual IRS foster reconciliation by helping initiate and sustain empathetic connections and encourage unsettling behaviour? The balance of the research available suggests that, properly integrated into VEs and suitably ‘embodied’, empathy will affect learning and may aid in realising long-term goals such as reconciliation and alleviation of the worst effects of the (ongoing) genocidal assault on Indigenous social and cultural life. How successfully EE’s immersive storyworld achieves this integration and embodiment, along with its specific short- and long-term effects, remains to be precisely determined. At the time of writing, the project has completed nearly all its formal design phase, and the vIRS is about to undergo extensive evaluation by Dr Katherine Starzyk, a psychology professor specialising in empathy. Over the course of 2019, extending into early 2020, more than 700 University of Manitoba undergraduate students will experience the EE storyworld. Their reactions will be logged and carefully assessed for evidence of long-term empathetic change and (ideally) enhancement. After many years of consultations only with IRS Survivors, we have begun discussing with intergenerational Survivors their hopes for and concerns about an immersive representation of their relatives’ experiences of residential school life, experiences that have often gone unmentioned (and that remain largely undocumented in the NCTR’s testimonial archive) even though their effects were cruelly felt. Through these discussions, we have been encouraged to secure funding to pay for a technician, IRS Survivor and cultural support worker to visit eight Manitoba high schools with significant Indigenous student populations. At each school, Grade 9–12 students will be given the opportunity to explore the vIRS and ask the Survivor about his or her experience of residential school education. The research team, partners and collaborators remain optimistic about EE’s prospects, and deeply committed to the twin tasks assigned to all Canadians by Murray Sinclair, the TRC’s chair. Sinclair (2015) spoke on behalf of his fellow commissioners Marie Wilson and Wilton Littlechild following the 2015 release of the summary of the commission’s final report: The Survivors have entrusted us, and by extension, all the people in Canada, with two priorities. First, the Survivors need to know before they leave this earth that people understand what happened and what the schools did to them. Second, the Survivors need to know that, having been heard and understood, that we will act to ensure the repair of damages done. Through EE, we hope to enhance awareness of the damage done by Canada’s IRS system to Indigenous students and their cultures, while in the process explore new means of beginning to successfully acknowledge and redress the suffering arising in its wake. 303

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Acknowledgements I wish to thank my co-directors Andrew Woolford and Struan Sinclair for their contributions to this chapter.

References Ahn, S. J., Le, A. M. T. & Bailenson, J. (2013). The effect of embodied experiences on self-other merging, attitude, and helping behaviour. Media Psychology, 16, 7–38. Bailenson, J. (2018). Experience on demand: what virtual reality is, how it works, and what it can do. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Bickmore, T., Schulman, D. & Yin, L. (2010). Maintaining engagement in long-term interventions with relational agents. Applied Artificial Intelligence, 24(6), 648–666. Britzman, D. (2003). After-education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and psychoanalytic histories of learning. Albany, NY: State University of New York. Fontaine, T. (2010). Broken circle: The dark legacy of Indian residential schools. Victoria, BC: Heritage House Publishing. Kovach, M. (2010). Conversational method in indigenous research. First Peoples Child and Family Review, 5(1), 40–48. McQuiggan, S. W., Robison, J. L., Phillips, R. & Lester, J. C. (2008). Modeling parallel and reactive empathy in virtual agents: an inductive approach. In L. Padgham, D. Parkes, J. Mueller & S. Parsons (Eds.), Proceedings of AAMAS. Retrieved from www.intellimedia.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/ empathy-aamas-2008.pdf Mühlberger, A., Bülthoff, H., Wiedemann, G. & Pauli, P. (2007). Virtual reality for the psycho-physiological assessment of phobic fear: Responses during virtual tunnel driving. Psychological Assessment, 19, 340–346. Regan, P. (2010). Unsettling the settler within: Indian residential schools, truth telling, and reconciliation in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press. Sinclair, M. (2015, 2 June). For the record: Justice Murray Sinclair on residential schools. Macleans Retrieved from: www.macleans.ca/politics/for-the-record-justice-murray-sinclair-on-residentialschools/ Sunstein, C. (2009). Some effects of moral indignation on law. Vermont Law Review, 33, 405–433. Tavinor, G. (2005). Videogames and interactive fiction. Philosophy and Literature, 29(1), 24–40. Zahavi, D. (2008). Simulation, projection and empathy. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 514–522.

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26 Hemispheres Transdisciplinary architectures and museum–university collaboration Sarah Kenderdine

Introduction The museum of the future will stand side by side with the library and the laboratory. (G. B. Goode, Assistant Secretary, Smithsonian Institute, 1891) This chapter examines a contemporary manifestation of G.B. Goode’s conjecture as a possible framework for successful alliances between universities and the cultural GLAMs sector as they find increasing research imperatives. It considers the mutually beneficial museum–university partnership DomeLab in the context of literature on academic and GLAM collaboration. It focuses the discussion on the development of state-of-the-art fulldome infrastructure as a shared framework across all partners with numerous applied outcomes and lasting impacts. DomeLab, initiated as a collaborative partnership between 11 research and GLAM organisations including two national museums, encouraged substantive contributions to cross-disciplinary visual research methodologies and experimental museology. In the absence of consensus on intra- and inter-sectoral GLAMs collaboration frameworks, DomeLab was as a prototype for mutually beneficial and effective museum–university collaboration. What demarcates DomeLab from a range of other collaborations is its focus on shared (and world-touring), relatively expensive, highly technical infrastructure and aligned expertise in transforming academic research and curatorial narrative into compelling highprofile experiences for mass public. This chapter sets up the context of museum–university collaboration in which DomeLab takes place, through a series of observations on various circumstances that contribute to its timely success.

Collaboration Collective action among museums is growing in importance to drive best practices in technology use across the sector. More and more, museums are joining consortia or alliances—associations of two or more organizations—to combine resources or to align

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themselves strategically with innovative initiatives. Today’s global environment is allowing museums to unite across international borders and work toward common goals concerning technology use, and the sharing and co-creation of collections and exhibitions. Support behind technology-enabled learning in museums has reinforced the trend toward museum communities and consortia, as leaders in the space recognize collective action as a sustainable method of supporting upgrades in museums’ technological infrastructures and digital offerings. (NMC Horizon Report: 2016 Museum Edition, p. 8) Speculation by curator G. B. Goode in 1891, centred around the premise that a good museum must not be a mausoleum of dusty objects and colonialist assemblages, was based on fears he held for the Smithsonian. Inspired by the Great Exhibitions of 1851 and 1876, he envisaged the Smithsonian as a facilitator of modern equipment, instruments, objects and ideas that would bring ‘enlightenment to the people’ (Goode, 1891). His words intentionally revivified the historic research collaboration that had existed between museums, laboratories and libraries, and brought a liberal European definition of the museum as ‘any place devoted to the cultivation of learning, music, pictorial art or science’ (Forgan, 1994, p. 140). Goode’s thoughts also reflect the move towards open public engagement and education in the museum that was to unknowingly foreshadow the change in relationships with ‘the laboratory’ as each entity redefined their respective purposes. Museums have been the site of scientific teaching and research since the 19th century and closely associated with university laboratories. Universities and museums were often historically set up in close proximity, or as in the case of the Oxford and Cambridge University Museums (1860 and 1865 respectively), created to form the locus for science where lecture theatres and laboratories were centred (Forgan, 1994). In addition, public science museums have a long precedence of university collaboration, with staff often holding adjunct positions. In a modern context, and reminiscent of the imbedded university museum, the North Carolina (NC) Museum of Natural Sciences and the University of NC System (NC State University, NC Central University and Appalachian State University) have uniquely deepened this collaborative relationship by physically embedding glass-walled multidisciplinary science laboratories into the exhibition space, revealing not only new knowledge, but the ‘process’ through which it is derived (Bell, Chesebrough, Cryan & Koster, 2016). Jointly selected and co-funded by the museum and affiliated university departments, senior scientists are expected to apply for grants and participate in collaborative research with investigators from other institutions. The benefits are bi-directional; the researchers gain access to collections and the museum gains access to cutting edge science to boost audience participation, educational outcomes and their own research agendas. When they participate in museum programmes, scientists gain valuable and necessary expertise in science communication. Museums, skilled at research translation and presenting complex knowledge to engage with diverse audiences, are a logical partner. The Visual World iLab (VisLab) is a free public laboratory that is open seven days a week at the Museum of Natural Sciences NC. The primary focus of the lab is scientific visualisations, a technique used by scientists to understand and draw conclusions from complex datasets. Using high-end computers and augmented reality, scientists working in the laboratory have written programmes that allow the visualisation of complex data. The public can visit to view impromptu interactive experiments or participate in a class. New exhibits can be created by staff publicly at the electronics station using hardware technologies such Arduino, Raspberry Pi and three-dimensional (3D) printing or audiences can participate in demonstrations and experiments with electronics and robotics (Visual World iLab, 2018). 306

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Laboratories, once the physical place of natural scientific investigation, have changed and diversified to embrace technological development, education and quality assessment. Graeme Gooday’s (2008) broad definition of laboratories could be considered to extend to places of ‘experimental epistemology’ and include sites of new knowledge and artefact making. New ways of understanding the context of the laboratory: includes both understanding how the public relations of laboratories were sustained by major social networking and friendly journalists and also celebrating the diverse ways and places in which knowledge making and artefact making have thrived without the authority of expert scientists in white coats to direct them from expensively furnished hi-tech laboratories. (p. 784) A new field of enquiry under GLAMs is setting the scene for reinvigorating the role of the museum as a site in which knowledge processes take place and are interrogated. It highlights the focus on participatory practice, situating of audiences and their experiences at the forefront of new museological practice. ‘Collaboration’ in research in the 21st century can refer to widening of the categories of ‘researcher’ and ‘audience’, ‘subjects’ and ‘participants’— which has resulted in a narrowing of the gap between those that control and present archives and those that seek access to them. As the hierarchies of knowledge production and dissemination are in a sense broken down and re-envisaged, myriad protocols once governing research practices are also reimagined. A pertinent example of disciplinary cross-over is the multidisciplinary penetration of ethnographic and anthropological methodologies into the cultural studies and arts sectors, bringing several otherwise disparate fields into contact within GLAMs (see for example Rutten, Van Dienderen & Soetaert, 2013; Schneider & Wright, 2010). The Tate Research Centre (2015) has hosted multidisciplinary seminars on the place of ethnography in the museum including innovative approaches, which take the qualitative attributes of sensory ethnography to focus them through the quantitative lens of scientists including neuroscientists and psychologists. Although museum research processes and agendas are perhaps most often perceived as safely rooted in the self-reflexive and critical examination of their relationship with the public, digital drivers are a first step in understanding why GLAMs are turning to a focus on digital infrastructures for organisation, access and dissemination/display and museums offer unique opportunities to test interactive platforms developed for various knowledge-transfer scenarios. This aligns their interests more closely with new research in visualisation technology; subsequently, they are often early adopters of new exhibition machineries (Freeman et al., 2016) Here it is useful to define the type of museums seeking research collaboration. Generally, they are major national institutions, whereby research is specified by their creation Act. For example, the National Museum of Australia Act 1980 states that the museum should: from time to time as the occasion requires, to exhibit, by itself or in collaboration with others, in Australia or elsewhere, material, whether in written form or in any other form and whether relating to Australia or to a foreign country … to conduct, arrange for or assist in research into matters pertaining to Australian history. There are some instances in which smaller museums are seeking to form collaborative partnerships with universities such as The Museum–University Partnership Initiative (MUPI) in the UK, though they are less common. The Museum–University Partnership Initiative ran 307

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for two years between October 2016 and 2018 and demonstrated how the higher education sector can be opened to smaller and medium-sized museums whose unique collections and engagement expertise are often an underutilised resource (Museum–University Partnership Initiative, 2018). An estimated 25 per cent of over 100 million objects contained by Australian GLAMs had already been digitised as of 2014 (Mansfield, Winter, Griffith, Dockerty & Brown, 2014). Considering the rapid rate of digitisation and the exclusion of born-digital content in this figure, it is unsurprising that several of the sector’s grand challenges are related to the digital. Key challenges in the field today are mostly related to the impact of digital proliferation and technological penetration; seven of the nine critical field challenges identified in the Australian Innovation Study for GLAMs in 2014 were derived from digital concerns (Mansfield et al., 2014). The rise of the digital, a key factor catalysing the drive for convergence and formation of GLAMs, also defines avenues for collaboration.

Domelab Fulldome immersion is one of the latest additions to immersive virtual environments, rising in popularity around the world for its research and immersive capabilities (see Lantz, 2011; Schnall, Hedge & Weaver, 2012; Tredinnick & Richens, 2015). These systems are advancing new frontiers in immersive visualisation, intelligent interaction and networked experience for interactive media, museology and digital humanities research. Experimental research into fulldome systems is essential if the domains of interactive media, museology and digital humanities are to realise the benefits of an expanded field of immersive visualisation that engage with large-scale data—formats that are proliferating rapidly in the cultural sector because of the digitisation of GLAM collections and the increasing drive to capture ultra-high-resolution imagery of heritage sites and architecture around the world. Digital media and humanities researchers are experimenting with a range of augmented, mixed and virtual reality technologies and large-scale video displays in conjunction with emergent digital practices to better represent and explore these datasets. Museums are increasingly directing their attention to next-generation immersive and participatory experiences. Similarly, serious game researchers recognise that immersive visualisation can more effectively engage with pressing social problems. Although experimental fulldome is emerging as a significant new medium worldwide, there was no facility for fulldome digital media research in Australia. DomeLab addressed this deficit, providing advanced immersive visualisation opportunities for researchers to contribute to the field internationally. Supported by Australian Research Council Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities project funding in 2015,1 DomeLab was the first ultra-high resolution (4K) experimental fulldome in Australia. It is a unique, low-cost display system integrating technical innovation in computing power and graphics capabilities with aesthetic innovation in content delivery. The perceived hemispheric curvature of domes has been rendered architecturally by many cultures throughout the world and used to enfold the most sacred environments. From Buddhist stupas and Jain temples to Islamic mosques and Christian cathedrals, dome constructions are places of ritual, communion and transcendence. With both internal and external surfaces infused with iconography and geometric symbolism, domes continue to represent the worldviews of many traditions. Throughout the ages, such arched enclosures have often been used as surfaces upon which to represent ‘psycho-cosmological constructs’, decorated with ‘incorporeal archetypes’ (McConville, 2012). 308

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Discussing the appeal of projection domes in the present day, media theorist Nick Lambert (2012) argues that these ancient caves, where etchings and paintings were animated by fire and torchlight, represent the beginnings of cinematic imagery, and were arguably the first immersive experiences created by humankind. This affinity between contemporary dome experiences and ancient painted caves was recently celebrated in an interactive digital dome experience of the pyramidal grottoes at Dunhuang, China, installed at the 2015 World Economic Forum (Figure 26.1).2 A sublime art treasury, the surfaces of these caves are rendered with a thousand years of mural painting that began in 400 BCE. Standing beneath the Cave Dome’s sloping ceiling, visitors were transported to the desert of Northwest China inside a life-sized interactive 3D model of Cave 220. A dome’s ability to completely envelope the visual field of viewers in a mediated environment has continued to provide a revolutionary framework for pioneers in the arts and sciences. The concept of an ‘experiential’ domed environment was created by art and engineering collective Experiments in Art and Technology in the Pepsi Pavilion for Expo ’70 in Osaka. Described at that time by art critic Barbara Rose as a ‘theatre of the future’ and a ‘living responsive environment’, this dome was envisioned as a ‘total instrument’ to be

Figure 26.1 Cave Dome, Annual Meetings of the New Champions, World Economic Forum, Dalian, 9–11 September, Kenderdine, S. & Shaw, J. (2016). Source: Photo by Sarah Kenderdine.

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played by the participants, providing them with ‘choice, responsibility, freedom, and participation’ (Rose as cited in McConville, 2012). Such early developments in dome projection theatres emerged from attempts to simulate the ‘spherical gestalt of the human visual field’ and were designed to exploit and extend sensory perception (McConville, 2012). Many pioneers involved in conceiving dome experiences from the 1960s onwards believed that spatialised multisensory embodiment made possible in a dome would enhance the capacity and speed of human cognition, and ultimately a sense of presence or being there. DomeLab is an immersive, dome-based video projection environment six-metres wide, horizontally suspended over users and filled with interactive real-time or pre-rendered content. It has a projected resolution of 4K (4096 x 4096 pixels) and consists of a lightweight, powder-coated aluminium geodesic frame. Using negative pressure technology, the screen is made from two sheets of welded PVC. A pump is used to create a perfect hemisphere. Eight projectors and four+one high-end workstations with dual graphics processing units drive the projectors in concert with a surround audio system using 5.1. The hardware configuration allows seamless edge blending and geometry correction of the eight projected images across the dome. It is specifically designed for rapid assembly and comes complete with transportation road cases. This project is a large-scale collaboration between 15 investigators from 11 major cultural organisations and universities whose pioneering research is at the forefront of new media art, new museology and digital humanities. These institutions included: the Australian National Maritime Museum; the National Museum of Australia; Museum Victoria; the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research; the University of New South Wales (UNSW); the Western Sydney University; the University of Tasmania; the University of Western Australia; RMIT University; the University of Canberra; and City University Hong Kong. The value of partnership in this key contemporary area of research is primarily driven by capacity both technological, production skill and financial: none of these institutions could have built this unrivalled hardware on their own, nor produced state-of-the-art applications independently. In the current climate for GLAMs and universities, the significance of visualisation research for the digital humanities and heritage sector overlaps with academic interests in developing new platforms and research on immersive environments. The breadth of knowledge that universities display in both technology and the transdisciplinary application areas for new visualisation technology highly recommend them as partners in visualisation, immersion and interactivity for museums. DomeLab joins a networked cohort of fulldome environments located at partner institutions (Museum Victoria, Melbourne Planetarium and Cupola at City University Hong Kong), enabling distributed collaboration and interactivity across three research themes: interactive media (spatial aesthetics and interactive narrative), future museology (experimental history and immersive learning) and experimental humanities (knowledge visualisation). DomeLab networks this research alliance through the national research services AARNet and Intersect’s Research Data Storage Infrastructure, extending pioneering research in aesthetic frameworks and frontier technologies to benefit artistic, cultural, museological and humanities researchers. Another success of the partnership model is that the DomeLab was specifically designed to tour. This allowed each institution to ensure that they would share in the research capability of the dome environment at their own institution as well as in collaboration with the team and other researchers. Domelab demonstrates commercial value for research and creative industries related to content production, with an increasing number of creative industry groups taking up content production for clients of DomeLab (both partners and new clients). DomeLab can circulate its content on the worldwide market for fulldome (typically the

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major planetariums). The rental income generated by non-partner clients is used to maintain the system, providing further benefits to the contributing partners. The DomeLab partnership is a unique scenario within the context of GLAM collaboration pictured so far. While GLAMs have much to offer in research partnerships across the breadth of knowledges they develop, preserve and transfer, their cross-sectoral collaboration is not often theorised—in part due to the focus on issues attendant to true sectoral formation (i.e. GLAM ‘convergence’, not addressed in this short chapter). DomeLab is an example of an architecture for transdisciplinary research, and a framework for museum–university collaboration, situated against the expertise in immersive and interactive displays and environments already housed in both sectors.

Case study 1 Look Up Mumbai (2016) The exceptional architectonic heterogeneity of Mumbai is the subject of Look Up Mumbai (2016) (Figure 26.2). The dome of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) was adopted as the epicentre of an artistic exploration that specifically focused on the ceiling architectures of Mumbai’s heritage and contemporary buildings and transformed them into an urban celestial imaginary. The collaboration was between UNSW (DomeLab lead), Museum Victoria (DomeLab partner), Jindal Art Foundation and Mumbai’s CSMVS (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum). Museum Victoria already had a long-standing relationship with Jindal Art Foundation, having completed the PLACE-Hampi museum at Kaladham, the arts precinct in Karnataka next to the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization World Heritage site known as the Monuments at Hampi (see Kenderdine, 2013). DomeLab represented an opportunity to reinvigorate the bilateral cultural relationships resulting in a major outcome for both museums. The installation featured 70 gigapixel fish-eye images and a soundscape, celebrating the architecture of Mumbai including domes and ceilings of temples, industrial buildings and key examples of Mumbai’s rich Neo-Gothic, Indo-Saracenic and Art Deco architecture. This site-specific installation located the six-metre diameter DomeLab on the ground floor of CSMVS to emulate the museum’s own 20-metre diameter dome located far above in the museum’s atrium. Visitors to Look Up Mumbai’s installation, estimated at 2,000 per day, recline on a custom-made couch under an immersive digital projection dome and look up to view an algorithmically animated sequence of over 70 fish-eye photographs that constitute a unique portrait of Mumbai’s extraordinary and varied architecture of churches, mosques, temples, government and industrial buildings, private homes and nightclubs, all observed from this unusual and spectacular point of view. Images of these singular ceilings—Gothic and contemporary, sacred and secular, monumental and everyday—digitally transform from one to another inside this dome, and envelope viewers in an unfolding and immersive realm of artistic revelation and gratification. This work is accompanied by an original soundscape created by a leading contemporary Indian composer and master musicians. Mumbai’s architectural heritage is unrivalled in India. The city has one of the largest representations of the grand Neo-Gothic style of architecture, numerous examples of IndoSaracenic architecture and one of the world’s largest number of Art Deco buildings. According to writer Jan Morris (1984), ‘Bombay is one of the most characteristically Victorian cities in the world, displaying all the grand effrontery of Victorian eclecticism’ (p. 212). While the British influence on buildings in the city is evident from the colonial era, the architectural features 311

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Figure 26.2 Look Up Mumbai, 28 January–28 February, Mumbai: Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai, India. Kenderdine, S., Lintermann, B. & Shaw, J. (2016). Source: Photo by Sarah Kenderdine.

include a range of European influences such as German gables, Dutch roofs, Swiss timbering, Romance arches and Tudor casements often interfused with traditional Indian features. Projection mapping of the ceiling images inside the dome maintains the architectonic integrity of the images’ varying sizes and proportions and provides dramatic perceptual shifts in scale and form as the sequence of images unfolds. These shifts are amplified through digital animations to create transitions between these images that deconstruct the internal pixel structure of each image and modulate and blend them in various patterns of transformation. This cinematic trompe l’oeil of structural conjunctions and iconographic interpolations creates an aesthetic re-visioning of the various sites—they became remediated as a narrative sequence that focuses on their spatial, formal and pictorially associative qualities. An underlying symbolic dimension also reveals itself, as the architecture and decoration of these ceilings often imply correspondences of cosmological significance. In our daily lives, the architectural context and especially its ceilings that we seldom observe or contemplate tend to belong to the insensible world ‘that is given’. Look Up Mumbai sets out to relocate these ceilings in the other world, the one that is provoked by the attention that we pay to it, and in so doing focus the multicultural richness and 312

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diversity of these structures as objects of aesthetic allure, technological wonder and empyrean fascination. The project was well appreciated by local and international media.3 For the CSMVS, it was the first major new media installation in its history and provided a democratising view on the heritage of the city for local citizens. Further, it represented a major undertaking in experimental museology that was well beyond its technical and financial means. It was also a unique educational tool for the architectural departments of universities of the city.

Case study 2 Travelling Kungkarangkalpa (2016–2017) Embodied space is the location where human experience and consciousness takes on material and spatial form. (Low, 2003, p. 9) A focal point of the Seven Sisters Songlines of the National Museum of Australia exhibition is a dome experience conceived to immerse audiences in sacred sites of the Seven Sisters (Kungkarangkalpa). Through paintings, objects and DomeLab, the exhibition was led and co-created by Indigenous communities and traverses three Indigenous lands—APY (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara), Ngaanyatjarra and Martu. Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders have long embraced English writer Bruce Chatwin’s term ‘songlines’ to describe what they also know to be Dreaming paths— cultural, political, spiritual, ecological, geographical, historical wisdom that is etched in the land. The Seven Sisters songline portrays one of the most defining and predominant metanarratives chronicled in ancient mainland Australia—the story of a predatory, lustful loner—‘an Ancestral Being initially in the guise of a man who relentlessly pursues Seven Sisters (Ancestral women) over land and sky’ (Nicholls, 2017). It is morality tale, ancient wisdom that is especially pertinent in today’s #MeToo age. As Director of the National Museum Mathew Trinca says, ‘The exhibition tells a story that resonates globally and places Indigenous story telling at the centre of the national imagination’ (National Museum Australia, 2018). The shocking history of colonial contact (e.g. Woomera and Maralinga) have made communities involved in the exhibition wary of disclosing details of their sacred knowledge (Johnson, 2018). For example, they withheld their approval and participation in the world-renowned Aboriginal art market for more than a generation. Until this exhibition, the songline of the Seven Sisters had never been told in the public domain. The knowledge bearers stressed that they wished to share this knowledge with all Australians as mutual legacy. This project was seven years in the making from the day Anangu Elder Mr David Miller asked for help to put back together their broken songlines. The curatorial group comprised both Anangu and Yanangu men and women (the true knowledge-holders) alongside museum curators, academics and technologists. Kungkarangkalpa is a Tjukurpa that covers vast tracts of land in the western deserts of Australia and beyond. Archaic dome theatres are typified by the rock art caves found throughout Australia, some of the oldest painted arcades in the world. The digital sanctuary of DomeLab simultaneously expressed the sphere of the world around us, the sky above and the ground below, enveloping viewers in depictions of the Seven Sisters as they travel through country avoiding the unwanted attention of the lustful Wati Nyiru. As these creation beings travel, they leave land formations in their wake and later continue the chase evident in Pleiades and Orion in the southern night sky. The architectonic form of the 313

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Figure 26.3 Travelling Kungkarangkalpa, in Tracking the Seven Sisters, 14 September 2017– 25 February 2018, National Museum of Australia. Kenderdine, S. & Morse, P. (2017). Source: Photo by Sarah Kenderdine.

dome provides an ideal spatial canvas, inviting viewers inside to lie down and look up— Travelling Kungkarangkalpa. Travelling Kungkarangkalpa invites viewers to enter two distinct journeys: one as witness to Walinynga, with its ochre-painted ceiling giving an animated canopy of Kungkarangkalpa. The cave was photographed in three dimensions for the first time, allowing visitors intimate views of the stories contained in its sandstone folds (Figure 26.3). The other journey immerses visitors in a series of projected artworks of this Tjukurpa, following the Seven Sisters as they travel country (Figure 26.4). In the final scene, 3D models of the extraordinary trussed grass tjanpi figures are observed taking flight, prefiguring their final destination in the night sky. The dome provides a modality of visitor experience suited to maximise the senses of kinaesthetic embodiment, audiovisual concentration and emotional engagement. Entering beneath the suspended dome, viewers look up into the hemisphere. A reclining position relaxes the body and focuses the receptivity of the viewers to the visual vault that envelopes

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their field of view. The prone body position effectually associates this installation experience with others familiar to the viewer: that of sleeping, where dreams take place; of lying on the ground; or camping in the desert, gazing up to the sky. These embodied memories amplify the receptivity of the viewer. This encompassing perceptual field is complemented by the dome itself, which acts as an acoustic cloak amplifying the all-surrounding sonic architecture of the work. Like its predecessors, this modern multisensory sanctuary continues to reflect the cosmologies and the worldview of its creators from which Travelling Kungkarangkalpa emerges. The importance of the Aboriginal worldview is fundamental to the infinite horizon of DomeLab in this context. Environmentalist Paul Faulstich (1998) describes: Landscape is fluid—it flows around us and encompasses us. It is not external to the individual; landscape is an assembly of sensory information which generates a seen and felt experience of the world. It is a symbolic constitution of the environment within which humans exist. (p. 201) The critical attention that the exhibition received has been profound, winning the most major of Australia’s national exhibition awards for 2017 (National Museum Australia, 2018).4 The exhibition is considered a watershed in relations between the National Museum, Indigenous Australia and the public. It is now destined to tour worldwide; the Museum will purchase a new fulldome as part of this touring. Without the initial collaboration, which involved extensive content production led by UNSW, the community and the museum (involving gigapixel panoramic imaging, timelapse photography, photogrammetry and drone-based aerial imaging and animation), this exhibition would not have been possible. As the National Museum was a DomeLab partner, it was able to install the dome for six months at no charge; it is now confident to tour such a system internationally. The opportunity to reframe the nature of experience of Indigenous art by the public in a combination of real-world imaging and computer graphics had a profound impact of the narrative of the exhibition with important impacts for both museum and community.

Conclusion Other projects for the DomeLab in 2015–2017 included RMIT’s Design Hub exhibition Design and Play, and the Melbourne Festival’s commission for the University of Melbourne, Inside the Ethereal Eye, both in 2016.5 As an experimental platform for museums and university collaboration, DomeLab continues to provide its partners a variety of opportunities and values. DomeLab demonstrates social value by changing the nature of public engagement with high-quality research through large-scale immersive systems in public settings. DomeLab demonstrates cultural value through art/science collaboration and output. It demonstrates research value by changing the nature of knowledge creation and driving insights through visualisation beyond those areas traditionally reserved for fulldome (i.e. astronomy). DomeLab demonstrates educational value by providing new models of immersive pedagogy and technological value by pioneering new software pipelines and creating unique hardware integration knowledge, valuable to the fulldome community worldwide. Domelab also demonstrates commercial value for research and the creative industries related to content production. Already, DomeLab content production is valued in excess of AUD 1,000,000 with an increasing number of creative industry groups taking up content production for clients of DomeLab (both partners and new clients). DomeLab can circulate its content on the worldwide market for fulldome (typically the 315

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Figure 26.4 Josephine Mick (pointing) and other members of the APY and NPY communities at the launch of the Travelling Kungkarangkalpa, in Tracking the Seven Sisters, Songlines, National Museum of Australia, September 2017. Source: National Museum Australia; Photo by George Serras 2017.

major planetariums). In addition, the platform is able to generate rental income from nonpartner clients, which is used to maintain and upgrade the system. If we return to the opening hopeful statement of G. B. Goode from the Smithsonian—the future museum, laboratory conjunction—we could consider media archaeologist Siegfried Zielinski’s (2006) analysis. He said the potential in cross-sector collaborations is not to produce ‘more cleverly packaged information of what we already know, what fills us with ennui, or what merely serves laziness and tries to harmonize what is not yet harmonious’ (p. 280). Instead, Zielinski celebrates those who understand the invitation to experiment and to ‘continue working on the impossibility of the perfect interface’ (p. 259). The interface is necessarily the work of collaborations through which museum, laboratory and the public create the new.

Acknowledgements Part of this text appeared in Kenderdine, S. (2017). Travelling Kungkarangkalpa, M. Neale (Ed.), Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters. Canberra, ACT: National Museum of Australia Press.

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Notes 1 The Australian Research Council (ARC), Australia’s federal research funding body, incentivises university–industry collaboration through its Linkage Project funding scheme, which supports joint research with a focus on end-user benefits. This aligns with the long-standing government objective to extend university-based research to applications in industry—reflective of the global recognition of the innovative research capacity of universities and the mission to ‘unlock’ new knowledge and research in academia to the benefit of end-users/society. While university-based researchers are seeking out collaboration with GLAMs, particularly for studies in education, cognitive science and research based on the collections held by GLAMs, there is little commentary on existing innovation and mutually beneficial frameworks for partnership between GLAMs and universities—just as the emergent GLAMs sector itself is still building protocols and senses of best practice for internal collaboration. 2 See Anna Bruce-Lambert, ‘Can 3D save our cultural heritage?’, World Economic Forum, 10 September 2015, www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/09/can-3d-save-our-cultural-heritage; Fran Strachan, ‘Using immersive technology to preserve China’s cultural heritage’, UNSW Newsroom, 9 September 2015, http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/art-architecture-design/using-immersive-technologypreserve-china%E2%80%99s-cultural-heritage 3 See Vij, G. (2016, 1 February). An architectural kaleidoscope comes to town, The Hindu. Retrieved from www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/entertainment/an-architectural-kaleidoscope-comesto-town/article8177804.ece; Page, T. (2016, 10 March). The spectacular, warped beauty of Mumbai’s elaborate interiors, CNN. Retrieved from http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/10/design/lookup-mumbai-ceilings; Harmon, S. (2016, 2 February). Look Up Mumbai: Exhibition invites public to experience city’s architecture lying down, Guardian. Retrieved 13 August 2018 from www.the guardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/feb/02/look-up-mumbai-exhibition-invites-public-toexperience-citys-architecture-lying-down, 2 February 2016. 4 See MacDonald, J. (2018, 10 January), ‘Seven sisters of a storied land: An exhibition of Aboriginal art explores ancient stories of sisters pursued across the land’, Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/review-songlines-tracking-theseven-sisters-at-the-national-museum-of-australia-20180109-h0fmlp.html?btis; Nicholls, C. (2017, 20 December). Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters is a must-visit exhibition for all Australians’, The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/songlines-tracking-the-seven-sis ters-is-a-must-visit-exhibition-for-all-australians-89293; Daly, P. (2017, 16 September). ‘Songlines at the NMA: a breathtaking triumph of 21st century museology’, Guardian. www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/2017/sep/16/songlines-at-the-nma-a-breathtaking-triumph-of-21st-centurymuseology; Grishin, S. (2017, 26 September). ‘It sets a new benchmark’: Songlines exhibition is a must-see at NMA, Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from www.smh.com.au/act-news/can berra-life/it-sets-a-new-benchmark-songlines-exhibition-is-a-mustsee-at-nma-20170926-gyovh8. html 5 Design and Play, RMIT, Design Hub, Retrieved from http://designhub.rmit.edu.au/exhibitions-pro grams/designandplay; TransformTechno. (2016), The architecture of inside the ethereal eye. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@TransformTechno/the-architecture-of-inside-the-ethereal-eyec837db24e8be

References Bell, J., Chesebrough, D., Cryan, J. & Koster, E. (2016). Museum–university partnerships as a new platform for public engagement with scientific research. Journal of Museum Education, 41(4), 293–306. https://doi.org/10.1080/10598650.2016.1228302. Faulstich, P. (1998). Mapping the mythological landscape: An Aboriginal way of being-in-the world. Philosophy & Geography, 1(2), 197–221. Forgan, S. (1994). The architecture of display: Museums, universities and objects in nineteenth-century Britain. History of Science, 32(2), 139–162. Retrieved from search-proquest-com.wwwproxy1.library.unsw.edu.au /docview/1298070278?accountid=12763. Freeman, A., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., McElroy, E., Glesinger, C. & Yuknke, B. (2016). NMC Horizon Report 2016 Museum Edition. Austin, TX. New Media Consortium (NMC).

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Gooday, G. (2008). Placing or replacing the laboratory in the history of science? Isis, 99(4), 783–795. https://doi.org/10.1086/595772. Goode, G. B. (1891). The museums of the future. Report of the National Museum, 1888–’89, 1(1), 427–445. Johnson, V. (2018). Songlines: Tracking the seven sisters [online]. Artlink, 38(1), 75–77. Kenderdine, S. (2013). PLACE-Hampi: Inhabiting the Panoramic Imaginary of Vijayanagara. Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag. Lambert, N. (2012). Domes and creativity: A historical exploration. Digital Creativity, 23(1), 5–29. Lantz, E. (2011). Planetarium of the future. Curator: The Museum Journal, 54(3), 293–312. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.2151-6952.2011.00093.x. Low, S. M. (2003). Anthropological theories of body, space, and culture. Space & Culture, 6(1), 9–18. Mansfield, T., Winter, C., Griffith, C., Dockerty, A. & Brown, T. (2014). Innovation study: Challenges and opportunities for Australia’s galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation Smart Services CRC. McConville, D. (2012). Cosmological cinema: Pedagogy, propaganda, and perturbation in early dome theaters. Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 5(2), 69–86. Morris, J. (1984). Stones of empire: The buildings of the Raj. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Museum-University Partnership Initiative. (2018). Retrieved from www.publicengagement.ac.uk/nccpeprojects-and-services/nccpe-projects/museum-university-partnership-initiative. National Museum Australia. (2018, 6 June). National Museum’s Songlines exhibition wins most prestigious award for a museum or gallery show in 2018 [Press release]. Retrieved from www.nma.gov.au/media/ media_releases_by_year/2018/songlines-award. National Museum of Australia Act. (1980). Canberra: Australian Parliament. Retrieved from www.legisla tion.gov.au/Details/C2016C01081. Nicholls, C. J. (2017). Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters is a must-visit exhibition for all Australians. The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/songlines-tracking-the-seven-sistersis-a-must-visit-exhibition-for-all-australians-89293. Rutten, K., Van Dienderen, A. & Soetaert, R. (2013). Revisiting the ethnographic turn in contemporary art. Critical Arts, 27(5), 459–473. https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2013.855513. Schnall, S., Hedge, C. & Weaver, R. (2012). The immersive virtual environment of the digital fulldome: Considerations of relevant psychological processes. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 70 (8), 561–575. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2012.04.001. Schneider, A. & Wright, C. (Eds.) (2010). Between art and anthropology: Contemporary ethnographic practice. New York, NY: Berg. The Tate Research Centre (2015). Rethinking the Senses. Retrieved from www.tate.org.uk/context-com ment/video/rethinking-senses. Tredinnick, J. & Richens, P. (2015). A fulldome interactive visitor experience a novel approach to delivering interactive virtual heritage experiences to group audiences in fulldome projection spaces, evaluated through spatial awareness and emotional response. Digital Heritage 1, 413–414. Visual World iLab. (2018). Retrieved from http://naturalsciences.org/learn/visual-world-ilab. Zielinski, S. (2006). Deep time of the media: Toward an archaeology of hearing and seeing by technical means, Custance, G. (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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27 Human-centred design in digital media Indigo Hanlee

Introduction Technology is changing the way we interact with the physical environment. Digital platforms such as touchscreens, voice recognition and motion-sensing technologies are becoming the conduits through which we navigate everyday life, such that we live in a hybrid digital/physical space. In this evolving context of new media and the internet of everything, museums and cultural institutions are searching for innovative ways to engage visitors in their exhibitions. Even established institutions like the Anzac Memorial Hyde Park and Australian Museum in Sydney have found themselves competing with the digital world and needing to respond to the needs of their media-literate audiences. With visitors seeking new and dynamic experiences, museums are being forced to evaluate whether their exhibitions are meeting visitor expectations. While this intersection between the physical and digital space creates some profound challenges for exhibition design, it also presents exciting possibilities. The adoption of humancentred, innovative technology in exhibitions is an opportunity for museums to tell new stories and reshape the way they approach the visitor experience. Designers play a key role in this process, creating new human-centred solutions in a context for which there is often no precedent. The following case study briefly explores this nexus between exhibition design, technology and the visitor experience, and uses some of the projects from the Sydney-based studio Lightwell to explore opportunities for human-centred design in the selection and creation of digital media.

Digital media and the visitor experience Digital media provides a wealth of experiential possibilities for contemporary exhibition design. Exhibitions are no longer simply viewed as displays for objects, but as environments for engaging visitor experiences where technologies can be exploited. With visitors increasingly attending museums to accumulate experiences rather than knowledge, the role of the contemporary exhibition designer is to navigate the multidimensional needs of the museum as both an educational institution and leisure activity. From the visceral to the cognitive to the emotional, exhibitions are transforming into ‘diverse experiential narratives, formulated and designed to attract and engage the audience’s attention’ (Lake-Hammond & Waite, 2010, p. 88).

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The Anzac Memorial Hyde Park is one of the Australian institutions investing in technology as a way of reinterpreting the visitor experience. As part of its 2018 Centenary Project, it engaged exhibition designers X Squared Design and media design studio Lightwell to reinterpret its significant collection of artefacts, images, videos and dioramas displayed in its new galleries. Within the exhibitions, large-scale video walls and touchscreens augment the physical displays and provide new access points for interpretation (Figure 27.1). Interactive flipbooks have also been installed, allowing visitors to explore photographs, postcards, logbooks and journals in high resolution. While the Anzac Memorial was originally opened in 1934 to honour the servicemen and women who lost their lives in World War I, the newly renovated building is now considered NSW’s principal memorial for all Australians who have served. This expansion of the Memorial’s original purpose has been reflected both in the design of its galleries, and its new focus on attracting a wider range of visitors through its doors. As the general public becomes increasingly familiar with digital media, the Memorial’s inclusion of cinematic experiences and interactive technologies has become a way for the institution to tell new stories and engage with younger audiences—an objective museums have traditionally struggled to achieve (Marshall, Morris, Rogers, Kreitmayer & Davies, 2011). The Australian Museum is another institution that has recognised the opportunities in digital media to encourage visitor engagement. With over 18 million objects in its natural science and cultural collections but only one per cent of these items on display, the Museum has embarked on several ongoing projects to expand and modernise its institution. Named barrabuwari muru, meaning ‘future path’ in Sydney’s Indigenous Gadigal language, the Museum’s plan is to provide greater access to its collection through the redevelopment of its existing site and strategic use of digital platforms in exhibitions. As part of this digital/physical strategy, the Australian Museum worked with Lightwell to create a suite of digital experiences for its 200 Treasures exhibition in 2017. A number of interactive and video components were developed, including quizzes, games, conversational apps and three five-metre interactive touch walls that cover the west side of the Museum’s Westpac Long Gallery (Figure 27.2). Cascading with images and artefacts, these large-scale walls recognise the lives of 100 influential Australians, using keywords and themes to connect their stories in interesting and unexpected ways. The multi-user installation has also become a meeting point for visitors. Designed as a shared visitor experience and conclusion to the exhibition, it allows groups to explore the Museum’s collection and share their discoveries with others across screens.

Novelty and technology The rapid adoption of digital media in exhibitions highlights the explosion of visitor experiences now available to cultural institutions and museums. However, as designers explore the new opportunities technology has to offer, they must also navigate its unique challenges. Exhibitions can become a tug of war between multidisciplinary teams; CEOs, curators, educators, marketing executives, architects, designers and hardware integrators all charged by their own agendas. This environment of multiple stakeholders determines the way digital media is selected and used. Excited by the possibility of potential customers or platforms adopted by other institutions, there has been a trend in exhibitions to move towards novel technologies and elaborate media regardless of the interpretive needs of the content. Digital platforms are being used to fill walls, gather 320

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Figure 27.1 Anzac Memorial Centenary Project, Anzac Memorial Hyde Park, Sydney. Source: Copyright Australian Lightwell.

unconnected stories or distract from the very absence of a story. As described by Chan and Cope (2015): Often it feels like museums make decisions about the appropriate use of technology based upon short term internal needs—the need to have something ‘newsworthy’, the need to have something to keep their funders happy. While it is easy for exhibition designers to introduce technology at a relatively superficial level, it is challenging to create meaningful visitor participation. When digital media is employed without proper consideration for the story being told or the overall experience, the result can be a cacophony of confusing, disparate messages that will tire or overload the visitor. Further, the differences between the experiential and interpretive functions of an exhibition often require multiple levels of visitor engagement within an exhibition. Not even the newest piece of technology, no matter how shiny or expensive, can successfully fulfil all the educational and experiential criteria required of the contemporary visitor. As explained by Falk and Dierking (2012), technology is only a tool: Although it is tempting to believe that the excitement and novelty of these new digital tools will make it much easier for museums to tell their story to the public, do not be deceived. These are only tools after all and will be selectively used by the public … People will only spend time watching/listening/interacting with media if they are interested in the topic and are motivated to learn more; if they are not, no matter how glitzy, expensive, or elaborate the media, they will not pay attention. (p. 122) Digital media must be thoughtfully designed in relationship with the rest of the exhibition for meaningful and successful visitor engagement.

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Figure 27.2 200 Treasures Exhibition, Australian Museum, Sydney. Source: Copyright Australian Museum.

Human-centred exhibition design This challenge of selecting and integrating digital media in exhibitions is forcing designers to re-evaluate the museum design process. Digital media is not a component that can be added once the rest of the exhibition has already been designed, nor is it appropriate to rely solely on its presence to drive the visitor experience. As described by Tina Roppola (2013) in Designing for the Museum Visitor Experience, the primary task of the contemporary exhibition designer is ‘to sensitively orchestrate interpretive content and interpretive media, in relationship with the overall vessel of the institution’s building, so that visitors are supported in meaningful and accessible ways’ (p. 6). Designers need to act as facilitators and directors of all the elements of an exhibition because ultimately, they are responsible for the visitor experience. In light of this, many design studios are now favouring human-centred methodologies to inform their practice. This is because, at its core, human-centred design is about understanding the needs of the visitor. While this may sound straightforward in theory, ‘HCD’ is not simply a suite of prescribed tools or acronym to be added to a company bio. It’s a completely different way of thinking that focuses on the requirements and interests of the end user by involving them in the design process. By integrating methods such as observation, interviews, prototyping and iteration throughout the design process, designers are able to build a deep empathy around the people they are designing for and create innovative solutions tailored to meet their needs. Within exhibitions, human-centred processes are an important way for studios like Lightwell to better design for the visitor experience. Research is key to this process, helping teams understand the story, context and people they are designing for by drawing a net around the ‘problem, encompassing the questions and the solutions and all points in between’ (Hill, 2014, p. 45). For the Australian Museum’s 200 Treasures exhibition, humancentred research played a primary role in the digital platform that was selected and approach 322

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that was employed. Lightwell completed a number of site visits, brainstorming workshops, user-experience wireframes and storyboards with the exhibition team before hardware platforms and designs were finally determined (Figure 27.3). These methods ensured that both the interpretive and experiential requirements of the project were considered early in the project, and the visitor experience was core to the final design.

Figure 27.3 Research allows teams to understand the story and people for whom they are designing. Source: Indigo Hanlee.

Figure 27.4 Interdisciplinary collaboration creates spaces for discussion and innovation to occur. Source: Indigo Hanlee.

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Figure 27.5 Reflective practices mature designs teams so they can focus on visitor needs. Source: Indigo Hanlee.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is also central to the human-centred design process, allowing designers to draw on the valuable input of visitors and other professionals to create well-considered digital media for exhibitions (Figure 27.4). Indeed, one of the main roles of the exhibition designer is to facilitate this collaboration between an institution’s different, and often disparate, professional silos. Through key stages of the design process—research, collaborative workshops, prototyping, iteration, feedback sessions and other scheduled meetings—designers are able to create understanding between these different groups to enable human-centred design. This is particularly important for digital media, where discussions around the selection, budget and scope of a project need to be resolved as early as possible. Finally, human-centred design requires constant feedback. For exhibition designers, testing and gathering opinions from visitors and stakeholders is a never-ending process that helps to refine designs into intuitive visitor experiences. Allocated feedback periods and interviews, as well as visitor analytics embedded in a digital platform’s software, provide designers with both the qualitative and quantitative data to determine which elements of their designs are working or require revision. This iterative approach to digital media recognises that, like all designs, the first prototype is never perfect. Feedback and iteration allow designers the opportunity to explore ideas, make mistakes, solve problems and ultimately arrive at innovative technological solutions that will be embraced by others. Reflection is also part of the feedback process (Figure 27.5). By taking the time to assess and thoughtfully record the successes and shortcomings of a project, designers can help bring a richness and understanding to their practice. This maturity provides a new flexibility for design teams, allowing them to focus on the needs of the visitor instead of their internal processes. At Lightwell, ‘postmortems’ are scheduled at the end of a project to identify the successes, difficulties and strategies that can be used in future practice. In these interdisciplinary sessions, the quality of a project is not

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measured by the absence of challenges, but by how they were resolved to improve the visitor experience.

Conclusion The adoption of digital media in exhibitions allows museums and cultural institutions to reshape the way visitors engage with their collections. Technology provides exciting possibilities to tell new stories and create installations designed to attract and engage diverse audiences. However, as institutions explore the digital opportunities available, they must also recognise their limitations. Digital media, while an effective device for visitor engagement, is only a tool. Without proper consideration for the story being told or the requirements of the audience, even the most elaborate media installation will fail to create a meaningful visitor experience. In this context, human-centred design is key to navigating how to best select and integrate digital media in exhibitions. With technology and audience expectations continuing to evolve, design studios like Lightwell are finding themselves creating digital media in a context for which there is considerable demand, but little guidance. By adopting humancentred methodologies such as research, interdisciplinary collaboration, feedback milestones and reflective practices throughout the design process, designers can better understand the museum visitor and create technological solutions to meet their needs.

References Chan, S. & Cope, A. (2015). Strategies against architecture: Interactive media and transformative technology at Cooper Hewitt. Museums and the Web. Retrieved from http://mw2015.museumsandtheweb. com/paper/strategies-against-architecture-interactive-media-and-transformative-technology-atcooper-hewitt/ Falk, J. & Dierking, L. (2012). The museum experience revisited. London: Routledge. Hill, D. (2014). Dark matter and Trojan horses: A strategic design vocabulary. Moscow: Strelka Press. Lake-Hammond, L. & Waite, N. (2010). Exhibition design: Bridging the knowledge gap. The Design Journal, 13(1), 77–98. Marshall, P., Morris, R., Rogers, Y., Kreitmayer, S. & Davies, M. (2011). Rethinking ‘multi-user’: An in-the-wild study of how groups approach a walk-up-and-use tabletop interface. In Proceedings of the 29th international conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1081–1090). Vancouver: ACM Press. Roppola, T. (2013). Designing for the museum visitor experience. New York, NY: Routledge.

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28 Unlocking the glass case Peter Higgins

Introduction Museums now have to compete within a volatile entertainment marketplace, which exploits both the virtual and the tangible. It may be that as museum practitioners, we must adopt a strategy that values and celebrates ‘the power of the real’: real time, real space, real people and real objects. It is possible that these sometimes precious and often fascinating objects provide the all-important unique selling proposition that helps provide a critical point of difference. Historically, there has been the need to curate, classify and conserve collections, establishing a tradition that demands sterile-cased and protected objects. In response, we have investigated the concept of ways to synthetically connect to these objects by metaphorically unlocking the glass case. This strategy has been encouraged through our experience incorporating digital technologies as part of the museum experience over the past 20 years. From this, we have learned many valuable lessons.

A starting point: the Playzone, Millennium Dome 2000 The Playzone at the Millennium Dome, which we designed and installed for the year 2000, provided an inspirational opportunity to investigate the potential of digital media in the context of museums, science centres and visitor experiences. Through a relationship with Ars Electronica in Linz, we were introduced to international digital artists who were beginning to exploit this emerging technology in a fun, imaginative and unique way. We discovered that these artists really understood the benefits of these technologies, rather than merely suggesting gratuitous applications. Our involvement with them encouraged us to challenge some conventions of interactivity in the museum domain. We interrogated the central objective of engaging the visitor through ‘discovery learning’, which is most successful when it is possible to establish an emotional link with information delivery. With an understanding of input/output and the feedback loop, it is possible to promote cognitive exploration such that initiative and experiment are rewarded (Caulton, 1998). The ‘smartness’ that the digital embraced somehow opened new doors and was especially attractive to the younger generation, who are acknowledged to more difficult to reach in the museum domain.

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Navigational device One of the most direct inspirations to evolve from the Millennium Dome was a classic input/ output device, where the user discovers that a manipulated light beam can activate a response. An installation devised by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, titled Phototopy, demonstrated the scientific principle of light providing essential, life-giving nutrition for living organisms. The interface was a physical torch, which attracted virtual insects to a large projection screen. Several years later, on the Dinobirds tour (at the Natural History Museum London, see Figure 28.1), our brief was to help visitors understand how dinosaurs had evolved into birds through a collection of fossils that had been discovered in China. Our task was to describe how the fossils provided scientific evidence of this transformation. The enchanting digital artwork of Sommerer and Mignonneau inspired us to develop a navigational joystick-controlled light source to investigate a horizontally cased archaeopteryx fossil that had embedded forensic clues showing their progressive evolution into birds. In simple terms, the physical visible clues, such as joint configuration or the emergence of feathers, attracted investigation and were enhanced by the light source navigated by the visitor. These hotspots were tagged through coordinates that were triggered by the light source and the interpreted data and image were sent to a slave screen to be interrogated by the user or even passive observers.

Figure 28.1 Dinobirds at the Natural History Museum, London (Nick Wood Land Design Studio). Source: Photo by Peter Higgins.

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Analogue/digital interface At the National Maritime Museum Cornwall (see Figure 28.2), though not case-protected, we faced the challenge of identifying and interpreting an open collection of small boats hung in a layered display 30 m x 15 m deep. The solution was to provide workstations, including a screen that enabled visitors to select a boat from an elevational drawing of the hang and then wind the symbol of their chosen vessel into the centre of the screen. The winding mechanism was a stainless-steel boating winch that represented a meaningful and fun analogue interface. Once the chosen vessel was located on the screen, the surface transformed into a conventional touchscreen,

Figure 28.2 National Maritime Museum, Cornwall (Nick Wood Land Design Studio). Source: Photo by Peter Higgins.

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allowing the user to investigate their chosen boat. The process of identifying a specific small boat through its technical features then moving it onto the screen for further scrutiny provided an important emotional engagement.

Kinesthetics Other methods of interface design include kinesthetic tactile learning experiences, such as tangible object facsimiles responding to the protected object. At Chatham Historic Dockyard (see Figure 28.3), we were able to develop this form of interpretation; four key objects were chosen,

Figure 28.3 Chatham Historic Dockyard (Nick Wood Land Design Studio). Source: Photo by Peter Higgins.

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including a flat timber plate, a block and tackle and an hourglass .The cased objects were chosen for their tangible qualities, such as rotation or markings, which could activate a screen-based feedback loop. Sophisticated maker technologies enable the manufacture of high-quality facsimiles, which provides the user with a convincing interface device. However, as always, the museum protocol is to emphasise and clarify that the authentic object is protected.

Projected augmentation For the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead exhibition at the British Museum (see Figure 28.4), many exhibits required careful conservation involving inevitable low-lighting levels, especially for the papyrus. We were particularly interested in the quality and interpretive value of the graphic information embedded in the papyri, which really invites significant investigation. The British Museum had long resisted the use of digital media in exhibitions, mainly because of the expectations of older, more conservative visitors, who comprise the majority of patrons. Our response to this genuine concern was to investigate how the media could remain non-invasive and not interfere with conventional visitors’ expectations. The solution introduced projection above glass cases in the way that surtitles are used in opera houses. For this, we selected the Hunifer papyrus, which is a particularly fascinating object containing multiple narratives related to the Book of the Dead. Key themes were selected, interpreted and projected in such a way that

Figure 28.4 Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead at the British Museum (Nick Wood Land Design Studio). Source: Photo by Peter Higgins.

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they did not interfere with visitors’ enjoyment of the key object at low level. Indeed, the design of the projected image meant that it could be viewed from a distance, enabling a clear protocol for different types of visitor engagement.

Gaming paradigm The National Waterfront Museum Swansea (see Figure 28.5) is a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF)-funded museum designed by architectural practice Wilkinson Eyre. The design integrated an existing Victorian coal shed with a new-build structure that could house heavy industrial objects. When it opened in 2005, it was the first new-build national museum with free entry. As with much of the media, our brief was to attract the harder-to-reach younger audiences to museums. When confronted with a gallery of predictable objects relating to professional practitioners, our starting point was to create a mechanism that referenced familiar computer gaming paradigms encouraging players to navigate through virtual space. The installation operates in three layers, beginning with a touchscreen interface that facilitates navigation through the streets of Swansea to discover the residence of a chosen character, such as a sea captain, doctor or engineer. While the simple architectural reconstruction of the journey through the city is screen-based, it is also projected onto a suspended, translucent ‘holopro’ screen for the benefit of passive visitors. Having negotiated the streets and entered the house through the agency of architectural line renderings, the user discovers three-dimensional

Figure 28.5 National Waterfront Museum Swansea (Nick Wood Land Design Studio). Source: Photo by Peter Higgins.

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objects within the virtual world. These distinctive objects are displayed in a large case in conjunction with the gaming interface. The design of this system intentionally focused on attracting younger visitors whose ‘gaming style’ virtual journey is rewarded through the discovery of a tangible historic object, rather than simply a symbolic icon such as a golden key.

Scanning The concept of presenting an array of moving objects that can be passed through a scanning device provides a fascinating kinetic mechanism that captures and interprets objects as they pass through space. The momentary time-based nature of this system seems to capture the imagination of visitors with the perception that the inert objects are coming to life. At the National Waterfront Museum Swansea—which is dedicated to the industrial revolution in Wales—our response was to present the theme of metals production using an industrial-scale vertical paternoster that contained a collection of objects in glass cases. As the vertical display passed through a scanning zone, a slave screen was dedicated to the interpretation and development of the historic object narratives. At the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, an exhibition called Manchester Science encouraged schoolchildren to consider a career in science and technology using famous local scientists as a historic starting point. The finale needed to provide stimulating contemporary science and technology narratives. In this case, everyday mundane objects, such as trainers or kitchen utensils, were suspended from an overhead continuous conveyor belt. The objects were then investigated as they passed through screens. The science behind these familiar objects was made more compelling as the screen mediated the moving object as if in an X-ray or forensic mode.

Mediated object An exhibition dedicated to the history of British popular music, The British Music Experience at the O2 Greenwich (see Figure 28.6), provided the opportunity to interrogate technical devices through the medium of the music that they transmitted. A large case displayed a timeline of objects from 1940–2010, including early radios, beatboxes through to contemporary iPhones. A series of identical interfaces enabled visitors to view the array and use a symbolic tuning knob to select a moment in time (displayed as an overhead timeline) linked to a chosen object, which then activates a piece of music most associated with that specific object. The fascinating feature of this installation is that it presents a very modest object collection of popular culture items (mostly disposed of by visitors) that are often remembered by individuals and help provide an emotional musical connection with their past.

Augmented reality and semantic identity At the higher end of technology, we have investigated radio-frequency identification and fiducial markers to identify protected objects and interpret them using handheld device interfaces. We prototyped and installed this technology at the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Expo Pavilion in Milan 2015. An assembly of smart media cubes that contained 3D models augmented with tablets helped describe complex innovations in food production and energy within the UAE. 332

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Figure 28.6 The British Music Experience at the O2 Greenwich (Nick Wood Land Design Studio). Source: Photo by Peter Higgins.

This project was language specific. However, it prompted us to consider the potential identification and tagging of more refined user profiles to provide personalised semantic levels of interpretation by directly linking to digitally generated data management systems. Finally, we can deliver distinct levels of intellectual content and more personalised material by understanding the individual characteristics of visitors. This requires visitors to provide some personal data, which can be redacted after their visit to avoid data gathering and privacy concerns. We imagined a veteran soldier visiting a war museum and being alerted to a letter written from somebody in their regiment. Without the alert, the visitor would possibly have passed the display case featuring the letter. The value of profiling is endless and will potentially overcome the continuing need to target the presentation of museum artefacts at the level of a 12-year-old.

Summary This personal journey, which investigates the interpretation of protected or remote objects through digital media, helps to define some principles. Interfaces are a continuing theme often mixing analogue and digital, and sometimes providing playful, symbolic or tactile solutions (e.g. handles, joysticks or tuning knobs). Sensory systems provide critical triggers of ‘if then’; these can be mechanical but are mostly embedded in the software. 333

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While I have an aversion to touchscreens, the screen remains an important mediator of communication systems often linked to smart interfaces, or in the case of kinetic movement, take on the role of mysterious scanners. In Swansea, they provide a reflective paradigm of another genre: gaming and virtual worlds. Interestingly, the more advanced augmented reality solution in Milan is combined with a more advanced screen in the form of a tablet device. The simplest example using linear animated augmentation (British Museum) may have its foot in the past (animatics), however, with refined quality, provides more powerful hybrid presentations through the augmentation of objects. It is worth referring to an interesting phenomenon that has resulted from our work in this field: the concept of ‘passive interactivity’, in which a sole navigator may activate a response from a mechanism. This passive interactivity applies not just to the navigator, but also an extended audience, provided the overall interactive protocol is clear and the output visible enough to be understood by all.

Reference Caulton, T. (1998). Hands on exhibitions. London: Routledge.

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29 The law of feeling Experiments in a Yolngu museology Paul Gurrumuruwuy and Jennifer Deger

You have find ways to catch people and draw them close. It’s not hard if you know how. Paul Gurrumuruwuy

This chapter claims museums as affective sites of relationship-making, places that lend themselves to creative acts of enlivenment aimed not only at the objects and images on display, but the visitors who wander through exhibitions with little expectation, or prior knowledge, of what they might encounter. The sensuous potential of such encounters and, even more importantly, the social potential of the traces they sometimes leave behind, is the subject of this short chapter, co-authored with my friend and collaborator, Paul Gurrumuruwuy.1 Gurrumuruwuy is a senior member of one branch of the Dhalwangu clan from the East Arnhem region of northern Australia. Though currently employed as an Aboriginal Ranger in a small outstation on the edge of the Arafura Sea, he has spent much of his adult life working on creative projects aimed at international audiences, having acted in a couple of Hollywood films, toured with dance groups through Asia and Europe in the 1990s and 2000s, and more recently co-directed a couple of documentaries that have had modest success in ethnographic film festivals.2 Over the past 10 years, Gurrumuruwuy and I have worked together with members of his family on a series of community-produced art projects that we have installed in galleries and museums in Darwin, Sydney, Brisbane, New York and Aarhus, Denmark. In each instance, Gurrumuruwuy has collaboratively directed—and then had final say—over both the form and the content of these exhibitions. Reflecting over the past decade, Gurrumuruwuy considers that he now knows something worth sharing, not only about the stories, songs and affinities that bind Yolngu families across generations, but about the potential performative and affective power of digital media more generally. It is this sense of confidence, mastery even, that compels this chapter. In what follows, we outline the aesthetic agenda that gives shape and purpose to these experiments in yuṯa [new] anthropology, undertaken under the banner of Miyarrka Media, the collective Gurrumuruwuy and I established in 2009, together with his wife, the late Fiona Yangthu, and Melbourne-based video artist, David Mackenzie.3 335

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Part of what makes Miyarrka Media’s work novel is that because it has been funded as a form of collaborative practice-led research, we have been able create art and exhibitions aimed specifically for installation in museums and galleries, rather than responding to the expectations and rewards of the art market—or, indeed, the expectations of collecting institutions and their own curatorial agendas. Unlike many creative Indigenous-led interventions into the museum sector, Miyarrka Media does not work with the aim of directly critiquing, or otherwise subverting, colonial histories of collection, spectacle and display. Nor do we seek to reframe, repurpose, or reactivate existing collections according to Indigenous taxonomies and ontologies.4 Our aim is broader, which makes our outcomes less assured than such projects, precisely because this work is dependent on more than our creative efforts and epistemologies. It is reliant on the willingness of others to allow themselves to open to, and so participate in, a radically transhumanist agenda in which Miyarrka Media position sameness and difference, connection and incommensurability as the necessary grounds of relationship. Ultimately, our aim is to generate unexpected moments of mutuality that might, in turn, stimulate the emergence of an ethico-aesthetic zone of intercultural understanding.5 With this distinctive generosity and optimism, my Yolngu colleagues explore the new forms and combinations made possible digital media, taking advantage of the colour, allure and sheer luminosity of the digital, to create multi-screened installations orientated towards the relational potential of museums and galleries.6 Dhäkay-ŋänhawuy rom is the Yolngu term that Gurrumuruwuy uses to describes the social aesthetics at the heart of all Miyarrka Media’s projects. Dhäkay-ŋänhawuy rom means ‘sharing feelings’. Or maybe we could call it ‘the law of feelings’, or maybe there’s a better way to say it in English. What I’m talking about is that experience of connection that you can get through feelings. That’s what we are doing here. Sharing feelings from inside us and giving them to you. So you can feel and you can know. Miyarrka Media (2019:25) In recent years, affect has become increasingly acknowledged as a crucial dimension of curating in museum studies.7 In the context of these discussions, it is important to note that dhäkay-ŋänhawuy rom seeks to trigger affects with specific tones and trajectories. The work of setting up a field of intensified attraction—or what Terry Smith describes as the curatorial task of ‘laying out the lure’8—is only the first stage of an orchestration of affect that aims to stir deeper and specifically attenuated feelings such as yearning, missing, longing and love— in the case of museum visitors not for Yolngu, but for one’s own close kin. The hoped-for result is that visitors will be moved to recognising the fundamental value and ethics of kinship as a social orientation that enables an opening beyond oneself, locating each person— and by extension, different cultures—within a broader, transhuman constellation of experience and values.9 Over the years, photographs have provided a key motif and materiality. Highly valued by my collaborators and their families, photographs of deceased family members provide a means to activate distinctive flicker of absence and presence in ways we seek to make recognisable to museum visitors of all backgrounds. As dhäkay-ŋänhawuy rom guides our curatorial practice, cherished family photos provided by members of the collective become a means by which to materialise not only ancestral power, but an archive of distributed affect. As images of deceased people become activated and mobilised through the viewers’ own associations and life experiences of love and loss, the museum visitor becomes something more 336

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than simply a spectator observing another distinct and distant culture. In the process, these photographs, whether encountered as framed objects or screen-based images, become vital agents in a visual economy of a distinctively different order to the salvage photography of an earlier ethnography. This chapter provides a short, step-by-step introduction to Gurrumuruwuy’s credo for dhäkay-ŋänhawuy as it guides his approach to digital museology. Drawing examples from several exhibitions, we show how a Yolngu, ritual-honed social aesthetics can be given new form and expression through digital media, and, in so doing, highlight the potential of museums and galleries as contemporary contact zones. Direct quotes from Gurrumuruwuy appear in italics. Drawing examples from a range of exhibitions between 2011 and 2017, we show how Miyarrka Media orchestrates light, colour and pattern as technologies of captivation and intersubjective opening: using multi-screen installations, algorithmically generated artworks and large wall projections of straight-to-camera performance to create the a backand-forth zone of sensuous connection and relationship. Kinship is made to matter in these exhibitions, not something to be charted across generations in anthropological charts; it is something to be activated in each viewer as an orientation to a world imbued with an ethics and aesthetics of relationality—affinities become key to generating moments of mutuality across the bounds difference. Face-to-face, body-to-body, eye-toeye, heart-to-heart. So you can feel and you can know. What might one might actually come to know through a Miyarrka Media exhibit is complex, dependent, of course, on the content of the specific work and the willingness of the audience to give themselves over to the work, not to mention the time they have to spend, the level of understanding they arrive with and the range of associations they can draw as part of their response to the work. This chapter will not consider the specifics of individual works; rather, it will concentrate on the overarching curatorial intent that unites all our projects. As we will outline, our aim is to extend the relational potential of ethnography. In making exhibitions we hope to achieve something more than display and explanation. If conventional museology understands its role as revealing one world to another, the aim of Miyarrka Media’s yuṯa museology is to use digital media to bring formerly separate worlds into relationship. But to share feelings, you first need to generate them. Or, at least, stir up them up.

Step one: Catch ’em, pull them close The first thing you have to think about is how you’re going to catch someone. How you’re going to pull them in, how you’re going to make them interested, how you’re got to catch ’em. There can be different ways to do this. Like this touchscreen we made from photos we decorated on our phones. When you see a pattern from a long way away, it catches your eye. It makes you come close. Like this pattern now. First you might see only the pattern and the colour, ’cause those bitja [photographs] are moving around the screen, moving slowly. So this can make you interested. Instead of walking straight past, you might stop and think, ‘Wow, this is lovely’. Or, ‘This is full of energy!’. So maybe then you stop walking around. And you move closer, to really have a look. For Warwuyun (worry) (Figure 29.1), produced in collaboration with the digital collective HAWRAF from New York, an algorithm remixes photo collages made by Yolngu members of Miyarrka Media and their families into an ever-changing constellation of kinship and pattern designed for audience interactivity can on a giant touch screen. The 337

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Figure 29.1 Warwuyun (worry) commissioned for the exhibition Group Therapy and installed at UNSW Galleries (2017). (Image: Silversalt Photography, Courtesy: UNSW Galleries)

instructions to the exhibition designer was that the screen had to be first seen and approached from a distance. Another way to do it is with sound. Or showing something that people really like, something they want to come and look at. That’s what we did for that show in New York. We made a beautiful video of the forest, close on the trees and the water. Texture. That’s what they call it. People loved that texture. In Gapuwiyak Calling (Figures 29.2 and 29.3) a large projection of the forest surrounding Gapuwiyak with the sound of a yidaki [didgeridoo] calling clans to ceremony provided a foundational poetics of call and response for the show, the sound and images intended explicitly to lure an urban population to come and engage a selection of video and photography created on mobile telephones displayed on micro-projectors and collaged boards, much of which was remixed in the Warwuyun work in 2017. 338

Figures 29.2 and 29.3 Gapuwiyak Calling: Phone Made Media from Aboriginal Australia at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in association with the Margaret Mead Film Festival (2014). (Copyright: Miyarrka Media) Source: Silversalt photography.

Figure 29.4 Christmas Birrimbirr (Christmas Spirit) at the Chan Contemporary Artspace, Darwin (2011). (Copyright: Miyarrka Media)

Figure 29.5 The ‘explanation area’ for Christmas Birrimbirr (Christmas Spirit), Moesgaard Museum, Denmark. (Copyright: Miyarrka Media)

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Step two: Let people settle down and concentrate You have to make a space where it is quiet and so people can be comfortable and really concentrate. What I have seen is that sometimes in museums there can be too many lights and sounds and colours. You shouldn’t give people a headache. You’ve got to be smart. You’ve got to stop and really feel what you are doing and why you are doing it. Otherwise you only might end up people running here and there, back and forth, like ants. But then what? If you are going to really see and really connect then you have to be able to look and listen and feel quietly. There are riches there. Deepness. In our work, when you look closer can you see the people, the stories, the deep connections. If you come really close then you can see everything. It pulls you in. So what I’m saying is that museums and in art galleries you need to let people settle down, instead of running around like ants. Give them chairs, keep it a little bit dark, get good quality speakers or headphones. ’Cause we made that touch screen so that balanda [Europeans] and other people, even Chinese or Mexican, anybody with a heart and mind, would come close, to touch the screen, and to spend time with our families, our stories, our country. We reckoned that, as they did that, they might think about their own loved ones. Maybe they will cry with us. And some people did! At the opening in Sydney, my daughter, Guruŋulmiwuy, she was talking with many people who had tears in their eyes after they looked at our screen and our videos where we explained a bit more. Some people came and gave her a hug. They could feel it. That same idea, that same dhäkay-ŋänhawuy rom, we put into the video project we called Christmas Birrimbirr. Birrimibirr means spirit in our language. That project looks different, different technologies and different way of making media, but those same deep feelings and riches are there, coming from Yolngu hearts and minds to balanda as they think about their families. Christmas Birrimbirr (Christmas Spirit) (Figures 29.4 and 29.5) explored the role of lights, photographs, colours, song and affective labour of warwuyu to produce an intensified and immersive sensory environment designed to draw the spirits of the dead closer to Yolngu families—and simultaneously draw visitors to experience a more generalisable sense of the social value of kinship.

Step three: Share feelings Dhäkay-ŋänhawuy means that you can feel something just by looking at us and hearing the dhawu [stories] we are giving out. These feelings come from inside us and they can go inside you … We are sharing what we’ve got, sharing with our experiences, our bodies, our ŋayangu [the embodied seat of emotion]. And when someone does that, other people can see and other people can take it in. Then they can see and feel the same thing that we’ve got.

Figure 29.6 Video stills from Christmas Birrimbirr (Christmas Spirit) (2011). (Copyright: Miyarrka Media)

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Figure 29.7 Video stills from Christmas Birrimbirr (Christmas Spirit), Miyarrka Media (2011). (Copyright: Miyarrka Media)

When you feel inside then you cry, because it hits you right in your ŋayangu, and then it comes out and you cry … you feel sorrow, what we call warwuyu, or you feel happy, like you feel satisfied from the richness of that feeling. Dhäkay-ŋänhawuy rom means when that feeling goes in and comes out it shows your reaction. Something happens inside and other people can see. Other people can feel it as well. Your body opens up that’s the connection. That feeling, it sits on your ŋayangu, doduk [heart] and your djal [your desire]. And it comes out from your body … then you cry and you show and people can see out from you. You don’t need to speak or understand Yolngu matha [language, literally tongue], because you can feel it, straight away. If balanda can take in those feelings, it would help them a lot. Some people are gumurr dhal [hard chested]. They keep their heart closed. But sometimes dhäkay-ŋänhawuy rom works. For soft-hearted people, especially. When you feel it, your body will show you. Your outside body will show your reaction, it comes from your heart but your rumbal [body] will show whether you cry, whether you are connected with that feeling. Dhäkay-ŋänhawuy rom is just giving out and sharing … and then those feelings settle down. That dhäkay-ŋänhawuy rom settles down on your heart, and it is there, all the time. Like it’s waiting and when the moment comes, it is there, filling you up … the same attitude and feeling is there. It’s powerful. And it is through that feeling that you and I can be connected, from inside me to inside you. Alive in us both, it draws us together, even though we are living different lives in different places, we can share feelings together. Anger is another djama [another kind of work]. Jealousy is different again, a different reaction. With what we are talking about here with dhäkay-ŋänhawuy rom the feelings are only sorrow or worry or that feeling of happiness that you can get. As you get older you get more knowledge, more memories … and more feelings, from going to ceremonies, spending time at bapurru [funerals]. The wangga [land] has the same rom [law]. The wannga will feel you and it will talk to you. The 342

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dharpa [trees], the wangga, the sea. It’s a yindi [big, important] word. I am talking at this level, but it goes it down, down, deep to your djal [desires] and ŋayangu. It’s there all the time, it doesn’t matter that balanda [colonisers] came; it doesn’t change the feelings.

Step four: You can try this too. Why not? This sort of things like exhibitions has been going for a long time. Maybe people are getting fed up with it. It’s like we are putting a flavour on it. So people can taste it. Because we got this media now, all this technology, lights, speakers, everything. It doesn’t matter that we’re not all standing in the same room or sitting together on the land of our ancestors. This is what we can do now. With our Yolngu mulkurr [mind] and ŋayangu. We take that modern technology and use it. All that colour and light, it can wake you up, make you interested, make you feel happy. Maybe now other people who are working in museums, they might get interested, they might try this in their own way. So they can feel and they can know, something different. Not just about Yolngu life. But something more, something deeper and wider. There is richness for everyone in dhäkay-ŋänhawuy rom. It’s about more than being smart with technology. It’s about life. Your life and my life. It’s about coming together. You and me, Yolngu and balanda, connected, but not mixed up.

Notes 1 Many of the comments and quotations from Gurrumuruwuy in this chapter are excerpts from Miyarrka Media’s co-authored book, Phone & spear: A yuṯa anthropology (2019). 2 Gurrumuruwuy acted in the feature films: The Right Stuff (dir. Philip Kaufman [1983]); Quigley Down Under (dir. Simon Wincer [1990]); Ringtone (dir. Deger and Gurrumuruwuy [2015]); and Manapanmirr, in Christmas Spirit (dir. Gurrumuruwuy, Yangathu, Deger and MacKenzie [2012]). 3 Miyarrka Media operates under the auspices of Gapuwiyak Culture and Arts Aboriginal Corporation. 4 See Hutchens (2017) on Christian Thompson’s work with ethnographic collections; see also Andrews (2017); and Gumbula,Corn and Mant (2013). See also Geismar (2015). 5 Miyarrka Media (forthcoming). See also Deger (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016); Gurrumuruwuy & Deger (2016). 6 See Bell (2017) on the relational potential of museum collections and Indigenous experiments with digital media in this context. 7 See Golding (2013) and Fisher and Reckitt (2105). 8 Smith (2012, p. 25). 9 See O’Sullivan and Andrews (2013, p. 17).

References Andrews, J. (2017). Indigenous perspectives on museum collections. Artlink, 37(2), 14–15. Bell, J. (2017). A bundle of relations: Collections, collecting, and communities. Annual Review of Anthropology, 46, 241–259. Deger, J. (2013). In-between. In A. Schneider & C. Wright (Eds.), Anthropology and art practice (pp. 105– 114). Oxford, UK: Berg. Deger, J. (2014). Gapuwiyak calling: Phone-made media from Arnhem Land. Brisbane: University of Queensland Anthropology Museum. Deger, J. (2016). Thick photography. Journal of Material Culture, 21(1), 111–132. Deger, J. (2017). Curating digital resonance. In L. Hjorth, H. Horst, A. Galloway & G. Bell (Eds.), The Routledge companion to digital ethnography (pp. 318–328). New York, NY: Routledge. Fisher, J. & Reckitt, H. (2015). Introduction: Museums and affect. Journal of Curatorial Studies, 4, 3.

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Geismar, H. (2015). Post-photographic presences, or how to wear a digital cloak. Photographies, 8(3), 305–321.https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2015.1102760 Golding, V. (2013). Museums, poetics and affect. Feminist Review, 104, 80–99. Gumbula, J., Corn, A. & Mant, J. (2013). Discovering the earliest shadows: A Yolŋu-led approach to managing community access to archived cultural resources. In L. Ormond-Parker, A. Corn, C. Fforde, K. Obata & S. O’Sullivan (Eds.), Information technology and Indigenous communities (pp. 197– 206). Canberra, ACT: AIATIS Research. Gurrumuruwuy, P. & Deger, J. (2016). Mobile phone remix: Miyarrka Media. Artlink, 36(2), 85–87. Hutchens, J. (2017). Down under world: Christian Thompson at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Artlink, 37(2), 82–86. Miyarrka Media. (2019). Phone & spear: A yuṯa anthropology. London, UK: Goldsmiths Press. O’Sullivan, S. & Andrews, J. (2013). Visual cultures as objects and affects. London, UK: Sternberg Press. Smith, T. (2012). Thinking contemporary curating. New York, NY: Independent Curators.

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30 Henry VR Designing affect-oriented virtual reality exhibitions for art museums Andrew Yip, Paula Dredge, Anne Gerard-Austin and Simon Ives

Introduction Conservation science has long employed analytical imaging techniques as core methodologies in the production of material data for art historical analysis. However, the deployment of these data in embodied visualisation systems for the purpose of augmented sensory investigation and analysis is new to art history and, more broadly, curatorship. Less certain still is the relationship between a work of art, its accompanying digital metadata, and viewers of these hybrid materialities when these encounters take place in museums, whose remit traditionally privileges the preservation and interpretation of physical material cultures. The unique viewing modalities of immersive reality systems offer much to support the preservation and presentation of works of art, though the deployment of such systems within art museums in particular remains a novelty. The slow uptake of interactive digital paradigms as an interrogative practice is artificially maintained by historical silos between curatorial disciplines and between collecting and research institutions (Yip, 2017). This chapter examines the exhibition Henry VR, held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in 2018, as a case study in the design of affect-oriented, immersive reality systems for exhibition display. Henry VR was the AGNSW’s first virtual reality (VR) exhibition, focusing on the restoration of a Tudor portrait of Henry VIII in the Gallery’s collection, which featured a VR installation alongside the restored painting and other 16th-century works of art. The VR installation transports viewers into a reconstruction of a 16th-century London artists’ workshop, where they can experiment with the materials and pigments used to create the painting and experience the sights and sounds of Tudor-era London, before teleporting inside a particle accelerator to view unique images produced at the Australian Synchrotron particle accelerator. The exhibition employed affective, sensorial investigation in service of the mission of the Gallery to interpret, present and preserve works of art of cultural value.

Conservation imaging and restoration In 2014, the portrait King Henry VIII (see Figure 30.1), painted on oak panel dated from 1535–1540 and attributed to an Anglo-Netherlandish workshop, was examined in the 345

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Figure 30.1 Anglo-Netherlandish workshop, King Henry VIII, c.1535–40, oil on wood, 54.5 x 41.3 cm, Purchased 1961. Source: Image courtesy of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

conservation laboratories of the AGNSW. This was in the light of recent research undertaken at the National Portrait Gallery in London on a group of early Tudor portraits that included four versions of similar composition, but differing in costume details and hand position (Cooper & Bolland, 2014). While most portraits of the King produced after 1536 were based on archetypes by Hans Holbein, this group is different. In all portraits of this group, the King places his hands on a ledge or cushion in front of him, his head and body turned slightly to the right. He wears a linen shirt with a circlet of gold braid at the neck and his shoulders are covered by the fur collar of his outer garment. A black hat is topped by a white ostrich plume. To assess how the Sydney painting might relate to the known group, a full technical study was initiated including infrared studies, ultraviolet photography, dendrochronology of the oak panel, sampling of microscopic paint samples in cross section and transmission 346

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X-radiography to image the elementally heavy pigments. In addition, the painting was scanned at the X-ray fluorescence microscopy beamline at the Australian Synchrotron, producing a complete image archaeology detailing key elemental maps of pigments used in the painting’s creation (see Figure 30.2). Technical analysis of the numerous elemental maps, particularly through the identification of visual elements related to the known group of nonHolbein pattern Henry portraits, since obscured by later paint layers and material additions, allowed conservators and curators to formally identify the Sydney painting as a contemporary to the London paintings. Thus, they were able to make new assignations as to its date and mode of construction (Dredge et al., 2015).

Figure 30.2 X-Ray Fluorescence scan (mercury) of King Henry VIII. Source: Image courtesy of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

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Little is known about the artisan workshops that may have been involved in the production of these early English portraits. Authorship of the group has been, for many decades, attributed to an anonymous Anglo-Flemish workshop. It is not clear whether the five paintings of Henry VIII derive from a single workshop or were produced by several workshops or artists. Almost no associated documentation on London workshops and artistic practice prior to 1540 has survived. Thus, the paintings themselves are often the only source of insight into these questions. In the absence of substantial documentary evidence for the way artists painted in the Tudor and Jacobean periods, technical study provides a wealth of information about how paintings were made and how they have changed with time. Close inspection of the X-ray fluorescence maps for the elements chromium, mercury, gold and copper provided conclusive information on the status of original and later materials, allowing painting conservator Simon Ives to complete a full restoration, which included the replacement and replication of a lost right part of the painting (Dredge et al., 2015). Construction of a replica Tudor-era frame allowed reinstatement of the original presentation of the painting. Further historical details were obtained from dendrochronological analysis of the supporting wooden board, which located the felling of the oak tree to a forest in South East England in about 1520. The composition showed the influence of Netherlandish artists, and microscopic inspection of the paint surface revealed the techniques of manuscript illuminators.

Designing for affect-oriented authenticity Henry VR (see Figure 30.3) reconstructed the historical context surrounding the creation of the painting, using material analysis and sensorial investigation to deepen users’ understanding of the object life of the painting and the world in which it was created. Given the

Figure 30.3 Henry VR in-game screenshot. Source: Image courtesy of Andrew Yip.

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impossibility of discovering conclusive evidence resolving the physical actuality of the workshop, a strategy of pursuing affective authenticity was employed, with two broad considerations. First, reconstructive processes followed a form of arts-based scientific method, producing an adaptive simulative model that is itself subject to revision in the case of the discovery of new information contradicting original assumptions. In this case, the authenticity and authority of the reconstruction derived from a negotiation between the project partners in their respective disciplines of conservation science, art history, curatorship and immersive environment design. Each element of the digital reconstruction—architectural, social and material— was informed by relevant historical sources and awareness of social function. For example, the architectural reconstruction was based on surviving Tudor architectural and visual cultural patterns (Hearn, 1995; Thurley, 2003), further informed by socio-economic and biographical accounts of artists and societies (Town, 2014). This form of post-hoc historical negotiation between custodial disciplines has been well documented in archaeological conservation and restoration practices by Siân Jones (2013). Jones (2013) demonstrates how the authenticity of the reconstruction thus vests in multiple community stakeholders. Second, as the exhibition of the restored painting was further museologically complicated by its curatorial status as an object ‘orphan’ within the Gallery’s European collection—it could not be easily exhibited alongside contextualising cultural materials from English art history—close attention was paid to the design of the physical gallery space in which the installation was exhibited. As it was designed to bridge historical contexts for the production and display of art, the installation relied upon its relationships to the paintings it was exhibited alongside, and a mixed reality exhibition architecture was created to integrate the spaces. Technical equipment was stored in a purpose-built housing that masked cabling and improved useability. This housing formed part of a larger physical ‘play space’ demarcated by a 3 m x 3 m area of acrylic flooring. This space disrupted the imposing 19th-century salon architecture of the exhibiting gallery and, when viewed obliquely, became a trompe l’oeil resembling a threedimensional (3D) ‘black box’. A 1:1 scale 3D model analogue of the exhibition gallery, representing the workshop of the artisans who created the painting, was created in VR, with the entrance to the exhibition gallery corresponding to the entrance to the virtual workshop. This strategy blended reality and user expectations of space between the two worlds; the physical doorway acted as a liminal signal to visitors to expect an altered experience once through its threshold. Further details of artisans’ tools and furniture were derived from contemporaneous depictions of continental artists’ workshops, such as Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut Draughtsman Drawing a Lute 1525, which provided the pattern for a perspectival draughting table, and Jan De Beer’s St Luke Painting the Virgin and Child 1500, depicting the saint at a medieval easel, while the layout of the interior space was influenced by James Ayre’s study of British domestic interiors (2003). Three-dimensional modelling of the workshop and furnishing objects was completed using Blender 3D, an open-source computer graphics and animation application. Physics-based rendering materials were created in the texturing application Substance Painter, before ingestion into the video game engine Unity 3D in which the interactive simulation was scripted. The final application was deployed at the AGNSW on two HTC Vive VR headsets driven by portable gaming personal computers, with gestural interaction facilitated by wireless controllers. Such a deep integration of physical and virtual objects in exhibition environments is unusual in the context of fine art museums, where digital interventions into and 349

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augmentations of original works are rare. However, in a recent study of visitor perceptions of Sarah Kenderdine and Jeffrey’s Shaw’s augmented reality installation Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang 2012/16, also exhibited at the AGNSW as part of the exhibition Tang: Treasures from the Silk Road Capital 2016, Kenderdine and Andrew Yip (2018) demonstrated that in that case, visitors to the installation felt the blending of physical and virtual environments added to their understanding of exhibition and cultural themes. Further, there was no sense that the exhibition of a digital interactive replica lacked authenticity or diminished the authority of the contemporaneous artefacts exhibited alongside. Debates led by Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe (2010) reconsidered the philosophy of object copies. They argued that in the case of high fidelity reconstructions of works of art and cultural heritage environments experienced through immersive interaction paradigms, it is possible for the aura and authenticity of an original work to imbue in its digital copy. Such auratic migration is conditional on two key affective indicators: a sense of physical or temporal transportation and a feeling of immersive presence within the user, both of which underpinned the interaction design of Henry VR.

Interaction design Henry VR built on a previous experiment in the immersive visualisation of conservation data by Dredge and Yip (Dredge, Howard, Morgan & Yip, 2017). In Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly Unmasked 2017, a similar X-ray fluorescence image archaeology of one of the earliest paintings in Nolan’s Kelly series, which showed a full portrait beneath the famous Kelly mask, was visualised in VR. Sidney Nolan placed the user in a 1:1 scale facsimile of the room a room at Heide Museum of Modern Art in which it was exhibited.1 To facilitate natural onboarding of users from real space to virtual, interaction design was centred around actions naturally available to the visitor in real space. Within the virtual world, to maintain user presence, augmented content was triggered by physical proximity and gaze-based triggers uncovered solely by user curiosity. Similarly, in Henry VR, to limit instances of disruptive ‘break-in presence’, interactive paradigms were limited to embodied actions ‘naturally’ available to an imagined inhabitant of the virtual spaces depicted. During user onboarding, exhibition hosts assisted with the safe application of the VR headset and instructed on the use of the wireless controller to interact with objects. No other contextual information was provided, and in-world interaction was designed to be solely user-led—the absence of any graphical user interface or text-based instruction were decisions made to increase sensory investigation. Users began their interactive experience as an artist standing at an easel in the reconstructed workshop. However, within the installation’s play space, they were able to move around the virtual world to inspect elements both interior and exterior. Interaction pathways covered four broad paradigms, accessible in non-linear order: 1) Sensory immersion in ‘living’ London: Following Town’s (2014) identification of several plausible sites for 16th-century painting studios, the workshop was geographically situated on Trinitie Lane, located near the Thames river on the north-eastern quadrant of Tudor London. The reconstructed workshop was located within a simulated ecosystem conveying the specifics of the locality; buildings visible to the user lined the Thames banks, trade vessels were anchored at the wharfs and rocked in accordance with tides, people moved through market stalls, a light fog affected world lighting, and real-time lighting was provided by interior candles and fireplace. This was accompanied by an 350

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adaptive spatial soundscape—crowds burbled, fires crackled, ships creaked and the sounds of footsteps and passing horse carts moved spatially in real-time 3D. 2) Exploration of material relationships: The core interactive modality concerned the examination of material relationships between source minerals used in the creation of Tudor-era pigments, and their distribution on the surface of the painting. To this end, 3D models of source objects describing gold leaf and green, black, ochre, blue and vermillion pigments were place on a workshop table within users’ reach. These could be picked up and inspected in high resolution, which triggered a brief audio excerpt describing the processes involved in creating pigment from the object, using medieval and Tudor artisan recipes drawn from historical sources (Ball, 2003; Harley, 2007). 3) Visualisation of elemental data: Activation of an interactive object triggered a physics-based particle animation corresponding to a point cloud elemental map that resolved on the surface of a copy of the Henry painting. The distribution of the particles on the painting’s surface correlated with their relative density in the paint layers. Particle layers could then be physically manipulated to create an extended visualisation of the image archaeology that could be walked among by the user. 4) Transportation to particle accelerator: When activated, an ‘Easter egg’ in the form of an anachronistically placed model of a microscope in the Tudor workshop teleported the user inside a 1:1 scale model of the synchrotron, where they were surrounded by an interactive archive visualisation of recoloured X-ray fluorescence maps and an ultra-high resolution image of the painting mid-restoration. In this second virtual scene, users could interact with the images to trigger audio descriptions of the science behind the images, and watch a short documentary. A similarly anachronistic model of a Tudor house transported users back to Tudor London. Navigation between interactive modalities was entirely user-led. Henry VR was designed to deliver an immersive sensorial experience regardless of the modalities discovered by the user; a satisfying encounter was possible through visual exploration of the workshop scene alone.

An end to totalising narratives? Rather than attempting to offer an authoritative, architecturally-accurate reconstruction of one particular built environment—impossible in this case—the design principles employed in Henry VR evinced a new approach to both the use of immersive environments and the pursuit of art history of the Western canon. In this approach, reconstructive authenticity relies on the plausible sensorial presentation of sociocultural context. Practical questions about the making of art and authorship of paintings were at the heart of early art historical writing constituting the foundations of connoisseurship in European art. However, art historians have challenged the principle of, and impetus towards, identifiable sole authorship for paintings in the Western tradition as a benchmark for authenticity. In the last two decades or so, researchers have begun to ask questions that allow us to interrogate other aspects of production through materialist and sociocultural lenses. By focusing instead on artistic sources and influences, the production of versions and copies, and the relationships between painters and their social contexts, a different picture has begun to emerge. Art historians are less likely to seek totalising narratives that imply there is a definitive set of answers to art historical questions. Our understanding of artistic authorship in this period, which is supported by the physical evidence from the paintings 351

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themselves, has been reframed. Henry VR demonstrates that, by employing immersive and embodied visualisation methodologies, it is possible today to identify numerous categories, or models, for authorship from stylistic and technical examination of paintings, and from the sensorial interpretation of documentary evidence.

Note 1 The virtual reality installation Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly Unmasked (Yip, 2017) was exhibited at Heide Museum of Modern Art as part of Sidney Nolan Centenary, 23 January–12 November 2017. The installation was awarded the 2018 Museums and Galleries Australia National Award for Interpretation, Learning and Audience Engagement.

References Ayres, J. (2003). Domestic interiors: The British tradition 1500–1850. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ball, P. (2003). Bright earth: Art and the invention of color. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cooper, C. & Bolland, T. (2014). The real tudors: Kings and queens rediscovered. London, UK: National Portrait Gallery Publications. Dredge, P., Howard, D., Morgan, K. & Yip, A. (2017). Unmasking Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly: X-ray fluorescence conservation imaging: Art historical analysis and virtual reality visualisation. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 17(2), 147–161. Dredge, P., Ives, S., Howard, D., Spiers, K., Yip, A. & Kenderdine, S. (2015). Mapping Henry: Synchrotron-sourced X-ray fluoresence mapping and ultra-high-definition scanning of an early Tudor portrait of Henry VIII. Applied Physics A, 121(3), 789–800. Harley, R. (2007). Artists’ pigments c. 1600 –1835. London, UK: Archetype Books. Hearn, K. (Ed.). (1995). Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530 –1630. London, UK: Tate Publishing. Jones, S. (2013). Crafting authenticity: An ethnography of conservation practice. Journal of Material Culture, 18(1), 3–26. Kenderdine, S. & Yip A. (2018). The proliferation of aura: Facsimiles, authenticity and digital objects. In V. Dziekan, K. Drotner, R. Parry & K. Christian Schrøder (Eds.), Routledge handbook of museums, media and communication. London, UK: Routledge. 274–289. Latour, B. & Lowe, A. (2010). The migration of the aura, or how to explore the original through its facsimiles. In T. Bartscherer, & R. Coover (Eds.), Switching codes: Thinking through digital technology in the humanities and the arts. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. 275–298. Thurley, S. (2003). Hampton Court: A social and architectural history. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Town, E. (2014). A biographical dictionary of London painters, 1547–1625. In J. Simon (Ed.), The Seventy-Sixth Volume of the Walpole Society. London, UK: The Charlesworth Group. 1–235. Yip, A. (2017). The Ekphrasis engine: Towards a new industry architecture for digital art historical practice in the age of the virtual. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 17(2), 135–146.

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31 Websites as a publishing platform Tim Jones and David Simpson

Introduction The home page of almost every art museum leads with information about current exhibitions, forthcoming events and contact details. Practical and important information, yes, but is this the best we can do? In 2011, a natural disaster placed Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū (Figure 31.1) in an unusual situation and gave us a story to tell.1 Our attempts to work out what form that story should take, and how best to present it, changed the way we approached online content delivery. But more importantly, we also began to rethink our ideas about the digital face we presented to the world. Five years later, when we redesigned the gallery’s website, our exhibition content became secondary, and the focus was first and foremost editorial. Online, we began to position ourselves as a library of ideas. At a little more than 6,000 items, the gallery’s art collection is relatively small. When the current gallery building opened in 2003, it was accompanied by a traditional art gallery website: information on location, exhibits and events. It was a marketing tool, built from static pages of HTML. We had very little control over it—as a branch of our city council, even the smallest change had to be manually updated by the council’s information technology department. By 2010, we needed a change. We wanted a decentralised, database-driven site, in which individual departments managed their own sections, quickly and responsively. Rather than concentrating primarily on our exhibition schedule, we wanted to push the collection to the fore, linking all our activities to it and filling the site with news, videos and multimedia. We teamed up with a small local firm, Sons & Co, and produced an award-winning site that achieved our goals.

Shaken In September 2010, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake caused widespread damage to buildings throughout Christchurch. As one of the strongest buildings in the city, the art gallery was used as the emergency operating centre for the city-wide civil defence operation. In the following months, through hundreds of aftershocks, the gallery continued operating largely as normal—in fact, we held our most popular exhibition ever.

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Figure 31.1 Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. Source: photo John Collie.

However, that first quake was just a taste of what was to come. On February 22, 2011, another quake struck, this time a magnitude 6.3 shock that, although smaller, was considerably more violent and resulted in 185 deaths in the city. The gallery closed and again became the hub for the earthquake recovery. This occupation was considerably longer and was followed by an extended period of closure while the gallery’s insurance claim was settled and a repair programme agreed. Between 2013 and 2015, major gallery repairs were done, including relevelling and the retrofitting of base isolators. These events, and our subsequent closure, tested our website in ways we had never expected. It was still operating primarily as a platform to promote our programme, but, suddenly, we found ourselves with no programme to promote. The online equivalent of a rack of promotional leaflets made no sense. In the weeks and months that followed, our traffic spiked as our site became a place to share information and reassure people about the status of staff, our collection and the building. We were also forced to think hard about our online actions and plans. Digital visitor numbers were now all we had, and we wanted to maintain them with content that was engaging. But how? Why do people visit gallery websites? And what happens when the physical presence behind an institution’s digital façade disappears? Can the digital transcend the physical and become a destination in its own right? As an institution, we were already beginning to adapt to the idea that we were more than our programme. Within our walls we had an active team of photographers, writers,

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thinkers and makers and we came to realise that the whole point of being as a gallery was not just the exhibitions we presented—it was the ideas that underpinned them. We suddenly had to create content that could be digested without a physical visit, beginning with a daily, wide-ranging blog, moving on to improving the data we held about artists, our collection and our history, and the connections between them. As time went on and we were still unable to use our building, we began to exhibit art in various spaces around town and the website had to accommodate multiple exhibition venues rather than one. We also developed My Gallery to publish user-generated content on the site and encouraged people to share our collection, tell stories with it and add their own interpretations. The idea was to foster a much-needed sense of community.

Stirred With the building set to reopen in December 2015, we realised that the experience of being, for almost five years, an art museum without a building had changed our thinking about the purpose of a website. It was time to change our approach quite radically; rather than a refreshed design or a new look, we needed a completely new website structure. We decided to make a significant shift from a traditional art gallery website to a more magazinelike and editorial approach that put our thinking at the forefront of the online experience. While keeping our collection at the core of our activities, we wanted to provide a space in which we could expand on, and share our ideas about, our activities—offering a rich, indepth, online publication about current issues in art. We had the commissioning, editing and publishing expertise, and we had extensive legacy content. By combining these two strands, we aimed to incubate new thoughts and tell new stories. An important concept behind the site was generosity. Previously we felt that we could not simply give away our ideas. We offered snippets and elements of our writing, but we still aimed to use it to drive sales of our publications. However, we wanted to move beyond this. We were inspired by institutions like the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which had beautifully demonstrated that an institution’s website could position itself as an aggregator of ideas, and be generous in the way it allowed visitors to access content and be exposed to other people’s ideas. Another factor in our thinking was how, during the period of our closure from 2011–2015, social media had dramatically changed the way visitors reached our website. Most online visitors now did not even visit our homepage; they went straight to the content that interested them through a combination of more intelligent searching and shared links. A good proportion of our page visits were single-page entries, directly to collection items, essays from our back catalogue or exhibitions from our archive. We realised that, in effect, every page had to act as a kind of micro home page, bringing together related content from throughout the site that might lead visitors to new discoveries and unexpected areas of our collection. The goal was to ensure that no page acted as a dead end, along with a realisation that a traditional breadcrumb trail that took you back to where you had come from was nowhere near as good as links and suggestions that took you to places you had not yet been. We also recognised that we were a significant generator of content. The gallery has an ambitious publishing programme, and we are unusual (for New Zealand at least) in that we have editors on staff and produce our publications largely in-house. As well as several books and exhibition publications a year, we produce a quarterly magazine, Bulletin. The writing we publish, by both our staff and external experts, adds value to the collection. We wanted to forge connections between works in the collection and the content that demonstrates our thinking about them. 355

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We began by looking at how we might build those connections, and after a degree of trial and error, settled on a system that was a hybrid between broadly applied subject tags and individually applied hard links. All our exhibitions, artworks, artists, audio, video, blogs and essays are held as discrete units of content in our database. We decided to leave our home page relatively unstructured, and allow rapid changes based on our nominations and choices. The site is technically simple, but it is proven technology, providing a simple framework that works well. In many ways, the website is now the primary driver of content for the gallery, overtaking the importance of the printed Bulletin, which we make available free online. We have back issues of the magazine stretching back to the early 1970s, and are working on digitising that material and building connections to it within the website so that readers can find pathways there themselves. We also have an ambitious publishing programme and are looking at how we can create space online for our back catalogue of exhibition catalogues and art books, many of which are now out of print. The ideal might be to create ‘books’—items that can be distributed online, both within our own website and externally, as complete publications, or as individual chapters and essays. The beauty of the web is that it allows us to play on the same field as much larger institutions. We may never have their exhibitions or collection budgets, but we can have a great website. In Christchurch, we are a small team—only two of us work on web projects. But our strength lies in the depth of the content the institution has generated over the years. For visitors to the website, our move to what is effectively an online magazine has been a major conceptual shift, and that has, at times, been contentious. However, we have seen an increase in website visits, the number of pages each person reads is up, and the time spent browsing is on the rise: all of which indicates that the website is now a more compelling place to be.

Served? The changes we have made to our website structure, and the move away from promotion to exploration, are still unusual in New Zealand institutions. However, they reflect a broader shift in curatorial practice and thinking that has been happening over the last 15 or 20 years. They are one manifestation of a broad front of changes within the gallery, which can also be seen in the thinking of our curators and the design of our exhibitions. These changes do not, of course, happen in an instant, but there are good examples already of other gallery activities that reflect the website’s richer, more open and more generous way of operating. Where once we, like many other galleries, thought in terms of the authoritative institutional voice and the definitive publication or exhibition, we now embrace the individual position, and within our activities allow space for the voices and interests of a range of people. There is now broad acceptance that producing a definitive narrative on any object in our collection is impossible and that even attempting to do so is undesirable and unproductive. Rather than authorising one view, we choose to explore many views. The recent exhibition Closer: Old Favourites, New Stories exemplifies this approach, taking a small number of works and examining them in great detail. Works were selected and researched by four of our five curators for the depth of the stories that could be told around them, and then the most appropriate delivery vehicle (text, audio or video) was chosen to tell that story. Interestingly, Closer explicitly does not have all the answers; questions are unresolved and avenues of further research are left open. 356

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As senior curator Lara Strongman (personal communication, February 2018) has said, there is a strength in acknowledging what you do not know. She argues that this is another example of the ‘production of new knowledge in collaborative ways—making a contribution by asking a question’. This desire to share information and weave stories can also be seen in our archives. Work on a legacy archival collection, the papers of a distinguished local artist, has begun with consideration of how research findings might best be presented on—or rather, integrated into—the website. Where once a publication output might have been considered sufficient, and what that output looked like (an inventory of the contents of an archival collection, for example) would certainly have guided the process, research is now being done with the new structure and systems in mind. The question being asked before this project even begins is ‘how will the ideas contained in this archive relate to the ideas already circulating online?’. This particular artist is central to the narrative of visual art activity in Christchurch, indeed in New Zealand, and his papers are a rich source of information that can develop that narrative. His letters and notebooks feature many names and places; these certainly need to be intelligently connected. However, going further and creating conceptual relationships using online hard and soft links is a further exciting challenge. Both of these projects exemplify the start of a gentle change away from producing authoritative statements—online, in print or in exhibitions—and a move towards giving the stew of ideas a good stir. The delivery methods can be more specifically tailored to suit the needs of the ideas explored or the story being told. We are taking the first steps to combine legacy resources with new thinking and configuring the website as the library of these ideas, there for anyone to see and use, dispute and contest. Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū has not changed overnight. The ideas and trends described here are not unique to us and they take time to flourish. The gallery has an orthodox system of budget cycles and key performance indicators dictated by its principal funder and many of our activities are perfectly conventional. But the growing curatorial practice of questioning rather than pronouncing is expressed in both the appearance and the underlying structure of our website. We have the confidence to say we don’t know all the answers and to use our website as a publishing platform on which to explore ideas, interpretations and responses.

Note 1 Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū is the public art museum of the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. It was founded in 1932 and moved into its present building in 2003. It was closed from 2011–2015 due to earthquake repairs. It has a staff of 44 full-time equivalents and an annual budget of NZ$7 million, funded almost entirely from local taxes.

Reference Strongman, Lara. 2018, May. Personal Communication.

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32 From shelf to web First reflections on the O’Donnell marginalia project Julia S. Kuehns

Introduction Have you ever come across a record in a library or archival catalogue, but no matter how extensive the descriptive notes, upon viewing the actual item you realise that a written description simply cannot substitute for a visual inspection? Addressing this dilemma was one of the objectives of the O’Donnell Marginalia Project, a pilot study that began in 2016. The project takes its name from the Nicholas O’Donnell Collection, which forms part of the Irish Collection held at the St Mary’s College and Newman College Academic Centre (SNAC), a joint academic and research library servicing two residential colleges affiliated with the University of Melbourne. Nicholas Michael O’Donnell (1862–1920) was Melbourne’s foremost Gaelic scholar. An Irish nationalist and Irish-language advocate, his engagement with Irish culture and contemporary Irish affairs—despite never having visited Ireland—was remarkable. This engagement is evidenced by his extensive personal library, the O’Donnell Collection, which comprises over 400 books and pamphlets (Noone, 2012, p. 87). Many of these items contain autographs, annotations, notes and marginalia in O’Donnell’s hand, as well as other signs of engagement, thus offering a fascinating social commentary and window into O’Donnell’s idiosyncratic reading practices. They are also testament to O’Donnell’s correspondence with leading Irish figures of the Gaelic Revival movement. The archive is therefore a unique resource for forming new historical understandings about colonial and commonwealth social and cultural networks of knowledge and collection. Using Omeka, an open-source web platform developed in 2008 by the Roy Rosenzweig Centre for History and New Media at George Mason University (Virginia, US), and designed for collection and exhibition sharing, the O’Donnell Marginalia Project dedicates itself to facilitating a visual engagement with the O’Donnell Collection in an online space. Select digitised pages, presented with fully searchable metadata assigned according to Dublin Core standards, allow for a contextualised discovery of O’Donnell’s marginalia and annotations on a publicly viewable website (https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/odonnell/). The digital exposure of the collection complements existing research into O’Donnell’s activities while adding to the ongoing scholarly conversation around Irish history in Melbourne and Australia.

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This chapter outlines the O’Donnell Marginalia Project from its conception to its current state. It introduces O’Donnell and the significance of his personal library to provide context, and discusses Omeka, the platform on which the project website is built. Also discussed are the collaborations that supported the project, future directions and challenges encountered. As a case study of a digital humanities project, this chapter illuminates potential pathways that could be used as a framework for similar initiatives engaging with a cultural archive.

O’Donnell and his collection Nicholas Michael O’Donnell (1862–1920; see Figure 32.1 for a photograph of O’Donnell in 1897) was born in Bullengarook, central Victoria, to Irish parents from Co. Limerick, with his ancestry and life until 1894 well documented in a manuscript titled My Autobiography. Written between 1908 and 1916 by O’Donnell himself, the manuscript was recently edited and published by Val Noone (2017), who also supplies information about O’Donnell’s life pre- and post-autobiography. O’Donnell studied medicine at the University of Melbourne, and in 1884 was conferred the degree of Bachelor of Medicine. He then established a general medical practice in North Melbourne, where he operated until 1919 (see Geary, 2016, for a detailed account of O’Donnell’s education and medical life).

Figure 32.1 Detail from photograph ‘Dr Nicholas O’Donnell with his eldest son Nicholas Gerald 1897’. Source: O’Donnell Family Photographs 1896–1911 (p. 5), State Library of Victoria. http:// handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/252062.

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Beyond his medical career, O’Donnell was deeply involved in Irish and Irish-Australian cultural and political activities. He was elected President of the Irish National League of Victoria in 1889 and held this position until 1915 (Noone, 2012, p. 81). He also served as president of the Melbourne Celtic Club from 1901–1907 (McConville, n.d.). O’Donnell was a passionate supporter of the Gaelic Revival, a late-19th century movement to promote and revive the Irish language and culture. In 1901, O’Donnell co-founded the Melbourne branch of Conradh na Gaeilge (‘The Gaelic League’), a social and cultural organisation that had been established in Dublin in 1893 (Noone, 2009). A self-taught speaker of the Irish language, O’Donnell wrote the weekly ‘Our Gaelic Column’, which was published in Melbourne newspaper The Advocate from 1901 to 1912 (Noone, 2010). O’Donnell was an avid book collector. In 1924, four years after his death from a cerebral haemorrhage (Noone, 2017, pp. 304–305), his children bequeathed his personal library to Newman College. This bequest now forms the core of the SNAC Irish Collection. The roughly 400 volumes in the O’Donnell Collection comprise books and pamphlets in and on the Irish language, Irish folklore, history and politics. Also in the O’Donnell Collection are two 19th-century scribal manuscripts, previously digitised (Noone, 2012, p. 56) and made available with explanatory notes on the Dublin-based Irish Script on Screen project website (www.isos.dias.ie/). A notable absence in the O’Donnell Collection of medical texts, devotional material, fiction and volumes on photography—O’Donnell’s hobby—suggests that the material bequeathed was in fact a discrete ‘Irish component’ of a much larger library, which is now lost (Molloy, 2013). Although an itemised list did not accompany the bequest, a significant number of items bear evidence of O’Donnell’s engagement with his collection, and can therefore be assumed to have been in his possession. Marks of engagement include spine labels—sometimes affixed to the cover of a volume—using a three-tiered system that corresponds to a bay/shelf/item classification (Molloy, 2013, p. 570), provenance notes, dates and signatures, marginalia, annotations and commentaries, as well as extraneous material such as correspondence that was pasted into the volumes. Among this correspondence are letters from Dr Douglas Hyde (1860–1949), Gaelic League president and future first president of Ireland, and lexicographer Patrick S. Dinneen/Pádraig Ua Duinnín (1860–1934), another leading figure of the Gaelic Revival movement. Supplementary and reference material includes pasted-in sheets of translations in O’Donnell’s hand and newspaper cuttings. O’Donnell’s penchant for documenting and collecting is further evidenced by two volumes of scrapbooks containing newspaper clippings, photographs and letters. In an initiative led by SNAC director Angela Gehrig (1966–2016) and O’Donnell scholar Dr Val Noone, both scrapbooks were digitised and made available for download on the SNAC website (www.snac.unimelb.edu. au/collections/).

The O’Donnell marginalia project … I became very familiar with the O’Donnell volumes when working on the collection as a cataloguer at SNAC from 2010 to 2011. My role initially focused on capturing uncatalogued pamphlets and Irish-language material. Unique features of the collection are O’Donnell’s notes and annotations, and in consultation with the SNAC librarians, I subsequently began adding copy-specific notes to the catalogue records to document this engagement. A custom subject heading—Nicholas O’Donnell Collection—was also created and included in the bibliographic records, allowing for a more targeted discovery of collection items (http://snac.worldcat.org/). 360

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Despite these enhanced records, which now include idiosyncratic details such as marginalia, dates, signatures, notes and pasted-in items, a library catalogue record can only convey so much information. The record also cannot provide context: where, for example, does an annotation sit in relation to the text? How does a catalogue record sufficiently describe the changes in O’Donnell’s handwriting that can be detected in annotations written after he suffered a stroke in early 1912 (Noone, 2017, p. 226)? In 2016—nearly a century after the O’Donnell Collection was bequeathed to Newman College—I was working as a research liaison librarian at the University of Melbourne Library and participated in a series of digital humanities tools training workshops, run by the University’s Research Platform (ResPlat) Services. One of the tools introduced was Omeka, which immediately struck me as a potential platform for building on my previous work on the O’Donnell Collection. I took my tentative idea to Meredith McCullough, then lead trainer for Omeka with Research Platform Services, with a view to combining our respective expertise in the tool and the collection: the O’Donnell Marginalia Project was born. For the pilot phase of the project, we aimed to: •

• •

expose part of the collection in a digital space by digitising select pages that bear marks of O’Donnell’s engagement, thereby facilitating remote access and enabling what we termed ‘meta-engagement’ (i.e. engagement with O’Donnell’s engagement with his collection) create a central repository gathering details of the O’Donnell scholarship published to date—articles, books and book chapters—and the digitised materials from the collection made available by previous initiatives respond to the demand for and interest in Omeka at the University of Melbourne by ‘road testing’ the tool with a real-life project.

… and its platform, Omeka Omeka is an open-source web-publishing platform primarily designed to showcase cultural collections and exhibitions. Omeka combines the functionalities of web content and collection management systems, as well as digital archival systems (Sumner & McCullough, 2018). Its relative ease of use—which is not dissimilar to a Wordpress site—is testament to the fact that Omeka was designed with non-tech specialists in mind. Omeka is available in two versions, omeka.net and omeka.org. Omeka.net (www.omeka. net/) is a fee-based, hosted service that offers access to storage and advanced features on paid plans. Omeka.org (http://omeka.org/) is a standalone application that is downloaded and installed on local servers. This gives greater flexibility, as themes and plug-ins, for example, can be customised, but requires the infrastructure to host, store and maintain the tool. In response to the interest in Omeka, a local ‘.org instance’ hosted on the University of Melbourne’s server was made available to the University’s research community, with the O’Donnell Marginalia Project among the first sites to be created: https://omeka.cloud.unim elb.edu.au/odonnell/. Designed with libraries, galleries, archives and cultural collections in mind, Omeka aims to facilitate the contextualised discovery of a collection’s content. To support this discovery process, digital items within Omeka are described according to a structured metadata schema: Dublin Core, a global standard for archival collections (ISO15836). The original Dublin Core Metadata Element Set uses 15 fields to describe digital and physical resources: 361

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contributor, coverage, creator, date, description, format, identifier, language, publisher, relation, rights, source, subject, title and type (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, 2012). The optional tagging of items with keywords offers an additional access point and finding aid that can help to further organise an Omeka site. An Omeka site is made up of three ‘building blocks’: items, collections and exhibitions. A collection is made up of items that may share common attributes or themes. Exhibitions can bring together items from different collections. For the O’Donnell Marginalia Project, we decided that a ‘collection’ would denote a book, while the ‘items’ in the collection are the specific pages from the book that bear marks of O’Donnell’s engagement with the material, such as marginalia. An exhibition would then allow us to showcase multiple pages from different books that have a thematic connection, such as marginalia or annotations demonstrating O’Donnell’s Irish-language learning, correspondence or political commentary.

Planning and collaborating During its planning phase, the O’Donnell Marginalia Project team, consisting of Meredith McCullough and myself, mapped out the set-up of the site and its content. The assignment of Dublin Core metadata fields for our purposes required some consideration. While some fields were easy to assign—for example, title, date, publisher, or the use of the creator field for authors—we also required a strong link between our online presence and the physical collection at SNAC. Thus, we decided to use the Dublin Core ‘relation’ field to add links to the SNAC catalogue record of the book being described, and an ‘identifier’ to note the SNAC call number (see Figure 32.2). The SNAC librarians were the first collaborators to join the project, enthusiastically giving permission and access to the O’Donnell Collection. We shortlisted nine previously catalogued volumes for initial inclusion on the project website. These volumes were selected to represent the range of marks of engagement left by O’Donnell, but also to reflect the breadth of his interests such as the Irish language and contemporary politics, and his correspondence with notable Irish figures. With a project emphasis on exposing copy-specific idiosyncrasies rather than full texts, only pages bearing evidence of O’Donnell’s engagement were to be digitised from each volume, a full list of which is included in the appendix to this chapter. Professional digitisation of the relevant pages from the selected volumes was carried out by the University of Melbourne’s Digitisation Centre (http://library.unimelb.edu.au/digitisa tion). This work was made possible by a digitisation grant, awarded to the project by the University’s Social and Cultural Informatics Platform, SCIP (http://scip.unimelb.edu.au/), a service that encourages, supports and facilitates opportunities for researchers to engage with digital scholarship. The professionally digitised images are a valuable asset to the project, as their quality and image resolution allows for exactly the kind of exposure of and engagement with O’Donnell’s notes we envisaged. The project website itself is an omeka.org site hosted on the University of Melbourne server. Staff from the University’s Research Platform Services (http://research.unimelb.edu. au/infrastructure/research-platform-services) were indispensable to the project, helping to establish the infrastructure and install required plug-ins. Being one of the first Melbourne University-hosted Omeka sites, the O’Donnell Marginalia Project benefitted from the team’s technical expertise, and in turn was able to serve as a ‘guinea pig’ for testing the tool, plugins and other features where required. For the front-end of the project website, we selected one of Omeka’s pre-installed themes, ‘Thanks, Roy’. With a responsive design that appeals because of its clean and 362

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Figure 32.2 Example of the Dublin Core metadata fields assigned to Duanaire na Macaomh: A Selection of Irish Poetry for Schools and Colleges (1910). Source: O’Donnell Marginalia Project website. https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/odon nell/collections/show/8#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0&z=-0.8267%2C-0.0849%2C2.6534% 2C1.6983.

uncluttered interface, this theme also gives a customisable side navigation panel (see Figure 32.2). This offers a logical access point to the different components of the project website.

Looking back, and into the future The pilot phase of the O’Donnell Marginalia Project has been a success; we were able to fulfil our initial project aims and confirm Omeka’s suitability for the project’s purpose. Feedback—especially from the local O’Donnell scholarly community—has been positive and supportive of expanding the project. While similar projects have conducted an environmental scan and assessment of suitable tools before settling on Omeka (e.g. Hardesty, 2014; Ruge, Wright, Evans, Willett &

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Jaynes, 2016), the O’Donnell Marginalia Project aimed to facilitate access to parts of the O’Donnell Collection and test Omeka as a suitable tool. At the conclusion of the pilot phase, it appears that Omeka works very well for the project. As Hardesty (2014) notes, a locally hosted omeka.org site offers an easy entry point for creating an online exhibition but has the potential to grow in complexity as required. The output we have been able to achieve using the ‘standard’ plug-ins has generally been successful; however, it will be interesting to explore other options to enhance the project site’s content. Such options include KnightLab’s Timeline and StoryMap tools (https://knightlab.northwestern.edu/projects/ #storytelling), in lieu of Omeka’s own timeline plug-in, NeatLine. The success of the project has relied heavily on the fact that we were based at a large, research-intensive university where relevant services and infrastructures were readily available. We had some serendipitous support such as the award of the SCIP digitisation grant, and being able to build our site on a university server-hosted platform means that storage, access and preservation of the site are managed at a central level. A concern at the end of the pilot phase, and one which is shared by a majority of digital humanities projects that aim to digitise and make accessible historical archives, is the discoverability of the site. Ironically, for a project aiming to expose a collection, the O’Donnell Marginalia Project’s website itself is still somewhat obscure. A future priority will be to increase the site’s visibility through promotion and linking from related sites, such as the SNAC website. As with any project, time is also a concern, with key staff and resources finite. An annual O’Donnell Fellowship, with its incumbent based at a University College for six weeks, invites scholars to engage with the Nicholas O’Donnell Collection. Seeking the input from past and future fellows on how the O’Donnell Marginalia Project can support the ongoing scholarship on the collection will be a possible avenue for future collaborations. This will also ensure the ongoing relevance of the project. The project, and in particular the hands-on use of the Omeka platform, has proven to be a valuable professional development and research opportunity, and vehicle for discovery around the challenges and issues presented by many online repository projects.

Appendix: volumes from the O’Donnell collection included in the pilot phase of the O’Donnell marginalia project For the pilot phase of the project, nine volumes were selected to showcase O’Donnell’s engagement with his collection. The marginalia, notes and annotations contained in these volumes can be loosely be grouped into the categories of language and language learning (L), politics (P), and correspondence (C). Below is a brief annotated bibliography of the volumes, detailing O’Donnell’s engagement. As the project emphasis is on copy-specific idiosyncrasies, only pages bearing marks of engagement, rather than the full text, are being made available on the project website. Hyde, D. (n.d.). Legends of saints and sinners. Dublin: Talbot Press. (C) Remains of O’Donnell’s spine labels on front of volume. On recto of frontispiece, dated 1916, is a dedication to O’Donnell, in Irish, by the author—future president of Ireland—signing with his Irish pen-name An Craoibhín. O’Reilly, E. & O’Donovan, J. (n.d.). An English-Irish Dictionary, with copious quotations from the most esteemed ancient and modern writers, to elucidate the meaning of obscure words, and numerous comparisons of Irish words with those of similar orthography, sense, or sound in the Welsh and Hebrew languages. Dublin: James Duffy and Co.

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(L) Glosses to dictionary entries offering alternative meanings. ‘Code-switching’ between cursive and scribal hands for English/Irish. Mo Shgìal Fén Scrapbook (n.d.) (L) Scrapbook containing newspaper cuttings (from a still unidentified source) of the Autobiography of Canon O’Leary—Mo Shgìal Fén, published in Irish but in a simplified, phonetic spelling system. O’Donnell retransliterated the text into standard Irish, his hand reminiscent of those found in Irish scribal manuscripts. The inclusion of diacritical marks and scribal abbreviations is evidence of his proficiency of the language. Spine labels on cover. The Times. (1891). The Parnellite split: Or, the disruption of the Irish Parliamentary Party. London: George Edward Wright, the Times Office and George Routledge and Sons. (P) Title emendation (italics indicating O’Donnell’s edits): ‘The Parnellite Split: or, the disruption of the . same for veracity of the lying. “The Times,” & Piggott its dupe (which of course is carefully excluded)’. Pádraig Ua Duinnín. (1906). Filidhe na Máighe. Áth Cliath: M.H. Gill agus a Mhac [Dublin: M.H. Gill]. (C) (L) Author’s dedication to O’Donnell, and a pasted-in letter from the author asking O’Donnell to ‘kindly notice the book in one or more of the leading Australian papers’. O’Donnell’s English translations of the Irish poems pasted into the volume. Textual crossreferences. Scribal hand used for Irish notes, cursive for English. Tomás Ó Flannghaile (1910). Duanaire na Macaomh: A selection of Irish poetry for schools and colleges. Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son. (L) Remains of spine label remains. Pasted-in pages of English translations of the Irish poems in O’Donnell’s hand, in one instance cross-referenced with a pasted-in newspaper clipping featuring stanzas of a poem published in a simplified, phonetic Irish spelling. O’Connor, Major G. B. (1910). Stuart Ireland: Catholic and Puritan. Dublin: Hanna & Neale. (P) Note in O’Donnell’s hand in bottom margin of introduction: ‘With all his discourse on fairness this man [= the author] is patently a partisan. His bias obtrudes itself in every chapter + his apologies for English persecution + aggression + oppression sound perilously like hypocrisy’. Pádraig Ua Duinnín (1911). Startha as an Soiscéal. Áth Cliath: M.H. Gill agus a Mhac [Dublin: M.H. Gill & Son]. (C) Author’s dedication to O’Donnell, dated ‘4-4-[19]11’. Quiggin, E. C. (1914). Prolegomena to the study of the later Irish bards 1200–1500. London: Oxford University Press. (L) Cover page glossed ‘Prolegomena [=] Preliminary observations. Introductory’. Annotations and textual cross-references throughout; O’Donnell switches between a cursive hand for notes in English, and a scribal hand for Irish.

Acknowledgements Thank you to Meredith McCullough, and everyone else who contributed to the O’Donnell Marginalia Project in its pilot phase. I am grateful to Rhonda Gordon-Brown, Dr Val Noone, Monica Raszewski and Tyne Daile Sumner for their feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter; all errors are of course my own. In memoriam Angela Gehrig (1966–2016).

References Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. (2012). DCMI: Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1: Reference Description. Retrieved from http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/

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Geary, L. (2016). Nicholas Michael O’Donnell (1862–1920): A Melbourne medical life. Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, 16, 13–29. Hardesty, J. L. (2014). Exhibiting library collections online: Omeka in context. New Library World, 115 (3–4), 75–86. McConville, C. (n.d.). O’Donnell, Nicholas Michael (1862–1920). In Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. Retrieved from http://adb. anu.edu.au/biography/odonnell-nicholas-michael-7879 Molloy, K. (2013). O’Donnell, Dr Nicholas Michael (1862–1920). In C. Stitz (Ed.), Australian book collectors: Some noted Australian book collectors & collections of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: second series. Part II, I–Z and index (1st edition, pp. 568–583). Sydney, NSW: Green Olive Press. Noone, V. (2009). Nicholas O’Donnell: ‘Australian born … but a good Irish scholar’. Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, 9, 95–111. Noone, V. (2010). ‘Our Gaelic column’: Melbourne 1902–1912. In B. Patterson & K. Patterson (Eds.), Ireland and the Irish Antipodes: One world or worlds apart: Papers delivered at the 16th Australasian Irish Studies Conference, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand 9–12 July 2009 (pp. 162–174). Spit Junction, NSW: Anchor Books Australia. Noone, V. (2012). Hidden Ireland in Victoria. Ballarat, Vic: Ballarat Heritage Services. Noone, V. (2017). Nicholas O’Donnell’s autobiography. Ballarat, Vic: Ballarat Heritage Services. O’Donnell Family Photographs 1896–1911 (p. 5), State Library of Victoria. http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/ 10381/252062. Ruge, C., Wright, S., Evans, J., Willett, G. & Jaynes, G. (2016). Digital dilemmas: A participatory investigation into developing a digital strategy for a community archives. Presented at VALA 2016. Retrieved from www.vala.org.au/direct-download/vala2016-proceedings/vala2016-papers/601vala2016-session-13-ruge-paper/file Sumner, T. D. & McCullough, M. (2018). Omeka. In C. Tuke Flanders, D. Jotanovic & T. D. Sumner (Eds.), The digital research skills cookbook: An introduction to the Research Bazaar community. Independently published. pp. 170–194.

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33 Interpreting the future Tony Holzner

As cultural institutions continue to expand beyond a historical focus and ‘look into the future’ (Antonelli, 2014), what are the opportunities and how can we best capitalise on these to increase public engagement? This chapter focuses on technological change in relation to new digital interfaces and their role in enhancing visitor engagement in the GLAM sector. The approach adopted for the digital interpretation of exhibitions at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia is used as a reference point for exploring how more natural interactions between people, place and content can be created. Consideration will be given to new human–computer interfaces—resultant from mixed reality (MR) technology—that promise to deliver increased access to collections and superior visitor experiences. When the subject of technological innovation is raised, it is often coupled with talk about ‘disruptive innovations’. Much of this is, admittedly, hype and coopting of the latest new term to sell products that are decidedly not disruptive. For an innovation to be disruptive, it must substantially disrupt an existing paradigm and displace the market leaders. It is interesting to explore the application of disruptive innovation to the GLAM sector. While directly associating GLAM organisations with private enterprise notions relating to growth and disruption can be fraught, I would argue that GLAM organisations fundamentally have a purpose of value creation just like every other business, in that they work to increase a resource’s usefulness to other humans. Because disruptive innovations are typically produced by an outsider, are not immediately applied by the predominant status quo, and involve considerable risk from a financial and reputation perspective, they tend to have a higher degree of impact once realised. Brown and Wyatt (2010) state: Truly innovative ideas challenge the status quo and stand out from the crowd—they’re creatively disruptive. They provide a wholly new solution to a problem many people didn’t know they had. Mona, in Tasmania, founded by David Walsh, has many of these qualities. A central element of Mona’s disruption to the dominant museum paradigm has been the removal of traditional wall labels that provide information on the works of art. Walsh was clear on the interpretive approach required for Mona from the outset. His rationale stemmed 367

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from a realisation that conventional approaches were less than ideal; inhibiting both exhibition design and the free thoughts of museum audiences. Walsh (2014) writes: And here’s the thing I realised. When museums became adornments to the state they needed to communicate the profundity of their collections. They needed labels on their walls. And they needed you and me to be able to read them. As scribes throughout history had demonstrated, and Gutenberg’s press had highlighted, the best way to make them legible is black text on a white background. Thus museum design the world over. (p. 183) The digital substitute to traditional artwork wall labels that has been created specifically for Mona is ‘The O’. At its simplest, The O is a personal touchscreen interface that provides every Mona visitor with a list of artworks ordered by physical proximity, with the work physically closest to you shown at the top. Each artwork on The O can have any amount and type of interpretive content associated to it, ranging from Walsh’s personal insight, candid audio interviews with the artist, research-based material and, on occasion, popular music. A centralised content management and publishing system allows Mona’s team to regularly update The O’s interpretation throughout the lifecycle of an exhibition. This reduced publishing friction frees curators, researchers and writers to help produce the kind of raw, unedited, emotive and sometimes frivolous responses to the artworks that the audience overwhelmingly prefers. On any given day, fresh content might be added, like this: I was sitting in a bar yesterday (the wine and beer bar here, back up the hill. Not this one, in the museum. No decent names yet. Any suggestions? ‘Bar Stard’ just came to mind. Don’t worry, I’m not serious). I was playing with this thing you have in your hand, ‘The O’ (perhaps for ‘Orgasm’ or ‘Oracle’) and I looked up this work, by Christoph Ruckhaberle. To my surprise there was no ‘Gonzo’ entry for it so I thought I’d better write one. Trouble is, I don’t have anything to say, and since this is the very first work in the gallery I wouldn’t want to give you the false impression these entries are frivolous. When it launched in 2011, Mona’s new approach to museum interpretation had an immediate impact on audience engagement. A survey commissioned in 2012 across a sample of 1,100 visitors found that over 80 per cent of visitors considered that The O enhanced their experience of the museum, and over 70 per cent of visitors preferred The O to traditional wall plaques and signage (Mona Museum Hobart, 2012). The absence of traditional museum wall labels removes artwork metadata from the equation, making the visitor’s natural curiosity the sole driver for engagement. The museum never prompts you via a sign or label to ‘go here’ or ‘look there’. Any bias created by attaching the celebrity (or lack of celebrity) of the artist to every artwork is removed. It is an inherently visitor-centric approach, as it is fundamentally about democratising the museum experience. You can see the outcome of this explorative, curiosity-driven approach in full effect in exhibitions that juxtapose the works of major artists beside comparatively lesser-known names. Similarly, distinct styles will also be mashed together—an abstract expressionist work placed beside a kinetic sculpture for example. Such was the case in Mona’s inaugural exhibition, ‘Monanisms’, in which a painting by Vasily Kandinsky, with its mix of curves, colours and lines, was hung nearby Conrad Shawcross’s intense light sculpture Loop System Quintet 368

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Figure 33.1 Loop System Quintet by Conrad Shawcross. Source: Fraser Mummery, https://flic.kr/p/b3uczt Creative commons licence.

(Figures 33.1 and 33.2). Visitors stood transfixed by the kinetic sculpture for long periods, paying only cursory attention to the Kandinsky—sometimes missing it entirely—their interest not piqued. The O lends a helping hand in these kinds of curatorial arrangements in the form of a personalised post-visit experience that records and helpfully distinguishes between the works that were seen and unseen via Mona’s website. The agency of the visitor is further amplified by Mona’s artwork rating system. The O displays a prominent ‘love or hate?’ option atop each artwork. As distinct from the echo chamber of social media ‘likes’, designed primarily to funnel ever more targeted advertising towards us, Mona’s love–hate binary exists to reinforce the visitor-centric approach by alluding to every visitor, whether consciously or unconsciously, that their thoughts about the museum and the artworks contained within it matter. There is no immediate outcome from tapping ‘love or hate’ in The O, but visitors still enjoy sending their thoughts to the museum. (On average, each visitor votes 4.4 times per visit. Interestingly, the ratio of love to hate averages a constant of 70 per cent in favour of love.) However, tangible effects of the love–hate provocation can be observed in the interaction between visitors. One example is Mona’s librarian Mary Lijnzaad’s observation of a Tasmanian outlaw motorcycle gang roaming through Mona’s exhibits laughing and joking, and generally enjoying themselves. Leather-clad and intimidating, the diligent Mona invigilators probably had some nervousness about what they were up to. On closer inspection though, each bikie had The O in hand and was jamming in ‘hate’ on every single artwork. Call it engagement if you like, or better, call it having a great time! In effect, Mona is shouting out to every visitor: tell us what you really think! So they do. 369

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Figure 33.2 Mona ‘Monanisms’ exhibition design, 2011. Source: Leigh Carmichael, Mona.

The absence of wall labels also achieves significantly greater flexibility in exhibition design; dramatic lighting amplifies the visual connection to each work, at all times accompanied by The O’s interpretive content. A second visitor survey conducted in 2014 across a sample of 6,411 participants found that Mona’s approach increased the enjoyment of art by 77 per cent, with 25 per cent of the audience describing the museum visit as a ‘life-changing experience’ (Franklin & Papastergiadis, 2017). These types of extraordinary responses have resulted in Mona quickly rising to become one of the world’s top museums to visit, with the Lonely Planet’s Ultimate Travelist (Hope, 2015) ranking it 20th, ahead of international institutions including New York’s MoMA and London’s Tate Modern. These examples span approximately 10 years of research and development, and while not exhaustive, they provide an overview of the benefits created by a unified approach to museum exhibition design and user-experience design. But what happens next? And what might the interpretive interfaces of the future look like? We are at an interesting juncture in terms of human–computer interfaces. There is a clear trend towards more natural and subtle interface design. The field of MR is shaping up to be the engine for this imminent wave of technological change. MR describes the ‘merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualisations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time.’1 MR represents a mixing of reality spanning the real, to the augmented, to the virtual environment. Relevant to this is the growing capability of smart devices and the move away from traditional two-dimensional interfaces and towards three-dimensional (3D) environments. From

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a GLAM sector perspective, one of the more practical benefits of the move to 3D will be the ability for the end-user to get closer to artefacts and artworks. The combination of more natural, gesture-based interfaces, coupled with high-resolution 3D scanning and display systems, means that objects locked away behind glass display cases can be examined effortlessly, in greater detail and from any angle. The MR version of this interface can then transport the 3D object to its original location, returning it to its natural resting place and reestablishing the important context so often lost with traditional object display approaches. Until now, digital interfaces (described above) would typically rely upon our personal smart devices or larger format displays like projections. But as with the old rotary dial telephones of the past, the pervasiveness of the ‘little black mirror’ shall also come to pass. Much of the big money in consumer technology investment is currently following the path to the visual cortex (MR start-up Magic Leap has raised over $2.3 billion in funding to date [Matney, 2018]). With vision accounting for two-thirds of the electrical activity in our brain, or about 2 billion of the 3 billion firings per second (Fixott & Sell, 1957), it is safe to say Silicon Valley is not betting on Smell-a-vision as the next big thing. So-called ‘smart glasses’ might just be the ‘singularity’ for natural interfaces. Just like normal corrective lens and sunglasses have pride of place into the window of our soul and enhance our view of the world, the electronic version will achieve this and a great deal more. By intercepting the light that falls on a glass lens, Silicon Valley, for better or worse, will have control of humanity’s vision. Obviously, this is a big deal. No longer is light simply going to fall into our eyeballs haphazardly. Instead, miniaturised cameras will be the first in line, sending it off to the Cloud for processing, and special optical ‘waveguides’ will then throw it back into our visual cortex all in the blink of an eye. And, sitting in direct contact with our temples, the arms of our smart glasses may even use electroencephalography (EEG) to read our minds and serve as a thought-control interface (Taylor, 2017). If this sounds alarming, you are not the first to think so. However, as this is a discussion about future museum interfaces, let us examine how the smart glasses of the not-so-distant future could be used for good rather than evil. Let us assume we now have direct access to the visual cortex and our wearable smart devices are working hard to process the world around us. Leaving the deep philosophical, moral and privacy issues aside, what might happen when we explore our favourite museum? Knowing exactly what you are observing, and to a certain degree, even what you are thinking, coupled with the ability to seamlessly overlay content across your field of vision, theoretically enables an entirely natural digital interface. We will be able to skip many of the typical selection-based interface approaches of today, instead using computer vision to immediately detect the artwork or artefact you are focusing on and then automatically provide relevant and personalised content. Aided by EEG and thought control, the digital interface will also be aware of your sentiment towards the object you are looking at. Shortly after focusing your eyes on any object in the exhibition space, your emotional state can be accurately assessed, and the interface can respond accordingly. For example, the absence of any strong emotional response might mean we take no action at all, since you are not interested in that work! However, if your emotional response does exceed a set threshold, we can then assume your interest is piqued, and automatically overlay an interpretive interface (or inversely, a lack of interest could be used to identify an opportunity to convince the viewer otherwise?). This too can be, by several orders of magnitude, subtler. Digital overlays across our vision do not need to be slammed across our field of view to obscure what drove our interest in the first place. Instead, more natural design approaches could overlay in the form of a virtual book across an open palm. Looking down at our hand is all that is needed to display the interpretation for the artwork of interest. The 371

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typeface would always be set to our ideal reading size. If we prefer to listen rather than read, natural language processing will perfectly vocalise the content in whatever language we desire. Aside from the immediacy and intuitive nature of these type of vision and thought control-based interfaces, there is another potentially interesting upside. To make it all work seamlessly, we may have to train our minds to concentrate a little better. If we are at the exhibition, and our mind is a little scattered, the thought-based interface might struggle to accurately intuit our interest level. In other words, the system will work optimally when we are focused on the exhibition. In this manner, the exhibition experience would bias towards a state of increased mindfulness, requiring greater focus on the physical works; this could end up being the best thing to happen to museums.

Note 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_reality.

References Antonelli, P. (2014). The journey is the destination. Retrieved from www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/ 2014/06/26/the-innovation-route-the-journey-is-the-destination/. Brown, T., & Wyatt, J. (2010) Design thinking for social innovation. In Standford Social Innovation Review, Winter. Retrieved from https://ssir.org/articles/entry/design_thinking_for_social_innovation. Fixott, R. S., & Sell, S. B. (1957). Evaluation of research on effects of visual training on visual functions. American Journal of Ophthalmology, 44(2), 230–236. Franklin, A., & Papastergiadis, N. (2017). Engaging with the anti-museum? Visitors to the museum of old and new art. Journal of Sociology, 53(3), 670–686. Hope, E. (2015, 18 August). MONA tops international modern art galleries as ‘world’s best’. The Mercury. Retrieved from www.themercury.com.au/lifestyle/travel/Mona-tops-internationalmodern-art-galleries-as-worlds-best/news-story/3a86ee2408b9ba22ba97597d325d7e10. Matney, L. (2018, 8 March). Magic Leap raises $461 million in fresh funding from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Tech Crunch. Retrieved from https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/07/magic-leap-raises-461-mil lion-in-fresh-funding-from-the-kingdom-of-saudi-arabia/ Mona Museum Hobart. (2012, March). The O Device 2012 Survey Report. Taylor, T. (2017). Not your standard shades. Retrieved from www.si.com/edge/2017/01/06/safilo-inter axon-brain-sensing-eyewear-sunglasses-athletes-mental-fatigue-focus. Walsh, D. (2014). A bone of fact. London, UK: Picador.

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Part IV

Locating in place

34 What could have Bean? A digital construction of Charles Bean’s Australian War Memorial Anthea Gunn

Art of Nation: Australia’s official art and photography of the First World War is an online exhibition that explores the original vision for the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and its art and photography collections using an innovative combination of digital methodologies. The project was a response to the centenary of the First World War (1914–1918), which was also that of the foundation of the AWM: the nation’s shrine, museum and archive that commemorates those killed in military service. One of Australia’s most popular museums, the AWM galleries combine art, archives and historic objects to explore the nation’s involvement in military conflicts. These galleries, and the building that houses them, are substantially different to how they were originally conceived. Through the Art of Nation exhibition, digital technology allows visitors to experience and explore this original vision and to capture a historically significant act of curation, neither of which are now possible physically. The AWM was the first museum created by the federal government and it was a deliberately grand response to the events and loss of the First World War, understood as the ‘birth of the nation’. It was one of the first substantial buildings in Canberra, the young nation’s capital.1 The establishment of the AWM is historically important then, both because of the events it commemorates and as the first museum in the nation’s capital. Art of Nation showcases how some of those who lived through these nation-defining events understood them and their expectations of how history would recognise their experiences. At the centre of this was official war correspondent, historian and AWM founder Charles Bean, who had firsthand experience of the reality of the war, after four years reporting from the frontlines. On his journey back to Australia in 1919, he wrote a detailed proposal for an Australian war memorial museum that included sketches of the façade and a floor plan for the projected building (see Figure 34.1) (April 1919). The memorial was to be monumental, built in the neoclassical revival style and include dedicated spaces for the display of art, photography, models (dioramas) and documents. A massive central hall would display large objects, but more importantly, the walls would become the heart of the building, holding a roll of honour listing of all those who died in military service during the First World War.

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Figure 34.1 Charles Bean, sketch proposing what Australia’s national memorial might look like, 1919, File AWM170, 1/1. Source: Australian War Memorial.

The sketch, and Bean’s proposal as a whole, reveals the true scope and original purpose of Australia’s official war art and photography schemes. A grand gallery of history paintings would depict Australia’s military involvement in the First World War. There are over 70 376

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large paintings on Bean’s list of planned commissions that have never been displayed according to the vision that guided their creation. It is now impossible to convey the full scale of Bean’s intention in a physical exhibition space. Art of Nation, an online interactive exhibition, fulfils this intent for the first time.2 The AWM partnered with Brisbane-based Ortelia Interactive Spaces to create a threedimensional (3D), navigable digital interpretation of Bean’s proposal. Within it are galleries exhibiting the official art and photography collections. The works displayed link to maps on which the sketches and photographs created in the field are pinned.3 This presents an overview of where Australians served in the war and allows detailed engagement with specific locations and works of art. Unlike other online exhibitions, rather than a ‘reconstruction’ of an historic place or exhibition, it is a ‘construction’ of something that was proposed but never built. It is the first known digital project to combine two modes of spatial analysis: 3D design and collection mapping to present more than 600 works. The software (based on Ortelia’s Curator software) allows the exhibition content to be changed and additional material to be added.4 It combines an online exhibition with elements of data visualisation, providing rich and complex content for users to explore. It was also envisaged as a means for AWM’s curators to experiment with the uses of digital art history, with the potential to be developed to deliver additional functions. The partnership with Ortelia included the development of back-end software so that curators are able to change the content without requiring technical support. There is capacity for an entirely different exhibition in the virtual space—for example, a more revisionist approach, including a wider range of perspectives than those of the official artists, or that of contemporary artists. Potentially, multiple versions of the virtual building could be made available, with exhibitions demonstrating different curatorial possibilities. Further development could create an interactive version in which users curate exhibitions. This would be of particular interest for secondary and tertiary education uses, where it could be used to teach students how museums use objects to engage visitors with history. In this chapter, I detail how Art of Nation was shaped by archival research that determined the digital methodologies used and guided the curatorial approach and exhibition design. This specialist knowledge underpins the project, which is intended to be accessible to a general audience and showcase one of Australia’s earliest national collections and demonstrate how and why it was created. I first give an overview of the user experience and collection content and why the 1919 proposal was considered definitive for this project. The historical sources that determined the design of the building and the exhibitions are then considered, to show how these were translated into a digital exhibition, particularly focusing on the official war art scheme and the role of art within this memorial museum.

The Art of Nation user experience Art of Nation is accessed on the AWM’s website.5 This page contains contextual historical information and instructions on how to use video-game-style keyboard and mouse controls. Clicking the link ‘View Art of Nation’ opens a full-screen, immersive 3D environment. When the user opens Art of Nation, they are standing on the forecourt outside the building. This can be explored to view glimpses of Mount Ainslie behind the building, and the view down Anzac Parade, which firmly locates users on the site of the present AWM in Canberra, at one end of the axis with the federal parliament (see Figure 34.2). 377

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Figure 34.2 What the viewer sees when they launch Art of Nation, the 3D model of how Charles Bean conceived of the Australian War Memorial (top), and when they turn around, the view down Anzac Parade of contemporary Canberra (bottom). Source: Australian War Memorial.

Entering the building, users find themselves in the foyer standing on the Shellal mosaic— more on this later—facing a portrait of Charles Bean and a map of the building. On their right is the eastern wing of the building with the art galleries and on the left is the western wing, containing the photography galleries. Each wing has three large and one small gallery. The eastern wing showcases the history paintings commissioned at Bean’s instigation. Arranged chronologically by the events they depict, the paintings present an introductory history to Australian military service in the First World War (see Figure 34.3). The small gallery is a showcase of work by official war artist Will Dyson (1880–1938). In the eastern wing, the photography galleries recreate the first exhibition of Australian official photography in London in May 1918. This includes animations that reveal how large composite prints were created from multiple negatives and in the small gallery, a projection of magic lantern slides. For reasons of space, this chapter focuses on the art galleries. Moving through the galleries, users ‘click’ on a painting or photograph to bring up a larger image with information about the event depicted, the commissioning of the work and a brief biography of the artist. Eighteen of the 24 artists are official war artists or photographers, and their works link to maps on which a selection of their field sketches are 378

Figure 34.3 View of First World War art gallery in Art of Nation. Source: Australian War Memorial.

Figure 34.4 Art of Nation map view showing field sketches by Arthur Streeton. Source: Australian War Memorial.

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pinned. The maps illustrate their journeys and consequently, an overview of where Australians served. When users select a pinned work, it opens an image, details of the work, and the option to open Google Street View, which allows the user to explore these locations as they are today, positioned at street level. This means users can make a ‘then and now’ comparison between the artwork and what they see, encouraging a close examination of the work (see Figures 34.4 and 34.5). Unlike most online exhibitions, commonly just webpages developed alongside a gallerybased exhibition, Art of Nation could not be achieved physically. It enables users to appreciate and interrogate the creation of the entire official war art collection, as well as assessing individual works or the production of a specific artist. In both the 3D-modelled exhibition and the maps, spatial relationships are paramount. Delving into the maps, users can explore the relationship between the larger paintings and the firsthand experience of artists working in the field during the war. A sense of scale in the gallery is created between the size of the artworks and the cavernous gallery by including 3D-modelled furniture and the time it takes to navigate the space—the user cannot jump from point to point within the gallery, but has to ‘walk’ through (though ‘running’ is an option). The conceit is that Bean’s plans were fulfilled as he envisaged in the early 1920s and the user is visiting in the present day. In Art of Nation, the building, and the artworks displayed, is presented as close as can be ascertained to how Bean and others in his circle intended around 1919. Their expectation was that the galleries would house unchanging displays, and this determined their collecting strategy. This is evident in art committee minutes from the

Figure 34.5 View showing comparison between Arthur Streeton’s view of Peronne’s citadel and the place today via Google Street View. Source: Australian War Memorial. 380

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1920s in which proposed acquisitions and commissions were considered with regard to their possibility for display. The intention was that every painting was to be displayed— apparently forever (Bean, 1923). Deciding to create Bean’s 1919 proposal meant accepting the limitations of the collections as it then stood. The next section explores the reasons for this approach.

Positioning Art of Nation in time No matter the founders’ intentions, it is inconceivable that the AWM’s galleries would have remained the same until the present day. History and modern museology ensure that exhibitions are now markedly different. As Anne-Marie Condé (2007a) has argued, Bean and Treloar, and their desire for ‘a combat-related, soldier’s-eye view of the war’ shaped the AWM collection. Catherine Speck (2009) has documented how this excluded other views—those of women, especially—from the art collection (Dora Meeson [1869–1955] is the only female artist included in Art of Nation). Bean and his circle were driven by a desire to see the soldiers remembered and were surely (and understandably) blinkered by their personal experience of years of war and trauma. The collection remit has long since been expanded to allow for exhibitions from multiple perspectives, and consequently, a fuller account of Australia’s experience of the war. In Art of Nation, the galleries are presented according to the original intentions for three reasons. First, it makes apparent the stark reality of the AWM—the museum was to be a memorial to one conflict, the ‘war to end all wars’—the First World War. Instead, by the time the building opened on 11 November 1941, Australia was in the midst of an even larger war with the mainland under threat. There is a perverse idealism in the scope of the collection and the scale of the building as a memorial to just one war, located prominently opposite the federal parliament, and with confidence that no further such memorials would be needed. Art of Nation places the visitor in this imagined future in which no subsequent wars had occurred requiring commemoration. The second reason is to show the official war art collection as it was originally conceived. Most visitors to the AWM are unaware of the complexity of the official war art scheme; from the works on display, it is not obvious that 15 artists were deployed during the war to the Western Front and Sinai and Palestine campaigns and that so many small works were created in the field. The large paintings have never been seen together as an art exhibition. Select examples have been exhibited in the AWM’s permanent galleries as part of mixed collection displays or in temporary exhibitions, such as retrospectives of a single artist. Moreover, the same paintings have been exhibited repeatedly, so perhaps as few as eight of these paintings are reasonably well known.6 Consequently, only specialist audiences know the true extent of the collection and no one has experienced the affect of these paintings collectively depicting the war. Third, the AWM was the first museum established by the Australian commonwealth government and the only known instance in Australia in which a collection and its building were conceived of simultaneously, as a historical record of events that were still unfolding. It seems an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking in the midst of a conflict that continued to demand the full resources of government, society and individuals (and especially for a nation in which Henry Parkes was publicly mocked for proposing a museum dedicated to the colonies’ history in 1888 [Ashton, 2008]). The support Bean’s proposal received was no doubt due to the expectation that an impressive memorial was required to remember the many war dead, buried so far away, but also the popular 381

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interpretation of Australia’s involvement in the war as the ‘birth of the nation’ (Yip, 2010). It was not meant to be, however, the final word. In Appendices A–U of his memoir, Bean proposes the nature of the collection, the memorial museum and the official history, and concludes with a proposal for a ‘national research committee’. In these appendices, Bean’s (1919a) diagrams show the war collections as one branch of museums of ‘history, art, agriculture, medicine, geography, architecture, economics, etc. etc. etc.’. Even during the war, Bean (March 1918) conceived of the memorial museum as a model for institutions to come: Australia will unquestionably need her own national museum, her national gallery, and her national library in [the] future, in which the history of her race will be preserved and illustrated, just as the history of the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] will be preserved and illustrated in the War Museum Gallery and Library. P. 33 In mid-1919, Bean was confident that most staff required to create the AWM would have finished their duties by the end of 1920 and be available to establish a national museum (1919b). (The National Museum of Australia was legislated in 1980 and its permanent building opened in 2001.) Art of Nation presents this vision of a museum that Bean was sure would be complete in just a few years, allowing the nation to confidently turn its energies to all the areas of life that had been on hold for the duration of the First World War. Bean’s proposal was an important historical moment in the history of Australian museology and the development of the national collections.

An unlikely memorial: the Shellal mosaic and Bean’s proposal The inclusion of the Shellal mosaic in Art of Nation obliquely references how unlikely the museum undertaking was. The 6th-century mosaic floor was uncovered by a Turkish machine gun position in Palestine taken by the 2nd Light Horse Brigade in April 1917. It was excavated and shipped to Egypt for transport to Australia as a war trophy. A spirited administrative campaign was mounted on the British War Office to defend Australia’s claims to the piece. The government needed a more concrete plan for a collecting institution to reinforce its claim to the mosaic, and Bean seized the opportunity to send a detailed proposal, his ‘first memoir’, to Senator George Pearce, the defence minister, in March 1918. His proposal, approved by the minister on 30 May 1918, cited the mosaic as foremost among the trophies at risk, described the collecting activity to date and: suggested that the great Federal War Collection if established at the Commonwealth Capital in a building worthy to be a memorial of the Australian Imperial Force, would be the finest monument ever raised to any army. This memorial to the AIF would be a far greater and more sacred monument than the one raised to the individual leader of armies—Napoleon—by the French nation at the Invalides in Paris. The monument itself would contain within it the records of the Force, the pictures, trophies, and visible relics of its work. I would suggest that it should consist of three parts—the great central building to be the Museum, one wing to be the Gallery, the other wing to be the Library. (March 1918) 382

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With the support of AIF leadership and with access to the minister, Bean was able to capitalise on the need to resolve the fate of the mosaic to obtain approval for his ambitious memorial museum. Art of Nation positions the mosaic as a floor, prominently located in the foyer of the building. There was never any suggestion in Bean’s plans that the mosaic would be laid into a floor, and still less that visitors would be allowed to walk on it (when the AWM was constructed, the mosaic was embedded into a wall, where it remains on permanent display). Its inclusion in Art of Nation is a reference to its symbolic significance for the whole collection (and because of the irresistible temptation to return it to its original 6th-century purpose).

Interpreting the sources: creating Art of Nation There are a number of instances in which temptation to include oblique references overcame the curators. Such inventions have been soundly criticised in other historical exhibition projects. Catherine Roach (2016) concludes that ‘reconstructions should be crafted with an awareness of their limitations and presented in a way that makes those limitations transparent to the viewer’. Similarly, Anna Bentkowska-Kafel (2015) contends that, ‘historical visualization that does not show the difference between known facts and hypotheses’ lacking in ‘rigorous scholarly methodology, often demonstrates inferior or uncertain cognitive value of the findings’. Art of Nation differs from other 3D projects in that the original concept was never actually built, so it does not have the pressures of being an inaccurate reconstruction, instead being a construction based on source materials that were only ever preliminary. In what follows, I detail the available sources and how they were translated into a digital exhibition. Bean (April 1919) proposed that his building should: stand on an eminence in the Federal Capital; that it should have garden around it; that it should be built in a pure Greek style of architecture with as much simplicity as possible—the idea being of such a monument as records Australia’s Thermopylae—of white Australian marble or brilliant white stone on a wide platform of white stone—and set in heavy formal native trees of the nature of cypress. P.79 Along with Bean’s sketches, this text from his proposal was virtually all the architectural and landscape information available for the creation of Art of Nation. However, this material does connect the project to a rich vein of classical references. Bean’s proposal for a neoclassical building was not merely a continuation of the style of other museums, libraries and galleries in Australia; as Peter Londey (2007) observed, it was ‘a useful way of avoiding too much Christian symbolism’ for a secular state. Building the memorial in the neoclassical style physically connects it to the cultural legacy of the nation-defining battles of Greek city-states. Bean’s sketch is obviously not a set of architectural drawings, and so required elaboration in Art of Nation to provide a fuller user experience. To create the virtual building from the façade and floor sketches, a series of decisions had to be made through a combination of educated guesses and logical extrapolations: from a façade of this style, what would the interior be like? How grand would ornamentation be? In the absence of detailed plans for the art exhibition, how should the paintings hang? Bean visited museums and would have seen other neoclassical museums and galleries in Australia, such as the then co-located State Library of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria 383

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and Museum Victoria; the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Art Gallery of South Australia. The interiors of these institutions have informed Art of Nation. Bean’s floor plan was a preliminary sketch, so changes have been made in keeping with what would reasonably have been made during the translation into a finished building. For example, his entrance opened directly into the museum space, so a foyer has been introduced. His art gallery was cavernous, so archways have been introduced to demarcate spaces. The decorative motif on the archways is based on the wattle sprig that adorns Treloar’s memorial plaque, a suitably subtle reference to an indefatigably modest man (Bowles & Gregory, 1953; Condé, 2007b). The paintings have been hung in chronological order of the events they depict, following Bean’s list of commissions and his approach to other exhibition displays. These interpretations and allusions are made plain through accompanying information on the AWM’s website, but not within Art of Nation itself. This provides links to detailed supporting information that the immersive, interactive nature of the exhibition does not accommodate. The decision not to make all inventions immediately apparent was balanced with the intended user experience. Considering the exhibition contains more than 600 works spanning a historically complex event, displayed in a building that was never actually built, while being accessible to existing AWM audiences, new online visitors, education programmes and popular and specialist art history audiences, this seemed like a reasonable approach.

Official war art Art of Nation arose from research into the origins of the official war art collection, which are inextricable from those of the AWM as a whole. I will now consider the official war art scheme and how art has been exhibited within Art of Nation. Starting in 1915, there were many calls for a museum or works of art recording Australia’s role in the war, but it would be Bean who unified these ideas into a coherent vision (McKernan, 1991, p. 36). As Australia’s official war correspondent, by December 1916 he had lived among the troops for eight months on Gallipoli and had witnessed the full horrors of the Pozières campaign—when Australia suffered 28,000 casualties in seven weeks—and remained deeply committed to his belief in the quality of the Australian character, but disabused of any notion of the glories of war. According to McKernan (1991, pp. 34–36), after Pozières, Bean’s sense of responsibility to the soldiers deepened and he sought to ensure recognition and understanding of their sacrifices, as well as remembrance. As the idea for official art gained support, Bean developed a concept of the collection itself as a memorial. Will Dyson’s appointment on 10 December 1916 was a defining moment for the official war art scheme. Then a successful London-based cartoonist, Dyson had offered his services— with all his work to become property of the Australian government—seemingly as an act of personal patriotism (Wray, 2015, p. 192). He set the precedent for the appointment of civilians by convincing Bean that artists who were not enlisted were able to capture the truth of war. Dyson arrived on the Western Front on 12 December 1916 and met Bean at Montauban, a village on the Somme that had been all but destroyed the previous summer. On 16 December, Bean wrote in his diary that: Dyson is an able man at his game, I can see. He has got hold of the weary detached way in which men come out of the trenches … he has a pretty acute sympathy and he will produce a drawing, he tells me, which will give the idea of it—‘you know—a line of men, all going slowly along—no step more than about three inches—every man utterly detached as if they were living in a world by themselves’. 384

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This is high praise from Bean, as being able to empathise with the experience of the troops and record their experience for posterity was his abiding concern throughout the war—and indeed for the rest of his life (Inglis, 1970). The proposed drawing was Coming Out on the Somme (December 1916, charcoal, pencil, brush and wash on paper, 58 x 47.4 cm, ART02276, AWM collection). Soldiers, each ‘utterly detached’, wearing wet weather gear and heavy boots return to the relative safety of Montauban after several days in the front line and a trudge through the mud and desolation of ground that had been fought over for the previous six months. Mapped in Art of Nation, the work connects the viewer to the place as it is today: a small, quiet village surrounded by potato fields, unrecognisable as the scene of misery Dyson witnessed. In his floor plan (see Figure 34.1), Bean included a dedicated ‘Dyson gallery’ such was his esteem for Dyson’s depiction of the soldiers. The 3D model in Art of Nation allows users to experience the spatial relationship between the grand display of history paintings in the main gallery and the adjacent, smaller gallery of Dyson’s works. Almost all the large paintings in the main gallery depict overall scenes: quite literally, the ‘big picture’ of Australia at war. Dyson’s works are intimate, focusing mostly on a small number of individuals, portraying their forbearance and courage in the grinding tedium and misery of war. The contrast between these two modes of depiction is an important aspect of the collection; the large paintings laud military action, positioned as nation-defining moments of history, whereas Dyson’s drawings were an homage to human endurance and personal sacrifice.

A museum as memorial To understand the importance of art to the overall collection, it is necessary to consider the plan for the memorial as a whole. Dyson spent more time on the Western Front than any other Australian war artist, often with Bean and Hubert Wilkins, an official photographer, and Arthur Bazley, Bean’s batman. They shared ideas about ‘the war memorial museum’. Together, they furthered and refined Bean’s concept of a gallery, museum and archive that would collectively form Australia’s national memorial. It would act as a site of commemoration for those far away from their loved ones’ graves. The collections would deepen understanding of the war and thus appreciation of the AIF, but also act as de facto physical remains, tangible connections to those who were lost—some missing forever (McKernan, 1991, pp. 56–57). Official support was initially gained when the AIF established the Australian War Records Section (AWRS) in May 1917, following the example of the Canadian War Records office in 1916. The AIF announced that the unit had been formed ‘in the interests of the national history of Australia and in order that Australia may have control of her own historical records’ (McKernan, 1991, p. 37). Until it was established, records automatically went into British collections. Under the command of 23-year-old Lieutenant John Treloar (who would become the AWM director and remain so until his death in 1952), the AWRS managed the AIF archive. The brief was soon expanded; troops were instructed to collect material relating to their own, and the enemy’s, service, and photographers and additional artists were deployed to the field to create pictorial records for the national collection. Treloar and Bean were a formidable partnership. The two were responsible more than anyone else for seeing the AWM built. Where Bean articulated the vision and placed it before Cabinet members for approval, Treloar translated the vision into action (Condé, 2007b). Throughout 1917 until early 1919, artists were contracted to spend three months attached to one of the five Australian divisions on the Western Front (or in George Lambert’s case, to the Anzac Mounted Division in Palestine) and produce 25 sketches in the 385

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field, with the expectation that they would then be contracted to create a ‘big historical picture’ on a subject suited to their practice and based on what they had witnessed in the field. Dyson was an exception to this, as he was in France almost continuously from his appointment in December 1916, producing hundreds of drawings and lithographs now in the collection of the AWM. The Australian High Commission publicity section, managed by H. C. Smart, appointed civilian artists whereas those enlisted in the AIF were appointed by the AWRS. Almost all the artists produced more field sketches than they were contractually obliged to, and donated extra works. There are approximately 1,500 field sketches by these artists now in the AWM collection, of which 400 have been digitally mapped to locations in Art of Nation. In the map view, users can choose to view these either by artist or as a whole collection. The field sketches include drawn and painted portraits, landscapes, battle scenes and genre studies. Many capture everyday life away from the front, the living conditions, recreation, boredom and interactions with local civilians, along with the devastating destruction and utter misery of the front line. In the field, artists were largely free to choose what to depict. All were encouraged to create work in accord with the strengths of their practice, so portraitist John Longstaff (1862–1941) was expected to create portraits of AIF leadership; Arthur Streeton (1867–1951) was free to seek out vantage points for landscapes; H. Septimus Power (1877–1951) to focus on the horse teams; and Dyson to focus on the lived experience and character of the Australian soldiers. Considering each artist individually, and in the context of their fellow war artists, allows users to appreciate the depth and complexity of both the collection and the historical circumstances it documents. For more than a decade after the war, artists were being commissioned to create history paintings of key moments during the war. As paintings were finished, they were added to temporary collection exhibitions in Melbourne and then Sydney, ahead of the construction of the permanent building in Canberra. They were never displayed as the art exhibition envisaged by Bean. Lists drawn up by Bean, in consultation with military leaders and the art committee, guided the commissions. Subjects were assigned according to the artists’ strengths and, wherever possible, to depict events they had witnessed. For example, George Lambert (1873–1930) was commissioned to paint Anzac, the landing 1915 (1920–22, oil on canvas, 199.8 x 370.2 cm, ART02873) and deployed to Gallipoli immediately after the war to record Anzac Cove, where the AIF had first gone into battle on 25 April 1915. Lambert created many studies in his studio of former soldiers wearing uniform and posed as though they were climbing up the steep hillsides. The commissions are extensively documented on files, some of which were included in the text that accompanies the paintings in Art of Nation, with the intent to convey not only the context of what the works depict, but also the story of how the collection was created. The archive also guided the exhibition hang, as it is clear it was intended to display a chronological history of the war. Art of Nation makes apparent how the AWM’s architecture and exhibitions were intended to work together, employing the elevating associations of Western high culture to frame the war as nation defining, the suffering and loss cast as ‘Australia’s Thermopylae’.

Conclusion The primary purpose of the AWM was to provide a place for Australians to grieve for their First World War dead. Few were able to visit official war cemeteries or see where servicemen fought and died. The collections were intended to help them understand the 386

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experiences of their compatriots at war overseas and convey a tangible sense of these places. Art of Nation invites exploration of place and distance in a new way; users can pay a virtual visit to contemporary Canberra, where they can explore the geography of the First World War and consider how artists sent to record the war wanted them to see it. Art of Nation was conceived of as a showcase of Australia’s First World War official war art scheme that would have lasting value on the AWM website. It was designed to accommodate visitors’ different interests—for example, as an accessible introduction to Australia’s role in the war—or to consider what would have been Australia’s first national art gallery. It has received a positive reception from users and received an award for ‘Best Permanent Exhibition’ 2018 from the Museums and Galleries National Awards, whose judges commended the use of digital technologies to make the depth of the collection material accessible. In considering online exhibitions and digital technologies, we often consider what is lost: not seeing art in person, or experiencing it in the context of the architecture, site and other visitors. While Art of Nation does not replace a visit to the actual AWM, digital technology has been employed here to do things not possible for reasons both physical and historical. Three-dimensional design allowed for a full-scale interpretation of Bean’s original proposal, inviting consideration of the historic moment of its creation, and the reasons it was not created in that form. The scale and complexity of the art collection would be impossible to contain in a physical exhibition, especially the use of maps and Google Street View. This allows the collection to be viewed at both a macro level, showing all the works on a map, and a micro level, an individual work compared to the location as it is today. As with most museums on their centenary, the AWM today is a markedly different institution, in ways that its founders could never have conceived. Revisiting this history allows us to appreciate the changes that have occurred since, for better and for worse, and the historic value and legacy of the collection in context.

Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge and thank AWM curatorial colleagues and the team at Ortelia who worked on Art of Nation, and the reviewers of this chapter for their helpful comments.

Notes 1 The Commonwealth of Australia was founded in 1901 with the federation of the previously British colonies, which had been established around the continent since 1788 on the lands of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. 2 Art of Nation (www.awm.gov.au/art-of-nation) is a partnership between Ortelia Interactive Spaces and the Australian War Memorial. Lead curator Anthea Gunn with Emily Wubben, with content development by art curators Hannah Hutchison, Warwick Heywood, Bridie Macgillicuddy, Alex Torrens, Diana Warnes, Laura Webster and curatorial intern Aylin Akyol, with oversight by Head of Art Ryan Johnston. From Ortelia, project management and 3D modelling by Lazaros Kastanis and technical development by Darren Pack. Subsequently, the Memorial’s photography section has curated another exhibition within Art of Nation, showcasing the May 1918 exhibition in London of Australian official war photography, led by Kate Morschel. 3 Developed using the Web Graphics Library (WGL) technology in order for the AWM to be able to deliver Art of Nation via a standard browser without the need for third-party plugins or software. 4 Ortelia Curator: http://ortelia.com/products/ortelia-curator-3d-exhibitions-for-museums-and-galleries/ 5 www.awm.gov.au/art-of-nation

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6 These include those by the artists who were best known at the time, and since—such as George Lambert, with his iconic Anzac, the landing 1915 (1920–22, oil on canvas, 199.8 x 370.2 cm, ART02873, AWM collection) and The charge of the Australian light horse at Beersheba, 1917 (1920, oil on canvas, 122.7 x 245 cm, ART02811, AWM collection); and Arthur Streeton, with The Somme valley near Corbie (1919, oil on canvas, 153 x 245.5 cm, ART03497, AWM collection) and works that have become beloved to AWM audiences, such as those by H. Septimus Power, for example, First Australian Division Artillery going into the 3rd Battle of Ypres (1919, oil on canvas, 121.7 x 245 cm, ART03330, AWM collection). Will Longstaff’s Midnight at Menin Gate (1927, oil on canvas, 137 x 270 cm, ART09807, AWM collection) is the best known painting relating to the First World War in the AWM collection, but as it was not commissioned or acquired to depict the Australians during the First World War, and as it does not appear on any of Bean’s lists to that purpose, it has not been included in Art of Nation.

References Unless otherwise stated, all archival references are from National Archives of Australia (NAA) files held at the AWM, Canberra. Ashton, P. (2008). Centennial Park, Dictionary of Sydney. Retrieved from http://dictionaryofsydney.org/ entry/centennial_park Bean, C. (1914–1918) Diaries NAA: AWM38, 3DRL 606/68/. Retrieved from www.awm.gov.au/ collection/RCDIG1066833. Bean, C. (1918, March). The Australian war records: An account of the present development overseas and suggestions of course necessary to be taken at the end of the war. P. 38. Unpublished document on file: ‘Official History, 1914–18 War’. NAA: AWM38, 3DRL 6673/362. Bean, C. (1919a, April). Further memoir, together with appendices, by CEW Bean, official historian, Australian Imperial Force, concerning the official records and history of the Australian Imperial Force; and the establishment of a memorial. NAA: AWM93, 2/5/7. Bean, C. (1919b, July). Outline of scheme for the Australian War Museum. ‘Australian War Museum main file’. NAA: A1 1921/6401, Canberra. Bean, C. (1923, 15 May). Letter to AWM director, Treloar, J. ‘Official history, 1914–18 war: Records of Charles E W Bean, official historian: Papers, 1920–37’. NAA: AWM38 3DRL 6673/287 Bentkowska-Kafel, A. (2015). Debating digital art history. International Journal for Digital Art History, 1.50–64 Bowles, L., & Gregory, E. J. (1953) Memorial to Lieutenant-Colonel John Treloar, bronze plaque, 84.2 x 73.2 x 3.2cm, AWM collection: ART31470. Condé, A. (2007a). Imagining a collection: Creating Australia’s records of war. reCollections, 2(1). Retrieved from http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_2_no_1/papers/imagining_a_collection. Condé, A. (2007b). John Treloar, official war art and the Australian War Memorial. Australian Journal of Politics and History, 53(3), 451–464. Inglis, K. (1970). C.E.W. Bean, Australian historian. St Lucia, QLD: The University of Queensland Press. Londey, P. (2007). A possession forever: Charles Bean, the ancient Greeks, and military commemoration in Australia. Australian Journal of Politics and History, 53(3), 346. McKernan, M. (1991). Here is their spirit: A history of the Australian War Memorial 1917–1990. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press with the Australian War Memorial. Roach, C. (2016). Rehanging Reynolds at the British institution: Methods for reconstructing ephemeral displays. British Art Studies, 4. doi:10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-04/croach Speck, C. (2009) The Australian War Museum, women artists and the national memory of the First World War. In M. Crotty (Ed.), When the soldiers return: November 2007 Conference Proceedings (pp.277–290). Brisbane, QLD: University of Queensland Press. Wray, C. (2015). Pozieres: Echoes of a distant battle. Port Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge University Press. Yip, A. (2010). A portrait of the nation as a young man: The genesis of Gallipoli mythologies in Australian and Turkish art, PhD thesis, University of Sydney.

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35 Succession A generative approach to digital collections Mitchell Whitelaw

Digitisation is turning out corpora that rapidly exceed our human capacity for interpretation. In 2014, the Internet Archive published some 2.6 million machine-extracted images to the Flickr Commons (Miller, 2014); this collection has since grown to 5.2 million items. The National Library of Australia’s Trove newspaper database currently records some 218 million automatically transcribed articles (National Library of Australia, 2018a). Europeana’s aggregated digital collection numbers over 55 million items (Europeana, 2018). While these massive collections are significant and celebrated digital GLAM projects, they also pose significant challenges for both collection holders and collection users. How might a curator work with millions, or tens of millions, of digital objects? How might a visitor understand the contents and contexts of such collections? Computation has enabled the emergence of these collections; as I have argued elsewhere, computation can also support improved representation and access to these collections (Whitelaw, 2015). This case study shows that computational techniques can also support new forms of creative and cultural practice, new ways of using and reusing collections, and new modes of interpretation and meaning-making. Succession is an experimental digital GLAM project developed in 2014, while I was a visiting researcher at Newcastle University, UK. It draws on a set of around 2,000 image records related to the city of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and its surrounds. These were harvested from the Flickr Commons, where they were contributed by institutions including the Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, the British Library, the Internet Archive and others. The project arose out of my encounters with the city, and the thoughts and feelings that the place provoked. I was struck by its densely layered quality; Newcastle was a key Roman settlement, later one of the crucibles of the Industrial Revolution and is now finding its way in a ‘de-industrial’ Britain (Chakrabortty, 2011). As well as its intrinsic interest, this city seemed to speak to a range of very current concerns: energy, urbanisation, industrialisation and its legacies. My aim in developing the work was to find a way to use digital collections to respond to or articulate the complexity of this place, its layered histories and its wider resonances; but also, to use these traces of the past as materials in a generative process that 389

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could prompt reconsideration and create new meaning. The work’s title draws a term from ecology, alluding to continuous and ongoing change and adaptation. Succession aims to mine the city’s industrial past to fuel consideration of our possible futures. Succession was also influenced by an emerging strand of digital GLAM practice that takes a poetic and playful approach to collections, offering serendipitous samples and chinks of algorithmic insight. Tim Sherratt’s (2013) Trove News Bot tweets archival news articles based on daily headlines; the British Library’s Mechanical Curator posts random images from the library’s digitised books (Baker, 2013). Sherratt’s Eyes on the Past (2014) harvests faces from digitised newspapers, and has their eyes peer out through the interface, inviting investigation. These approaches reflect an emerging interest in collections as active sites of meaningmaking, and experimentation with how we might encounter such collections in an everyday digital environment. In practice, Succession is a web application that draws on a corpus of some 2,000 images and combines these elements into new visual composites (or ‘fossils’) (see Figures 35.1 and 35.2). Each fossil is composed of five randomly selected source images—arranged, composited and potentially repeated to make a new image. Each source image is cited in full, with a thumbnail, title and home collection. These citations link back to the item’s Flickr Commons page, so that while these composites often radically obscure, transform or juxtapose their elements, the sources and their attendant contexts remain navigable and intact.

Figure 35.1 Succession composite 1508308880101. Source: Mitchell Whitelaw. http://mtchl.net/succession/#/saved/1508308880101.

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Figure 35.2 Succession composite 1478230078096. Source: Mitchell Whitelaw. http://mtchl.net/succession/#/saved/1478230078096.

Composites may be saved, acquiring a permanent URL to become a new citable online object. The generative process of composition is performed live, in the browser, so each viewer will encounter a series of unique composites. The system allows for around 2.5 x 1015 combinations of elements (ignoring spatial and blending variations). At a rate of one per second, it would take around eight million years to show all permutations.

Authored spaces and speculative heritage Succession’s generative techniques are an instance of what Drucker and Nowviskie (2004) term speculative computing: ‘speculative approaches to digital humanities engage subjective and intuitive tools’ while enlisting computation for augmentation, rather than simply automation. A speculative approach pursues computation that is ‘dynamic and constitutive’, ‘creating programs that have emergent properties’. As Drucker and Nowviskie (2004) show, generative procedures have long been used in the arts to augment and extend thought, creating aesthetic and conceptual provocations. Succession uses combinatorics, the procedural combination of specific formal elements. Permutation gives combinatorics a form of quantitative leverage; small sets of elements proliferate into vast numbers of possible outcomes. When the permuted elements are symbolic or textual, combinatorics becomes a machine for knowledge or meaning. Ramon Lull’s Ars Magna (1305) permuted divine principles 391

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into sets of theological assertions; these conceptual machines marked out domains of knowledge for investigation (see Gardner, 1958). In the 1960s, poets Brion Gysin and Raymond Queneau used combinatorics to pursue unforeseen or inconceivable meaning using fixed and finite textual means. Bill Seaman’s ‘recombinant poetics’ seeks ‘emergent meaning’ within digital arrays of textual and audiovisual elements (2001). Ross Gibson and Kate Richards’s (2006) Life after Wartime applies combinatorics to an archive of 1940s crime-scene photographs, showing how a generative ‘story engine’ can prompt speculative interpretations of digital heritage. Bill Seaman (2001) describes his combinatoric generative system as an ‘authored electronic space’, emphasising that it is expansive, but not arbitrary (p. 426). Similarly, Succession’s space is authored, in part through its corpus; sources were selected for content relevance and visual potential. The content-base grew and was pruned around the conceptual focus in a slow process of subjective evaluation, exploratory search and tangential investigation. In Seaman’s (2002) words, this authorship seeks out a ‘resonant unfixity’. In Succession, the rules for compositing elements are also authored, tailored around the idiosyncrasies of the sources and the poetic aims of the work. Layered composition is a formal machine here—a way to combine and arrange visual sources into new artefacts. However, it is also a metaphor; to address a city built on coal, it seemed necessary to combine and compress things, to obscure them while at the same time hopefully intensifying some of the energy latent in those sources, just as fossil fuels store concentrated solar energy gathered millions of years in the past. To evoke this feeling, the image blending modes are biased to overlay dark elements; this treatment works particularly well with the engraved illustrations in the Internet Archive and British Library collections. Thus, the generative algorithm is not an indifferent automated process; it has been tuned and shaped by the aesthetic potentials of the collection material, and by the (human) concepts and metaphors at play in the work. This saved composite in Figure 35.3 shows how the generated artefacts can also operate as what Drucker and Nowviskie (2004) call ‘aesthetic provocations’ while enlisting the contexts and referents of their source elements in speculative juxtapositions. This composite is dominated by a 1993 photograph of Wearmouth Colliery in its final week of operation: a poignant image of the last days of Newcastle coal. But a spectral waterbird (from Gould’s 1837 Birds of Europe) seems about to splash down in those desolate puddles. Faintly in the background is the bustling River Tyne itself, circa 1880; on the left of frame is a carriage destined for Newcastle’s Metro system, under development in the mid-1970s. Almost imperceptible at bottom left is the HMS Opal, a torpedo destroyer, under construction at the Sunderland shipyards in 1915. Thus, this composite encompasses not only 150 years of urban history, but a latent portrait of 20th-century capital, the rise and (UK) fall of extractive industry, war, urbanism and pre-Industrial naturalism and the non-human lives it records. This example shows how formal and visual transformations inflect narrative or historical interpretations. Thus, these generative artefacts are not simply bundles of citations, but speculative visual propositions. Layering emphasises simultaneity and atemporal juxtaposition, rather than chronology: Gould’s duck, about to dive into the colliery puddles; or perhaps swimming on the 1880s Tyne? Faded traces evoke the presence of the lost; visual collisions prompt an interpretive search for coherence, patterns of connection in the authored space of the system. Thus, generative systems like Succession can be both prompts for interpretation and humanistic ways of speaking in themselves. In addressing complex topics (or ‘wicked problems’) such as extractive industry, capital and urban change, it seems necessary to respond in kind. In this project, generative techniques provide a way to speak complex multitudes, as well as an engine for unforeseeable combinations, using digital cultural collections as the seeds of something new. Seaman (2001) terms this ‘unfixity’; Gibson (2006) calls it 392

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Figure 35.3 Succession composite 1413513552860. Source: Mitchell Whitelaw. http://mtchl.net/succession/#/saved/1413513552860.

a ‘restlessness’ that prompts imagination through ‘artful imbalances and implied possibilities for completion or patterning’. This active imagination is essential, Gibson argues, in understanding and potentially altering ‘the continuous tendencies that are making us as they persist out of the past into the present’.

Succession and digital GLAM practice As well as demonstrating some of the creative potential of generative techniques applied to digital heritage objects, Succession illuminates a number of current and emerging issues with wider relevance for the digital GLAM sector. The promise and challenge of large-scale digital collections is a central theme here. Succession’s approach exploits—and depends on—both the scale of these collections and their distinctively uncurated or computational quality. The Internet Archive’s Book Images collection on Flickr is a key source. This collection is a fundamentally computational corpus, generated through an algorithm that identified and extracted images from the Archive’s digitised books collection, appending existing book-level metadata and automatically extracted text (Miller, 2014). Automation maintains many of the valuable features of conventional collections, such as descriptive and structured metadata, while radically amplifying their scale; the collection currently numbers some 5.2 million images. By comparison, the Tyne and

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Wear Archives and Museums Flickr collection, another key source, has around 2,200 images. This large scale is both challenge and opportunity. It offers a wealth of potential resources, but it challenges traditional means of access and interpretation based on human curatorship. The Archive provides no curatorial narrative, no guiding themes or choice selections. In the duality that Lev Manovich identifies of narrative and database, this collection sides entirely with the database (Manovich, 2002, p. 225). It is readily accessible, indeed highly and usefully structured. Flickr’s description and tags have been populated with consistent metadata, enabling browsing the collection by subject, publisher or other features. Notably, in the absence of human curatorial framing, all representations of the collection are themselves computational: search or browse listings generated by database queries. The emergence of large-scale digital collections will continue to challenge traditional approaches to managing, interpreting and using heritage objects. The Internet Archive’s broad scale, curator-free approach to generating a collection also shapes its content. Many of the images in the stream would never be deemed worthy of the human effort of digitisation and description. They are often oblique, obscure, fragmentary and generally marginal. Often, they must be read in the context of their original (book) source to make any kind of sense. In the corpus harvested for Succession, a characteristic mixture of diagrams, illustrations and advertisements are drawn from publications such as the Transactions of the Institution of Mining Engineers—a primary source documenting the literal machinery of coal-powered industrialisation. These fragments are powerfully evocative but only available as resources thanks to the uncurated, algorithmic collection-making pursued by the Internet Archive. It is also notable that the Archive itself is not a traditional collecting institution; the Book Images collection is as much a product of an ambitious digital-first institutional approach, as it is of a specific algorithmic intervention. Succession is also enabled by aggregation, another key emerging feature of digital collections practice. In this case, Flickr Commons aggregates content from a wide variety of sources and makes it readily accessible through a single point of entry. As well as the Internet Archive and Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, Succession draws on collections including the British Library, the UK National Archives, the Imperial War Museum and as far afield as the Library of Congress and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Aggregation enables a broad harvest that cuts across different institutional contexts and collecting practices, once again marginalising traditional curated interpretations, and enabling a complex new thematic aggregate to be formed through a single search query. Flickr’s application programming interface (API) works in tandem with aggregation. The API provides machine-readable collection data, meaning that users can write software to query and harvest that data at scale; Succession is completely dependent on the Flickr API to identify and gather its sources. Thus, it demonstrates the utility of GLAM APIs, but equally shows that as computational approaches to engaging with heritage develop, APIs and other forms of data sharing will condition and constrain it. APIs from large aggregators such as Trove and Europeana support significant re-use and experimentation (Europeana Pro, 2018; National Library of Australia, 2018b), while collections outside these aggregators, absent APIs or other forms of data sharing, will not benefit from this engagement. Finally, Succession demonstrates some of the novel forms of creative re-use that are enabled by digital collections and their computational tractability. As well as combining sources to form new composites with emergent visual and semantic properties, Succession shows how re-use can draw attention to its sources. This work deliberately includes thumbnails and descriptions of sources alongside each composite fossil. This cues the audience to the constituent parts of each composite, as well as inviting engagement. Each thumbnail links to the 394

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original source on Flickr, where it can be further investigated. Cryptic diagrams from the Internet Archive collection can be traced back to their source publications, which in turn provide rich new layers of information—on mine-shaft engineering or geological surveys. The looming hulls of ships at dock lead into the rich history of Newcastle’s shipyards and their international trade. An array of speckled eggs will bring you to William Hewitson’s 1833 volume British Oology, published, like many similar volumes, in Newcastle-UponTyne. Each artefact that Succession generates is an opening into an expansive rabbit warren of provenance and context. Digital re-use has been a focus of engagement projects such as the DPLA’s GIF IT UP (Digital Public Library of America, 2017); here too, sources are carefully attributed in the transformed content. A key difference is that Succession uses computational techniques to recombine multiple sources, multiplying the attributions in turn. Like projects such as Sherratt’s Eyes on the Past (2014), Succession shows how computational techniques can blur the lines between creative re-use and collection interface. The large-scale digitisation of cultural heritage is a transformative process. It unlocks a wide range of potential outcomes yet to be explored. Succession demonstrates a set of generative techniques that transform digital heritage artefacts into unforeseeable new composites. These offer prompts for speculative interpretation and imaginative insight, as well as sparks of aesthetic engagement. They also, importantly provide an interface for investigation of the source materials and their contexts. As well as demonstrating some of the generative potential of digital heritage, Succession illustrates emerging issues in the field as computational techniques transform the production and use of heritage materials. Large-scale collections, aggregation and machine-readable data are all key to supporting the generative approach that this work demonstrates.

References Baker, J. (2013). The mechanical curator. Retrieved from http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-schol arship/2013/09/the-mechanical-curator.html. Chakrabortty, A. (2011, 17 November). Why doesn’t Britain make things any more? Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/business/2011/nov/16/why-britain-doesnt-make-things-manufactur ing?CMP=twt_gu. Digital Public Library of America. (2017). GIF IT UP. Retrieved from https://pro.dp.la/events/gif-it-up. Drucker, J., & Nowviskie, B. (2004). Speculative computing: Aesthetic provocations in humanities computing. In S. Schreibman, R. Siemens, & J. Unsworth (Eds.), A companion to digital humanities (pp. 431–447). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Retrieved from http://digitalhumanities.org:3030/compan ion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-4-10&toc. depth=1&toc.id=ss1-4-10&brand=9781405103213_brand. Europeana. (2018). Europeana collections. Retrieved from www.europeana.eu/portal/en Europeana Pro. (2018). Apps. Retrieved from https://pro.europeana.eu/resources/apps. Gardner, M. (1958). Logic machines and diagrams. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Retrieved from http:// archive.org/details/logicmachinesdia227gard. Gibson, R. (2006). Places past disappearance. Transformations 13. Retrieved from www.transformations journal.org/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml. Manovich, L. (2002). The language of new media. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Miller, R. (2014, 29 August). Millions of historic images posted to Flickr [Blog post]. Retrieved from http:// blog.archive.org/2014/08/29/millions-of-historic-images-posted-to-flickr/. National Library of Australia. (2018a). Current work counts—Trove. Retrieved from https://trove.nla.gov. au/system/counts National Library of Australia. (2018b). Trove application gallery. Retrieved from http://help.nla.gov.au/ trove/building-with-trove/application-gallery. Richards, K. (2006). Life after wartime. Canadian Journal of Communication, 31(2). Retrieved from http:// cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1729.

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Seaman, B. (2001). Oulipo | vs | Recombinant Poetics. Leonardo, 34(5), 423–430. Seaman, B. (2002). Interview with Yvonne Spielmann. Retrieved from www.fondation-langlois.org/ html/e/page.php?NumPage=386. Sherratt, T. (2013). Conversations with collections. Retrieved from http://discontents.com.au/conversationswith-collections/. Sherratt, T. (2014). Eyes on the past. Retrieved from http://eyespast.herokuapp.com/. Whitelaw, M. (2015). Generous interfaces for cultural collections. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 9(1). Retrieved from www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/1/000205/000205.html.

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36 Rephotography and the situating of then-and-now Hannah Lewi and Andrew Murray

This chapter explores the phenomenon of ‘rephotography’, or ‘then-and-now’ composite images, which has been taken up with enthusiasm in recent years by artists, photographers and GLAM sector institutions (Kalin, 2013, p. 170). Typically, in this visual technique, historical images are layered or blended with contemporary images—in a way that is sometimes obvious and abrupt, sometimes seamless or faded—to create new appreciations of past events and inhabitation, duration and tense. The creative process and the dissemination of rephotography has been greatly facilitated by the ready-access to digitised archives, image-making software and social media. Although its recent uptake has certainly been driven by digital know-how, we propose that rephotography’s popularity is indicative of deeper cultural tendencies in the ongoing postmodern project of historical quotation and re-emplacement, as seen in art, architecture and culture since the demise of Modernist singularity. Hal Foster (1994), for example, saw this generally as the fundamental transformation of an event or image to afford it resonance in the present: Understanding emerges only when one event is registered through another that recodes it … thereby confusing any straightforward readings of ‘before and after’, ‘cause and effect’, ‘origin and repetition’. (p. 30) We became fascinated with the popularity of rephotography when working on a digital application (app) that engages with local history in the city of Melbourne called ‘Pastport’ (2016). This chapter situates this digital uptake alongside its historical antecedents, and dissects what we view as some key motivations for creating rephotographic images by examining recent examples that adopt all kinds of analogue and digital techniques and practices. In the following account, we suggest that rephotography has been harnessed as a powerful way of animating existing archives and bringing a mediated experience to actual physical sites of experience—whether as audience or maker. We also posit that rephotography remains fascinating to contemporary viewers because of its inherent uncanny and disruptive relationship to capturing time. Iain Borden (2007) has categorised the temporal capacity of architectural photography as either capturing some historical event, or freezing some historical moment in the everyday flow of time (this is particularly true of images that contain things that we can easily date, such as cars, fashion and so on) (p. 66). However, as we demonstrate in this chapter, then-and-now montages seem to blur and disrupt these boundaries to create 397

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temporal interactions that are quite odd, particularly when the black and white of the archive combines with the colour of the present. But first, to set the scene, we explore two quite different recent examples of the allure of rephotography transformed into successful digital and analogue projects in Melbourne and London. In inner-city Melbourne, a 19th-century, heritage-listed brewery building and brick tower was redeveloped into a residential apartment complex in 2015. The developers, SMA Projects, along with Hayball Architects wanted to draw on the industrial heritage value of the site as an obvious marketing edge and ‘authentic’ place-making strategy, but also to genuinely contribute to the historical fabric of the local area. Working with MARS gallery in Melbourne, they instigated a public art programme to involve local artists in the historical interpretation of the site. One of the participating artists, David Burrows (2012), curated a photographic essay that captured the history of the site and brewery operations. He drew on his successful Mirage project of 2012, in which he installed a series of stereoscopic viewers in the central public space of Federation Square, Melbourne, to photographically transpose images of an iceberg from his trip to Antarctica into the square. Stereoscopes were originally used from the 1850s onwards as a viewing device that seemingly fused pairs of images to simulate what the left and right eye would see into one stereoscopic or three-dimensional (3D) image. They were often used to depict exotic places, events and even creatures. Akin to rephotography, they have always held some magical fascination. Burrows installed seven stereoscopic viewers in the Yorkshire Brewery, each containing an image telling part of the story of the site’s history, scattered at strategic points throughout the development (see Figure 36.1). The viewers act as windows into the site’s past and strategic interruptions to its present everyday use. They present manipulated archival photographs that come to life in the 3D viewers, including: portraits of the brewery founder and Yorkshire Fire Brigade; another depicting a still life of objects contained in a time capsule buried under the north-west foundation stone of the brewery tower; and the remaining four showing the site in various moments of its history from brewery, to cooperage, to neglected urban site inhabited by squatters and artists.

Figure 36.1 The Yorkshire Brewery Site, Collingwood, Melbourne. Source: Photo by David Burrows.

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The project involves intricate image manipulation to convert the two-dimensional (2D) historical photographs into stereoscopic 3D, but there is also a strong physical presence of the work on the site. The steel-cased viewers are sturdy and designed to last, mounted in Melbourne Bluestone, sourced from the site. They are carefully situated in locations that relate to the archival images, either by situating them where artefacts were originally found, or aligning the photographs with the same views of the site today. Thus, the brewery project explores the power of stereoscopic viewing as an interpretation of the past, located very firmly in the present physical site, reminding passers-by of some slightly ghostly historical presences. Our second example of the then-and-now image phenomenon was a free digital app, created by the Museum of London in conjunction with the creative agency Brothers and Sisters, and launched in 2010. The app was designed to create an immersive museum experience on a smartphone or tablet outside of museum walls. It used geotagging, augmented reality and the smartphone camera to animate the museum’s collections archives to ‘bring history to life … at the very spot where it happened’ (Swift, 2013, p. 65). Structured around a Google map, Streetmuseum created a series of pinned sites, linked to a selection of digitised images that were supplemented with brief curatorial notes and context (see Figure 36.2). Some 300–400 images could be viewed in situ with users able to manually line up old images with the contemporary view or use the camera function to capture them in 2D or 3D to create a ‘ghostly overlay’ (Ellis, 2010). The Museum of London opened in 1976—the first major museum to be created after World War II—in a bomb-damaged area of east London, in the Barbican complex. Its remit has always been to tell old and new stories about London and Londoners. In the 2000s, staving off a midlife crisis and hoping to lure competition from crowded cultural, retail and sporting sectors, it began to think about renewal programmes: ‘The museum felt they

Figure 36.2 The Streetmuseum app. Source: Brothers and Sisters creative agency.

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needed to take their purpose and their collections to where people are, and not just wait for people to come to them’ (which has been difficult in the congested site marooned on a traffic island). The museum recognised that museums have and need to rapidly evolve from traditional ways of exhibiting and curating, to satisfy a world in which, as former Director of Communications at the Museum of London said: All of us are curators now … We all carry mobile devices around with us, we want to dip in and out of content, and that’s what makes augmented reality and the opportunity of digital media so fantastic. (Antony Robbins, interview, 16 July, 2016) The app was designed in part as a marketing tool that aimed to increase traffic to the physical museum, while also making collections more accessible to a new generation. The museum was quick to capitalise on the shareability of apps, and the appeal of novel technologies. Vicky Lee, the Museum of London marketing manager, stated: What we bet on from the start was that users would enjoy finding images of the street the live or work on and would be quick to demonstrate this to their friends or colleagues—helping to spread the word about Streetmuseum but also raising the profile of the museum itself, particularly young Londoners who we have previously struggled to reach. (Ellis, 2010) The strategy worked. Streetmuseum is a widely acknowledged pioneer in the field of digital museum apps and was wildly successful initially, with over 10,000 downloads in its first month of release (Dialling the Past, 2016). Widespread media coverage translated into a marked increase in the museum’s foot traffic—with monthly visitation targets achieved within a week (Lee, 2013b). It continued to be a popular tool for the museum, winning a series of awards and returning more than half a million downloads in its first few years of existence. The app was also used to foster relationships with other institutions and a series of follow-on projects were initiated, including the app ‘Soundtrack to London’ developed with Nokia in 2011. This further increased the museum’s reach (Lee, 2013a). However, in late 2017, Streetmuseum was taken offline due to the budgetary hurdles involved in keeping it up-to-date with new operating systems and smartphone technology—an ongoing issue in digital maintenance and funding models. Both the Melbourne and London cases described here have developed, in quite different ways, the appeal of rephotography by resituating archival images into the urban realm, which as Muntean (2015) notes, offers a new and different experience to formally composed and printed rephotography projects (p. 122).

Historical antecedents Comparative photographic pairings have been created by artists, architects and scientists since the 19th century to demonstrate the effects of unintended and designed change in the environment. While differing in conception to rephotography—the ‘before and after’ images were adjacent but not actually superimposed—they attempted to show time through dual image comparisons that were carefully staged and spatialised. For example, Humphrey Repton, a landscape architect from the late 18th century, produced a series of ‘red books’, which he used to show prospective clients the potentials of his designs. The books showed a painted image of the ‘before’ scene, and using simple devices such as a flap or a fold, the after image was revealed to demonstrate his proposed transformations of the landscape. The 400

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19th-century architect Viollet-le-Duc (1987) was another early adopter of photography as a method of documenting and visually comparing his extensive and controversial conservation works in France, famously captured in his ‘before and after’ images of the fortress town of Carcassonne (p. 128). Geologists were also pioneering in their uptake of rephotography to record the changing nature of glacial shifts and vegetation patterns. First developed in the 19th century, the use of repeat photography to establish a geologic benchmark became an important part of surveying in the latter part of the 20th century. Regarded as a scientific tool, accuracy was paramount in selecting historical photographs of landforms and making new images from the same vantage points: The camera sees all the intricate qualities of terrain that may otherwise escape notice: the staining of outcrops, the cracking of soil, small rills made by runoff on bare ground, the growth of plants, the impact of man’s use, and countless other features that are virtually impossible to map and describe by other means. (Malde, 1973, p. 193) A new wave of artists were inspired to exploit these scientific origins of rephotography by the photographs of Mark Klett, who has used the technique since 1977 to meticulously recreate historic photographs by juxtaposing old and new images to highlight ‘the different time scales of human development and geologic change’ (Rothman, 2011). Klett (2006) commented on his process: So in addition to reproducing the camera position, accurate rephotography tried to duplicate the time of day, time of year, weather conditions and so on in which the original photograph was taken. (p. 4) However, not all antecedents of rephotography, and its near cousins, were aimed at achieving accuracy or truthful documentation. The work of Burrows harks back to the popularity of the stereoscopic viewer that created a 3D illusion with pairs of images. The phenomenon of ‘spirit photography’ revealed ghosts or spirits using early photographic tricks through the superimposition of images—in the camera or printing—and the capturing of projected images through magical apparatus like the ‘magic lantern’ projection technique (Natale, 2012, pp. 125–145).

Present day motivations There are many motivations for creating contemporary then-and-now images, however, we have identified four interrelated factors, which we will briefly elaborate here. These examples appear to share an emphasis on the photograph as a form of evidence through the selection of archival images that rely on some semblance of ‘truth’ and ‘accuracy’ in their original act of recording and through the faithful act of rephotographing. Through accurate depiction or ‘denotation’, the remade images hold the potential to affect the viewer and promote renewed engagement with the contemporary and historical world. Therefore, they exist at what Elizabeth Edwards (2012) described as ‘the interface of information and affect’ (p. 255). Time: First, a compelling motivation for the creation of ‘then-and-now’ images is that they somehow enhance the capacity of the still image to represent the passing of time, thereby attempting to compensate for the perceived lack of duration encapsulated in the conventional photograph. Photographic images can inherently signify some aspect of temporality. As famously discussed by Walter Benjamin (1968), the photograph has the peculiar 401

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phenomenological capacity to present us with something past: its ‘uniqueness and permanence’ (p. 223). However, the limits of this temporal function have been much questioned in photographic theory. Benjamin himself stressed the need for accompanying text or annotation to explain the historical meaning and ontology of photographic images. Using comparative superimposition, this inability to narrate time is, in some ways, compensated for by directing viewers’ attention to the space between the original and the now. Rebecca Solnit (2006) wrote: Rephotography is a sort of calliper for measuring the distance between this moment and that, between two moments, both now past, that record for us the strange ways time passes. (p. 30) Nor does the evidence of the passing of time in the rephotographic process necessarily imply linearity. As Klett (2006) suggested, ‘The past, the present and the future lie uncomfortably close together in a curve of probabilities; and they are not necessarily connected by an implied linear flow’ (p. 6). The work of Byron Wolfe provides a compelling example of the way that complexities in the apprehension of time can be expressed in rephotography. In the ‘Traces of Ishi’ project (2012), Wolfe travels throughout Northern California, recreating a series of photographs taken in 1914 of Ishi the ‘last wild Indian in America’ (Jollimore, 2014). Historical black-and-white images—capturing the figure of ‘Ishi’ hunting or fishing— are placed within a much larger frame. Much of the natural environment has remained essentially unchanged for 100 years. However, the juxtaposition of Ishi in his traditional dress and tools with contemporary fragments intentionally left in the frame (laptops and clothing etc), along with the distinction between the black-and-white and colour-blended images, represents the passing of time in curious ways. Animating the archive: Second, and interrelated with the first motivation, rephotography is often used to animate a historical archive of photographs by acquiring renewed relevance through forced comparisons between past and present. Historians began to use photography as a powerful tool for documenting environs and people from the late 19th century onwards, as seen in the mass-observation and survey photographic movements and camera clubs. Their mission was to exhaustively document everyday places, people and buildings that were often under imminent threat of change, modernisation or decay. Images were collected and displayed at local exhibitions and sometimes published as nostalgic history books of ‘past and present’ places to show the effects of change on buildings, streets and vistas, often across double page spreads. A growing number of these local photographic collections have now been digitised and revived as the source of comparative imagery for new rephotography projects (Edwards, 2012). As Jae Emerling (2012) qualified: It is important to understand that contemporary projects termed ‘archival’ do not usually approach the archive as evidence of the past, as that which has passed and is finished; instead, they frequently attempt to use archival material, and/or means to present the coexistence of the past in the present, that is, to focus our attention on its continued psychological, political, and socio-cultural affects. (p. 121) Thus, through digital rephotography, archives of historical photographs held in libraries and private collections are again becoming the focus of renewed and self-reflexive production. Edwards (2012) suggested: ‘The reshuffling and remediation of collections constitute a proliferation of possible discourses around people and objects in which photographs are entangled’ (p. 255). 402

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An example of reanimating an archive through rephotography can be observed in the SNS Challenger project (Mcleod, 2014). This project makes available an existing archive of 500 photographs taken during a voyage of the HMS Challenger in the 1870s and encourages the public to rephotograph them. Utilising a crowdfunding model, the project has invited the participation of a geographically diverse cross-section of citizens to engage with the archive to ensure widespread coverage. The project thereby facilitates broad community engagement with a previously hidden photographic archive. This possibility of re-engagement and reanimation has provided a strong motivation for our own adoption of the technique in the creation of the digital app ‘Pastport’ for the area of Port Melbourne, where the local historical society holds a sizeable archive that could be better experienced by new audiences in a situated manner and through new digital means. In selecting artefacts from their archive and digitally recasting them, we sought to focus active attention on the historically rich suburb of Port Melbourne, and foster new ways of appreciating and engaging with the area today (Smith, Lewi, & Nichols, 2018). One example of the rephotography technique that has been integrated within the app is the reworking of an image of the flooding of Crichton Street, Port Melbourne in 1931 (Figure 36.3). This image has been blended with the contemporary street scene from the same vantage. The formal characteristics of the street and houses remain largely the same, thereby inviting the viewer to focus on the aspects that have changed, including the short-term consequences of the flood and more subtle changes in the people and colouration of the photographs. This composite image simultaneously draws attention to a significant historic event in the area, while also demonstrating the rich built heritage that still exists. Re-experiencing the everyday: This brings us to our third motivation—the comparative technique of rephotography may help bring renewed attention to, and experience of, the more intimate and incidental details of everyday places and people. An interest in the everyday realm coincided both with Modernism and the rise of photography, and is a reoccurring trope in both their histories. As written by many commentators, photographic images hold unique capacity to elevate the gravitas of the ‘passing moment’: the seemingly ordinary, banal or unnoticed, through mechanical representation and reproduction. In rephotography, it is often these everyday details transposed across brackets of time that become fascinating. Laszlo Muntean (2016) wrote of this quality: In the same way that we enfold photographs within narrative textures once we imagine what came before and what happened after the click of the camera, so do the smallest things that rephotography animates invite a variety of affective engagements, the full potential of which is yet to be seen. (p. 9) An image created by Keith Jones of ‘Church Street 1970s’ (Jones, 2014) demonstrates this heightening of the everyday. A bus passing in the street at first glance appears to be quite straightforward to the point of banality. It is only after careful examination of the image that the deception is revealed. The bus and surrounding streetscape are collaged together from two different photographs taken approximately 40 years apart. Given that both photographs are colour, their edges almost completely dissolve so that only the discolouration of the 1970s photograph gives the trick away to the viewer. Considering the rephotography phenomenon more from the perspective of the photographer than the audience, it seems that rephotography projects have ignited interest also because of their potential for augmented experience through the actual taking of a photograph from the same point of view and location as someone from the past. Thus, it 403

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Figure 36.3 Crichton Avenue, Port Melbourne. Then and now. Source: Andrew Murray.

dictates an artistic agenda and often an itinerary driven from outside the photographer’s own whim. As Muntean (2016) described: Energised by the rephotographer’s field of vision and embodied experience of place, the event depicted in the old photograph lays claim to the landscape and marks material details that survived the passage of time as ruins of the photographed event. (p. 5) Thus, the photographic process becomes an extension of and ‘emplacing’ of the archive through a performative and experiential agenda of remaking and re-presenting the composite image (Casey, 1997). The notion of reinforcing our experience of places through these sorts of performative projects has, of course, a long and pre-digital history, in which as John Urry suggested: ‘Places are intertwined with people through various systems that generate and reproduce performances in and of that place. … and might be experienced anew through mobile performances’ (Baerenholdt et al., 2004, p. 148). In this manner, the act of rephotographing an image, in situ, can create an attachment to place in the author that might otherwise not have been there. Memory and the uncanny: If the act of rephotography can stimulate new relationships to familiar places, it might also trigger memories in the viewer beyond that of the singular photograph—whether by individual recall of actual memories, or the simulation of some collective process. Kalin (2013), for example, argued that rephotography ‘produces a particular style of engagement with memory—its past, present, and future—and thus a particular way of relating to and being in the world’ (p. 170). He continued: Rephotography, rather than a representation of memory, suggests a practice of actively constructing and inhabiting 404

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memories and their time and places while also incorporating them into the present as active forces, as taking part in the world. (2013, p. 170) Although, as with any straightforward claim to remembrance and the photographic image, caution should be exercised. This is because the photograph can also become an obstacle that supplants other nuanced understandings of the past in the manner which Adrian Forty suggests material objects, which may include photographs, ‘can act as analogues for human memory’ (Forty & Kuchler, 1999, p. 2). Intimately connected to memory, rephotography can provoke or exploit the uncanny, and a heightened sense of loss by manipulating what Susan Sontag (1978) called ‘those ghostly traces’ that photographs create, whereby ‘photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal’ (p. 9). The technique shares a long lineage with 19thcentury attempts to produce images that evoke some spiritual or haunted visitation through the use of tricks of projection and superimposition. The History Channel campaign ‘Know where you stand’, produced by Seth Taras (2010), is a particularly effective example of using rephotography to engage with memory. Taras collapses a series of significant historic events onto everyday locations, evoking strong perceptions of the past. In one image, a couple pose in front of the Eiffel Tower, seemingly unaware of the ghostly figure of Adolf Hitler next to them. Another shows a parent and child playing at the beach, with the 1944 invasion of Normandy unfolding around them. In both these images, there are strong shared visual markers facilitating the easy identification of place, and heightening the sense of the uncanny, which may trigger viewers to question their own personal relationships and memories of certain places. The motivation for creating a haunted or uncanny image is, perhaps, due partly to the reaction that many then-andnow composites provoke through the clash of the now and the epic representation of the past, which is akin to the amazement of a trick—part fascination, part laughter, part unsettling strangeness. Composites also appear to work against the binary categorisation applied to photographs that often polarise between those taken for accurate documentation that can be used for social, political and scientific ends, and those that are the result of creative or aesthetic practices concerned with formal and technical qualities and manipulations—or what Torney (2013) described as ‘fetish or fact’, ‘art or utility’ (p. 44). Roland Barthes further dissected this binary paradox inherent in photography as, on the one hand, an emphasis on the ‘denotative functions’—that is, analogous to objectively recording the real-world supposedly as it is, and on the other, the ‘connotative modes of production’ that impose meanings and conventions of reception through the technical treatment of the image. Barthes (Sontag, 1993, pp. 200–203) identified certain connotative procedures as: trick effects; staged poses; the arrangement of objects; embellishment through photographic techniques such as blurring, exposure and so on; conscious aestheticism; and syntax using serial images. These procedures are central to the creative process of rephotography. It is these manipulated elements that place the practice outside of the purely denotive. Benovsky (2014) has identified this fine line in trick photography: ‘Once the viewer easily intuits manipulation and deception then the photograph is not functioning as an index to the world in the conventional manner. It becomes something other’ (p. 732). Therefore, we can consider the practice of rephotography as selecting historical images that are primarily denotative in value, and overlaying a highly connotative manipulation through the use of trick effects and syntax or seriality that alters the singularity of the original image. Barthes (cited in Sontag, 1993) stated:

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The methodological interest of trick effects is that they intervene without warning in the plane of denotation; they utilize the special credibility of the photograph—the exceptional power of denotation—in order to pass off as merely denoted a message which is in reality heavily connoted; in no other treatment does connotation assume so completely the ‘objective’ mask of denotation. (p. 299) It is this conflation between the motivations of realism and trickery that renders then-andnow images fascinating and uncanny to the contemporary viewer.

Contemporary digital techniques The rise in popularity of rephotography has spurred the production of tools allowing users to actively participate in the production of composite images. From early highly staged image sets, like those produced by Shaun Clover (2010) and Sergey Larenkov (2010), the emphasis has now shifted to include more homemade possibilities of creation and reception usually facilitated by digital image manipulation. Levels of interactive engagement range from moving a slider to reveal a preset image, to mobile apps allowing the user to select, frame and compose a new photographic montage either on location or at their desktop. One of the most successful examples can be found in The Guardian’s (2013) ‘Photography Then and Now’ series that began as a regular online column in October 2013. The site allows the viewer to drag their cursor across the image and alter the opacity of the layering to reveal the underlying archival photograph. A very early example of the Forth Bridge in Scotland was particularly effective— portraying a half-completed bridge, covered in scaffolding, and a dramatically altered shoreline. Another version of this digital fade manipulation is the use of a hard line break to define the superimposition of images. Overall, this is not as successful in creating a seamless blended illusion. However, it is more powerful when adopted with map superimpositions, in which two maps or aerial photographs of different time periods are aligned. Here, the hard-line division between maps creates a datum through which comparative change can be analysed and measured. The website ‘Melbourne 1945’, for example, effectively demonstrates this, allowing the user to slide between aerial photographs taken in 1945 and current satellite maps (Jeffrey, 2015). Other rephotography projects have adopted a more low-tech approach that does not aim for seamless illusion but rather intentionally captures the activity of physically holding one historical image up against its current location. As Muntean noted, it is often the physical act of ‘holding’ the image, the performance, that provides the strongest connection between the maker and place: Holding up the old photograph against the landscape constitutes an act of pointing, a performance of an indexical connection, which forges a phenomenological bond between the rephotographer and the landscape. It is this ritual of emplacement, whereby space is experienced as temporally layered. (Muntean, 2016, p. 5) The resulting image often includes the participant’s hand or arm, thus capturing a sense of immediacy of the author as witness, in what Muntean (2016) described as a triangle of witnessing: the author, the archival image and the new setting (p. 9). This approach can be traced back to American photographer Kenneth Josephson’s (1999) ‘Images Within Images’ series. While the subject of Josephson’s work is not archival, the intent of achieving a layering of time and space within a singular image remains the same as 406

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more recent projects. The Flickr (2015) group ‘Looking into the Past’ continues in this tradition but focuses exclusively on historical subjects. With almost 3,000 photographs added since 2009, the group’s size is indicative of the popularity of these works. Recent digital developments of then-and-now photography technology extend this activity, as seen through the creation of user-controlled mobile apps like Timera (2014). Timera allows users to select a photograph from their smartphone library, or from an existing mapbased library generated by users, and ‘ghost’ this image in the middle of the camera picture frame. The transparency of superimposition is controlled through a slider. Therefore, the impetus is on the user to select an appropriate image and align it themselves. The result is uploaded, geolocated and added to a publicly viewable database. While Timera’s montages are not professional in their production, there is something intriguing in its location-based experience; the act of physically holding up an image places more emphasis on the performative activity of making than the apprehension of the final image. Therefore, an interesting variety of graphic approaches exist in the practice of image layering and montage at the point of insertion, ranging from hard-line cut-outs to more blended and feathered edges. The sense of historical distance is often further delineated through changes in tone and quality—sepia-toned or black and white to colour, sharp to scratched, and so on. Typically, the more seamless and smooth the blending of two distinctive images, the more powerfully the deceit of continuity is evoked; past and present are rendered less distinct and impossible in their simultaneity. Therefore, this is not in the mode of the modern collage or the postmodern pastiche, but rather strives for a new kind of digital smoothness and continuity. Seemingly non-negotiable boundaries of time are dissolved in a graphical trick—a magical moment of revelation that invites the possibility of inhabiting this space of artificial representation.

Modes of dissemination and reception The recent surge in popularity of then-and-now photography is inextricably linked to both the ease of digital photographic manipulation and the ability to share and discuss images on social media platforms. The Flickr group, ‘Looking into the Past’, for example, has over 4,000 members. It has been well documented that these platforms have allowed the production and discussion of local history, memory and nostalgia to expand inexorably in recent years, and rephotography is becoming a popular technique of these sharing cultures. The comment threads attached to these images allow the community to discuss the sites in question, and bear witness to collective amazement at the transformations taking place. The enthusiasm of the comments is revealing of their capacity for engagement: ‘Wow, really creative, awesome photo! Fantastic way to show history!’ (Flickr, 2009). The phenomenon is clearly popular, and indeed, it can be argued that it is fast becoming a new kind of visual convention—in both photography and film—for the representation of memory, loss and change in popular journalism and advertising (for example, The Guardian’s efforts to depict recent events and natural disasters including the devastating effects of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and its aftermath in 2015). However, we contend that its most compelling application remains in the animation of unique archival images. The work of David Burrows and apps like Streetmuseum and Timera effectively utilise the ability for rephotography to provide an immersive experience in situ, and one that can significantly broaden appreciation of archives contained in museums, libraries and other collecting institutions. Rephotography builds on older traditions of comparative imagery, and holds the potential to draw in viewers to experience a scene in a more interactive manner, 407

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particularly if they have participated in the taking of contemporary images. Further, as demonstrated in this chapter, scholarly interpretation has made claims towards the technique being able to somehow compensate for the lack of time and duration in the conventional photograph, by creating a temporal illusion of simultaneity between the then and the now. By extension to these epistemological claims, it has also been suggested that rephotography can be considered a peculiar mnemonic representational practice that invents ‘a composite time and place that opens up the possibility for a new modality of memory, a new style of inhabiting the past, present and future’ (Kalin, 2013, p. 172). However, in conclusion, we question if rephotography can really flout the temporal limitations of the photographic image and act as some kind of time-travelling technique that allows viewers to occupy or experience two places or scenes coincidentally. Rather, it creates a mode of recording, or apparatus for viewing, that allows the measurement of distance and change between two frozen moments. Whether motivated by emotive sensibilities of nostalgia or scientific accuracy, and whether viewed on location in a stereoscopic viewer, on a smartphone, or in print media, then-and-now images cannot transport us back to remember any more than any other media. However, they can ask us to slow down and apprehend archival images, and their originating scenes and places, in new and intriguing ways. In doing this, they articulate observations about change and loss that are more compelling in their transmission than words or the singular image (Zimmerman, 2017, pp. 446–448).

References Baerenholdt, J. O., Urry, J., Haldrup, M., Larsen, J., & Framke, W. (2004). Performing tourist places. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing. Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World. Benovsky, J. (2014). The limits of photography. The International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 22(5), 716–733. Borden, I. (2007). Imaging architecture: The uses of photography in the practice of architectural history. The Journal of Architecture, 12(1), 57–77. Burrows, D. (2012). Mirage project [iceberg]. Retrieved from www.davidburrows.info/iceberg.html Casey, E. (1997). The fate of place: A philosophical history. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Clover, S. (2010). Fade to 1906. Retrieved from http://shawnclover.com/projects/fadeto1906/ Dialling the Past. (2016). #HeritageEveryware StreetMuseum augmented reality app for citywide sightseeing. Retrieved from https://diallingthepast.wordpress.com/2016/08/24/heritage-everyware-streetmu seum-augmented-reality-app-for-citywide-sightseeing/ Edwards, E. (2012). The camera as historian: Amateur photographers and historical imagination, 1885–1918. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ellis, M. (2010, 1 June). Streetmuseum: Q&A with Museum of London [Blog post]. Retrieved from http:// blog.variousbits.net/2010/06/01/streetmuseum-qa-with-vicky-lee-museum-of-london/ Emerling, J. (2012). Photography: History and theory. New York, NY: Routledge. Flickr. (2009). Looking into the past [Online group]. Retrieved from www.flickr.com/groups/ lookingintothepast/ Forty, A., & Kuchler, S. (Eds.). (1999). The art of forgetting. Oxford, UK: Berg. Foster, H. (1994). What’s neo about the neo-avant-garde? October, 70, 5–32. The Guardian. (2013). Photography then and now. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ series/photography-then-and-now Jeffrey, N. (2015). Melbourne 1945. Retrieved from http://1945.melbourne/ Jollimore, T. (2014). Some versions of the same river: Rephotographing Ishi with Byron Wolfe. Boom: A Journal of California, 4(3), 36–45. Jones, K. (2014). Church Street in the 1970s. Retrieved from www.flickr.com/photos/keithjones84/ albums/72157636828138245 Josephson, K. (1999). Kenneth Josephson: A retrospective. Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago.

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Kalin, J. (2013). Remembering with rephotography: A social practice for the inventions of memories. Visual Communication Quarterly, 20(3), 168–179. Klett, M. (2006). Rephotography, and the story of two San Franciscos, an interview with Karin Breuer. In M. Klett (Ed.), After the ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco earthquake and fire (pp. 4–11). Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Larenkov, S. (2010). Ghosts of World War II. Retrieved from www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/ the-ghosts-of-world-war-iis Lee, V. (2013a). Museum marketing – Taking a risk. Retrieved from http://advisor.museumsandheritage. com/features/museum-marketing-taking-a-risk/ Lee, V. (2013b). Taking to the streets of London with the Museum of London’s iPhone app. Retrieved from www.culturehive.co.uk/resources/museum-of-london-takes-to-the-streets-of-london-with-itsiphone-app-streetmuseum/ Malde, H. E. (1973). Geologic bench marks by terrestrial photography. Journal of Research of the U.S. Geological Survey, 1(2), 193–206. Mcleod, G. (2014). SNS Challenger. Retrieved from www.snschallenger.org/ Muntean, L. (2015). Of time and the city: Urban rephotography and the memory of war. Observatorio Journal, 111–124. Muntean, L. (2016). Rephotography and the ruin of the event. Transformations Journal, 28, 1–12. Natale, S. (2012). A short history of superimposition: From spirit photography to early cinema. Early Popular Culture, 10(2), 125–145. Pastport. (2016). Retrieved from www.pastport.com.au Rothman, A. (2011). Views across time: The art of rephotography. Places Journal. Retrieved from https:// placesjournal.org/article/views-across-time/ Smith, W., Lewi, H., & Nichols, D. (2018). PastPort’: Reflection on the design of a mobile app for citizen heritage in Port Melbourne. Australian Historical Studies, 49(1), 103–125. Solnit, R. (2006). The ruins of memory. In M. Klett (Ed.), After the ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco earthquake and fire (pp. 18–32). Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Sontag, S. (1978). On photography. London, UK: Penguin. Sontag, S. (Ed.). (1993). A Roland Barthes reader. London, UK: Vintage. Swift, F. (2013). Connecting Londoners with their city through digital technologies. Journal of Museum Education, 38(1), 60–68. Taras, S. (2010). Know where you stand. Retrieved from https://sethtaras.wordpress.com/know-whereyou-stand/ Torney, J. (2013). Cities and photography. London: Routledge. Viollet-le-Duc, E. (1987). Lectures on architecture: Volume 1. New York, NY: Dover. Webb, D. (2014). Timera [Application]. Retrieved from www.timera.com Zimmerman, C. (2017). Reading the (photographic) evidence. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 76(4), 446–448.

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37 Hospicio Cabañas Seeing World Heritage through Google’s eyes Cristina Garduño Freeman

Introduction Google is most well known for its search engine services; its corporate mission is ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ (Google, 2018). However, Google is more than simply a search engine. It is a pervasive mediating technology that is transforming our experience and engagement with our natural and cultural environments. Google’s services are far reaching and distributed over many projects and platforms. Google Maps offers location services. Google has not only organised the world’s information, but also, indexed the physical world around us (Kilday, 2018, Location 2165). Google’s influence on culture is complex and profound. Searching on Google, and its related platforms such as Google Images and Google Maps is ubiquitous. While it is primarily a location-information service, Google Maps is also a tool and a technology that situates experiences in places. Google shapes virtual online interactions for people who will never travel to significant sites; it also operates as a lens before, during and after in-situ visits. In doing so, Google has given rise to new cultural practices and experiences that entangle information search with everyday life. This chapter considers how searching on Google Maps is becoming an informal proxy for in-person experiences of World Heritage sites through a digital ethnography of one particular place: Hospicio Cabañas. Hospicio Cabañas is probably one of the lesser-known World Heritage sites of Mexico, yet it is one of largest and oldest historic hospital complexes in the Americas. The property was the first site of Modern Heritage in Mexico inscribed onto the World Heritage List. The hospice was designed by Spanish architect Manuel Tolsá and founded in the early 19th century to provide shelter for the needy, including orphans, the elderly, and people with disabilities and chronic illness. The vast architectural complex also houses significant murals that depict a fusion of Spanish and indigenous Mexican culture, completed in 1937 by one of the most important Mexican artists, José Clemente Orozco. Google Maps provides virtual experiences of Hospicio Cabañas, through Google Earth’s satellite and aerial imagery, threedimensional (3D) maps and virtual walks. These experiences are highly sanitised and curated,

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and complex, participatory and haphazard. This raises questions around the implications of such commonplace public experiences of World Heritage, and their role in generating or maintaining connections with important places. How can experiences mediated by Google’s socio-technical interfaces be considered in the policy, practice and management of the properties themselves, and their digital counterparts?

Hospicio Cabañas Hospicio Cabañas is located in the historic centre of Guadalajara, the second largest metropolitan region in Mexico. The hospital complex was designed by Manuel Tolsá, who through this project introduced neoclassicism to Mexico. The hospice was originally founded by Bishop Juan Cruz Ruiz de Cabañas y Crespo (1752–1824) in 1810 as a shelter for the needy until 1910, when for a decade it was used as military barracks during the Mexican Revolution. After this, it became an orphanage and school, housing 3,000 children at its peak (Lopez, 2018). In the late 1930s, the government of Jalisco invited José Clemente Orozco to paint murals on the interior of the building’s chapel. In 1980, the children were rehomed to more modern quarters and Hospicio Cabañas became a cultural institution and museum to support the creative arts. Hospicio Cabañas is vast complex of courtyards and buildings covering approximately 2.34 ha over a square urban site (United Nationals Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 1997). Tolsá designed a symmetrical, single-storey plan, 7.5 m high to aid the movement of the aged and the ill. The hospital complex comprises 126 rooms connected by covered passageways that border 23 open courtyards of different sizes intended to provide healing light and air to its residents. The only break to the complex’s uniform height is the 32.5 m-high dome of the chapel, which houses 57 murals by José Clemente Orozco. The most significant of these is El Hombre de Fuego, which is painted on the internal surface of Tolsá’s dome. Hospicio Cabañas was inscribed for its outstanding universal value as a World Heritage site in 1997 under four criteria: Criterion (i) recognises Tolsá’s architecture and Orozco’s murals as masterpieces of human creative genius; Criterion (ii) cites Orozco’s murals, particularly El Hombre de Fuego, as representative of the interchange of human values within and beyond the Americas; Criterion (iii) affirms that the hospice complex bears testimony to the humanitarian spirit and cultural tradition of public welfare; Criterion (iv) recognises Hospicio Cabañas as a ground-breaking solution of hospital complexes, one that introduced the neoclassical style to Mexico and was realised on a monumental scale (UNESCO, 1997). The World Heritage inscription of Hospicio Cabañas clearly delineates that its significance is an accumulation of its architectural value and a repository for Orozco’s magnificent murals. This makes Hospicio Cabañas a particularly interesting example for exploring the affordances of one kind of online interaction, on Google Maps, as a tool that can enable experiences that precede, substitute for, or recall, in-person visitations. Google Maps offers several types of maps and virtual experiences. The potential of Google Map’s two-dimensional (2D) and 3D satellite maps provides large-scale views that enable contextual understandings of places, such as Hospicio Cabañas. Architectural form and urban relationships are revealed in ways that cannot be apprehended through in-person visitations. Street View and See Inside are Google Maps virtual experiences. For much of the ‘mirror world’ that Google has captured, only the exterior of buildings is available on Street View. However, for significant cultural places, many of which are World Heritage destinations, Google has added a See Inside feature through which interior spaces, such as 411

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the chapel containing Orozco’s superb murals which usually require an entry fee, are made public to a global audience. How are these socio-technical platforms framing Hospicio Cabañas? How does public access to such widespread virtual experiences of World Heritage enable connections with our most esteemed places? While Google and the World Heritage programme already have formally established collaborations, the World Wonders Project (now seemingly defunct) was initially developed in 2012. More recently, a new Open Heritage project (Vanian, 2018) has been launched. The World Wonders Project, a partnership between UNESCO, the World Monuments Fund and Getty Images, sought to make World Heritage accessible to global audiences by making 360degree photographs and street view images available for online exploration (Google, 2012). In contrast, the Open Heritage project is a high-end documentation programme established to digitally preserve sites, provide rich data on World Heritage sites and provide access to these sites to global communities and audiences. The project is a collaboration between the World Heritage sites, non-profit CyArk and Google Arts and Culture. Using laser scans of an initial set of 25 sites, Google and CyArk are recreating digital models that will become an archive of information for research and conservation. At the same time, these digital models will facilitate detailed virtual-reality (VR) experiences for online audiences. Open Heritage, unlike Google Maps, is a specialised programme requiring VR equipment and access to a specific website to experience the project’s high-quality digital models. While this endeavour is valuable and important, the most common experience that people are likely to encounter of World Heritage sites at present, is probably through Google Maps. People’s social and cultural connections to places drive economic and political support for their conservation and valuation. However, little attention has been directed at such everyday virtual experiences of World Heritage sites, such as those available through Google Maps. In an era of exponential growth of online interactions, it is likely that many ‘visitors’ of World Heritage sites may never physically travel to the actual site (Simes, O’Mahony, Farrall, Huggins, & Redhill, 2013). This shift from in-person to digital engagement increases World Heritage audiences and communities but presents a challenge; the digital life of significant places may soon surpass their physical presence.

Google Maps Google Maps was first launched in February 2005, seven years after Google Search was launched and Google was first incorporated. Google’s main product is its search engine platform, driven by the closely guarded algorithm ‘PageRank™’ (Lee, 2016, p. 4). However, in the first years of Google Search, almost a quarter of search queries sought maps or location-based recommendations, such as ‘best margarita Austin’ or ‘hotel in New Orleans’ (Kilday, 2018, Location 78). In response to this, Google acquired two start-ups—Keyhole, a Silicon Valley start-up that was creating a virtual experience of the world, and Australian company Where2Tech—who were developing the world’s first web-based mapping service (Kilday, 2018). Today, Google Maps is the dominant online map service. Within the search landscape, it is the only spatial search platform that can claim its own share of the market. Google Search holds 86 per cent1 of the global search market (Statcounter, 2018); a further 1.3 per cent of search queries are undertaken on Google Maps (Desjardins, 2018; Fishkin, 2018). To demonstrate the magnitude of these figures, Google’s dominance in the maps services amounts to some 154.4 million unique users of the Google Maps mobile application within the United States (US) (Verto Analytics, 2018). The success of Google Maps can be attributed to three 412

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factors. First, it was launched as a free service, which enabled its widespread uptake. Second, its free application programming interface (API) allowed businesses to use it as a base for other information mash-up websites. The third factor was the development of smartphones, which transformed our experience of the world by enabling users to move through the physical world and Google’s virtual mirror world simultaneously. Google Maps and its sibling Google Earth are the combined result of several technological breakthroughs. The first was part of Keyhole; the start-up was named after the satellites. Keyhole set out to develop proprietary software to ‘tile’ a library of satellite and aerial photography to produce a virtual model of the world, its landscapes, oceans and urban settlements. The idea for Keyhole evolved from technology developed for high-end three-dimensional simulators and games, and was influenced by the 1977 film, the Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames. Early versions of Keyhole Earthviewer 1.0 provided spectacular experiences that allowed people to move across the globe, ‘zoom in and pan’ on familiar places. Keyhole’s software created a seamless viewing experience of earth, with a scalable resolution that allowed views from outer space to zoom in on details, where one pixel on screen represented 15 x 15 cm on the ground (Kilday, 2018, Location 607). Before being acquired, Keyhole’s development was supported by venture capital, the real estate market and the US military until it become part of Google in 2004. The second technology that preceded Google Maps was developed by a small fourperson start-up called Where2Tech. Its aim was to compete with the CD-ROM-based MapQuest and Microsoft Streets (Kilday, 2018). Where2Tech found a solution to securing mapping data within a web browser, specifically Internet Explorer and Firefox, enabling mapping services to go online while maintaining speed and interactivity (Kilday, 2018, Location 1868). Before Where2Tech all mapping services had required an installed application and access to a computer’s memory hard drive. Where2Tech’s solution, like Keyhole, enabled maps to load quickly by predicting the likely maps a user would request, and preloading them before they were needed. Where2Tech and Keyhole, together, made it possible to create an apparently seamless user experience. The third technology was developed within Google, prior to the acquisition of Keyhole and Where2Tech. Google’s engineer, Dan Egnor, developed a new software algorithm in 2002. Unlike PageRank which indexed pages by keyword or subject, this new algorithm indexed webpages based on street addresses (Kilday, 2018, Location 2112). Google’s main source of revenue is advertising (Alphabet, 2018). Egnor named the new algorithm Geographic Search, which later became a new Google service called Google Search by Location. Geographic Search opened fresh revenue opportunities for Google by targeting results by location. In the decade since Google Maps and Google Earth were first launched the ability to search for locations, to retrieve maps and high-quality satellite imagery in a seamless experience has transformed the way we experience the world: Google Maps is used as the ‘base’ for many other data sets; it has achieved the massive goal of creating a mirror world, documenting the built environment and making it accessible through Street View; and, it has also become a participatory platform where individuals can contribute to the overall project. To explore how the Google Maps interface enables proxy experiences of World Heritage, a 40-minute screen recording of one exploration of Hospicio Cabañas is considered.2 While not necessarily comprehensive, this is intended as an initial analysis that draws on established methodologies within digital humanities research. 413

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Digital ethnography (Pink et al., 2016) and auto-ethnography (Adams, Jones, & Ellis, 2014) are contemporary social research methods that are intended to counter more traditional expert-driven modes of assessment. Digital ethnography, by being more open and iterative, can capture the way people interact through networks, tools and platforms in iterative and dynamic ways that draw together, rather than separate, tangible, intangible and digital forms of culture. Such an approach understands that significance and attachment between people and places is not generated, maintained nor evidenced in straightforward ways. Instead, attachment to places tends to be implicated in the way experiences form part of individual and collective memories, generate associations and support identity. To date, such activities have been understood to occur on or nearby the World Heritage site itself. However, as new digital technologies become further entangled in everyday life, from participation on social media to experiences on virtual worlds, or even through search services such as Google, they are increasingly becoming places where interactions take place with World Heritage sites (Garduño Freeman, 2018).

Searching for Hospicio Cabañas on Google Maps Google Maps, like Google Search, uses keywords to retrieve locations. Finding Hospicio Cabañas on Google Maps is straightforward. Simply entering the name of the site, Hospicio Cabañas, or organisation, Instituto Cultural Cabañas, returns a location on Google Maps, indicated by ‘red place marker’ and text with the name of the site, and a small icon that broadly categorises the requested destination. On Google Maps, Hospicio Cabañas is a museum. The name as a keyword returns a location on Google Maps. However, when other descriptive keywords such as ‘world heritage Guadalajara’ or ‘world heritage Mexico’ are used, Hospicio Cabañas, is not retrieved.3 Yet a search under ‘museum Guadalajara’ returns Hospicio Cabañas. These results demonstrate that Google’s algorithm is not neutral; rather, it privileges certain frameworks of knowledge over others (Vaidhyanathan, 2011). Google Maps aims to offer relevant results. To do this, it infers a user’s geographic location from their internet service provider for desktop searches or global positioning system for mobile devices. Google Maps begins by displaying a 2D map that displays the user’s inferred location. In addition to this standard 2D roadmap, Google Maps also provides access to 2D and 3D satellite maps, a hybrid map—which is a combined version of these—and a terrain map that shows major landscape features. The photographic quality of Google’s satellite maps allows viewers to explore the urban scale of places, to understand the different grids of cities, their morphology and to situate significant landmarks within them. A frequent request from first-time users of these satellite maps (when they were part of Keyhole) was to locate their own homes, perhaps driven by a desire to understand how familiar places are part of a greater urban landscape. In the satellite map, Hospicio Cabañas is no longer an excised part of a collection of inscribed places, but instead is one of many significant large urban buildings contextualised within the larger city of Guadalajara (see Figure 37.1). A criticism of the World Heritage List, and other lists more generally, is the way they disconnect sites and subsume them into an authorised collection of significant places (Schuster, 2002). As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2004) states: World Heritage is first and foremost a list. Everything on the list, whatever it previous context, is now placed in a relationship with other masterpieces. The list is the context for everything on it (p. 57).

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Figure 37.1 Hospicio Cabañas as rendered on Google Maps satellite map. The top image shows the site in two dimensions. The middle shows Hospicio Cabañas in the standard 3D map. The bottom image shows how individual manipulation of the 3D map can offer simulated views of the urban and wider landscape context. Source: Map data © 2018 Google.

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Finding and exploring Hospicio Cabañas on Google’s satellite map emphasises the scale of the hospice in comparison to surrounding buildings and streets. It also shows its proximity to other important but unlisted places, such as markets, gardens and retail centres. In doing so, Hospicio Cabañas is presented as a much more ordinary place that, like other places in the city, is subject to traffic, residents and tourists, weather and regulation, rather than reified as a cultural object at a global level. Google Maps transforms the context of World Heritage and offers viewers a tool to mediate spatial and psychological proximity through ‘tool absorption’. David Kirsh (2013) argues that digital tools become incorporated into our kinaesthetic experiences and alter our perception of our lived-in world. Tools make distinct things relevant, as the tool highlights specific affordances that ‘extend our exploratory and probative capacities’ (p. 2). Google’s satellite mode also offers an interactive 3D map. This renders Hospicio Cabañas into a miniature model, situated on a flat terrain and surrounded by mountains. Models are regularly used in architectural practice to project and understand ideas. Hospicio Cabañas on the 3D map makes clear its architectural schema—a single-storey building, perforated by open courtyards and anchored by a single dome positioned along the central axis of the complex. Miniatures also engender affective experiences, in which the physical distortions of scale, enabled by zooming in and out of Google Maps, offer a new way to understand, connect with and remember particular places (Stewart, 1984, p. 70). Exploring Hospicio Cabañas on Google Maps creates a distinct and nuanced understanding of World Heritage in its urban context. This understanding is not readily apprehended through direct in-situ visitation because scale relationships between people and place are fixed. This does not exclude the hybridisation of such experiences; the physical in-situ can easily be intermixed with the virtual through mobile telephone or tablet use to find directions, locations, guides or even compare the past with the present. In this way, the fixedscale relationships can be augmented by a broader understanding of the building’s location in the city, proximity to other monuments and a building’s spatial organisation, which helps to internalise a type kinaesthetic knowledge of place. However, the photographs in the satellite maps and the 3D model are not neutral; they are highly curated. Google Maps integrates photographs from the Google Earth archive. In addition to satellite photography, the high-resolution aerial photographs are produced using Google’s fleet of aircraft, cars, snowmobiles, trikes, trolleys and trekker backpacks. These aerial photographs are taken under ideal weather conditions and digitally retouched to ensure even light and remove obstructions. They are then edited together using photogrammetry techniques and algorithms to create a seamless viewing experience. Further, Google’s 3D map has a certain low-fidelity aesthetic quality, a kind of homogenising effect that is a result of the way it is created (see Figure 37.2). Google collects ‘depth data’ as part of its aerial photography processes. This is used to develop a 3D mesh—a kind of faceted landscape—onto which the aerial photographs are texture mapped (overlayed) to give the illusion of depth. While Google Maps enables a greater contextual understanding, it simultaneously renders our experience of the world with a singular technological aesthetic that appropriates these places under the transnational corporation’s ‘brand’. This has political implications. If this mirror world, produced and owned by Google, is a primary mode for apprehending World Heritage, how will this shift broader understandings of these globally significant places?

Virtual experiences Google Maps also gives access to virtual experiences through Street View and See Inside. Google has mapped much of the urbanised world using panoramic photographs. Street 416

Figure 37.2 Three Mexican World Heritage sites rendered by Google Maps’ 3D maps. Top image is Hospicio Cabañas inscribed in 1997. Middle image is the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) inscribed in 2007. Bottom image the Prehistoric settlement of Teotihuacan, inscribed in 1987. Source: Map data © 2018 Google.

Figure 37.3 Hospicio Cabañas rendered through Google Street View. Top image indicates the extent of Street View on the exterior and interior of Hospicio Cabañas. Middle image depicts the streetscape at the north-west corner of the Hospicio Cabañas. Bottom image reveals details, such as water damage or incidental passers-by, captured by Google Street View. Source: Map data © 2018 Google.

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View—indicated by blue lines on the map—simulates a ‘walk’ through the surrounding streets, around the exterior of buildings. In the case of significant public buildings, such as Hospicio Cabañas, the walk extends through the interior of the building (see Figure 37.3). Street View and See Inside, unlike Google’s satellite maps, mix proprietary photography, created by Google’s fleet of vehicles and backpacks, with public contributions uploaded by individuals and Google’s ‘trusted’ photographers. The dynamic interface of Street View allows for a simulated physical exploration of the streets surrounding Hospicio Cabañas. The close-up views of the streets reveal the volcanic pumice stone on the façade of Hospicio Cabañas and the way the building relates to the surrounding streetscape. Street View, like satellite maps, allows viewers to zoom and pan, but the photographs are not carefully framed or processed. This means that details that might otherwise be removed from professional curated images are captured and remain discoverable. In this form of virtual exploration, incidental moments of everyday life are evidenced; people are caught mid-conversation, walking into and out of shops and driving unawares on the street. While faces are automatically blurred to protect privacy, the photographs depict the state of places in a particular moment, capturing deterioration and haphazard events without prejudice or concern for what they might reveal.4 The experience of walking is not entirely smooth. Each view point or ‘photosphere’ is marked by a cross and predetermined by the Street View photography. Moving through Street View’s ‘photospheres’ approximates an in-situ experience. In his research on tools and embodiment, Kirsh (2013) tested and observed how different forms of physical practice enabled dancers to learn and incorporate choreographic sequences. He compared dancers’ exact movements against ‘marking’, a process that involves running through steps mentally and in a modified physical form simultaneously. Kirsh discovered that while ‘marking’ is imperfect, it resulted in a better performance than physical or mental practice that followed the movements exactly. Kirsh’s findings suggest that marking, like architectural models or diagrams, are cognitive tools that enable a particular kind of apprehension to take place. Their imperfection is not a hindrance. In fact, their reduced detail enables the incorporation of new experience. Through this lens, Street View’s stilted virtual experience of places allows viewers an opportunity to become familiar with the context of the exterior surroundings of Hospicio Cabañas, the kinds of activities that take place there and the physical conditions of the building and the city of Guadalajara. Zooming in gives an unprecedented level of ordinary detail; it makes peeling paint, graffiti or water damage (see Figure 37.3) visible, rendering World Heritage sites real, rather than abstracted icons on a global list. Street View can also complement in-situ experiences. It offers a way to plan and compare experiences over time or to recall details not captured in the moment. The World Heritage inscription of Hospicio Cabañas equally emphasises the value of the architecture and Orozco’s murals. The murals are not publicly accessible; visitors must purchase a ticket to the museum. The interiors of buildings, unlike the public streets of cities, are not universally documented by Google. Instead, only culturally significant buildings or businesses, who commission high-quality 360-degree images from a ‘trusted photographer’, can post their interiors publicly on Google Maps. See Inside makes it possible for anyone accessing Google Maps to view Orozco’s murals in the chapel, walk through Hospicio Cabañas’s courtyards and view the museums’ interior galleries (see Figure 37.4). It democratises access to this site of World Heritage significance, but simultaneously presents this place in particular ways. At the time that See Inside photographs of Hospicio Cabañas were taken, a major series of art installations by French artist Daniel Buren were on exhibition in 2014. Titled De un patio a otro: Laberinto-trabajos in situ (From one courtyard to another: Labyrinth-works 419

Figure 37.4 Hospicio Cabañas as viewed on See Inside. Top image depicts the interior of Hospicio Cabañas where Orozco’s murals are housed. Middle image is of one of the galleries within the museum. Bottom image depicts the first central courtyard at the time to Buren’s installations in 2014. Source: Map data © 2018 Google.

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in situ), Buren’s work seeks to reconfigure the perception of the building, inspired by an earlier visit to experience Orozco’s murals. Buren’s work was exhibited for six months, yet on Google Maps, this work is still exhibited in the virtual experiences and mixed with images taken from other time frames.

Conclusion The representations of Hospicio Cabañas on Google Maps at first glance appear as simple guides that grant public access to a globally significant building. However, Google Maps is more than just a representation; it is a tool that extends and can influence our perception of these places. Google’s 2D and 3D satellite maps enable experiences that can recontextualise World Heritage places within their local geographic locations. Google’s virtual experiences, a kind of ‘armchair travel’, might appear inconsequential, but as Kirsh’s (2013) research on the value of tools for embodied experiences reveals, such experiences are valuable opportunities for generating or maintaining connections and gaining knowledge about places. At the same time, satellite mapping is also a form of ‘branding’ in which Google’s photographic capture systems and algorithm processes apply a homogenous aesthetic to important cultural places. Street View and See Inside simulate real experiences, though are solely reliant on the visual. These tools and technologies give free public access to interiors that are often behind museum paywalls, framing such endeavours as benevolent projects that can offer detailed examination of places, perhaps with greater clarity and precision than an in-person visit. However, these photographic records also raise ethical and temporal issues. The periodic wholesale documentation of the world by Google is also capturing people, their actions, events and the material conditions of important places and disseminating them publicly as permanent representations of World Heritage places. In doing so, it privileges certain moments in time, while also conflating temporality, by creating a homogenous experience of images taken at different times. The digital rendering of World Heritage places through Google’s suite of mapping technologies is a double-edged sword; this transnational corporation gains market share visitations, which likely flow on to advertising revenue. Simultaneously, they provide access to firsthand knowledge and virtual experiences to many places that most people will probably never see in person. Google, in many ways, is controlling an important first experience of most World Heritage sites for much of the global population. How such places are categorised, or even if the way they are returned (or not) through search queries under specific keywords, affects how they are publicly understood and valued. Our experiences shape the way we think (Vaidhyanathan, 2011). Google is framing our knowledge of World Heritage in unexamined ways, while purporting to offer access to sites through its ‘mirror world’. Such experiences have only emerged as dominant paradigms in the last five years. What will happen in the future?

Notes 1 Specific market share figures can vary depending on whether it is across desktop, tablet and mobile devices, unique users and the methodology of measurement. Google dominates to a greater or lesser extent in most calculations except in China. 2 The screen recording was made by the author using Quicktime (screen-recording software), Google Chrome (browser) and an Apple Macbook Pro (desktop hardware). Comparisons were made with Google Earth and on mobile devices (iPad and iPhone) using Safari (browser) and Google Maps App and Google Street View App.

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3 Google Maps returns 26 other World Heritage sites under the keyword search ‘World Heritage Mexico’. However, there are 35 inscribed sites on the list. The returned site are generally ancient monuments or natural landscapes and include: Mexico City, Puebla City, Chichén Itzá, Historic Centre of Mexico City, Xochimilco, Monte Albán, Guanajuanto, San Juan Teotihuacán, Biosphere Reserve, Biosphere Reserve El Vizcaino, Zacatecas, Oaxaca, Santiago de Queretaro, Uxmal, Tlacotalpan, Popcatépetl, Campeche, El Tajin, Zona Aquelogica Palenque and Xochicalco. Notable exceptions are World Heritage sites from the 19th and 20th centuries including Casa Barragan and UNAM Campus in addition to Hospicio Cabañas. 4 There are regular articles in the news about accidental findings on Google Maps. These range from mapping errors to news about people documented in compromising situations or even such delightful examples as a tiny dog that repeatedly appears after chasing the Google Street View car (Scott, 2018)!.

References Adams, T. E., Jones, S. H., & Ellis, C. (2014). Autoethnography: Understanding qualitative research. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Alphabet. (2018). Distribution of Google’s revenues from 2001 to 2017, by source. Statista—The Statistics Portal. Retrieved from www.statista.com/statistics/266471/distribution-of-googles-revenues-bysource/. Desjardins, J. (2018, 24 April). How Google retains more than 90% of market share. Business Insider UK. Retrieved from http://uk.businessinsider.com/how-google-retains-more-than-90-of-market-share2018-4/?r=AU&IR=T. Fishkin, R. (2018). New jumpshot 2018 data: Where searches happen on the web (Google, Amazon, Facebook, & Beyond). Retrieved from https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-jumpshot-2018-data-where-searcheshappen-on-the-web-google-amazon-facebook-beyond/. Garduño Freeman, C. (2018). Participatory culture and the social value of an architectural icon: Sydney Opera House. London, UK: Routledge. Google. (2012). World Wonders project. Retrieved from www.google.com/culturalinstitute/about/ wonders/. Google. (2018). Google company. Retrieved from www.google.com/about/our-company/. Kilday, B. (2018). Never lost again: The Google mapping revolution that sparked new industries and augmented our reality. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Kirsh, D. (2013). Embodied cognition and the magical future of interaction design. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 20(1), 1–20. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (2004). Intangible heritage as metacultural production. Museum International, 56 (221–222), 56–65. doi:10.1111/j.1350-0775.2004.00458.x Lee, N. (2016). Google it: Total information awareness. New York, NY: Springer. Lopez, M. (2018). Aquitectura. Instituto Hospicio Cabañas. Retrieved from https://hospiciocabanas.jalisco. gob.mx/hospicio-cabanas/arquitectura. Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., & Tacchi, J. (2016). Digital ethnography: Principles and practice. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publishing. Schuster, J. M. (2002). Making a list and checking it twice: The list as a tool of historic preservation. Retrieved from https://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/making-list-and-checking-it-twice-list-tool-historicpreservation. Scott, E. (2018). Please enjoy this evidence of a tiny dog chasing the Google street view car. Metro. Retrieved from https://metro.co.uk/2018/04/10/please-enjoy-evidence-tiny-dog-chasing-googlestreet-view-car-7454642/. Simes, R., O’Mahony, J., Farrall, F., Huggins, K., & Redhill, D. (2013). How do you value an icon? The Sydney Opera House: Economic, cultural and digital value. Retrieved from www2.deloitte.com/content/ dam/Deloitte/au/Documents/Economics/deloitte-au-economics-how-do-you-value-icon-2013.pdf. Statcounter. (2018). Worldwide desktop market share of leading search engines from January 2010 to April 2018. Statista—The Statistics Portal. Retrieved from www.statista.com.ezp.lib.unimelb.edu.au/ statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/. Stewart, S. (1984). On longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection. Baltimore, MA: John Hopkins University Press.

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United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). (1997). Hospicio Cabañas. Retrieved from http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/815. Vaidhyanathan, S. (2011). The Googlization of everything. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Vanian, J. (2018). Google showcases virtual 3D models of breathtaking endangered world wonders. Fortune. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/2018/04/16/google-world-wonder-3d/. Verto Analytics. (2018). Most popular mapping apps in the United States as of April 2018, by monthly users (in millions). Statista—The Statistics Portal. Retrieved from www.statista.com.ezp.lib.unimelb. edu.au/statistics/865413/most-popular-us-mapping-apps-ranked-by-audience/.

38 The experience of using digital walking tours to explore urban histories Wally Smith, Dirk vom Lehn, Hannah Lewi, Dora Constantinidis1 and Katie Best

Introduction Over the past decade, the app-based urban history tour has quietly emerged as a familiar feature of our new digital world. Entering ‘history walking tour’ into any app store produces a seemingly endless list of search results. Although reflecting the usual bias towards the Western world’s urban epicentres of both GLAM and digital content production, the list nevertheless contains a motley mixture of institutionally branded and privately developed offerings of both ‘official’ history and more offbeat historical themes. In this chapter, we report a study of people’s experiences of following digital history tours in Melbourne and London, and examine whether and how they might bring new kinds of engagement with places and the past. Underlying this enquiry is an inevitable comparison between the digital tour and what are arguably its parents: the human-guided tour and the tourist guidebook (Lewi & Smith, 2011). In many cases, the app version can seem like an inferior child of the human-guided tour, a digital prince unable to displace a very popular monarch. But in other cases, it opens new and interesting possibilities, partly inherited from the guide book, including self-paced freedom to explore and innovative juxtapositions of engaging historic text, images, audio and film against present-day realities. Since the 19th century there have been various characterisations of walking in the city, both as a habitual practice and as a touristic activity. We will first briefly review some of these ideas as a context to frame questions about how the design and use of digital touring apps responds to a larger history of urban exploration on foot. The central theme in this review, and the chapter as a whole, is an enduring tension between a romantic yearning for free wandering and a competing a desire to follow planned routes and itineraries that promise educational and culturally significant encounters with the city. The first of these desires might be traced back to the well-known figure of the flanêur, an aimless urban wanderer identified by Charles Baudelaire and other writers and artists to characterise a particular time and place in 19th-century Paris (Benjamin, 1973). Later, John Urry

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(2002, p. 127) and others saw the flanêur as a forerunner of the modern tourist who walks to experience new places, often to photograph them. Susan Sontag (1977) also made this link with photography, describing an ‘armed version’ of the middle-class flanêur: ‘reconnoitring, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes’ (p. 55). Guy Debord (1956, npn) and the Situationists in the 1950s and 1960s described a related idea of the dérive, meaning a playful engagement with the city, quite different to the journey or the stroll: In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Debord (1956) described the dérive as letting go of conventional plans, yet still being guided by something more than random chance: perhaps a sensory itinerary, or the writings of a poet, or the moves from a game. Running parallel to these celebrations of free urban exploration, numerous scholars have also pointed to the rise of tourist walks that are more planned and guided. In an illuminating account, historian Alan Gordon (2014) describes how an innovative guidebook walking tour of 19th-century Quebec City, appearing in 1882, was both a tool for an emerging tourism business and a formative influence on the way that city’s past came to be understood and consumed. Within this broader analysis, Gordon (2014) perfectly captures the very planned nature of the tour, yet curiously within this, the orchestration of a sense of agency and even discovery among the tourers: [The walking tour] … did more than simply identify major public buildings worthy of note: it laid out a route through town that led past selected sites deemed historically worthy. … Following this typical route, a tourist happened upon the city’s key religious and civic institutions. And, at each of those sites, the guidebook text explained what should command the stranger’s attention. (p. 87) Guided walks subsequently became an accepted practice of tourism and education. Henry Bischoff (1987) noted, in the context of learning about the immigration history of Paterson in the US: ‘a walking tour presents material expressions of wealth and power, it is one of the best ways to alert students to the more common, human aspects of immigration history’ (p. 202). However, within this wide positivity, there are sometimes historiographical criticisms of biases and limitations, some of which express a discomfort of being caught in an orchestrated event. In reviewing a guided tour of ‘Baltimore’s Historic West Side’, one professional historian expressed some common misgivings. One was the incompleteness of the narrative: ‘The Committee for Downtown cleared the mostly African American and low-income neighborhoods that occupied the space … Pousson did not tell us where the residents went’ (p. 121). Another was becoming a tourist who was marked out as separate from the ongoing lived reality of the surrounding people and place: ‘We were tourists consuming their difficult narratives as a form of educational entertainment’ and ‘the script relegated us to stories safely in the past’ (p. 123). 425

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In our study we set out to examine the how digital tours might respond to these historical patterns of urban exploration on foot. Our focus was the experience of the ‘tourist at home’, meaning people exploring the history of their own city rather than travellers and holiday-makers doing so. We wanted to compare the app-based experience with that of the traditional human-guided tour. Without the sure navigation and narratives of the human guide, how does the digital tour experience take shape? Does the digital tour provide a new kind of balance between the freedom of the flanêur to explore alone, and the instructive guidance of a planned itinerary?

A study of three digital history walking tours We chose three digital tours to study—two in Melbourne and one in London—and evaluated their use by 29 people in all. To keep a clear focus on the tour experience, we piloted many apps and chose carefully to include those that, in our view, contained valuable content and were readily usable. Our participants, adults of various ages, were recruited from the local city and invited to take the tour using their own mobile device. Each participant was given an initial briefing and left to take the tour at a convenient time in the following days. Later, an in-depth semi-structured interview was held with each participant about their activities and experience of the tour. A central aim was to compare different approaches to the design of digital tours. As for any digital technology, inscribed into these tour apps were implicit notions of a certain kind of user and prescribed patterns of use. We now briefly describe our three chosen apps and consider the images of the urban tourer and touring activities that were inscribed into them by their makers.

Tour 1: Golden Mile walking tour—a click-stop tour The first app-based tour was created and published as part of Museums Victoria’s ‘Walking Through History’ series, and developed by MyTours, a New Zealand-based software company (see Figure 38.1). Seven participants took this tour. It is based on an existing successful human-guided tour of the centre of Melbourne called the ‘Golden Mile’, which visits 45 stops over approximately two hours, mostly notable buildings fuelled by the 19th-century gold boom that gave impetus to Melbourne’s rapid development. We chose the Golden Mile as a good example of what we will call a ‘click-stop’ tour. This style of app mimics some of the aspects of a human-guided tour, by presenting a prescribed route of designated stops, each with a scripted delivery of manually triggered (‘clicked’) content in the form of text and images. It presumes an ideal user who obediently follows the prescribed path, consuming didactic, if lively, packets of information, sometimes in a small group of co-tourers. Figure 38.1 shows the main screen of the app, with information about the currently selected stop shown as text with the option to hear the same text narrated through audio. At the top of the page is a horizontally scrollable set of three to five images, related to the current stop. Figure 38.2 shows a streetscape that forms part of the tour.

Tour 2: War Remembrance Trail—a click-stop tour Our second choice, evaluated with 11 local participants, was also in the click-stop format. Here, we gave participants two apps to use in tandem, allowing scope to explore how multiple devices are managed and how this affects the experience of the event. The 426

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Figure 38.1 Golden Mile Tour: screenshot from Museums Victoria’s ‘Walking through History’ app series, showing text and audio information for the stop ‘Venice of the South’. Source: Melbourne Museum.

main app was published as part of the Victorian War Heritage Trails: Melbourne City ‘100 places for 100 years’. Like the Golden Mile, it is also based in the centre of Melbourne but takes a different route that passes along the edge of a major urban park, the Domain,

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Figure 38.2 A view of Collins Street, part of the Golden Mile Walking Tour. Source: Hannah Lewi.

encompassing the Shrine of Remembrance—a large memorial built to commemorate the First World War dead and subsequently all conflicts in which Australia has been involved. The walk takes in seven stops of mainly memorials, one stop having several pages in the app for separate but adjacent monuments (see Figure 38.3), with the full route containing many other memorials and objects of interest. The app interface was identical in format to the that for the Golden Mile tour, also built by MyTours. The second app, ‘Shrine of Remembrance School Walk’ created by the Shrine, presents a simple schematic map of an outdoors area called the forecourt, showing icons that click open to historic videos related to specific monuments with voice-over commentaries and oral history recordings of war veterans.

Tour 3: Soho stories—a location-triggered exploration Our third choice of app, ‘Soho Stories’, is set in London’s West End and was created by the United Kingdom’s (UK) National Trust. Unlike the click-stop tours with their predefined walking routes, Soho Stories invites users to roam freely in the small area of Soho and provides location-triggered audio content via Global Positioning System (GPS) (see Figure 38.4). Pilot testing showed that like the other tours, it was highly usable and well designed, with well-crafted and potentially engaging content. We studied 11 users to examine how they experienced its novel approach to exploring an urban area. The audios focus on postSecond World War street life, with stories of local personalities and events, many from the 428

Figure 38.3 ‘The Driver’—a memorial statue seen on the War Remembrance Trail. Source: Hannah Lewi.

Figure 38.4 Map view of Soho Stories, showing the hotspot locations that trigger audio narratives. Source: Wally Smith.

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music and sex industries that characterise Soho’s recent history. These stories are told by celebrities whose voices are recognisable to a (slightly older) British audience, such as Barry Cryer, Janet Street-Porter, Christopher Foyle and Molly Parkin. By inviting people to wander freely with their smart devices tucked out of sight, Soho Stories defies the tradition of the prescribed walking route. A map of hotspots is provided but is often not needed; by simply wandering, the user will soon happen upon the next audio delivery. In this way, the inscribed user of Soho Stories is a kind of modern flanêur, with echoes of the playful dérive through its variety of devices, including stories and poems that frame the experience of place. Further, in the manner of the Situationists, the narratives are often cut into fragments as the user moves in and out of range of a hotspot. Softening this intention somewhat, the app presents the reassuring voice of a human guide, cleverly designed to provide linking commentary as the user shifts between stories.

Findings for the two click-stop tours: Golden Mile and War Remembrance The goal of our study was not to attempt a summative evaluation of the effectiveness of these digital tours, if indeed such an evaluation is possible, but rather to provide more formative insights into the nature of the activities and experiences they afford. However, to provide some context, we begin by describing the overall reception of the two click-stop tours, before tracing the patterns of activities and experiences that were observed. Overall, most participants were positive about their digital tour experience, although within this there were notable and recurring disappointments. Sometimes these were expressed through unmet expectations that the app would be more like a human guide: ‘I assumed it was going to be a proper tour app, and I was waiting for it to tell me where to go next, and it didn’t do that!’ (R8).2 Some felt the absence of the banter of a human guide: ‘I like fun facts, interesting things and I personally would be more interested in that than who designed a building’ (R7). One participant recounted how at one stop they met ‘a concierge type guy downstairs who was passionate about the building and its history … I was kind of hoping for more from the app’ (G5). Nevertheless, most participants did not express this disappointment and considered the app and human guide as different options, each with its advantages, and some outright preferred the digital: ‘Sometimes those guided tours are frustrating, depends on the country … I like using headphones, you hear everything, and you don’t miss things’ (R11). Overall, the apps were found to be sufficiently usable, and supported some degree of social interaction within the small parties of two or three people that many of the participants assembled to take the tour. All participants trusted the information in the app and were surprised that it was queried in an interview question. There was a mixture of reactions to the various formats of content. Some preferred audio because it frees the eyes, but audio was not easily co-consumed in a group, despite reports of sharing headphones or leaning in to the speaker. Many others strongly preferred images, with testimonies of their benefits for more attentive, directed observation of the physical world. Pure text was also found usable and preferable by some, and was more easily reported to children. One participant much preferred watching and listening to videos. More significantly, there was evidence that our participants had genuinely learned things on the tour that might later change their knowledge and appreciation of the city: 430

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I got history on some people I didn’t really know … that means when I go past, I actually know what it is about. (R10) When I do bring people around, I will be able to talk about the architecture a little bit better. (G3) I think it has kind of changed my perspective and if I was to walk through the city again and go past those places it might kind of prompt me to take a second look. (G6)

Adapting the tour Turning now to the nature of the digital tour activities and experiences, the first striking observation was the considerable extent to which all participants modified and adapted the prescribed tour. Typically, its timing and the exact route taken was improvised around ongoing life, scheduled around work activities or meeting with friends. In the days before, decisions were made about when and whom to tour with, about which and how many devices to use, sometimes reviewed in response to charging and compatibility issues once the app(s) were downloaded. Interestingly, given these elaborate preparations, no participant took the opportunity to view the stop-based content in advance to any great extent, all suspending its consumption until they had embarked on the journey. During the tour itself, modifications continued as the actual route taken was often reordered and sometimes truncated for various reasons including transport convenience, and avoiding excessive walking and obstacles like road works: So, I skipped the nurses stop and the reason was that I was short on time. I was meeting a friend for lunch and it was a long way to go up and double back. I cheated a little bit. I took the tram in the morning and just got off at an earlier stop, just because there is such a big gap between St Pauls and King’s Domain. (R1) At the same time, another kind of adaptation often occurred, as many participants keenly deployed other smartphone apps and tools to make sense of place and history. As described above, we had contrived the War Remembrance tour to involve two apps to explore this issue, but in practice for both tours, many participants drew on a range of digital activities. Most common was the act of taking photographs. Some uploaded images to the apps and enjoyed the sense of improving the tours for others. Quite often, information in the app was checked and supplemented on Wikipedia and other websites. One participant preferred to use Google maps to obtain estimates of walking time, and another participant uploaded images to Instagram and received online feedback during the tour.

Minding the gaps This urge to modify the tour can be viewed as a kind of early resistance to being fully drawn into a highly orchestrated event. However, once into the tour, most participants 431

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consulted the app closely to furnish a coherent experience; there quickly became a point of consternation and critique of perceived gaps and disconnects. Sometimes this unease took the form of ongoing questioning and sense-making of the tour design: ‘The other thing I thought was that it was an odd choice of buildings … I wondered why some of them were chosen and why not others nearby’ (G2). In other situations, it was manifest in attempts to understand what the authors of the tour wanted to convey and whether they themselves were the right kind of audience: If the app was designed to make me get a better understanding of Australia’s military history, it failed. If it was an opportunity to experience a little bit about history, whilst exploring the city and what the city offers, then yes, that’s where it succeeded. (R1) At a more practical level, especially in the Golden Mile tour, there was an ongoing labour to match content in the app to reality. Part of this was the challenge of navigation using a map at smartphone scale: ‘Constantly checking map and orientation was complicated-and the iPhone screen is too small and that was tricky, a bit confusing because map was wobbly, and it would jump around’ (G2). Sometimes a physical feature of the landscape and its interpretation in the app needed effort to connect: ‘some of the statues were small even though photos looked big, so we missed them, but the kids liked it, the challenge of finding the next stop’ (R3). When reaching the stop, confusion persisted: ‘here I am comparing a photo with the building and trying to figure out which one it is because some buildings from the same period look alike’ (G4). Sometimes, the final matching was never achieved: This WWII nurse memorial I was kind of determined to go to it, even though it was hot, but that was just a waste of time, … I think it was a picture that was taken but it wasn’t anywhere there. (R9) For some, the interstitial spaces between stops were felt as an absence within the tour narrative: You pass like three different parks before you get there … it would have been handy to have some words about that, because it would make it a bit more like a guided tour; it would have been nice if they told you what you could see on the journey along the way. (R8) Some participants had suggestions for this problem: ‘perhaps it needs poetry or Australian stories in between stops to fill it out?’ (G7). However, for others, the open-endedness of these interstitial spaces created freedoms to reflect and explore: ‘We talked a little bit about what we had seen, but there were also some other monuments that weren’t on the tour that we were then interested in looking at’ (R5).

Exploratory walking and heightened observing Competing with the quest for narrative coherence, what might be viewed as a desire to stay ‘inside’ the tour, there was a recurring and competing desire to break out, to freely explore the spaces being passed through. This contradictory impulse was at least partly a product of 432

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the tour process itself. A heightened sense of information-seeking often spilled over to greater than usual attention to non-tour objects, such as plaques and signs: The biggest point of reflection was looking at the inscription on the floor in the centre … I’d already listened outside about the mathematics of the light coming through on the 11th day of the 11th hour, so I spent quite a bit of time looking at that and looking up at the ceiling. (R4) In a way that is perhaps not possible on the human-guided tour, the act of walking and touring was, for many of our digital tourists, surprisingly more akin to exploration: I was just like I’m walking here … I stopped thinking about the tour itself, and like yeah, I’m walking to the cathedral, or I’m walking across the bridge … I didn’t explain to my son that we were going on an historical walking tour … because we were out and about and having fun, looking at the world ever so slightly differently. (R6) Such exploration had to be carefully managed within the tour structure, by regularly checking the plan: I didn’t need the map for every step of the way, and it meant I could look around and see a lovely fountain. (R1) We were just chatting as we walked, then when we got to something and looked it up to see if was on the tour. If it wasn’t on the tour, we were looking at it anyway. (R11)

Defamiliarisation of the tourist at home In choosing locals to the city as participants, we wanted to examine how the tour might bring a new perspective to an already-familiar place. There was a strongly positive response to this experience of being a tourist at home, with frequent expressions of defamiliarisation. This was sometimes expressed as surprise at discovering new things to be learned: I have played there since I was little. I’ve gone to Carols by Candlelight, I’ve seen concerts, I’ve gone to the Shrine and I’ve walked past them a lot, and I’m usually pretty good at being nerdy and looking at what a plaque says, but a lot of them I had no idea about. (R6) For others, it was a deeper sense of elements in the urban landscape, that had receded into a familiar backdrop, being brought back into focal attention as something new to be investigated:

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Most of the King’s Domain I had no idea about … growing up. I knew the Shrine was always there, but I never knew the building was for the first war, and the forecourt was for the second war. (R6) The Madam Brussels was interesting for me, because I had heard the name before, but I hadn’t realised the story or the fact that it was a brothel. (G6) Sometimes the very novelty of a new route across otherwise familiar terrain brought a fresh perspective: ‘I run around the Tan [Track] but I’d never taken this route, so I kind of know what it looks like from top, but I never walked in the middle’ (R4). In some cases, the tours revealed previously unvisited spaces within the familiar landscape: I sort of know all the places but then you see the building, but you never go inside to see the magnificent ceilings or domes. (G4) We looked up, which is what you normally don’t do in your own town, and you see a gargoyle you’ve never seen before, or some mosaic. (G2)

Wanting both less and more information We turn now to how participants experienced the information provided in the app in textual, image and auditory forms. Here, we observed an almost paradoxical sense of people wanting only very lean servings of information, yet constantly wanting more. As explorers, they did not want to be talked to exhaustively by the app, nor did they want to be buried in its screen: ‘I didn’t want to sit there reading text when I was in amongst it all’ (R4). Equally, there were high expectations about what the app should speak to and the gaps in its delivery were felt as an absence. As an illustration of this paradox, one participant stated: ‘I guess it was good that there wasn’t too much to read, because you are kind of on your way … since I was riding, I couldn’t read while walking’. Later, the same participant mentioned an African memorial: Maybe a bit more structure would have been nice, a section on who actually paid for it, and who decided to build it … more of the actual monument history, and another section for things around it. (R10) Similarly, another felt that ‘sometimes information was deep, too much’, but later suggested ‘maybe a little bit more about Collins Street or why not include Flinders Street?’ (G2). There was often an expectation that, as a digital device, the app should when required behave more like an encyclopaedic database: ‘it’s much nicer than just looking up information, but you’ve invested in the app then to be complete and inclusive of everything’ (G2). The potential for disappointment around absent information and the desire for highly personally relevant information, lays down a significant challenge for the would-be digital tour designer: 434

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There wasn’t information about when the Shrine was built, which my friend actually asked, and we were trying to find out … the other information section has a lot of detail about ‘Oh you know this was funded by committee and a completion for the designer’ but I don’t care about that at all. (R5) With this, as tourists at home, there was sometimes a desire to have their own memories confirmed in the app: They didn’t mention the Indigenous exhibition nor that there was a tributary under Elizabeth Street that is now covered but there were floods … I remember the cars being carried down the street only about 25 years ago after a massive downpour. (G5) This irreducible sense of incompleteness of what the app delivers seemed to be a consequence of the freedom of exploration afforded by the digital tour experience, especially its effect of heightened observation which led to the noticing of many non-tour things. In this way, the disappointment of incompleteness is not a wholly negative outcome and participants came away with new curiosity and new questions about the sights observed. Many expressed the desire to return later to the places visited to explore more fully. Nevertheless, this finding draws a sharp contrast with a human-guided tour in which participants more readily accept, perhaps, that the account of the guide is inevitably highly personalised and bounded in its scope.

Findings for Soho Stories: a location-triggered exploration Compared to the fully prescribed walking routes of the two click-stop tours, our third app— Soho Stories—attempts to offer something firmly in a different tradition. By inviting its user to roam freely and explore the area of Soho in London, this app provides an experience that is, at least on the surface, closer to that of the flanêur and the dérive. Before exploring how this took shape in practice, we first note that Soho Stories was found to be highly usable on the street. Apart from a few crashes, participants generally trusted its content because it was produced by the National Trust, the largest heritage organisation in the UK. As a more innovative app that presents location-triggered and highly immersive content, the reception of Soho Stories was more polarised among our participants, as we now describe.

The effects of rich and immersive narratives We begin by considering the effects of having rich audio narratives of place in a tour app. Many respondents were impressed with the quality of the stories, the speakers and atmospheres created. Participants enjoyed the fact, if recognised, that speakers were famous and associated with the area (e.g. George Melly and Janet Street-Porter) or perceived to be ‘in the know’ (e.g. those associating with gangsters) and able to ‘go behind the scenes’ (e.g. the Groucho Club): We all know who Janet Street-Porter is … but actually to hear her speaking about what she did when she was going through uni making the silver coats and things like that and then … yes, that was a very personal thing. (S8) 435

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The experience was found to be immersive in the manner of drama: ‘It was quite theatrical … it reminded me of watching Sherlock … the background noise and the accent, and the way it was executed’ (S1). Street sounds incorporated into the audios were particularly effective and created a sense of time travel back to the past, including background music and other street sounds: It produced this noise as if you’re walking the streets, there were horses tapping the streets … they were trying to grab you back to the history … there were noises of people talking … there was jazz, when I walked passed Ronnie Scott. (S9) However, these narratives of social history conflicted with the expectations of some participants. Sometimes, this was a negative reaction to particular content. For example, two users found the portrayal of gay culture to be clichéd. In other cases, it was associated with the discomfort of being locked into highly immersive and dramatic narratives and a perceived lack of engagement with the present place. Two of the most popular stops (The French House and the sign ‘This is not a brothel’) overcame this problem and required participants to observe carefully and find particular objects or features in the landscape. However, almost half the users commented that elsewhere there was not enough engagement with the things around them: ‘I had this preconception that it might tell me more about, I suppose, certain buildings. I know it did to an extent, but it was like more about the history of … I don’t know what I thought, really’ (S5). Another commented that it was strange for items that obviously attract the tourist gaze to not be discussed: What I was surprised about was that it wouldn’t point out information about buildings where there are blue plaques for example. Like where Karl Marx lived or where Mozart used to live. I was surprised that that app would not pick up on that and give you more information about something that the environment would stimulate you to look at anyway. (S2)

The mixed blessing of wandering Many participants liked the sense of freedom that Soho Stories brought with it; they could go where they pleased ‘at their own pace’, listen when they wanted and tune out when they did not: ‘I like it better, because I could actually hear the tour guide, and it’s also self-directed … I could just leave when I had enough information’ (S7). However, this freedom was not universally enjoyed. Some users found it frustrating that everything emerged as a result of where they walked, rather than having more direct control over what they listened to: ‘At some point like when I was on Greek Street, I can’t remember what information it was, but I would have liked to listen to the information while I was walking but it wouldn’t allow me that’ (S2). These issues were sometimes compounded by failures of the technology, mainly the GPS not working and locating the tourer in a different place on the map with the incorrect audio content. There were often frustrating mismatches between participants’ locations, intended locations, focus of attention and audio content:

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I would like an app to detect that I’ve actually moved on from Ronnie Scott, which means that I’m no longer interested in the history of that place … so it would and detect the current location and start with the new voice. (S9) Even without these technological glitches, many users were simply uncomfortable with the uncertainty of free roaming. One participant felt the app was missing images to indicate what you should be observing, and that you were properly located. Another commented that it would be useful for places already visited to be marked to avoid accidental revisits. Another wanted more specific audio directions: ‘I thought, as it changed, so if you go down and you arrive at Wardour Street and it starts talking about Wardour Street, it might be nice to say “Wardour Street”’ (S5). The negative reaction of some participants to free roaming and rich narratives that were not strongly tied to features in the physical reality, can be viewed as unfavourable comparisons with a human-guided tour. One expressed this explicitly: It pointed me towards a green plaque on Old Compton Street that I’d never noticed before and it pointed out where the Groucho Club door was, but I didn’t feel like they were saying, ‘Look at this bit of architecture’. (S6) Some expressed a deeper antagonism to the playful spirit of Soho Stories and with this, anything resembling the dérive: ‘I know my dad, for example, would be really annoyed to discover he’d walked all the way to the other end of Soho for someone to read him a poem’ (S6).

Defamiliarisation and heightened observation As with the click-stop tours, a particularly powerful experience for participants lay in a sense of defamiliarisation and the renewal of interest in familiar things and places. One of the most popular stops was the alleyway with the sign ‘This is not a brothel’, because there was a feeling of confronting something known about the area in an unusual way. One user described how walking slowly between stops had allowed them to view the area in a new way: When they’re telling the story I walk slowly, but I realised, for example, some shops or places I hadn’t paid attention to before and so I stopped and looked around … so I wasn’t directly influenced by the story but sometimes I was influenced by the environment and the shops … sometimes we just walk by and we don’t really pay attention to the buildings or neighbourhood, so I think that’s very good … but you need to have some time to wander in the area. (S11)

Wanting more but less information Also repeating a pattern of the click-stop tours, participants presented paradoxical feelings of wanting less information, while simultaneously expecting more things to be reflected in the app’s content. Wanting less was often expressed as the narrative being excessively long: 437

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At the beginning we stopped in this pub and we listened for probably 70 per cent of the story. But I must say it was a long story, probably more than five minutes, so we only listened probably four minutes … and just kept walking. (S4) We were just listening to quite an interesting story about a pub and its history … then after a while it just got, ‘Okay, too much information’ … so we just started walking towards the next stop. (S7) One expression of wanting more information was the desire to have visual and video content alongside the audio narratives: ‘They talked about how it changed over the years, but I couldn’t visualise it … so I thought it might be nice to be able to take your phone out and look at a photograph’ (S10). For other participants, the desire reached further and reflected the belief, observed with the click-stops tours, that the app should be more encyclopaedic and provide links to support a deeper digital exploration of topics presented: If they mentioned there was an incident that happened in this place, I would expect at least it was in the news or some report … so if there’s a link to BBC, I could just click on it and see what happened. (S9) Wanting more in a different way, one participant lamented that despite being called Soho Stories, it stopped so abruptly at Soho’s borders: ‘I walked out past the “Coach & Horses” onto Charing Cross Road … I stopped outside the Palace Theatre … hoping it would tell me about the history, but it didn’t say anything. It stopped’ (S5).

Conclusion We began by tracing two contrasting historical precedents of urban exploration on foot: the free roaming flanêur along with the later more playful dérive, versus the rise of highly orchestrated and guided history tours. Digital history tour apps, we suggest, offer the modern visitor a way to combine, if not reconcile, these two traditions. They promise the opportunity of being able to tour without visibly becoming a tourist; visitors can be directed to sites and items of significance in an efficient manner, while remaining somewhat anonymous and always free to wander at any moment. The attraction of this covert tourism is in avoiding the kind of discomfort described by one participant: ‘I felt a bit self-conscious because we had it on loudspeaker … “Oh, I’m a tourist, looking at you”, so I felt a bit weird’ (S3). Another imagined the reactions of people around her: ‘look at that idiot, she’s confronted with beauty and she’s looking at her phone’ (R6). However, both were able to tuck their smartphones away and resume a normal appearance while remaining on the tour. In this way, the experience created is one of straddling an imaginary frame boundary; of being ‘inside’ the tour and yet able to step ‘outside’ it. This stepping in and out happens in both the overt sense of following or not following the designated path, and the covert sense of dutifully accepting tour instructions versus critically evaluating the wisdom of the tour design. The first demonstration of our participants’ desire to stand outside the tour was their readiness to modify the prescribed itineraries of the click-stop apps. Routes were evaluated, truncated and otherwise manipulated, and various other digital devices and apps were marshalled 438

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to extend and alter the tour app’s offerings. Although these click-stop tours are inscribed with the ghost of a human guide peddling a fixed itinerary of designated stops, in practice they provided more flexible resources for tourers to become co-designers of the activity. Following from this, many reported a sense that they were exploring freely, and some enjoyed the opportunity to mix in spontaneous activities like browsing shops and cafés. In embracing these freedoms, some participants resembled an updated version of Sontag’s (1977) figure of the armed flanêur, their smart devices now subsuming and extending the tourist’s camera, providing an upgraded touristic weapon that is both more readily camouflaged into the ordinariness of urban life, yet more versatile in its sense-making functionality. A different situation was observed for Soho Stories, in which the app comes already inscribed with a notion of free roaming and of the playful dérive. Curiously, in practice, its highly immersive audio content was more resistant to improvisation and adaptation. Although participants could roam anywhere and anonymously, they were less able to negotiate the boundary of being inside or outside of the tour. Once embarked, they were definitely inside the activity, and many were happy to be there, finding the deeply immersive and carefully crafted content absorbing and enjoyable. However, unlike the click-stop tours, in which participants could survey content in advance and pick and choose to an extent, participants in Soho Stories had less strategic control over the material consumed and had to accept what came next without much forewarning. Not everyone always wants or has time to become the flanêur it seems. The sense of freedom afforded by the click-stop tours, of being outside any organised event often came with a degree of disappointment and discomfort. Many of the click-stop tourers found the lean servings of factual content left yawning gaps and disconnects in any overall narrative. This was especially true in the interstitial spaces between the stops, where some felt the painful absence of a human guide to make sense of things and places, and hold them inside a tour experience. Exacerbating this, many tourers felt it a burden to be constantly making and maintaining correspondences between information in the app and features of the physical landscape, with ongoing uncertainty about the correctness of connections made. Despite the differences between the reception of the click-stop tours and Soho Stories, there were some common reactions across all three apps, which point perhaps to the deeper nature of the digital tour experience. Most striking was a paradoxical response, among nearly all participants, of an overall desire for less information in the apps coexisting with demands to be told more, about more things, and to be provided with related images or other materials felt to be missing. This paradox perfectly captures the conflicting desire to be inside a tour (wanting more information) while also being outside of it (wanting less). It also points to the fact that a digital tour is not able to explain itself and defend its choices of inclusions, and perhaps more importantly, exclusions. Nevertheless, the clear evidence of our studies shows that many users of a digital history app will constantly feel the gaps and uncomfortable edges of the tour as absences. This, of course, contrasts with the experience created by a human guide, whose patter may reassuringly fill the gaps while nevertheless often being as scripted and machinic as the content of an app. Yet curiously, the discomforts of the digital history tour may ultimately make for a productive experience, as we observed in two other common reactions. One is a kind of heightened power of observation, possibly to fill the sense of incompleteness, in which participants reported being switched into a mode of discovery and delighted to notice and consume various plaques, signposts and other sources of non-tour information that they felt would normally pass them by. Taking this further, another very strong reaction was one of defamiliarisation. Things that had receded into familiar backdrops of their home cities were 439

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dragged back into focal attention and illuminated through new perspectives or simply though previously unknown facts. In Dean MacCannell’s (1976) classic book The Tourist, he described an emerging generation of tourists in the 1960s and 1970s who seek out authentic experiences but are often presented with various forms of ‘staged authenticity’ in tourism sites. Roughly half a century after MacCannell’s portrait, the participants in our study were perhaps more aware of such stagings, and more skilfully able to discern forms of historic and cultural significance through and around them. However, this study shows that the notion of staging is still apt. The history walking tour is one such stage, and the tourer must manage their conflicting desires to be fully immersed inside the orchestrated tour narrative, while at the same time being a bystander of history who moves freely and anonymously though the city. The two forms of digital tours apps examined here provide new modes of negotiating these conflicting traditions of urban history exploration.

Acknowledgements This research was funded by the Australian Research Council through a Discovery Grant (DP140101188).

Notes 1 Dora sadly passed away during the writing of this chapter. She will be remembered as an insightful, kind and generous colleague and will be much missed by all who knew her. 2 Interview testimonies are referenced to participants from the three tours: G—Golden Mile tour; R—War Remembrance tour; and S—Soho Stories.

References Benjamin, W. (1973). Charles Baudelaire: A lyric poet in the era of high capitalism; translated from the German by Harry Zohn. London: NLB. Bischoff, H. (1987). A walking tour of an ethnic neighborhood: Communities as outdoor classrooms for teaching immigration history. The Social Studies, 78(5). 202–205. Debord, G. (1956). Theory of the dérive. Les Lèvres Nues 9, November. Reprinted in Internationale Situationniste, 2 (December 1958). Gordon, A. (2014). What to see and how to see it: Tourists, residents, and the beginnings of the walking tour in nineteenth-century Quebec City. Journal of Tourism History, 6(1), 74–90. Lewi, H., & Smith, W. (2011). Hand-held histories: Using digital archival documents on architectural tours. Architectural Research Quarterly, 15(1), 69–77. MacCannell, D. (1976). The tourist: A new theory of the leisure class. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sontag, S. (1977). On photography. London, UK: Penguin Books. Urry, J. (2002). The tourist gaze. London, UK: Sage Publications.

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39 Traces—Olion Creating a bilingual ‘subtlemob’ for National Museum Wales Sara Huws, Alison John and Jenny Kidd

Introduction In 2016, we began work on a Welsh and English language digital encounter for St Fagans National Museum of History. The project was a partnership between Amgueddfa Cymru—National Museum Wales, yello brick, a creative marketing and street gaming company based in the nation’s capital, Cardiff, and the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University. This was our second project together, following the creation of a prototype digital heritage experience in 2013 called With New Eyes I See (WNEIS). With New Eyes I See was a fragmented and nomadic experiment at the intersection of the digital and the analogue, which had involved (among other prompts and props) projections, voiceovers, found objects, maps and animations, with digital components triggered using radio frequency identification (see Kidd, 2017 for an overview). Following WNEIS, we were keen to use our findings about audience engagement with mixed-reality formats to develop a new kind of digital heritage encounter: subtle, quiet and invisible storytelling working at the interstices of fact and fiction. This chapter introduces the outcome of that endeavour—Traces—and offers our reflections on three core ambitions in that project. These were: 1) to disrupt and challenge the fact/fiction dichotomy, playfully exploring the ambiguities of museological representations 2) to create a digital heritage encounter that was subtle, quiet and invisible, and that blurred perceived boundaries between digital and physical experiences. We found the term ‘subtlemob’ (Speakman, 2009) useful in the design stages of work on Traces. A subtlemob is quiet, inwardly affective and invisible1 3) to conceive of Olion as a dynamic narrative in its own right, and much more than merely a Welsh translation or copy of the English version. Traces was designed for use at the St Fagans National Museum of History, one of seven museums that together comprise Amgueddfa Cymru—National Museum Wales. St Fagans,

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situated on the outskirts of Cardiff in South Wales, is one of Wales’s most iconic heritage sites and its most popular tourist attraction. It is in itself a curious and fragmented storyworld (Kidd, 2018): an outdoor heritage site populated with buildings that have been translocated from across Wales, which also houses a working farm, ‘castle’ and grounds. Its 20th-century modernist visitor centre has recently undergone extensive redevelopment, to become a participatory display space that reflects the museum’s continuing role in documenting the multiple histories of Wales. In this chapter, we offer a brief summary of Traces and then detail and reflect on the aforementioned ambitions for this project in turn. What emerges is a case study about the value of working with fragmentation and ambiguity in digital cultural heritage work (rather than trying to eradicate them), and about positive visitor engagements that have been facilitated around an intimate, intriguing and transgressive digital encounter. This work recognises that all our digital interactions are experienced as embodied, felt, sensed and situated, and begins to demonstrate how heritage institutions can work sensitively and productively with those qualities.

Traces—Olion Narrator: I have been called collector and guide, the unraveller of thread. Surrender yourself to this journey, to the order and disorder, the clarity and confusion, the artistry and chaos. See yourself reflected in the tales you hear, and the people you will meet. Agnes and Rose, and the others … These are the stories that make the trees grow, they nourish the soil. Traces is not a straightforward audio guide. Nor was it conceived as a tourist guide. It is a site-specific storytelling encounter that takes participants on a physical journey around the St Fagans National Museum of History, meandering between fact and fiction, past and present. As demonstrated in the above extract, Traces is an artistic narrative interpretation or ‘composition’ that challenges visitors to experience the museum in a new way. There are a number of possible user journeys structured into Traces. A user can follow the narrative on their own (on a route that is also fully physically accessible), or they can choose the partner experience that takes two people on separate journeys that interweave in ways that are expressly performative (although invisible to other visitors). Alternatively, participants can choose either of these routes in the Welsh language (Olion). Given difficulties with mobile and wi-fi connectivity at the St Fagans site, Traces was designed as a self-contained mobile download (on Android or iOS). Therefore, the audio material is not location-triggered but manually controlled. There are four chapters, and visitors follow the route via directions in the audio, starting each chapter once in the appropriate location, and at the same time as their partner (should they be journeying with one). Traces—Olion is a mobile application, yet it should not be confused with museum/ heritage mobile telephone applications that serve solely a wayfinding or more straightforward interpretive function (Cromartie, 2012; Lagoudi & Sexton, 2010; Robson, Castro, Paddon, & Beaman, 2016). Such mobile applications often remain ‘rooted in authoritative and didactic conservatism’ (Poole, 2017, p. 1) and are unlikely to reveal ‘dissonant histories’ (Poole, 2017, p. 2). Traces should be considered a more playful and complex elision of the digital and physical than the designation ‘museum app’ most readily calls to mind. Moreover, it has been our ambition that this not be a technocentric venture; the app is designed to encourage participants to put their mobile telephone in their pocket once they start their journey, rather than the telephone continuing to occupy their line of vision. During the design process, we were clear that the technology should enhance and enrich 442

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the experience and not be the experience. It should ignite the imagination rather than replace it. As Gerard Goggins (2012) has proposed, it can be more fruitful to see technologies not as ‘given’, but rather to understand them as an open set of questions. By mindfully designing in this way, participants can take their place at the centre of the story, focused on their audio companion, and the ways they are being invited to interact with the environment and (perhaps) their partner-participant. The Traces experience is linear yet fractured; moments come into focus then fade and blur. It is mostly an audio accompaniment2 featuring the voice of an unidentified narrator and a bespoke musical score. The narrator—your guide—directs you around the site, whispering fragments of interwoven fact and fiction in your ear, and implicating you in the story; sometimes you are a listener and sometimes an invisible actor in this fragmented and fleeting narrative. For example, unbeknownst to you, in ‘standing at the gilded gate, face pressed towards the castle’ you have become an actor in the narrative as it is playing out for your partner, watching and listening while sat on a bench across the gardens. In the twoperson experience, you look into the eyes of your partner-participant, and are asked to feel, to look at them differently (see Figure 39.1). Traces has other layers of composition that are just as much a part of the narrative as the spoken word is. The music is deliberately composed to dictate physical pace and reflect mood that augments an alternate layer of reality in the space. We have employed the

Figure 39.1 Participants on the partner journey of Olion.

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language of film by framing the space with different perspectives and angles: using parts of the narrative as ‘close ups’ to draw the attention of the listener to particular details of the space, or bringing their attention to a picture that encompasses a wider view (literally and figuratively). The narrative comes into focus and fades to create mood, pace and feeling through manipulation of our filmic perspective. This cinematic framing invites audiences to see through a different lens and connect viscerally with the grounds of St Fagans. Traces also makes much of the natural habitat and centuries-old built environment, and so the narrative is experienced differently depending on the time of year, weather and seasonal flora. As such, Traces is a unique assemblage of resources, and an attempt, quite intentionally, to unseat, unsettle and unravel. In the following sections, we reflect on our ambitions with Traces to account for how, in practice, we produced this subtler and more intimate (bilingual) digital heritage encounter. We also begin to articulate how users have responded to this more ambiguous mode of storytelling, introducing responses from an in-depth research project with 30 Traces and Olion participants completed in March 2018.

Playing with fact/fiction Traces walks a thin line between fact and fiction. But what does that mean, and what are the consequences of that kind of ambiguity? The Traces experience is constituted of myth, illusion and the navigation of fragments of story. This reflects the very real encounters of the writers and producers within the extensive St Fagans archives, and conversations with those working on site whose stories are seldom told through the official channels of interpretation on site—the gardeners for example. Traces augments the site with ‘what ifs’ and takes artistic licence with people who might have lived there, building on the knowledge of the societal structure of the time and the history of the site. For example, participants hear the story of the man who ‘visits Mametz Wood reluctantly every night, waking in a cold sweat before heading to breathe in the safety of the gardens every morning’, drawing inspiration from the fact that parts of the St Fagans estate became a hospital that provided for injured soldiers during the First World War. The hospital building, lost to fire long before the site became a museum, is now represented only by a set of steps, which seemingly lead nowhere. Mametz Wood is of particular significance in Wales, as the site of engagement—and devastating loss—for the 38th (Welsh) Division as part of the Battle of the Somme. We did not want Traces to provide ‘(yet) more information’ or duplicate other forms of interpretation that were being done perfectly competently through other means at St Fagans. Instead, Traces needed to be a different way of navigating the site, a means of creative wayfinding that might seed different kinds of experiences, and different ways of being in the space of the Museum (as noted above): Narrator: See yourself reflected in the tales you hear … In the people you will meet … You are at the centre of this journey. And at the centre, you will BE. You alone will hear what you hear and feel what you feel. As noted, we conceived of Traces as a ‘subtlemob’, oriented around deep and intimate entanglement in feeling, space and experience, rather than feeling this new (digital) encounter had to be hyper-visible or boisterous. Instead, Traces holds you gently, lightly pressing you to perform your visitation to St Fagans differently. In our research interviews, participants often responded emotionally to this quality, and talked about the experience in terms 444

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of their wellbeing, self-care and escapism; it is ‘calming’, ‘relaxing’, ‘energising’, ‘serene’, ‘hypnotising’, ‘soothing’, ‘spiritual’, ‘peaceful’, ‘dreamy’, ‘thoughtful’, ‘therapeutic’ and ‘rejuvenating’. One participant noted: I loved the stillness, the peace, the story … suddenly, I was small and part of the landscape—a piece of the picture. This is the quietest my inner to-do-list voice has been all day! Beautiful. [March 2018] Traces deliberately slingshots back to the participant, placing them at the centre of the journey, questioning and probing, and trying to make connections with their own narrative life. The stories are representations of the (often) shared experiences that constitute the human condition: love, grief, conflict, mortality and so on. Thus, there are touchpoints with all our lives: It’s a meditation on the human experience. [March 2018] The end was just quite emotional for me because I lost my mother recently and it was just, you know, it just kind of … brought me back to you when it says ‘what do you see in your partners face?’. [March 2018] We are aware, however, that our playfulness as maker-curators, and our risk-taking, is consequential. It seems people do not trust politicians or journalists, but they do still feel they can trust museums (Dillenschneider, 2017; Museums Association, 2013). Yet ours is not a ‘neutral’ museum voice in Traces (if such a thing exists). Instead, the experience disrupts visitors’ expectations about the kind of voice and assertions they will encounter on site (as WNEIS actively did). We understand Traces as delicately and playfully activist in this regard, and hope that by inserting our fictions, and revelling in ambiguity, we unsettle processes of museum-making that reify and attempt to sustain grand narratives of truth about the world, and about us as its inhabitants. Such an approach, we contend, could be further utilised to explore complex issues and amplify marginalised histories—to make the museum a place for people rather than a monument to them. Digital media offer us powerful ways (potentially) of multiplying narratives, undermining received wisdoms and questioning authority, and we understand these as core parts of the 21st-century museum project, not as at odds with it.

Complicating the physical/digital binary As has been noted, Traces is a form of mixed-reality and multimodal storytelling.3 It is not a virtual reality or traditional augmented reality experience, instead relying on multiple modalities and resources in communication. These include digital resources in service of the narrative, but also cues from the natural and built environment, and sensorial and tactile prompts; an invitation to press one’s hands deep into a cold stone archway for example, and to implant a memory there. In designing Traces, we wanted to disrupt how people perform their presence in the spaces of St Fagans—a site that for many is subject to repeat visiting, often with the same route taken time and time again (as people told us in scoping discussions 445

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with visitors at the start of our project). We wanted to give people ‘permission’ to engage with this place in a different way; the application itself became a mechanism that encouraged tactility, moments of stillness, changes in pace, and to some extent, a break in personal inhibitions. It offers a companion to those who are wary of visiting venues on their own and it encourages people to take the unexplored path, as one participant noted in our research: [Traces is] a beautiful journey that makes you look again at the smallest and most inconspicuous of corners of St Fagans. [March 2018] We wanted to defamiliarise the space somehow, and encourage people to be more aware of their visit as a thing embodied and enacted: It felt like I was actually allowed to properly pay attention to the environment, rather than almost bypass things. It made me notice things that I didn’t ordinarily notice. But also the way I was guided and the way the music affected me gave me permission to look and permission to spend time which, ordinarily, I think when you’re with a big group of people like a family or walking your dog, you don’t necessarily sit, wait and contemplate. It makes you have to connect with the space in a way I don’t think you would ordinarily. [March 2018] These ‘permissions’ are a key part of the experience, and for many, changed the dynamic of their relationship with this public space, a space that comes with its own socially acceptable rules of behaviour. By shifting parameters, participants began to redefine their relationship with their surroundings and become part of a redefined choreography that challenges the ‘norm’: Enjoy the moment. Hear out the narrator. Close your eyes when you can. Act like you are in the play. [March 2018] Now I am a part of this place. I feel like I am more than just a visitor. It’s quite powerful. [March 2018] The design of Traces had to consider certain constraints of the site: lack of wi-fi and technological infrastructure, and no available staffing to facilitate or maintain the experience. A mobile application as the delivery mechanism made sense in this setting as a way to facilitate our aims in the project; it might not have been preferable elsewhere. The audio and the simple visual interface are used in Traces to re-orient visitors. They do not digitally recreate space in the same way that virtual reality does or layer it in the traditional sense of augmented reality (AR). However, as noted above, the audio powerfully and subtly enhances the space. In this respect, we concur with others who have pithily asserted in the twitter threads accompanying #MuseTech events and conferences in recent months that audio is ‘the new AR’. The digital resources become a prompt for more reflective and intentional journeying in the space, amplifying elements that are easily overlooked or passed by. We encourage the technology to be hidden so that it becomes an enabler of more humancentred behaviours and responses: 446

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I generally didn’t look at my phone unless I was skipping to the next chapter and I really liked that. I think technology is at its best for something like this when it’s not all about everything that is on the screen, when it is more about the environment. This is more a tool for accessing it. [March 2018] We are used to thinking about much of our digital interaction as disembodied, but it is not, as Traces reminds us. Digital interactions are felt, sensed and situated. The digital enhances the physical and invites the audience to create their own memory and stories of the space, as echoed by participants: Dreamy, enchanting, escapism. We made some real memories, while listening to theirs. [March 2018] A meandering journey through both the gardens and your imagination. [March 2018] Beautiful experience for the imagination and senses. Amazing collaborative experience and a joyful way to spend some time here. [March 2018] Through Traces, visitors experienced the space differently, and were affected differently by it also. In user tests, they told us again and again how they had been encouraged to perform their visitation in new ways, often more purposefully and more emotionally. As we had hoped, participants often ended up feeling their relationship with St Fagans had been in some way shifted, altered and reimagined. Ironically perhaps, our attempts to unsettle the prototypical St Fagans encounter by changing its focus, direction and intensity have often resulted in a more settled sense of ‘being’ in the place of St Fagans as a space of natural beauty, a dynamic ecology and seasonal environmental flux.

Olion and working bilingually Our third ambition in the project was to conceive of Olion as more than a ‘Welsh-language equivalent’—a functional, sometimes outsourced, translation of an English prototype as is often the case with digital heritage work in Wales. We wanted Olion to be closer in spirit and methodology to a literary translation; dynamic, playful and considered. The nuances and poetry of the stories in English had to be expressed in equal balance in Welsh for it to ring true with participants who choose to engage through that medium. We worked with bilingual writer Sara Lewis on the project. She was passionate about catering for an underrepresented audience and creating another touchpoint for the project. Sara (personal communication, 5th February 2018) offers this perspective on bilingual artistic creation, development and delivery: Welsh and English ‘sing’ differently as languages and so when I am tasked to write something bilingually, I will always write two versions as opposed to a translation of whichever version I write first. Often, a straight translation of a creative piece, will never work completely because the words that are used, are used not just for their meaning, but for their sound and rhythm and so, while the overarching story I created for Traces was the same, the language I use to tell that story was different in the Welsh and English versions. 447

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Rather than deliver a Welsh ‘mirror’ version of an English digital product, with translated content dropped in towards the end of the process—often by contracted translators who have not been part of the product’s development—here, Olion was a separate workstream within the creative process. This approach develops on Amgueddfa Cymru—National Museum Wales’s previous pilot digital projects, which focus on discovering creative ways of engaging with digital visitors whose preferred browsing language is Welsh. Its @DyddiadurKate project, for example, sought to conceive of Welsh-speaking (or Welsh-browsing) visitors as an audience group with particular interests beyond their language choice, which resulted in over 280,000 impressions on a single, Welsh-language diary. The results not only informed the bilingual, parallel creative production model seen in Traces, but challenged more general, cultural assumptions about the strength of appetite for tailored Welsh-language digital content. Set against a popular perception that Welsh is both an ‘ancient’ and ‘useless’ language, projects such as Traces take the statutory requirement that the language is treated ‘no less favourably’ than English as a creative starting point, rather than a limitation.

Conclusion This chapter has explored our initial design ambitions for Traces—Olion and begun to reflect on how participants have responded to it. We wanted to (1) play at the interstices of fact and fiction, (2) complicate the binary between digital and physical, and (3) work bilingually with sensitively and dynamism. Against the often-noisy backdrop of investment in VR and AR, we have demonstrated that a focus on creating quieter, subtler and more intimate forms of immersion and experience can be both productive and insightful. The notion of the ‘subtlemob’ has been multiply instructive for us as we embarked on a project that was not technocentric, instead holding the digital and the tangible in delicate balance. It has helped us to challenge perceptions (perhaps even our own) about the screen as the principal agent of change in digital heritage work and attuned us to the potentials of agency and self-direction in playful museum encounters. We have explored how to create new languages and dialogues with audiences that arouse the senses, engage the emotions and are attuned to the environment. In working bilingually, we have been ethical and intentional, making more considered choices in the creation of accessible, relevant and empathetic work for a wider variety of audiences. In user tests, responses have been positive and energetic. With Traces, subtlety, ambiguity, stillness and voice combine to prompt encounters that are powerfully felt, sensed and situated. Those who participate find that their patterns and practices of visitation at St Fagans shift, perhaps immutably. People talk about Traces as an intervention, as a way of seeing the museum differently and of being in it more meaningfully and purposefully. And they have found it transgressive. This is hugely rewarding for us as creative practitioners and researchers.

Acknowledgements Traces was produced by yello brick in collaboration with Amgueddfa Cymru—National Museum Wales and Cardiff University Producer: Alison John Application build: Hoffi Writer: Sara Lewis Composer: Jak Poore Actor: Natalie Paisey 448

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Notes 1 In stark contrast to flashmobs, which are often noisy, performative and hyper-visible interventions in public space. For more on flashmobs, see Nicholson (2005). 2 Although there are visuals and artworks on the accompanying application screen if people do choose to look. 3 For more on multimodal heritage encounters, see Ciolfi (2015), Ciolfi and McLoughlin (2017), Damala et al. (2016), Kenderdine, Chan, and Shaw (2014), Kenderdine (2016), Kidd (2017), and Schraffenberger and van der Heide (2014).

References Ciolfi, L. (2015). Embodiment and place experience in heritage technology design. In M. Henning (Ed.), The international handbook of museum studies: Museum media (pp. 419–446). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Ciolfi, L., & McLoughlin, M. (2017). Supporting place-specific interaction through a physical/digital assembly. Human–Computer Interaction. doi:10.1080/07370024.2017.1399061. Cromartie, N. (2012). ArtClix mobile app at the high museum of art. Retrieved from www.museumsandthe web.com/mw2012/papers/artclix_mobile_app_at_the_high_museum_of_art.html. Damala, A., van der Vaart, M., Clarke, L., Hornecker, E., Avram, G., Kockelkorn, H., & Ruthven, I. (2016). Evaluating tangible and multisensory museum visiting experiences: Lessons learned from the meSch project. Retrieved from http://mw2016.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/evaluating-tangible-and-mul tisensory-museum-visiting-experiences-lessons-learned-from-the-mesch-project/. Dillenschneider, C. (2017). People trust museums more than newspapers. Here is why that matters right now (DATA). Retrieved from www.colleendilen.com/2017/04/26/people-trust-museums-more-thannewspapers-here-is-why-that-matters-right-now-data/. Goggins, G. (2012). New technologies and the media. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kenderdine, S. (2016). Embodiment, entanglement, and immersion in digital cultural heritage. In S. Schreibman, R. Siemens, & J. Unsworth (Eds.), A new companion to digital humanities (pp. 22–41). Chichester and Malden: Wiley. Kenderdine, S., Chan, L. K. Y., & Shaw, J. (2014). Pure land: Futures for embodied museography. ACM Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage, 7, 2. Kidd, J. (2017). With new eyes I see: Embodiment, empathy and silence in digital heritage interpretation. International Journal of Heritage Studies. 25: 1, 54-66, DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2017.1341946. Kidd, J. (2019). Transmedia heritage. In M. Freeman, & R. Rampazzo Gambarato (Eds.), The Routledge companion to transmedia studies. London, UK: Routledge.pp. 272-278. Lagoudi, E., & Sexton, C. (2010). Old Masters at your fingertips: The journey of creating a museum app for the iPhone & iTouch. Retrieved from www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2010/papers/lagoudi/lagoudi. html. Museums Association. (2013). Public perceptions of—And attitudes to—The purposes of museums in society. Retrieved from www.museumsassociation.org/download?id=954916. Nicholson, J. A. (2005). Flash! Mobs in the age of mobile connectivity. The Fibreculture Journal, 6. http:// six.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-030-flash-mobs-in-the-age-of-mobile-connectivity/. Poole, S. (2017). Ghosts in the garden: Locative gameplay and historical interpretation from below. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 24(3), 300–314. doi:10.1080/13527258.2017.1347887. Robson, T., Castro, G., Paddon, M., & Beaman, A. (2016). The de Young Museum app by Guidekick as a model for collaborative development, technological innovation, and visitor behavior insight. Retrieved from http://mw2016.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/the-de-young-museum-app-by-guidekick-asa-model-for-collaborative-development-technological-innovation-and-visitor-behavior-insight/. Schraffenberger, H., & van der Heide, E. (2014). Everything augmented: On the real in augmented reality. CITAR Journal, 6(1), 17–29. Speakman, D. (2009). As if it were the last time. Retrieved from http://wearecircumstance.com/as-if-itwere-the-last-time/.

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40 Investigating ‘ordinary’ landscapes Using visual research methods to understand heritage digital technologies and sense of place Steven Cooke and Dora Constantinidis1

Introduction: urban heritage and the ‘everyday’ Community-driven involvement in heritage practice has been advocated through a number of key texts and case studies, chronicling not only its successes, but also the pitfalls and limitations of grassroots participation (Crooke, 2007; Logan, 2016; Selman, 2007; Waterton & Watson, 2013a). However, according to Beilin (2005), participatory approaches provide a way of recognising the banality of the ‘everyday’ through which most social worlds are created and sustained: Critical theory affirms ordinary action and recognizes the effort involved in being an active citizen in the daily grind of participation. It emphasizes the centrality of everyday interpretation. It affirms the value in listening and attending to a grassroots perspective. (p. 59) This ‘everyday’ is constituted through engagement with place. There is a long history of research into the cultural production of meaningful places in a variety of disciplines such as cultural geography, archaeology, architecture and history, as well as those from within the cultural heritage discipline and professional practice (e.g., see Davis, 2011; Jive’n & Larkham, 2010; Relph, 1976). Further, new questions are being asked about the relationship between technical knowledge and historical and heritage expertise, and how social and popular media forms can be harnessed to identify new ways of engaging communities around heritage places and issues. Such engagement is cognitive, emotional and behavioural (Ponzetti, 2003 in Smith, 2017) and multisensory (Crang & Tolia-Kelly, 2010), which raises issues related to the ability of traditional ‘talk-only’ methodologies to understand the complexities of these engagements (Middleton, 2010).

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This chapter critically examines the use of visual research methodologies (VRM) to investigate the relationship between heritage digital technologies and ‘sense of place’. It argues that despite technological and methodological problems, VRM are useful in examining the cognitive, emotional and behavioural encounters with ordinary heritage landscapes. Providing a more nuanced understanding than talk-only research methods, VRM allows the exploration of complex issues surrounding the curation of content and place attachment.

Heritage and place attachment A common theme across many studies is that ‘heritage’, whether tangible or intangible, plays a vital and ongoing role in people’s accumulation of collective memories and attachment to places, and the creation of communal, local and national identities (Manzo & DevineWright, 2014). This is not confined to places and practices officially designated as heritage through inclusion on statutory and non-statutory lists and registers, but also through often ordinary heritage landscapes (Atkinson, 2007, 2008). As Hawke (2012) argues, heritage is a resource for residents to articulate an ‘autobiographical insideness’, and through which they can generate a sense of attachment to place over a relatively brief period. Through an incorporation of local history and heritage into personal narratives, their history and heritage can become my history or heritage. Such attachment to place can be experienced by both residents and visitors. For Knox and Marston (2007), the distinction is between the accumulation of shared experience of place for locals (‘insiders’) and a focus on the distinctiveness of place for visitors (‘outsiders’) through landmarks, built form and practices that ‘evoke a significant common meaning for people who have no common experience of them’ (p. 35). Such a distinction is problematic, not only through recent discussions of how places can be exclusionary (Cresswell, 2015), but also through a re-evaluation of Yi Fu Tuan’s notion of surface and depth (Forsyth, Lorimer, Merriman, & Robinson, 2013). Although ‘undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know if better and endow it with value’ (Tuan, 1977, p. 6), the privileging of depth over surface has a moral element. In social science research: Surface almost always suggests superficiality or the adventitious, whereas core denotes centrality and depth. As scholars of a puritanical or ascetic bent, we tend to undervalue and distrust the sense, appearance and the spectacles of life, and to esteem knowledge of the underlying structure and cause. (Tuan, 1989, p. 237) Further: Scientists strive to stand far above their material, for a view from nowhere with the hope that they will thereby be able to plunge well below the surfaces of reality. By contrast, cultural geographers-cum-storytellers stand only a little above their material and move only a little below the surfaces of reality in the hope of not losing sight of such surfaces, where nearly all human joys and sorrows unfold. (Tuan, 1989, p. 240) Such a privileging of depth over surface is evident in much writing about place attachment (Knox & Marston, 2007). However, as Forsyth et al. (2013) asserted: 451

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Surfaces and interfaces can be productive, enlivening, and enchanting spaces, where diverse materialities meet to produce physical and aesthetic mixtures, fluidities, turbulence, and movement; whether we are talking about the meeting of paint and canvas, sea water and air, rubber and tarmac, ink and paper, or concrete and soil. (p. 1017) Or, as we shall discover in this chapter, through leather on pavement. For Amin and Thrift (2002), the urban experience can be understood through three metaphors: transitivity—the ‘spatial and temporal openness of the city’ (p. 9) and the ‘intermingling and improvisation’ of everyday life (p. 10); rhythms—the ‘coordinates through which inhabitants and visitors frame and order the urban experience’ (p. 17); and footprints—traces of ‘the past, the daily tracks of movement across, and links beyond the city’ (p. 22). Amin and Thrift (2002) argued: These tracks allow the city to be known. We negotiate the city through used tracks and construct imaginaries around them of the known city. This is one way in which a city, with all its complexity, size and change, is named. (p. 22) These metaphors are useful in understanding the encounter between people and heritage in the urban landscape, particularly within the context of the affective and mobilities ‘turns’ in the humanities and social science. New conceptualisations of the Historic Urban Landscape (UNESCO, 2011) stress the unbounded, permeable nature of heritage places (Buckley, Cooke, & Fayad, 2016), which are both locally and globally constituted through movements of people, ideas, materials and capital (Castells, 2010). The affective turn in heritage and museum studies (Waterton & Watson, 2013b) has focused attention on the multisensory engagement with heritage places and the idea that heritage can be ‘felt’ (Crang & Tolia-Kelly, 2010) and which can form particular ‘landscapes of attachment’ (Kikuchi et al., 2014). Conversely, a focus on heritage mobilities raises the issue of how movement between places through ‘footprints’ (Amin & Thrift, 2002) is redolent of a refocusing from individual heritage sites to landscapes (Hayden, 1995), through which sites are viewed in dialogue, are mutually constitutive, and where the movement between places is part of the attachment to place. Such complexity and messiness calls into question traditional interpretive forms. Rather than static, top-down approaches to storying place, new digital technologies provide the opportunity to reflect both the complexity of urban heritage and the ability for the cocuration of narratives about place that disrupt the ‘authorised heritage discourse’ (Smith, 2006), through a focus on citizen heritage approaches (Lewi, Smith, Murray, & Cooke, 2016). A focus on citizen heritage, a version of citizen science, has been suggested as a way of including different voices and creating an active citizenry (Lewi et al., 2016).

Digital technologies and citizen heritage The relationship between new interpretive opportunities afforded by new social and popular media forms and community-driven heritage approaches have been explored in an Australian Research Council-funded project, which aimed to critically examine ideas of citizen heritage and digital technologies (Lewi et al., 2016). This was achieved by the development of a website—PastPort—optimised for mobile telephone usage, through which anyone with an interest in an area could upload content (images, video or audio), ask questions, or simply use the website to learn more (http://pastport.com.au/citizen/). The focus of the study was 452

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Port Melbourne, a suburb of Melbourne (the state capital of Victoria, Australia). Port Melbourne has a rich and diverse history, including a significant industrial component, and, through a very rapid and recent gentrification, the suburb has undergone a significant transformation in the local topography and architecture. These histories have left material evidence throughout the suburb, which the website aimed to augment through a form of digital heritage interpretation. PastPort aimed to be a digital guide that could illuminate and animate the material landscape through access to both the historical archive, and the personal memories of those that live and work in the area. The website contained both curated content uploaded by the project team and material uploaded by users. Most content was unstructured, although some individual sites were linked by specific themes to form tours. Thus, users were able to engage with the content in different ways depending on their motivations and interests. The website was evaluated through different methodologies (Lewi et al., 2016; Smith, Lewi, & Nichols, 2018) and several key themes emerged: a renewed interest in the locality by users, the connections between ‘historical time … pinned to a familiar present space’ and an emphasis on the ‘everyday’ through grassroots participation (Smith et al., 2018, p. 117). However, given the theoretical and methodological challenges prompted by new understandings of the urban (outlined in this chapter), we also decided to explore which new methodologies might be needed to understand this process. Which innovative ways of researching might be available to understand the relationship between digital platforms like PastPort and multisensory engagement with place? As Degan and Rose (2012) argued, the need here is to examine ‘the relationships between sensory experience and the shifting mobilities and temporalities of everyday urban experience’ (p. 3273, also see Berleant, 1992). The limitations of traditional qualitative and quantitative research methodologies in understanding cognitive, emotional and behavioural engagement with place are well documented. Latham (2003) argued, ‘Talk is made to stand in for all the complexities and subtleties of embodied practice’ (in Middleton, 2010, p. 580). One way of examining this is through VRM, which can take a variety of forms, including the analysis of visual representations of place, creative or artistic engagement or the generation of representations of place by participants. Authors such as Degan and Rose (2012), Pink (2013) and (Middleton, 2010) suggest that VRM may provide an opportunity to generate different types of data than that generated by ‘talk-only’ interviews, particularly when the focus is on sense of place. In addition to understanding multisensory engagement with place, some VRM provide a way of tracking movement through landscapes as well as engagement with particular sites. Visual research methodologies may also provide different opportunities for critical reflection on life elements often taken for granted, or what Amin and Thrift (2002) term the ‘banality of the everyday life in the city’ (pp. 8–9). As Rose (2014) argued, VRM: involves the participants reflecting on their activities in a way that is not usually done; it gives them a distance from what they are usually immersed in and allows them to articulate thoughts and feelings that usually remain implicit. (p. 28) Visual research methodologies are particularly appropriate for citizen heritage approaches, as: Everyday seeing, and occlusion of those traversing, a responsibility; a

remembering and living is about an ethics of practice; the inclusion the histories of ‘others’ becomes then a collective responsibility for seeing, viewing and situating themselves in place. Looking is visceral, ethical and historically conscious practice. (Rose & Tolia-Kelly, 2012, p. 8) 453

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Rather than privileging depth over surface, this study takes a phenomenological approach in trying to understand the interaction with place and the meaning it holds (Smith, 2017), an interaction that involves ‘emotion, cognition and behaviour’ (Ponzetti, 2003 in Smith, 2017, p. 17). This chapter reports on a small-scale evaluation of the PastPort website (Smith et al., 2018), exploring the applicability of VRM to critically interrogate the relationship between citizen heritage, digital heritage technologies and sense of place.

Citizen heritage and VRM For the VRM pilot evaluation, six participants were selected. They were identified through a convenience sampling methodology (Morse, 2007). Most did not live in the local area of Port Melbourne, but all had visited. Rather than drawing wider conclusions from a representative sample, the study was primarily interested in testing the methodology to determine its applicability to aiding understanding of the emotional, cognitive and behavioural engagement with place. The methodology used was a two-stage process. In the first stage, participants wore audiovisual (AV) recording glasses as they walked around Port Melbourne using the website. The technology used was Pivothead Kudo Original glasses. The glasses record point -of-view video and audio (i.e., they move with the head of the participant and record); they also record what participants hear and say. The author had used these devices in two other VRM studies, but due to a number of instances in which the Pivothead glasses had not recorded, Geco Mark II audio visual recorders (which also record point-ofview video and audio) were added to the frames of the Pivothead glasses as a backup.2 Audiovisual recording glasses were chosen over GoPro cameras, as they were considered less conspicuous for participants and had the important advantage of moving with the head of the participant rather than being fixed to the front as with a GoPro camera. Participants were given a starting and end point within the suburb, but the route they took was decided by them. The recordings were then analysed by the author to determine key themes. Participants were then contacted to arrange a follow-up interview. During this interview, they watched the recording with the researcher. This interview followed a narrative methodology (Schorch, 2015; Schorch, Walton, Priest, & Paradies, 2015). Rather than having a specific set of questions, participants were asked to describe what they were viewing and what they did. Rather than the researcher guiding the interview, individual stories emerged, ‘co-constructed between the researcher and the participant’ (Creswell, 2013, p. 71) through the shared experience of watching the recording. Although only a pilot project, two key themes emerged from this research that could form the basis of further investigation: the curation of content and dialogical insideness. Therefore, the remainder of this chapter will outline these themes, before returning to an evaluation of VRM and its applicability to critically exploring digital technologies and citizen heritage.

‘An invitation to autonomy’ or ‘grudge reading’: navigating Port Melbourne The first major theme to emerge from the VRM interviews was the curation of content and the relationship between an open, flat structure in which the user determined where to go and how to access content, and a highly curated, didactic approach. As with previous evaluations of PastPort (Smith et al., 2018), there were some differences in the way that participants navigated their way around the suburb during their walk. While most 454

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used the website to decide where to go, others focused on the landscape around them, searching for sites that piqued their interest, which they would then engage with digitally via the website. The recording displayed the time spent examining the telephone and viewing the surrounding landscape. For some, PastPort was a filtering device for their journey. For example: Oh yes, so this was when I was trying to decide whether to go out onto that pier and seeing what there was to see. So, like, it looked a bit like [pause] the pathway to walk out onto the pier wasn’t very clear to me, and although that was something that would normally be an interesting area for me, it was a hot day, and I couldn’t quite figure out where I needed to walk, so I was using the [site] to figure out how interesting the spots out there would be. So, I was reading about what there was and then use that information to decide that I couldn’t be bothered. (B) However, when and where that filtering took place, and who did the filtering, was problematic. For several participants, PastPort was not didactive enough, particularly given the time they had to explore the area. One commented that they would have preferred a more structured tour, with the flat structure of the website data forcing them to spend considerable time trying to find information rather than enjoying the walk, which they considered ‘a barrier to enjoyment’. She would also have preferred to be given auditory clues as to places of interest. One participant, who had expressed excitement about the lack of structure, praising it as an ‘invitation to autonomy’ before using it, modified this view after using PastPort on a hot day. Reflecting on the comparison between PastPort and other history ‘apps’, which she argued had both higher production values and were more didactic, she suggested that this autonomy needed to be structured or guided: I think a mix, but it’s a mix … it doesn’t have to all be one thing so that it provides your difference point with other apps … This ‘invitation to autonomy’ is a very nice thing indeed, and that’s got to be one of your big promotion points about it, but I just think you could also throw in a few, like almost like, a little kite icon that just goes ‘oh you could do this’. But that’s not to, not to remove, it could be like a point of whimsy, so it’s not like you being didactic, it doesn’t have to been directive, it could be just a little floating balloon with a little message that says, not all the time, you know, why don’t you. Sometimes people just like a few ideas, I think, when they’re on a walk or a stroll, especially in an area that they don’t know. (C) The tension between autonomy and heteronomy was articulated by another participant: That experience of going through a patchy environment and finding the things you value is something that humans really enjoy, but on a hot windy day, ah, when you know you’ve only got so much time before you … it’s going to become an unpleasant experience. That’s actually a bit counter. (B) The need for structure was tempered, however, by an acknowledgement of the transitivity of the urban environment, which involved: 455

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making your own experience. It wouldn’t make any sense. If you made it a slicker experience, it could evolve into something where you could just sit in your armchair at home, and you wouldn’t need to be there [in the field] and you could just push the button, but that would be more like entertainment, than something that you just played with, created yourself. (B) Further, the structure of PastPort allowed the creation of an individual experience akin to a visit to a museum, and the participant used her experiences of different types of exhibition to reflect on PastPort: Just going through the blockbuster exhibition and listening to the same audio that everyone else is listening to, that’s one end of the spectrum, which isn’t very appealing, but this is probably a little bit too close to the other end of the spectrum where there is a little bit too much work. (B) This was exacerbated by the weather. When viewing the recording of their journey, many participants commented on the act of walking: of the hard work of both the physical activity, but also of their engagement with the website. For participant B, there was too much of what she termed ‘grudge reading’: ‘reading where I have to read this to figure out whether it’s worth walking up this street’ (B). Like grudge purchases or grudge spending, the (nonconspicuous) consumption of good and services, such as insurance, are necessary but generally unenjoyable (Loader, Goold, & Thumala, 2015). Other participants used words such as ‘strolling’, ‘ambling’ and ‘wandering’ to describe their experience. For example: That there was something there to go and have a look at, rather than, umm, ahhh, following a particular topic of interest, or I’m looking to find out about so and so’s house, who I remember living here … because I don’t think I know anyone who’s lived there so, but it wasn’t that kind of motivation, it was, I was definitely ambling, definitely ah … ambling? What’s the word? Wandering? Yes, there wasn’t any direction, but I had these, had these spots where I could go and, go and find out about things. And generally, I found that in this area I found out that the information. (S) The differences can be partly explained by the differences in perceptions of the time that they had to spend using PastPort. Each participant was given an hour to walk around Port Melbourne. Some, like S and C, viewed this as a time for wandering, an invitation to spend time in the suburb, enjoying the transitivity of the urban environment (Amin & Thrift, 2002). Others, such as A and B, felt constrained by the time and frustrated that the website did not provide them with a structured way of engaging with the area.

Dialogical insideness: surface and depth The role of heritage in creating and maintaining a sense of place has long been recognised (Malpas, 2008). An engagement with stories of place can be a resource through which attachment to place can be formed. As Stephanie Hawke (2012) argued, this sense of 456

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‘autobiographical insideness’ can often form very quickly. Most participants did not live in the suburb, and while most used the website as a de facto tour guide, with varying degrees of success, S used the website in a different way. S, as mentioned earlier, described his movement through the area as ‘wandering’. At a particular point, watching the recording with the authors, he recalled an imaginary episode that he experienced during his walk: So, I was imagining meeting someone down the street, and them asking me what I was doing, and they would go ‘well blah, blah, blah lived here’ and that kind of thing. Because the feeling that people had lived there for a long time, like in their houses, so that they would have lots of stories about their neighbourhood. (S) Pushed for an explanation he explained why this imaginary encounter had arisen: Just because I was doing quite an odd activity, walking round with these funny glasses on holding a phone, and kinda, not really walking with any purpose, other than what was on the phone, aah, that, yeah, being drawn into a conversation, as a way to meet a local. (S) The imaginary conversation allowed a dialogue to take place between him and the (imaginary) resident: ‘Look at this, have you seen this about your houses?’; ‘Aww yeah, as it so happens I live just over there’ (S). For this dialogue to occur, S required the intimacy of local knowledge. Interested in ordinary ‘everyday’ heritage (Atkinson, 2007), S wanted locals’ stories of place rather than generic accounts by ‘experts’. When discussing his use of audio on the website, he suggested that: I didn’t think it was very interesting. It was a bit … it was an architecture, or a specialist on the architecture of the houses, and ah, I was expecting to hear the voice of the … locals or something. Although he was not a resident, S had visited the area before. Not only was PastPort a legitimation of his presence as an outsider, he wanted to use it to promote conversations about the area with a ‘local’. Such an encounter helps complicate current understandings of the role of heritage in identity formation. While not articulating a sense of appropriating stories of place himself—this is not autobiographical—S wanted the website to mediate his engagement with people and place: what we are terming a dialogic rather than an autobiographical insideness. This dialogic insideness is reflected in his both his use of PastPort (wandering) and the kinds of information that he was interested in (the ‘ordinary’ heritage of fences, concrete roads or a remnant archway). One way of understanding this encounter would be to view it as a search for depth, prompting an attachment to place through ‘the steady accretion of sentiment’ (Tuan, 1977, p. 33). However, contemporary theories of identify formation, especially those based on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, complicate the distinction between surface and depth. For Bakhtin (1984): Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and needs. (in Morson & Emerson, 1990 p. 293) 457

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Such an approach, as well as reminding us that encounters with the urban landscape are cognitive, emotional and behavioural (Ponzetti, 2003 in Smith, 2017), foregrounds heritage as a ‘dialogical space’ (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010, p. 6) through which a range of conversations can happen. S articulated a ‘process of positioning and repositioning, not only in relation to other people but also in relation to themselves’ (Hermans & HermansKonopka, 2010, p. 7). This imaginary conversation, using the resources provided by PastPort, suggests a way of overcoming dichotomies between surface and depth in theories of attachment to place.

Methodological issues The use of VRM in this study provided many benefits. On numerous occasions, participants reflected on what they were seeing; witnessing their behaviour prompted laughter, selfreflection, additional levels of information to do with the senses (for example, sounds of insects: ‘I didn’t notice that on the day’) and occasional embarrassment. However, several practical issues affected the success of the research. The first issue is technological failure. Two of the AV recordings failed, with either corrupted files or a complete failure to record. While some of this is may be due to the relative newness and fragility of the technology, the glasses are easily turned on and off, so user error cannot be discounted. With the first incident, the participant was willing and able to spend another period using the app in Port Melbourne, but the second was not able to do so in the time frame for the research, so this data could not be included. The second issue is the significant amount of additional time needed to undertake this three-stage approach. Compared to talkonly interviews, the researcher needs to spend significant additional time watching the video and making notes before the interview. The recording of bodily movement—a key advantage of VRM over talk-only interviews— was also a drawback for researchers and participants. Unlike GoPro cameras, which are fixed forward and move with the body, the AV recording glasses moved constantly with the head of the participant, either up and down while using the app, or from side-to-side as participants glanced around them. Watching the recording prompted one participant to comment that he felt ‘seasick’, and the researcher needed constant breaks in watching the recordings prior to the interviews, again adding to the time needed to complete the research. The position of the glasses also created line-of-sight issues. The glasses move with the head, not the eyes. When participants looked down, the camera did not capture how they physically used the app, where they clicked, or how long they dwelled on particular pieces of information. Although some studies use eye-tracking technology, these studies are laboratory-based, and are not useful for the field. Therefore, future studies will use screen-recording applications to record the mobile telephone screen, which can then be viewed at the same time as the glasses recording. While these issues are not prohibitive, a more fundamental challenge to VRM was raised by the wearing of the glasses by participants. Although not any larger than many sports sunglasses, most participants felt self-conscious or conspicuous wearing them, especially if they used clear lenses. One commented: Oh yeah and I talked to someone [laughing]. They were giving me funny looks. [Q: did you feel uncomfortable?]. I didn’t [when I was] wearing them, but I think people could see that they weren’t quite obviously. [pause]. It was only people if I was close up them, not if I was passing. (C) 458

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However, for this participant, this was not an issue because of the area through which she was walking: Not really, because it’s Port Melbourne … you know [laughs]. Not at all conspicuous. You get all sorts of people, wearing all sorts of things, all the time. It was only, the specs weren’t obviously sunshades, and they weren’t obviously glasses. (C) Another commented: ‘Yeah, yeah, it felt like a bit of a performance. You feel very conscious of everything that you are looking at, even though it doesn’t look like [you are recording]’(S). This was particularly the case as this participant talked to himself during his walk: [Responding to hearing himself speaking on tape] When I hear myself on tape, I feel as though I’m performing, just very conscious of being recorded, but that’s OK, it’s the nature of the thing. (S) Another participant expressed embarrassment about wearing the glasses. She was conscious of how she would look, researched the glasses online before using them, ‘and then deliberately chose to wear something sporty so that people would think that I had just come from some kind of sport thing’ (B). Not only did she modify her clothing during the research, she also modified her behaviour. She noted that she did not say hello to as many dogs as she would normally greet, not wanting to invite interaction that might prompt a discussion and reveal that she was recording the event. Another participant was comfortable wearing the glasses but reiterated her dislike of walking and using the telephone at the same time. The final methodology-related issue was the time allocated for using the website. The necessity of providing the glasses at the start of the walk and collecting them at the end, as well as accommodating participants busy schedules, meant that they were given an hour to use the app before meeting a member of the research team. Some participants commented on the time pressure and were conscious of the need to be at the agreed meeting point at a certain time.

Conclusions While only a small pilot study within the larger citizen heritage research project, the use of VRM has raised interesting questions and opportunities for future research. Visual research methodologies allow access to different types of sensory information than that offered by talk-only interviews. The AV recording glasses also provide an opportunity to investigate movement across landscapes, the ‘in-between places’ (Paulos & Jenkins, 2005). Further, VRM allowed participants to critically reflect on the usefulness of PastPort as a guide, critiquing its ability to help them co-curate their experience of place. The ability to watch their journey allowed them to re-experience it and brought back the difficulties of use, but also the bodily sensations of their engagement with place. Importantly, this ability to critically reflect on their own encounters with place did not take the form of an autobiographical insideness, but rather what we are terming a ‘dialogical insideness’, where heritage and the stories of the everyday provide the resources for a conversation that can make us feel connected. This helps to complicate place attachment; the notion of ‘dialogical insideness’ has been used to suggest an alternative way of thinking about the role of ‘ordinary’ heritage 459

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spaces. How might a such a concept inform alternative approaches to citizen heritage and the design of digital technologies? Visual research methodologies also highlighted issues with the use of digital technologies in facilitating engagement with place. For some, the use of the PastPort website on the telephone was challenging and a barrier to engagement: looking down, rather than around, proved a distraction. Participants also had high expectations about production values (based on use of other heritage applications); the look, feel and usability of the website fell below these expectations. Visual research methodologies is not a panacea for understanding the emotional, cognitive and behavioural engagement with place. It has many of the limitations of other methodologies. It is also very time-consuming and requires extensive resources to be able to generate meaningful data. However, as an opportunity to create new conversations with participants, we found it a useful way to explore the relationship between digital heritage technologies and place attachment, one that complicates sense of place and starts to approximate the messiness of our attachments to, and our understandings and use of, ‘ordinary’ landscapes. Acknowledgements This research was funded by the Australian Research Council through a Discovery Grant (DP140101188). The authors would like to thank Dr Paulette Wallace and Dr Donna-Lee Frieze for assistance with this project.

Notes 1 Dora sadly passed away during the writing of this chapter. She will be remembered as an insightful, kind and generous colleague and will be much missed by all who knew her. 2 The technology used were Pivothead Original AV glasses (www.pivothead.com/) and Geco cameras (http://gecocam.com/). These projects included using the Pivothead glasses to record urban transects as part of an investigation into the implementation of the Historic Urban Landscape approach in Ballarat (Cooke & Buckley, 2018) and understanding student engagement with education programmes at a Holocaust museum (Cooke & Frieze, 2017).

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41 Massive digital community archives in Colombia An international partnership towards peace Diego Merizalde and Jon Voss

Introduction This chapter explores a partnership between the National Library of Colombia, with its national network of public libraries, and Historypin.org, a global non-profit that seeks to strengthen communities through local history and story-sharing. This project highlights: the potential role of cultural heritage organisations to make lasting social impact through civic engagement, methods for designing digital content creation and community engagement along with technical infrastructure, the democratising potential of placing the power of cultural narrative in the hands of many, and how a digital cultural project allowed us to reach an entire nation during an essential time of peace-building. Sutatenza, Colombia is a small town several hours’ drive outside of the capital city of Bogota. In September 2017, we visited the public library—a small, white-washed concrete building with a tin roof, located just off a steep, brick-paved street heading towards the town centre. The library was hosting a community memory event, with people sharing stories and snapshots about the town’s history. Inside, the library was filled with bright colours along the walls, and literally hundreds of black and white photographs hanging on strings, like clotheslines across the library. More than 20 people sat around tables that had been pushed together in the centre of the library, with the photographs hanging all around (Figure 41.1). There was frequent laughter as people shared stories about the photographs they noticed. In particular, they recalled with pride Radio Sutatenza, an educational radio programme that began in the 1970s and became a national phenomenon, using the technology of community radio to run educational programmes throughout the remote countryside of Colombia. However, the people of Sutatenza were not alone in these community memory sessions. Across the country, people were gathering at their local public library to participate in storysharing events around historical photographs, while also digitising them, recording some of

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Figure 41.1 Residents of Sutatenza gather at the public library to share stories of the town’s history and provide background on photos that are part of the library’s collection. Source: Historypin.

the stories and digitally mapping the photographs and stories to the very spot the photographs were taken. In 2016, the National Library of Colombia launched a programme to reach over 900 public libraries in all regions of the country, with the aim of providing innovative cultural services to communities and strengthening use of technology to access information. As part of the curriculum to create these capacities in public libraries, the National Library of Colombia partnered with Historypin to digitise and map community snapshots of history (Comparte Tu Rollo). The project surprised everyone with its success, as the intergenerational workshops struck a nerve with Colombian citizens leveraging personal history to imagine new and more inclusive possibilities for the country.

The role of community-based archives in the path to peace In the second half of the 20th century, Colombia endured a wave of violence that has been reproduced in different shapes ever since. In the 1950s and 1960s, the main cause of conflict was the politics of a bipartisan country with serious rural unrest that unfolded in systematic attacks, led by partisan militias and terrorists in the countryside. Later, there was a pact between both parties to alternate power every four years for almost two decades, and with it, the exclusion of other political expressions. It was in this context that—in the early 1960s, after the Cuban revolution—various guerrillas formed and added new elements to the Colombian conflict.

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In the 1970s, the rural violence persisted while the nascent traffic of marijuana grew, profiting from the social chaos. The drug trafficking that began during the previous decade evolved in the 1980s from marijuana to cocaine, and with it, Colombia sank into wideranging corruption and a new and dreadful wave of urban violence was propagated by the drug cartels. By the end of the 1980s, four presidential candidates were assassinated during their campaigns for the 1990 elections, the Minister of Justice was murdered in his car in Bogota, and journalists and union leaders constantly disappeared. However, in the early 1990s, in the midst of their darkest days, Colombians came together in an unprecedented political mobilisation that invited all parties, social movements and ethnicities to sign a new constitution in 1991. Its spirit was to give the nation a new hopeful and collective purpose of which all Colombians could feel a part. Diversity, inclusion and participation became the ingredients to transform the country and help direct it to a desperately needed peace. Since that pivotal moment, it has taken Colombia almost 25 years to effectively reduce violence and sign a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In November 2016, with the introduction of a longawaited truce between the government and FARC, all social actors had a fresh chance to focus their attention on fulfilling the peace promise of the constitution and effectively integrate distant and vulnerable communities into the national project.

Building a cultural infrastructure to celebrate Colombia’s diversity alongside the peace process Colombia has a national network of over 1,400 public libraries. These cultural institutions are coordinated at the national level by the Ministry of Culture, through the National Library of Colombia. At the local level, public libraries depend on secretaries of culture at the municipal and departmental levels. In 2011, the Ministry of Culture of Colombia became a grantee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Libraries programme. The intention of this grant was to enable at least 1,200 public libraries within the national network to provide innovative cultural services to their communities and strengthen their capacity to use digital tools for that purpose. The source of the funding had a significant impact on the design of the programme because it: (i) secured the financial sustainability of the initiative in the medium-term, (ii) encouraged higher levels of learning and innovation, relative to the traditional restrictions that public funds create in these areas and iii) opened a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to introduce a coordinated nationwide curriculum of activities in public libraries, which disrupted the traditional jurisdiction of local secretaries of culture. Soon after the pilot programme began in 2011, the government of Colombia, together with a delegation of FARC, surprised the public with an announcement from Oslo—a precise agenda to negotiate peace between the government and the guerrilla movement would be put into motion. As the peace negotiations evolved and provided perspective into the requirements of peace-building in Colombia, the public libraries programme was being designed simultaneously to support these efforts. With a prospective peace treaty in the works, cultural institutions like public libraries were stepping up by asserting their capacity to create inclusive spaces where people could connect and shape a national project based on diversity and participation, priorities that had been long lost in the midst of conflict and violence. With clear incentives to innovate and broaden the perspectives of what could be achieved in public libraries (Coward, McClay & Garrido, 2018) and an increasing sense of living through a tipping point in Colombian history, the National Library of Colombia began 465

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looking for partners nationally and internationally, to facilitate the social change the country required through innovative cultural services. The National Library of Colombia had an interest in heritage, while building new, powerful and inclusive narratives about the national identity that could transcend the recent conflict and potentially reach out to nearly all municipalities through its national network of public libraries. Historypin has global expertise in crowdsourcing historical information at the community level and had already fine-tuned a set of creative digital tools to encourage people to become involved and interested in the process. The result of the partnership between both institutions was the creation of one of the most important digital community photographic archival projects in Colombia.

Creating simple activities for national community participation From inception, the overall aim of this project was to encourage as many people from as many parts of the country as possible to attend events at local public libraries to share historical photographs and collectively build the local history behind each picture. By expanding the co-creation of national heritage to include diverse voices, the project sought to build trust and strengthen connections among communities. The aim was to design a programme that was iterative in nature, with three simple activities that could be adapted locally, have a direct social impact, increase the adoption of digital skills and necessarily result in digital outputs. The National Library of Colombia team had assembled a plan for a systematic rollout to nearly 1,000 libraries in two rounds of training, supported by 29 tutors, or trainers, that would work closely with the project management team to gain a clear understanding of the three programmes. The tutors would then spread out around the regions of the country to train librarians at each library. Together with an international team of programme directors, service designers, digital designers and trainers, there was a need to design analogue guides and tools for facilitators, all of which could be included in a box that was shipped to each library, and a digital interface that could accommodate many contributions. Finally, there was a need to translate Historypin into Spanish. By March 2016, the activities had been determined, the materials designed and the training manuals written—all in time for the Historypin service designer to return to Bogota to train the 29 tutors, who would train regional librarians when they received their equipment and programme box. The programme activities were simple: 1) Local libraries and community members would share historical photographs and discuss them around a ‘wheel of emotion’, collectively deciding how a photograph made people feel. Was it happy, sad or nostalgic? This activity was strictly analogue. 2) A number of photographs that had been discussed would be ‘pinned’ on a map as an optional step. First, they would need to be geolocated—the process of determining where the photograph was taken. If the photograph was taken in a known spot of the municipality, the libraries could choose to form smaller groups to go to the location and take a photograph from the same spot. This introduced a digital component, though most people did not consider it as such (which was a good thing, as it eliminated the risk of technology being a barrier against people, particularly elders, participating in the activity). 3) The final step involved returning to the library to write a short story or description about the photograph in a notepad designed for the activity, along with fields for several 466

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details (e.g. location, date, etc.). These fields would be used in the Historypin digital interface, which was the last step participants would complete—scanning the photograph and uploading it to Historypin along with the gathered metadata.

From community action to digital preservation In the meantime, an international team focused on the digital development that would power this project. The National Library of Colombia’s digital team worked closely with the Historypin teams in San Francisco, London and Sofia to design a digital framework that would allow for pinning tens of thousands of photographs across the country by adapting the existing Historypin platform, and create a way to showcase the content. Historypin created a custom user interface for the project, utilising the colour palate and design specified by the National Library of Colombia graphic designer. Historypin simplified the overall website design and use of navigation words to enable translation teams to make the site available in multiple languages. This international collaboration resulted in the improvement of the Historypin platform. It reduced costs due to the use of an existing platform and avoided the creation of yet another one-off digital humanities project. While the digital build clearly had to meet the needs of the project, the Colombian team achieved their digital goals while also making a valuable free resource more easily accessible to the Spanish-speaking world (which was soon after followed by translations in French, Greek and Bulgarian thanks to volunteer translation teams). To facilitate the long-term preservation of the community content generated in this national project, two things were necessary: that contributors understood their options for

Figure 41.2 Community photographs shared on the Comparte Tu Rollo/Historypin site by Biblioteca Pública Municipal Guavatá. Source: Biblioteca Pública Municipal Guavatá, CC-BY.

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licensing text and media content, and that the National Library of Colombia had a way to harvest this information and map it appropriately to their catalogue. The Historypin platform already enabled contributors to choose any Creative Commons licence, although it was necessary to contextualise this information to ensure that librarians and individual contributors understood the implications. The digital platform defaulted to Creative Commons by Attribution, though that could easily be changed to appropriate licences. Further, it was made clear that this was a national project that was in participation with the National Library of Colombia and would be contributed to the national archives. To that end, Historypin used an application programming interface to make on-demand data downloads available to the National Library of Colombia. The National Library of Colombia archives and cataloguing team mapped the fields to their own collection management system, retained the licensing information and all other metadata and added the entirety of the collection into the permanent archives of Colombia. This addition to the archives offers a never-before-seen snapshot of community life spanning many decades of Colombian history, from the local ceremonies of rural communities, to portraits of early jazz musicians, to a national love of cycling and much more (Figure 41.2). As the project came to a close in April 2018, more than 10,000 photographs and stories had been contributed, with digital collections created in more than 900 libraries. Nearly 70 per cent of all Colombian municipalities were represented, including every region of the country. The project recorded more than 200,000 visits to approximately 6,600 workshops nationwide. Due to social media training as part of the technology programme, these photographs were shared even more broadly, inspiring far-reaching conversations on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The digitised content only scratched the surface, with many hundreds more photographs shared and proudly displayed on the walls of libraries across Colombia. Importantly, the digital collection process did not extract or remove these important physical artefacts from the communities, nor was the process meant to meet archival standards. These photographs and stories belong to the communities from which they came; it was left to them to decide which photographs and stories they wanted to share with the nation and the world. While there was certainly debate among the archivists on the team, there was a consensus that there was much more to be gained by gathering a sampling of the community-based archives in existence than to demand high-resolution archival-standard scans of photographs that would have greatly reduced the contributions. This also provided the opportunity for journalists to go back and further explore the content with those that shared it, creating another website featuring those stories (Nación Revelada).

Measuring social impact To evaluate the impact of the nationwide innovative cultural services on public library users, the National Library of Colombia conducted: (i) an extensive qualitative assessment of the perception of these activities and (ii) an experiment to assess the impact that the workshops had on creating trust and facilitating connections between people—building social capital. The theory of change that laid the foundations for the impact evaluation model argued that cultural institutions have an especially high potential to mobilise social capital. Cultural activities bring people together, are excellent mediators for dialogue and tend to facilitate connections (Gaitán and Merizalde, 2016). To rigorously measure the effect of the curriculum on the social capital of users, the National Library of Colombia hired the Centro Nacional de Consultoría, a Colombian 468

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consulting firm with extensive experience in programme impact evaluations. The first step of the evaluation was to build a social capital index, through which a baseline could be drawn. The baseline could then evaluate the changes that users showed in six different, equally weighted dimensions: (i) empathy, (ii) leadership and empowerment, (iii) participation, (iv) peaceful conflict resolutions, (v) sense of belonging to the community and (vi) positive expectations about the future. The impact of the curriculum on each of these areas was evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively. The qualitative results, based on 15 different focus groups in public libraries, before and after implementing the curriculum, showed how working with historic photographs made: (i) a deep impression on people and expanded their sense of belonging to their towns, and (ii) opened new opportunities to participate in community life. Figure 41.3 shows some of the stronger drivers that explain how the history co-creation workshops affected these two dimensions.

Figure 41.3 The theory of change illustrates the potential of history co-creation workshops to increase social capital in local communities. Source: Historypin.

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The quantitative research was conducted through a questionnaire, performed in a sample of 129 public libraries—half were users who participated in the workshops and half were users who did not—before and after the programme came to the libraries. The experiment used a ‘differences-in-differences’ approach, which assumes that the group that did not participate in the programme will behave the same as the participants would if the programme did not exist. In other words, the differences observed after the intervention between the two groups of users, participants and non-participants, shows actual impact. The results were impressive. In less than one year, the programme had a significant 12 per cent impact on the social capital indices of the participant users (the treatment group), especially in adults, relative to library users who did not participate in the programme (the control group).

Conclusion It is in the historical context of Colombia that the digital community-based archives organised through the partnership of the National Library of Colombia and Historypin acquire their full symbolic value. After a painful and long conflict, the country has built a collection of historical photographs with the participation of thousands of people and voices from across the country. Colombian history has never before had a richer and more diverse contribution from communities. That in itself is an inspiring symbol of peace and a compass on which other cultural projects can focus their peace-building efforts.

References Comparte Tu Rollo. Retrieved from http://comparteturollo.gov.co/ Coward, C., McClay, C. & Garrido, M. (2018). Public libraries as platforms for civic engagement. Seattle, WA: Technology & Social Change Group, University of Washington Information School. Retrieved from https://tascha.uw.edu/publications/public-libraries-as-platforms-for-civic-engagement/ Gaitán, C. & Merizalde, D. (2016, August). Los Servicios Bibliotecarios en Latinoamérica Como Acciones Para la Movilización Del Capital Social y Fuentes de Desarrollo: El Caso Colombiano. Poster session presented at the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) annual meeting, Dublin, Ohio. Retrieved from https://issuu.com/proyectotic/docs/20160616_servicios_bibliotecarios_l Nación Revelada. Retrieved from https://nacionrevelada.com/

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42 Mapping an archive of emotions Place, memory and the affective histories of Perth’s riverscape Alicia Marchant

Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding about them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water’s edge … by the beautiful, the beautiful river. (Tim Winton, Cloudstreet, 1991, p.1)

Derbarl Yerrigan/The Swan and Djarlgarro Beelier/Canning river systems run through the heart of the city of Perth in Western Australia. These rivers and their connected tributaries, lakes and estuaries that hold salt or fresh water (sometimes a mixture of both), consist of waterfalls, springs, riverbanks, headlands, stone cliffs and many beaches that stretch out across the coastal plain and beyond, covering 2,000 square kilometres. For millennia, these water systems have had cultural, social, historical and spiritual significance, as places of recreation, movement and transportation, exploration and encounter. They are sacred spaces of ancient creation by the serpent, the Waugal, a place of birthing, healing and initiation, and a critical source of food and water, for fishing, hunting and farming (Hallam, 1981; Nannup, 2008); these rivers are an ideal and idyllic place to live beside. River corridors are complex places that consist of a variety of intertwined elements that are constantly changing and in flux, through natural processes such as tides, winds and floods, and through human intervention. Higher up from the rivers, the waters are dammed and piped for drinking water, while the river bodies themselves are collectors of pollution, sewerage, rubbish and run-off. River banks have been managed for erosion, and sites around the rivers have been developed as harbours and jetties, breweries and bridges. Rivers then, as historian Sue Graham-Taylor (2011) points out, are sites where ‘human action and environmental change are intertwined’, and as such are not simply ‘the backdrop against which human actions are played out but instead play an active role in historical processes’. Rivers are

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not stagnant or passive entities, rather, rivers do things, encouraging and contributing to specific actions and emotions. How can you capture the entangled connections between the human and non-human components of the Perth river corridor? How can you map the emotions of place? These questions prompted the development of the Rivers of Emotion: An Emotional History of the Derbarl Yerrigan and Djarlgarro Beelier/the Swan and Canning Rivers project, which actively ran between 2012 and 2014 in partnership between the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE) at the University of Western Australia and National Trust of Australia (WA).1 Building on CHE’s research priorities, which include the study of historicised emotional experience and understanding the ways European emotional regimes shaped, and continue to shape, modern Australia, the Rivers of Emotion project mapped and documented the systems of values, emotions and attitudes that are critical to place and place-making. This value system is key to the rivers’ preservation, development or neglect, and in turn, when actions and changes to the river system and its health take place, feelings and opinions are shaped by this value system. This project, then, asked: how have human actions, behaviours and emotions shaped the rivers, and in turn, how have the rivers shaped human actions, behaviours and emotions? A range of digital and scholarly infrastructure was created during the Rivers of Emotion project to ask a broad cross-section of communities attached to the water corridors: ‘how do the rivers make you feel?’. In an expansion of this, in the interests of documenting historic and changing emotions: ‘how did people feel about the rivers in the past?’. As this chapter will explore, while these questions are seemingly simple in their design, they have deep conceptual underpinnings; it allowed for targeted case studies on the individual (the ‘you’ of the questions) and the ways memories, emotional practices and lived experiences create and maintain place. The theoretical underpinning of the Rivers of Emotion project draws upon new approaches informed by the history of emotions, and concepts of place and heritage studies, to explore the emotional histories of the rivers and map an archive of emotions. Emotions and affect are currently a burgeoning area of research in many scholarly disciplines. In heritage and GLAM studies, emotions scholarship has focused on the ways individuals and communities produce, perform and experience heritage through acts of nostalgia, remembering and recalling, preservation, curation and management (Haldrup & Bærenholdt, 2015). Questions revolve around how emotions are used, evoked and manipulated within heritage settings, in visitor experiences, and motivations for visiting heritage sites and museums (Sather-Wagstaff, 2016). The project took emotions as an analytical lens through which to understand people, resources and values, across time and place, and critically, provided a digital space in which private memories, reminiscences and feelings of connection to the Perth riverscape and its histories could be articulated in the public sphere. The project’s rendering of personal and interior articulations of emotions into shared, exterior practices is significant, and draws on a body of scholarship around the practice of emotions. Emotions theorists such as Sara Ahmed (2004) have come to view emotional articulation not as interior states within individual narrators, but as social and cultural practices formed in the relationship between bodies, objects and subjects. In this respect, the Rivers of Emotion project captured the private emotions of place, and the personal emotional practices associated with place and place-making. The applied Rivers of Emotion model has wide-ranging application for sites of recognised heritage, and meaningfully, places of human engagement more generally. It created a significant and valuable digital archive of social memories and emotions concerning the rivers, articulated through storytelling and nostalgic recollections (childhood memories of 472

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prawning for instance), films, interviews, photographs and creative engagements. This chapter will centre on the design, management and curation strategies of the Rivers of Emotion project, and the twofold significance of the collected digital archive that was both assembled from and contributes to existing GLAM institutions through additional interpretation, connection to place and recognition of emotional resonance. Secondary to this discussion will be analysis of how affective and embodied experiences, memories and emotional practices create place, and contribute to senses of place, within both digital and non-digital contexts.

Designing the Rivers of Emotion digital archive The intellectual content and framework of the Rivers of Emotion project, its practical facilitation, the collection, curation and analysis of the gathered materials occurred in three developmental phases. The first phase focused on consultation and initiating key strategies to seek advice from the public and relevant stakeholders about the design, concepts and terminology, and desired outcomes of the project. From this consultation process, digital and scholarly infrastructure was developed, such as the critical web platform. The second phase involved data collection in the web platform, and in parallel, the employment of strategies to broaden the scope, variety and quantity of public contributions to the project. The third phase of the project centred on analysis of the archive, particularly through scholarly publications. A Rivers Symposium was convened at the University of Western Australia early in the two-year project to establish best practice in the design of the key media platforms, and the conceptual underpinnings through which the multiple stories and perspectives of the river could be told, shared and displayed. The symposium was attended by Noongar elders, historians, artists, sailors, representatives of local governments, and representatives from sporting groups and cultural institutions, who offered different perspectives on the river as quite literally a fluid space: a natural resource, a recreation space and a spaced space. Critically, categories like ‘rivers’ were discussed and debated. Noongar elders spoke of a different perspective on the boundaries of water bodies, stating that rivers do not begin and end at the water’s edge, but flow through all that is nourished by them; thus, rivers consist of the waters and the land, humans and animals (Port-Louis, 2012). The presentations and discussion were filmed, and with permission, were made freely available through YouTube, and later through the Rivers of Emotion website. These have become important resources for the community of the Swan and Canning River corridor, and have been accessed locally and internationally. The findings and discussions of the symposium led to the development of an intellectual framework for the project and design for a new media platform. This web platform had many demands. It needed to have emotions and senses of identity and place conceptually embedded within its design; it needed to be attentive to the multiple perceptions and viewpoints about the rivers and its spatial boundaries from time frames that ranged from deep history to contemporary times. Moreover, the design needed to be able to archive and display multiple types of media—including narrative, sound, pictorial and film formats—and critically, as content was user-driven and community focused, the website needed to be easy to navigate for those of varying levels of digital literacy, both for general access to the archive, and for contributors to upload their own data. The final design was developed by the two leaders of the project, Professor Susan Broomhall (UWA) and Gina Pickering (National Trust/Latitude Creative Services), who worked closely with web-designer Andrei Nikulinsky to achieve these aims. The final website, which used the Drupal Content Management System, had several key innovations. First, the 473

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Figure 42.1 Introductory Page—The Rivers of Emotion project. Source: Susan Broomhall and Gina Pickering.

Rivers of Emotion home page (see Figure 42.1) set the tone for the information that followed, providing a welcome and critical information about the project’s content for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. This included information about sensitive images and names and discussions of ancestors on the site. From the welcome portal, active participants who wanted to upload content were asked to register and reminded that their content was to appear in the public domain. Registered contributors then became ‘members’ of the Rivers of Emotion project, which led to the creation of an online community, cohered by their emotional attachments to the rivers. The uploaded material was moderated by an administrator, with the user content only posted within the public domain after its approval, to protect against offensive content. The website was designed for content to be curated into three overarching themes. First, content was curated according to media format—Riverscenes (videos), Riversights (images), Riversounds (audio) and Riverstories (narrative accounts). For instance, images associated with the rivers, such as photographs and paintings, were gathered in Riversights (see Figure 42.2). Second, content was further curated through place, and third, through emotion. When providing content, contributors were asked to plot location on an interactive digital map, and to tag the emotions words that described their river story. This was conducted to construct an emotions word cloud (see Figure 42.3). I will consider the significance of this in greater depth shortly, but the map and emotions word cloud were important in their display of the affective histories of the rivers. Emotion ‘hotspots’ are easily identified on the map, such as around Kings Park, while the word cloud displayed the dominant feelings and emotions through a scale of font sizes; with larger font denoting the more frequent and popular river emotions, such as ‘happy’, ‘love’ and ‘surprise’. Clicking on the various map icons (marked using symbols denoting media type, such as a speaker for ‘sound’) will take you to the full recorded entry, while clicking on the emotions word will take to you to a collection of other entries that also contain that emotion. 474

Figure 42.2 Example of the Riversights collection within the Rivers of Emotion archive. Source: Susan Broomhall and Gina Pickering.

Figure 42.3 The interactive map and word cloud. Source: Susan Broomhall and Gina Pickering.

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Collecting the Rivers of Emotion digital archive The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. (Rukeyser, 1968) From the outset, in terms of its content and infrastructure, the project was designed so that everyone could contribute. With the Rivers of Emotion digital infrastructure launched, content began to be uploaded, forming a new archive. The collected materials varied, and responses utilised the many media formats provided. Many contributors provided written narrative memories, commonly reminiscing about the past, such as Margaret McLean’s nostalgic reflection of a hot summer’s day on the river in the 1940s. Others provided artistic responses, sculpted or painted, or wrote about the peaceful and calming effects of the estuarine environment. Others submitted videos of water swirling under a bridge or jellyfish slowly floating along. Through the Rivers of Emotion project, an important archive of social memories and recollections emerged, which capture the emotions associated with the river from a range of perspectives, and documents changing value frameworks and cultural understandings. The archive reveals numerous, complex social and personal engagements with the river. To broaden the scope of the collection and ensure the project included a broad crosssection of people, a public education programme was developed. A range of workshops was conducted in schools and with mature age learning association groups. An education officer employed by CHE developed a series of educational packs for teachers in classrooms and led many of the workshops. Moreover, support was offered for members of the public who did not have access to a computer or felt they did not have the digital skills to upload materials themselves. Several interviews were conducted and uploaded in this way. A booklet was produced, An Emotional history of Derbarl Yerrigan and Djarlgarro beelier/the Swan and Canning Rivers (2012), written by Susan Broomhall and Gina Pickering. This booklet included a range of scholarly material on emotions and rivers, and provided priming content and examples of materials already captured by the digital infrastructure. The booklet was distributed to every local library and school around the river as an educational tool and to encourage participation and engagement with the digital format. The Rivers of Emotion project provided a critical framework and infrastructure that encouraged and supported research and the digitisation of assets, both private and public. Many contributors searched through their family archives and records, digitised and uploaded items like photographs. As a result, new source materials about the rivers from private collections were identified and digitised, some made available within a public forum for the first time. Importantly, some participants actively sought materials—art works, maps and material objects—held public collecting intuitions, conducting private historical inquiry. This included the major holding institutions of WA, and smaller collections held in local libraries and historical societies (see Figure 42.2). In terms of what was collected, and critically, how it was collected, the content was largely driven by people with an interest in the river—the public—rather than any one GLAM institution. The use of volunteers and ‘crowdsourcing’ to aid in the transcription, cataloguing, digitisation and refining of materials held within GLAM institutions has been well documented, as has the significant contribution of the public in providing new and unique content, to expand the scope and depth of existing collections (Eveleigh, 2014; Navarrete, 2013; Owens, 2014). The Rivers of Emotion project utilised both these frameworks; however, the innovation of this gathered archive and its methods of collection lies in its focus on the individual, and the extent to which the material is centred around them, their curiosity and

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drive for historical inquiry, and their desire to share personal and family memories and knowledge (Purkis, 2017). It is the individual who shapes the archive and directs its content. The Rivers of Emotion digital infrastructure provides the public with a viable tool with which to investigate and explore, which in turn makes various GLAM resources more accessible to the public and contributes to the democratisation of heritage and heritage practices (Blackburn, 2013). The project’s focus on emotions was important in its inclusivity, as everyone has emotions and could participate. Combined with insight into individuals’ private lives and life experiences, this provided unique perspectives that have numerous benefits for GLAM institutions. Contributors not only aided in the creation of a new digital archive, they also provided significant interpretation and analysis to existing collections. It provided items like the ‘Hot Pool’ photograph (see Figure 42.2) and places them in a local library collection with a new layer of emotion and personal interpretation. It flags the items’ place within wider historical and social contexts, beyond the institution in which they are held. This was done primarily through two interrelated ways. First, by locating the GLAM object and resource in place and alongside other reflections on place, and second, through the mapping and articulation of emotions.

Locating in place The Perth riverscape is a dynamic, multilayered and complex place, ‘a locus of meaning, memory and identity’ (Malpas, 2017). Increasingly, experience has come to be understood as fundamental to concepts and practices of place and place-making, and visa-versa. Malpas (1999) notes: The crucial point about the connection between place and experience is not, however, that place is properly something only encountered ‘in’ experience, but rather that place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience. (pp. 31-32) Place, then, is something to be felt and lived. Indeed, place is created through that feeling and living. Place is embedded within ‘us’, and ‘we’ within place. Smith and others (2009) have also considered the organic nature, arguing that ‘emotions are vital (living) aspects of who we are and of our situational engagement within the world; they compose, decompose, and recompose the geographies of our lives’ (p. 10). The Rivers of Emotion digital archive contributes to place scholarship in a variety of ways, most notably in its capturing and highlighting of the nexus and connection between lived experiences, emotions and place. One such example was provided by Anne Brake: Paddling on the river as the sun comes over the horizon is very special. In a kayak you are very close to the water, almost sitting in it, and somehow its peace, its depth and serenity, seeps into you as you move silently across its surface. Sometimes, if you are lucky, river creatures come up beside you and travel a short way on their journey with you. Now I have my own kayak, I can go to the river whenever I want. (Rivers of Emotion Project) At the heart of this narrative is a moment of connection that an individual, Anne, feels for the river on which she paddles. Like many other contributors, Anne locates herself in place by 477

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using the first person ‘I’ or ‘we’; this is a critical expression of her embodied and affective connection. Moreover, Anne is able to articulate the ways in which this occurs; the gentle paddling work of the silent kayaker is rewarded with a transference of the river’s tranquillity, so that the paddler can feel and sense the serenity and peace that ‘seeps in’ through her calm body. From within the space of a borrowed kayak—that itself occupies a liminal space simultaneously below and above the water—the kayaker shares her heightened awareness of the rivers’ depth, which here refers not just to the literal capacity and volume of water, but rather, the river’s deeper meanings and significance. It supports and nurtures life, the many river creatures that live below and above its waters, and indeed human life, with whom this deep river has a profound history of interaction and connection. Narrative, stories and storytelling have long been highlighted as fundamental to senses of place (Flock & Jiang, 2015). It was critical that the Rivers of Emotion infrastructure supported a variety of narratives be told, not only in written form, but also visually and orally. In Rivers of Emotion, stories of place and expressions of places are expressed via film, interview, photography, creative engagement and the retelling of archive sources. A key strategy of the project was the locating of these narratives and emotions in place; contributors were asked to plot onto an interactive digital map of the river the location of their contribution—their memories, the place of their photograph or film, or the events narrated in the archive sources. This strategy asked contributors not only to consider the rivers in its entirety, but also its individual parts as important places in themselves. The resultant map (see Figure 42.3) projects an emotional landscape, a peopled world, a world in which people’s emotions, experiences and histories are embedded within it and through which it is constituted. The map displays multiple narratives simultaneously; in so doing, it captures the plurality through which place is constituted (Malpas, 2017). For the Rivers of Emotion, this plurality includes personal memories and official histories, Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge, human and natural histories, deep histories and more contemporary accounts alongside each other simultaneously, as interconnected and valued histories of the rivers. The map displays spatially the complex individual, emotional and personal social relationships and engagements with the rivers. It includes feelings of connection and disconnection as of equal importance; one contributor, Ilse Erber, articulated her feelings of disconnection to the river, stating, ‘I don’t feel connected to the river because I’m a migrant from Sydney … when I see the river I think it’s pretty and nice … But Sydney harbour has more memories for me.’ Such examples highlight the relationality of place—that ‘no place’, as Malpas (2017) suggests, ‘exists except in relation to other places, and every place contains other places that are related within it’. For Erber, the Perth rivers could not compare to those that she has loved in the past. The ‘place’ on the map that Ilse plotted her narrative was in the middle of the Swan River. The map is in many ways a paradox of relationality, in its simultaneous display of lost places and feelings of disconnection within a framework that itself displays and depicts the existence of place. The narrative capabilities and relationality of the rivers map allows for the simultaneous articulation of place and the loss of place, capturing the changing ecologies and shape of the river and emotional responses to these changes. Several narratives were prompted by loss or threat, like the contribution from Pat Hart, who discussed a lack of support for the river in the face of the Araluen Golf Course development. A further example is Ron Davidson’s nostalgic recollection of the Chinese market gardens that had stretched along the South Perth foreshore since 1880s, discussing them as he remembered them growing up in the 1940s; he notes that these were gone by 1953. The Rivers of Emotion map projects a complex temporality that place, disconnection and the loss of

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place is displayed, and in which connections and emotions from the past sit alongside contemporary connections and emotions in a seeming collapse of time and space. Key to the Rivers of Emotion project was the documenting of Indigenous places of importance and experiences of the river, both for documenting memories and acknowledging the loss of place and implications of the changing river in the light of European settlement on the local Noongar people. Many Elders related stories, such as Albert Corunna who narrates that: ‘I remember Mum … telling me that Success Hill was where they camped’ or Irene Stainton who remembers when ‘Aunty May used to take us turtle fishing near Guildford Bridge’. While memories were often fondly narrated, they also express a sadness and regret attached to a loss of place and traditions, and family related to that place. The team was acutely aware of the problematic nature of the map as an inherently European concept of place and definitions of river; the team found this challenging. As Nannup (2008) points out, ‘The water connects places most people don’t know about’. The form of the map and its spatial representation draws on a tradition of map and map-making with a European genealogy (Harley, 2001). However, the map came to be a touchstone through which to explore different perceptions of the rivers and their spatial representations. Through uploaded institutional content, the Rivers of Emotion map and booklet illustrated the different possible visualisations of the river. Various artistic contributions demonstrated Indigenous ways of thinking about

Figure 42.4 Deborah Bonar, Maali 2012, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 85 cm, City of Perth Art Collection. Source: City of Perth; Artist: Deborah Bonar. 479

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the river spatiality, including work by Deborah Bonar (see Figure 42.4) that powerfully refigure the space of the Eurocentric map with Indigenous senses of time and place.

Mapping emotions In contributing to the Rivers of Emotion project, participants were asked not only to mark the places around the river as particularly emotional to them, but also to denote how these were emotional, and to identify the emotions. However, as the project continued, the team noted a range of emotional literacies and a general difficulty in articulating emotions. Contributors struggled to independently offer an emotions word tag that best described their own memory or contribution. They also found it difficult to identify past emotions from archival and documentary sources concerning the river. As Brake’s contribution illustrates, many narrative contributions did not explicitly use emotions words such as ‘despair’ or ‘joy’, but rather were richly descriptive in their expressions of mood and feelings of connection, and of senses of being in place. The team felt it imperative that the contributors tag the emotions they felt were embedded in the short film, interview or image that they uploaded and to provide the emotional context to its production, rather than for a third party (such as project facilitators) to read the emotions within it. To map these emotions, a revision to the digital infrastructure was undertaken to include an extensive drop-down list of emotions words. This list was designed to be a prompter for contributors, to challenge them to think about their emotions, rather than to structure their responses. One or a series of emotions could be selected and, while the list offered as many emotions words options as possible, contributors could add to the list if a suitable term could not be found. A database of emotional terms—like fear, love and happiness—emerged, from the past and today. The terms collected from this tagging process, and all other words as they appeared in the narrative, formed a word cloud (see Figure 42.3), which was displayed below the map. The word cloud was an important visual display of the various emotions and their frequency of use. Like the map, the word cloud grouped emotions in a quantified spatial configuration and provided a portal through which to explore particular emotions and their plotting around the river. One unexpected outcome highlighted through the grouping of emotions words in the world cloud was reference to what we might call negative emotions associated with the river, particularly ‘despair’, ‘worry’, ‘left’ and ‘fear’. Many of these emotions were associated with extremely sad events, like death and several instances of suicide. For instance, in one contribution, artist Jo Darbyshire, who spoke at Rivers Symposium (Darbyshire, 2012), uploaded a painting and wrote: The river hides many stories. The river can be perceived as a site of immersion and ‘disappearance’. This is a ghostly image of the inverted first City Baths, swimming baths established at the end of the Esplanade in 1885. It is also a painting about my great aunt, Marguerite (Doe) Rampant, who committed suicide in the river on Mother’s Day in 1974. She was 70 and had felt lost since being forced to retire from work as a parliamentary secretary. She put heavy rocks in the pockets of a winter coat and we imagine took pills as well, because she drowned herself in the shallow waters of Mt Pleasant foreshore. My father and uncle found her body after they saw her car parked in the same place for two days. This contribution was plotted on the Rivers of Emotion map at the Mt Pleasant foreshore, the spot where the body was found. It is an important marking of sadness and grief on the 480

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riverscape, and one that is linked to similar events and places though emotions words. The tags ‘left’ and ‘despair’ links Darbyshire’s contribution to a historical newspaper report detailing the death of ‘Harry Brooks’, who was ‘a tale of worry and despair culminating in the taking of his life’ (The Daily News, 8 May 1931). The Rivers of Emotion map and word cloud, then, displays spatially places and events with ongoing emotional resonance around the river, and captures moments of personal family tragedy. The Rivers of Emotion digital infrastructure provided a tool that was able to ‘open up new ways of exploring and articulating a community’s relations with … physical and social settings’ (Giaccardi & Palen, 2008). For GLAM institutions, there are numerous advantages to a project such as the Rivers of Emotion, particularly circumventing the risk of the loss of significance and meaning that comes with the reconfiguration and rearrangement of sources that can occur through the process of digitisation (Stiller, 2012). Resources are provided with a new layer of meaning and connectivity: a network of people with expressed connectedness, and a layer of affection and interpretation that connects the resource to the everyday lives of people. Further heritage and tourism interpretative works have been developed from the captured and mapped data of the Rivers of Emotion. The identified emotional hotspots of the rivers demonstrated the importance of places like Herrisson Island and the Perth Central Business District and led to the development of a major heritage initiative on the life of exceptional 19th-century Aboriginal resistant fighter Fanny Balbuk Yooreel. A walk trail, booklet and film were produced by National Trust (WA) under the leadership of Gina Pickering (2017) with CHE support that documented Fanny Balbuk Yooreel’s life and identified important places in her Whadjuk landscape.

Conclusions: emotional practice and digital place-making The Rivers of Emotion offers an intricate case study through which to explore not only the emotions of place, but also the ways emotional practices such as reminiscing and nostalgia contribute to place-making, senses of place and feelings of belonging within both digital and non-digital contexts. Drawing particularly on the work of emotions theorist Monique Scheer (2012) and her work on emotions-as-practice, the emotional work and practices undertaken by the contributors in creating the archive of emotions was critical in shaping the digital archive content. The emotions of the Rivers of Emotion project were not only captured in the collected data, they were also performed through actions and practices. The contributions were often the product of private emotional practices like nostalgia and the recalling of memories, which are then recorded and shared within a public heritage digital platform. The project encouraged a range of actions, including private researching and digitising, uploading, curating, commenting and sharing, and locating and plotting on the digital map to create the archive. These actions are emotional practices of place and acts of placemaking. This overlapping of emotions, that is of emotional practices in documenting emotions of place, recalls what Cresswell (2004) refers to as the ‘complicated layering of digital technologies and place’. In so doing, the project highlighted a range of emotional practices and processes that drive and shape community heritage programmes. The creation of a public digital archive enables the exploration of the layered emotional histories of the rivers and creates a further layer of place-making. The map offers the ability to ‘move around’ and explore the location of various stories and emotions, and think and reflect about various places as emotional places with affective meanings. The digital infrastructure provides a simulacrum to evoke feelings; it produces and acknowledges affective connections not only to others immediately present, but also to the past and to prior generations who too have 481

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engaged with this river. The resultant archive and plotting of emotions and place are tools for exploring place and emotion, resulting in new connections and reconnections to the rivers landscape. In this way, the Rivers of Emotion archive has the ability to contribute to public cultural and social life (Burgess & Klaebe, 2009), creating an opportunity for belonging and attachment and storytelling, and speaks to the social aspects of sharing knowledge (Stuedahl, 2009). The model of digital and scholarly infrastructure developed through the Rivers of Emotion project has the potential to be applied to other places to reveal deeper historical layering and embedded emotions. It was a model grounded in community heritage practices that had at its core individuals, their emotional practices, memories and place within communities. The project’s booklet asserts that ‘the Rivers tell us about ourselves, our communities and our values’ (Broomhall & Pickering, 2012). The digital and scholarly infrastructure that was developed provided and encouraged opportunities for the community to play an active role in conservation, curation and interpretation. The project resulted in the gathering of previously unconnected source materials from both private and public domains in a digital forum to create a new digital collection. As a tool for GLAM institutions, such a model provides a rich level of interpretation that reconnects the artefact with the place, people and histories from which it is somewhat disconnected. Critically, the Rivers of Emotion project assembled and mapped an archive of emotion that was collected and shaped by people, their emotions and their emotional practices.

Note 1 My thanks to Susan Broomhall and Gina Pickering. The Rivers of Emotion project was funded by an Australian Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities Your Community Heritage Program grant.

References Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. New York, NY: Routledge. Blackburn, K. (2013). The ‘democratization’ of memories of Singapore’s past. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 169(4), 431–456. Broomhall, S., & Pickering, G. (2012). An emotional history of Derbarl Yerrigan and Djarlgarro beelier/the Swan and Canning rivers. Crawley, WA: Uniprint. Burgess, J., & Klaebe, H. (2009). Digital storytelling as participatory public history in Australia. In J. Hartley, & K. McWilliam (Eds.), Story circle: Digital storytelling around the world (pp. 155–166). Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Cresswell, T. (2004). Place: A short introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Darbyshire, J. (2012, 30 October). ‘Rivers of Emotion symposium talk’ [Video file]. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XlofXW1fSU Eveleigh, A. (2014). Crowding out the archivist? Locating crowdsourcing within the broader landscape of participatory archives. In M. Ridge, H. Short, & A. Prescott (Eds.), Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage (pp. 211–229). London, UK: Taylor and Francis. Flock, J., & Jiang, S. (2015). One place, many stories digital storytelling for cultural heritage discovery in the landscape. Digital Heritage, 2, 503–510. Giaccardi, E., & Palen, L. (2008). The social production of heritage through cross-media interaction: Making place for place-making. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 14(3), 281–292. Graham-Taylor, S. (2011). A missing history: Towards a river history of the Swan. Studies in Western Australian History, 27, 125–143. Haldrup, M., & Bærenholdt, J. O. (2015). Heritage as performance. In E. Waterton, & S. Watson (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of contemporary heritage research (pp. 52–68). Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave MacMillan. Hallam, S. J. (1981). The first Western Australians. In T. Stannage (Ed.), A new history of Western Australia (pp. 72–123). Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australian Press.

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Harley, J. B. (2001). The new nature of maps: Essays in the history of cartography. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press. Malpas, J. (1999). Place and experience: A philosophical topography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Malpas, J. (2017). Thinking topographically. Place, space, and geography. Il Cannocchiale: Rivista di Studi Filosofici, XLII(1–2), 25–53. Nannup, N. (2008). Caring for everything. In S. Morgan, M. Tjalaminu, & B. Kwaymullina (Eds.), Heartsick for country: Stories of love, spirit and creation (pp. 101–114). Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Navarrete, T. (2013). Digital cultural heritage. In I. Rizzo, & A. Magnosa (Eds.), Handbook on the economics of cultural heritage (pp. 251–271). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Owens, T. (2014). Making crowdsourcing compatible with the missions and values of cultural heritage organisations. In M. Ridge, H. Short, & A. Prescott (Eds.), Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage (pp. 269–280). London, UK: Taylor and Francis. Pickering, G. (2017). Fanny Balbuk Yooreel: Realising a Perth resistance fighter. Perth, WA: Dessein. Port-Louis, B. (2012, 30 October). Rivers of Emotion symposium talk [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/0p_1dxvwLI0 Purkis, H. (2017). Making digital heritage about people’s life stories. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 23(5), 144–434. Rukeyser, M. (1968). The speed of darkness. London, UK: Random House. Sather-Wagstaff, J. (2016). Making polysense of the world: Affect, memory, heritage. In D. P. ToliaKelly, E. Waterton, & S. Watson (Eds.), Heritage, affect and emotion: Politics, practices and infrastructures (pp. 12–29). London, UK: Routledge. Scheer, M. (2012). Are emotions a kind of practice (and is that what makes them have a history)? A Bourdieuian approach to understanding emotion. History and Theory, 51, 193–220. Smith, M., Davidson, J., Cameron, L., & Bondi, L. (2009). Introduction: Geography and emotion— Emerging constellations. In M. Smith, J. Davidson, L. Cameron, & L. Bondi (Eds.), Emotion, place and culture (pp. 1–18). Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Stiller, J. (2012). A framework for classifying interactions in cultural heritage information systems. International Journal of Heritage in the Digital Era, 1, 141–146. Stuedahl, D. (2009). Digital cultural heritage engagement—A new research field for ethnology. Enthnologica Scandinavia, 39, 67–81. Winton, T. (1991). Cloudstreet. Ringwood: Penguin.

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Afterword Andrea Witcomb

In reading this collection of pieces which describe, analyse and reflect on contemporary uses of digital technologies in the GLAM sector, I am struck by the importance of the figure of time and the role it plays in many of the arguments, shaping a number of the major themes of this book. It isn’t only at the level of content that time makes its presence felt however. Equally as important is the timing of the volume itself and what its contents have to say about this particular time in the history of the engagement of the GLAM sector with digital technologies. Let me begin with the latter. There was a time when many who were interested in what the digital world had to offer museum and heritage practitioners, lapsed into a form of binary thinking in which digital forms of communication and cultural practice were associated with a speeding up of time, a speeding up that was taken as a counter to the slow world of museums and heritage institutions, bound as they are by materiality. In this binary way of looking at the world, these things were not only understood as the opposite of each other; they were also given positive and negative valences (Witcomb, 2003). On the negative side was slow time, associated with materiality and with the weight of conservative institutions that resisted the pressure of change. On the positive side was digital heritage, associated with progressive politics because of its rhetoric of inclusion, greater democracy as well as the speed of communication. To be modern and up to date was to be on the side of speed not slowness. Of course, such a way of understanding the impact of the introduction of the digital world into the world of heritage and museums was itself part of the revolutionary impetus. Revolutions are not possible without the figure of those that resist, as well as that of the revolutionary. The passage of time however, allows for a softening of these hard positions to emerge, making space for other kinds of arguments to do with the function of digital technologies as a form of interpretation, in the management of cultural heritage and even as a tool for audience studies. This volume is a sign of the distance we have travelled since that revolution, given the lack of contributions that felt the need to maintain a form of argument based on a desire to maintain binary oppositions. There is neither a spirited defence of the material world by attributing positive valences to the first item on binary pairs such as real/virtual, material/immaterial, authentic/inauthentic, original/copy nor a revelling in the second item 484

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of these pairs. Neither is there a knee-jerk reaction to automatically assume that the digital world possesses all the positive values in pairings such as democratic/undemocratic, accessible/inaccessible, new/old. What we have instead is a much more sophisticated discussion that is interested not in reacting to or advocating for, the shock of the new, but in developing an engagement with the medium itself, exploring its possibilities through any number of theoretical frameworks – a stance amply demonstrated by Fiona Cameron’s own biographical journey of her engagement with digital heritage. Many of the contributions in this book are interested in finding out what affordances are made possible by the introduction of digital technologies into museum and heritage spaces, wanting to understand the work that these technologies do. What the volume testifies to therefore, is that it takes time to stop reacting to something as a challenge to what is and start engaging with it in its own right. That this engagement is occurring across the scholarly/practice divide is another sign of the maturity of the field. As hinted in my introductory remarks, time also plays a role in the nature of the actual arguments being made at this temporal juncture. I will point out three of them. The most prominent of these has to do with the relationship between time and ethics, a relationship that permeated a number of contributions in interesting ways. The first of these was the need to pay attention to the relation between time and speed, both fast and slow. To begin with, a number of contributors argued that the instantaneous nature of the digital world raises questions about the nature of power relations, particularly with regard to marginalised, oppressed communities who may not have had the opportunity to give permission for the use of their materials such as the presentation of heritage now on Google which shows people, actions, events and places without the consent of those involved. In the context of digital archives belonging to the LGBTIQ community, for example, the question as to whether or not it is ethical to reveal the sexuality of those who have passed away and cannot give their consent or who may not have come out within their own communities is a case in point as argued by Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor. A further ethical question is that of who has access to digital archives. As pointed out by Graeme Counsel, in authoritarian regimes, there is no guarantee that those who produced the heritage in question will have access to it. The extent of accessibility raised by digital archives presents new management issues not encountered before, or, at the very least, heightens existing ones. Does digital access create new power relations or extend existing ones? Can these relations be challenged, managed, changed? Do digital archives facilitate or make it more difficult to engage in decolonisation for example? How can we ensure an ethics of care for those whose information is now available to the world? Such questions also point to a rethinking of the function of digital archives, making it clear that these are not only about the preservation of the past but an address to the present and to the future of memories. The second issue under this theme, is the converse – the possibilities to use digital technologies for establishing ethical relations across difference by slowing down the nature of the engagement and allowing more time for that engagement to take place. Unlike fastness, which is associated with a lack of ethical care, slowness, in a number of contributions is associated with taking care of others. This is particularly the case when slowing down the visitor is embedded within digital installations in exhibition contexts, facilitating the creation of a space in which emotional engagement across difference can occur. This was the case in both Aretti Galani’s and Jennifer Deger’s and Paul Gurrumuruwuy’s contributions. As both of them point out, this requires attention to what Galani describes as the social, spatial and artefactual ecology of the installation itself (see also Witcomb, 2015 for further discussions on the theme of slowness). Both of these contributions argue for the importance of making 485

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time to dwell in the space as essential to establishing caring relations between visitors and the objects/subjects of display. The opportunity to use digital representations to encourage more ethical relations between human and non-human relations is particularly applicable in contexts where difficult histories provide the terrain of engagement, such as histories of colonisation, or where the aim is to facilitate encounters across radical differences (western/ Indigenous subjects for example) or with developing ethical responsibilities in relation to non-human entities within the context of the Anthropocene. The second theme I wish to comment on is obsolescence. The very passage of time since the first tentative introductions of digital technologies into gallery spaces has now been long enough ago for designers to realise that a constant danger of bringing in the new is that it will soon become old. Changes in both software and hardware mean that any approach to interpretation will soon become obsolete and its replacement will require an entirely new approach and new content rather than simply an update. This problem, for example, provided much of the basis for the interviews with Dave Patten from the Science Museum in London and Keir Winesmith from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who points out the serendipity that occurs between gallery redevelopments and the development of new technological applications. If either one is out by a year or so, that application will not be used in the exhibitions, so fast are the technological developments at present. The other point both make is the need to ensure that audiences are familiar with the way these technologies work so as to ensure ease of use. One of the problems here is not actually making sure they understand new interfaces but old ones! The third and final theme I wish to comment on is the idea of future time – what might be around the corner. Contributions in this vein fall into a number of categories. Some point to the technological possibilities of ever greater realism, the ability to see into an object, more kinetic interactions, as well as the ability to know visitors’ emotional response to works through intelligent interactives. Such contributions to discussion are essentially about the breakdown of distinctions between the human and the non-human. A second approach to this idea were those who were concerned with displaying and initiating conversations about the role of the digital in the future, such as the discussion with Roy Hyde at the V&A around an exhibition that dealt with the role of digital design in shaping our future. And finally, there were those who saw in digital technologies and their applications the possibility of transforming the slow nature of museum institutions into fast moving, responsive ones, able to undertake a faster speed than is traditionally the case around, for example, new exhibitions. This in a way, returns us to our starting point – time is closely tied to speed and the ability of an institution to respond quickly will, perhaps, be essential to the future of institutions. Looking at these themes as a whole, what becomes clear is that this focus on the temporal dimensions of digital heritage reveals that conventional concerns with the politics of representation are morphing into a concern with ethical questions around relations of power and the hope that digital technologies can be used to facilitate more empathetic relations across difference, whether between humans or humans and the non-human world. In this context there is a hope that our use of these technologies can help in decolonising projects, in providing access, in representing minority groups in ways that bring no harm, in bringing diasporic groups together across distances and above all in creating new relations between the past, present and future. At the same time, the contributions around these themes are not naïve and make it perfectly clear that achieving this requires deep thinking, hard work and constant attention to the political context in which such work takes place. 486

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References Witcomb, A. (2003). Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum, Routledge, London. Witcomb, A. (2015). “Toward a pedagogy of feeling: Understanding how museums create a space for cross-cultural encounters”. In A. Witcomb and K. Message (Eds.) Museum Theory, vol. 1 The International Handbooks of Museum Studies edited by S. MacDonald and H. Rees Leahey (pp 321-344), Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell.

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Index

Locators in italics refer to figures. 200 Treasures 320, 321, 322–323 3D modelling: Art of Nation 377–378, 378, 383–384; Henry VR 349; interpreting the future 370–371; rephotography 399 3D printing: China 110; museum-university collaboration 306 3D projection: China’s cultural heritage 110; Mogao Grottoes exhibition 287–293 3D technologies 106 3D-scanning 29–30 the academy: and the condition of knowledge 74–76; GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) 1; Western educational-cultural mode 184 access: African infrastructure 174–175; Augmented Reality 104–106; benefits of 117–118; Embodying Empathy project 298–299; full-text search 117; hacking 127–128; inaccessible collections 125–127; limits of 118–119; meaning of 116–117; not everything is digitised 121–124; search engines 119–121; transparency and openness 49; see also database management; online visitors ‘active interviews’ 271 actor network theory (ANT) 188–190, 195–196 affective turn 452 affect-oriented Virtual Reality exhibitions 345–352 affectual power, objects 249–250 Africa: archiving in 169–170, 176; Endangered Archives Programme 172–175; GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) 169; Guinea 170–175; independence and funding to the arts sector 170 Afro-Brazilian Digital Museum initiative 131–134, 136–141 Afro-Brazilian heritage 131–141 Afrofuturism 94–97

488

agency see audience agency; curatorial agency; human agency Akomfrah, John 94–95, 96 Alan Vaughan-Richards archive 178–186 Albers, Greg 88 ‘algorithmic image’ 76 All of This Belongs to You 39, 40 American Alliance of Museums (AAM) 294 Amin, A. 452, 453 Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead 330–331 animating the archive 402–403 Anthropocene: the art museum in the age of the Anthropocene 79–80; ethical relations 486; libraries 94; Technosphere 62 Anzac Memorial Hyde Park 319, 320 Apple computers 206, 208 application programming interfaces (APIs): Dave Patten interview 27–28; Flickr 394; Google 413; search engines 120; Seb Chan interview 15, 17; testing 30 apps: Guggenheim, New York 47; National Museum Wales 441–448; production by museums 32; rephotography 397–400, 407–408; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 42–44; see also digital walking tours arborescence v. rhizome 87–88 Arcadia, Endangered Archives Programme 172 archaeological site, Çatalhöyük, Turkey 147–153 ArchiAfrika project 184 Architects Co-Partnership (ACP) 179–180 architecture: computer-aided design 200; design purpose 20; The Future Starts Here 36–37; Henry VR 349; Look up Mumbai 311–313 archives: academic library collecting keynote talk 93–100; Africa 169–170, 176; digital as medium 74; digital tools 5–7; Guinea 170–175; purpose of digitalizing 20; rephotography 402–403; West Africa 179; William J. Mitchell collection 199–209

Index

art: the art museum in the age of the Anthropocene 79–80; Australian War Memorial 375–387; conservation imaging and restoration 345–348, 351–352; curatorial agency 65; globalisation and curation 78; Open Media Art 220; Yolngu museology 335–343 art museums, as reference libraries 16 Art of Nation 377–386, 378 astronomy exhibition 270–281 Astronomy Questions 279, 280 atomisation of society 39–40 attachment to place 451–452, 456–458, 459–460 audience see online visitors; visitor experiences audience agency 82, 84 audience research: exhibition design 271–272; Rory Hyde interview 38; see also visitor experiences Augmented Reality (AR): for children 107, 257–268; Chinese cultural heritage institutions 107–113, 109; Dave Patten interview 27; development in Western cultural institutions 105–107; interfaces 332–333; MR (merging of real and virtual worlds) 370–371; National Museum Wales 446; purpose of AR in cultural heritage institutions 103–105; visitor perceptions 104–105, 350 auras, cultural heritage objects 243, 249–254 Australia, online heritage access 116 Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) 15, 18, 19, 21 Australian Imperial Force (AIF) 382–383, 385–386 Australian Museum, Sydney 319, 320, 321, 322, 322–323 Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) 121 Australian War Memorial 375–387 authenticité movement, Guinea 171–172, 174, 175 authenticity: Agan Harahap’s photography 227, 229, 232; care ethics 161; designing for affect-oriented authenticity 348–350, 351; Digital Museum initiative 141; digitisation 55, 56; Mogao Grottoes exhibition 284–285; place-making 398; tourism 440; values v. culture 89 authored spaces 391–392 Balsamo, Anne 82–83, 85 Barthes, Roland 405 Baudelaire, Charles 424–425 Bautista, Susan 82–83, 85 Bean, Charles, Australian War Memorial 375–387 Beck, Ulrich 69 Benjamin, Walter 401–402 Benkler, Yochi 87 Bentkowska-Kafel, Anna 383

bilingualism, Welsh and English language digital encounter 441, 447–448 Bischoff, Henry 425 blackness: academic library collecting keynote talk 94–97; Afro-Brazilian heritage museum 131–134, 136–141; intersectional black feminist technology studies 99 ‘bodies without organs’ 63 books, William J. Mitchell collection 204–205 Borden, Iain 397 Borrowers installation, National Centre for Children’s Book 259–268 brand: apps 32; distinctive identity of institutions 27–28, 38–39, 46; GLAM sector 16–17; Google’s photographic systems 416, 421; re-branding 47 Bratton, Benjamin 62–63 Brazil: Afro-Brazilian heritage museum 131–134; cultural politics 134–136; Digital Museum initiative 136–141; preserving African and Afro-Brazilian memory 136–138 Brazilian Virtual Memory Network of the National Library (BN) 138 British Library: Augmented Reality 104–105; West African archives 179 British Museum, Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead 330–331 British Music Experience at the O2 Greenwich 332, 333 Broomhall, Susan 476 Brown, Michael 97–98 budgets, charges for exhibits 33–34 Burrows, David 407 Camara, Moussa 173 Cambridge University museums 306 Canada: settler-colonialism 297; virtual Indian Residential School exhibition 296–303 care ethics: centering webs of relationships in the digital 166–167; digital tools 485–486; feminism and archival relationships 159, 160–162; Islamophobia project 162–164; Visual AIDS digitisation project 164–166 Caribbean heritage 94–97 Carter, Rodney 118 Caswell, Michelle 97–98 Çatalhöyük, Turkey 147–153 Cave 45 Virtual Immersive Experience 284–295 Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road 283–295 celebrity culture, Agan Harahap’s photography 229, 232–234 Chan, Seb, interview with 3, 15–22 change, v. transformation 86 CHESS 143, 146–147 Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) 311–313

489

Index

children: Augmented Reality experiences 107, 257–268; interactive technologies 320; interface design 326, 331, 332; reading ability 217; school visits 31, 149; visiting with parents 145, 147, 149 China: cultural heritage institutions and adoption of technology 103, 107–113, 109, 111, 112; Mogao Grottoes exhibition 283–295; shadow puppetry culture 210–217 Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu 353–357, 354 Christmas Birrimbirr (Christmas Spirit) 340, 341, 341–342 circulation of images 75–76 citizen heritage: digital technology 452–454; visual research methodologies 454, 459–460 civil exchange 39–40 click-stop tours 426–428, 430–435, 437–438 Closer: Old Favourites, New Stories 356 Clover, Shaun 406 co-constructed imagination 263–266 co-creation: heritage sector 226; Indigenous communities 313; metadata 203; National Library of Colombia 466, 469, 469–470; speculative collections 93, 98; see also crowdsourcing coding, Dave Patten interview 34 coins, digitisation case study 57–59, 61–62, 66 collaboration: Afro-Brazilian heritage museum 140–141; human-centred design 324; museum-university 305–316; Open Media Art 220–222; Yolngu museology 335–343 collaborative meaning-making 143–144, 153; an emotive shared digital experience at Çatalhöyük 147–153; issues with group experiences 145; the museum as a social space 144–145; successful digital collaborative experiences 145–148 Colombia, National Library 463–470 colonialism: African heritage 169–170, 175; Afro-Brazilian heritage museum 136; Agan Harahap’s photography 234–238; Canadian settler-colonialism 297; ‘contact zone’ 84–85; digitisation 137; Ghana and Nigeria 179; postcolonialism 84–85; Seven Sisters Songlines 313–315 communication technologies, Global South 131 community-based archives 464–465, 466–468 computer-aided architectural design 200 Condé, Anne-Marie 381 conservation imaging and restoration 345–348, 350–351 ‘contact zone’ 84–85 contemporaneity 77–78 Cooper Hewitt Museum 16, 17, 20

490

copyright: Africa 175; Alan Vaughan-Richards archive 185–186; Digital Museum initiative 138, 139, 141; Trove 119; William J. Mitchell collection 202 CREATE 2010 216 creativity: authenticité movement 171; liberatory descriptive standard 98; reuse at Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision 219–226; shadow play 213; visual hoaxes of Agan Harahap 227–238 crowdsourcing 188–197, 476–477; see also co-creation cultural antinomies 227 cultural heritage institutions: access to objects 225–226; Chinese and Western 103; development of AR and VR technologies in Western cultural institutions 105–107; purpose of AR in 103–105; technological enhancement in the Chinese museum 107–113; see also GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) cultural infrastructure, Colombia 465 Cultural Technology Innovation Planning 107 culture: Brazilian cultural politics 134–136; Guinea 170–172; v. values 89; see also technology and the cultural curation: the art museum in the age of the Anthropocene 79–80; data curation workflow 205–206, 206; globalisation of art 78; hyper-circulation 75–76; PastPort 454–455 curatorial agency 64–65 curators, future of role 41 Cybernetic Serendipity 73–74 Darbyshire, Jo 480 data management: academic library collecting keynote talk 92, 94–95; computation and Succession 389–395 database management: access to content 117, 120, 121, 127; Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu 353, 356; the digital as tool 44–45, 59; digital walking tour apps 434; eMunch.no 192, 195; Rivers of Emotion 480; Succession 394; Timera 407; Trove 389; William J. Mitchell collection 204–205 Debord, Guy 425 Deleuze, G. 63 ‘democratisation of access’ 119 Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) 68–69 ‘depth’ 451–452, 456–458 dérive 425 Dery, Mark 96–97 descriptive notes, limitations of 358 design: academic library collecting keynote talk 93; architecture 20; human-centred

Index

319–325; infrastructure in museums 17–18; interfaces 326–334; v. tradition 86; see also exhibition design design approach 272, 273 design teams 272, 280–281 Dewdney, A. 84, 85 dhäkay-nanhawuy rom 336–337, 341–342, 343 The Dice Interactive 274–275, 275, 277 digital, v. physical 83 digital access see access digital as medium 73–74 digital dialectics 83, 86–90 digital donation, Afro-Brazilian heritage museum 138–139 digital ethnography 139, 410, 414 digital forensics 205–208 digital generosity, Afro-Brazilian heritage museum 139 digital hoaxes: Agan Harahap 227–238; projection and superimposition. 405–406 Digital Lab initiative 23, 29–30 digital literacy, professional development 88–89 Digital Museum initiative 131–134; challenges 141; documents in 139–141; museum without owners 138–139; preserving African and Afro-Brazilian memory 136–138 digital networks, infrastructure in museums 17 digital place-making 481–482 digital repatriation, Afro-Brazilian heritage museum 138 digital storytelling: CHESS 145; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 50 digital surrogacy 243–246, 249–254 digital tools: archives 5–7; citizen heritage 452–454; exhibition design 7–9; GLAM sector futures 484–486; Google Maps 416, 421; heritage 1–2; targeted use of 44–45; technology and the cultural 71–73; see also apps Digital Transformation Office (DTO) 18–19 digital urbanism 199 digital walking tours: case studies 426–438; historical context 424–425, 438; limitations 438–440; PastPort 452–453, 454–456, 458–460 DigitalGLAM Symposium 1–2 digitisation 55, 66; access promises and limitations 117–119; access to non-digitialised content 121–127, 122; Alan Vaughan-Richards archive 182–183; care ethics 159–160, 166–167; as ecological compositions in global computational infrastructures 59–64; material, immaterial binary 55–56; museum crowdsourcing 188–197; Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision 219–226; the parent and the digitisation as related, overlapping, non-identical assemblages 57–59; purpose of AR in cultural heritage institutions 103–105; shadow puppetry culture 210–217; Succession

389–395; three-dimensional (3D) models 250–254; users and curatorial agency 64–66; Visual AIDS digitisation project 164–166; William J. Mitchell collection 199–209 Dinobirds 327 distinctive identity of institutions 27–28, 38–39, 46; see also brand the distributed museum 89–90; change v. transformation 86; hierarchy v. network 87–88; literacy v. fluency 88–89; three descriptions of 81–85; tradition v. design 86; values v. culture 89 DomeLab 305, 308–316 driverless cars 35, 36 Drucker, J. 391, 392–393 Drucker, Peter 89 Dspace platform 138 Dweck, Carol 86 Dyson, Will 384–385, 386 Eco, Umberto 104 ecological alliances 64–65 education, Brazilian cultural politics 134–135 Edwards, Elizabeth 401, 402 efficiency: civil exchange 40; database management 204–205; hypermodern times 68, 75, 79; tradition v. design 86 electroencephalography (EEG) 371–372 Electronic Superhighway 73–74 the emancipatory library 92–100 Embodying Empathy (EE) project 296–297, 298–303 Emerling, Jae 402 emotion: digital place-making 481–482; an emotive shared digital experience at Çatalhöyük 148–153; Rivers of Emotion digital archive 471–481; Yolngu museology 335–343; see also empathy; social experience of museums EMOTIVE 143, 152 empathy: care ethics 160; Embodying Empathy (EE) project 296–297, 298–303; and storytelling 302–303; and technology 301–302; Yolngu museology 337–343 eMunch.no 188–197 Endangered Archives Programme 169, 172–175, 186 entertainment marketplace 326 Ernst, Wolfgang 93 Eshun, Kodwo 96 ethics: access 118; centering webs of relationships in the digital 166–167; of digitisation 159–160; Embodying Empathy project 299–300; feminist care ethics 159, 160–162; Islamophobia project 162–164; time 485; Visual AIDS digitisation project 164–166 ethnographic observation 260–261 ethnography, digital 139, 414

491

Index

everyday: rephotography 403–404; urban heritage 450–451, 457 exhibition design: affect-oriented Virtual Reality exhibitions 345–352; development of an astronomy exhibition 270–281; digital tools 7–9; human-centred 322–324; Mogao Grottoes exhibition 287–293; relationship between the physical and the digital 23–24 exhibition development 29–30, 32 ‘experimental epistemology’ 307 experts, exhibition design 279–280 Faulstich, Paul 315 feminism: care ethics 159, 160–162, 166–167; intersectional black feminist technology studies 99 film, William J. Mitchell collection 204 finances see funding First World War, Australian War Memorial 375–387 flanêurs 424–425 Flickr 48, 389–390, 393–395, 407 flight simulators 33 fluency, v. literacy 88–89 forensic recovery of evidence device (FRED) 205–206 Forensic Toolkit (FTK) software 207 Foster, Hal 397 Frank Moore Archive Project 164–166 Freeman, A. 88 full-text search 117 funding: Africa 170, 172–173; Alan Vaughan-Richards archive 178, 180–181; Endangered Archives Programme 172–173, 186 The Future Starts Here 35–37, 36 future time 486 futures, role of GLAM sector 367–372, 484–486 gaming see video games gaming in museums: Henry VR 348, 349–350; successful digital group experiences 147 Gapuwiyak Calling 338, 339 Gell, Alfred 65 generative techniques, Succession 389–395 Germaine Greer archive 207–208 Getty Center 283–295 Ghana: ArchiAfrika project 184; regional archive 179 Gibson, Ross 392–393 Gibson, William 81 Gilligan, Carol 161 Gilliland, Anne 97–98 GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) 1–2; Africa 169; computation and Succession 389–395; crowdsourcing 476–477;

492

cycles of production 45; distinctive identity of institutions 27–28, 38–39; fundamental objectives 3; futures 484–485; influence of new digital practices 3–5; interpreting the future 367–372; museum crowdsourcing 188–189; museum-university collaboration 305–316; nature, strategy and brand 16–17; time 484–486; see also cultural heritage institutions GLAMorous Humanities conference 19 global computational infrastructures 59–64 Global South, communication technologies 131 globalization, digital divides 2–3 Gooday, Graeme 307 Goode, G. B. 305, 306, 316 Google: Earth 413; Hospicio Cabañas site 411–412, 414–421, 415; influence on culture 410; Maps 411–416; Street View 417–421 Gordon, Alan 425 Graham-Taylor, Sue 471 Great Exhibition (1851) 37, 68, 306 Greer, Germaine 207–208 group visits see social experience of museums ‘grudge reading’ 456 Guattari, F. 63 Gubrium, J. F. 271 Guggenheim, New York 47 guided walks: digital tour limitations 438–440; digital tours 426–438; historical context 424–425 Guinea 170–175 Gurrumuruwuy, Paul 335 hacking access 127–128 Haff, Peter 62 Hand, Martin 230–231 Harahap, Agan 227–238 hardware, ease of updating 23–24 Hawke, Stephanie 456–457 Hazen, Dan 94 Hazen Symposium 92–100 headphones 37, 145–148, 430 Henry VR 345–352 heritage: contemporaneity, modernism and 77–78; digital technology 452–454; digital tools 1–2; place attachment 451–452, 456–458, 459–460; visual research methodologies 451, 453–454, 458–460 heritage collections as digital copies see digitisation Hetfeld, James 232 hierarchy, v. network 87–88 Historic Urban Landscape 452 Historypin.org 463, 467–468 HIV/AIDS, digitisation project 164–166 Holbrook, Carolyn 123 Holocaust exhibition 249, 253 Holstein, J. A. 271

Index

Hospicio Cabañas site: on Google 411–412, 414–421, 415; World Heritage List 410–411 human agency 58, 65, 118; see also audience agency; curatorial agency human-centred design in digital media 319–325; exhibition design 322–324; novelty and technology 320–321; visitor experiences 319–320 Hunt Museum 258 hybrid paper/digital collections 199–209 Hyde, Rory interview 3, 35–41 hyper-circulation 75–76 hyper-individualism 77 hypermodern museums 68, 70, 75–76

internet society 84–85 intersectionality, black feminist technology studies 99 Islamophobia project 162–164

identity, place attachment 457–458; see also distinctive identity of institutions imagination: academic library collecting keynote talk 94; children and co-construction 263–266; ‘impossible archival imaginary’ 97–99 ‘imagined audience’ 270, 280–281 immersive design, shadow puppetry culture 213 immersive technology: conservation imaging and restoration 351–352; DomeLab 308–316; Mogao Grottoes exhibition 283–295; virtual Indian Residential School exhibition 296–303 Imperial War Museum 249, 253 ‘impossible archival imaginary’ 97–99 Indigenous peoples: content-management tools 96; erotic photography 234; Indian Residential School exhibition 298, 299, 301–303; limits of online access 118; publication of works 202; Rivers of Emotion digital archive 478–480; Travelling Kungkarangkalpa 313–315; Yolngu museology 335–343 individualised experiences: catering for 145; digital walking tours 434–435; personalisation 28–29, 106, 434–435; within a social space 144 Indonesia, Agan Harahap’s photography 227–238 The Infra-red Camera 276, 276–277 infrastructure for digital networks: Africa 174–175; design 17–18; global computational infrastructures 59–64; museums 17; see also database management innovation: interpreting the future 367–372; tradition v. design 86 Institute of Contemporary Arts 73–74 interactivity: audience engagement 104; conservation imaging and restoration 350–351; exhibition design 274–277; interface design 326–334; rephotography 406, 407–408 interface design: academic library collecting keynote talk 92; kinesthetics 329–330; MR (merging of real and virtual worlds) 370–371; shadow puppetry culture 216–217; ‘The O’ 368–370 International Library of African Music 176

kairos 94 Kalin, J. 404–405 Kaohsiung Museum of Shadow Puppet 211–217 Keyhole 412 kinesthetics 329–330 kinetic sculpture, Loop System Quintet 368–369, 369 Kirsh, David 416, 421 Klett, Mark 401, 402 knowing-in-action 86 knowledge, the academy and the condition of knowledge 74–76; see also data management Kungkarangkalpa, Australia 313–315

Jagger, Alison 160–161 Japan, Taiwanese shadow play 211 Java, Agan Harahap’s photography 234–237 Jokowi, Indonesian presidential candidate 234 Jones, Keith 403 Josephson, Kenneth 406 journals, William J. Mitchell collection 204–205

laboratories 307 Lagos, Alan Vaughan-Richards archive 179–186 Lake, Marilyn 123 landscape, visual research methods 450–460 languages: translation on mobile phones 32; Welsh and English bilingual app 441, 447–448 Larenkov, Sergey 406 Latour, Bruno 78, 197, 350 law: copyright law in Africa 175; inaccessible collections 124–127 learning process, use of technology 24 Leclercq, Christophe 78 LGBTQ 159–160, 166, 485 libraries: academic library collecting keynote talk 92–100; distinctive identity of institutions 27–28, 38–39; museums as 15–16, 21–22; National Library of Colombia 463–470 LiDAR scanning 29–30 Lightwell studios 319, 320, 322–323, 324, 325 Lipovetsky, G. 68, 77–78 literacy, v. fluency 88–89 location-triggered exploration tour 435 London: Museum of London 399–400; Natural History Museum 327; Science Museum 23, 26–27, 250–254; Soho stories digital tour 428–430, 435–438, 439; V&A Museum 19, 35–37, 36 Look up Mumbai 311–313

493

Index

Loop System Quintet 368–369, 369 Lowe, Adam 350 Lyotard, J. 74 MacCannell, Dean 440 machine learning 63, 65, 225 machinic jurisdictions 62–63 magnetic tapes 207 managerial activism 68 Manchester Museum of Science and Industry 332 Manchester Science 332 Mandé, West Africa 170, 175 manuscripts, William J. Mitchell collection 203–204 Mardijker Photo Studio 234–235, 237–238 market research: exhibition design 271–272; Rory Hyde interview 38 material/immaterial binary 55–56 meaning-making see collaborative meaning-making media consumption 21 Melbourne: Golden Mile digital tour 426, 430–435; PastPort 397, 403, 452–453, 454–456, 458–460; rephotography 397, 398–399; War Remembrance Trail digital tour 426–428, 430–435 Melbourne International Games Week 21 Melbourne University: DomeLab 315; William J. Mitchell collection 200–201 memorials: Australian War Memorial 375–387; museum as 385–386 memory: African and Afro-Brazilian 136–138, 140; National Library of Colombia 463–464; as purpose of museum 19–20; rephotography 404–406, 408; Rivers of Emotion digital archive 472–481 merging of real and virtual worlds (MR) 370–371 Messham-Muir, K. 248, 249, 250, 253 metadata: shadow puppetry culture 213; wiki workplace 195; William J. Mitchell collection 202–203 Metallica 232 Metropolitan Museum of Art 16, 64 Michelangelo’s David 56 Mignonneau, Laurent 327 Millennium Dome 326–327 Mitchell, William J. collection 199–209 Miyarrka Media 335–343 mobile phones, use for translation 32 modernism, and heritage 77–78 Mogao Grottoes exhibition 283–295, 350 Molesworth, Helen 85 Mona 367–370, 370 more-than-human ecological alliances 64–65 Morse code key exhibition 26–27 MR (merging of real and virtual worlds) 370–371

494

Muf Architecture/Art 40–41 Munch, Edvard research project 188–197 Muntean, Laszlo 403, 404, 406 museum crowdsourcing: eMunch.no 188–197; GLAM sector 188–189; wiki workplace 195 Museum of London, rephotography 399–400 Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester 332 museum values statements 89 museums: digitalization as goal 19–20; distinctive identity of institutions 27–28, 38–39; entertainment marketplace 326; expectations about 31–32; infrastructure for digital networks 17; professional and public-facing remits 246–247; purpose of 16–17, 22, 39; as reference libraries 15–16, 21–22; and tradition 69–70 museum-university collaboration 305–316 Museum-University Partnership Initiative (MUPI) 307–308 music: Afrofuturism 97; British Music Experience at the O2 Greenwich 332, 333; Guinea 170–175; RE:VIVE 223–225; Seb Chan interview 22 narrative see storytelling nation and industry 68–69 National Archives of Australia (NAA) 121–127 National Centre for Children’s Books 259 National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) 301, 303 National Library of Colombia 463–470 National Maritime Museum Cornwall 328, 328–329 National Museum of Australia Act 1980 307–308 National Museum Wales 441 National Waterfront Museum Swansea 331–332, 334 Natural History Museum, London 327 navigation: Google Maps 411–416; Google Street View 417–421; group visits 146, 147; human-centred design 319–320, 325; interactive reading 104; successful digital group experiences 147; virtual space in video games 331–332; wiki workplace 195 navigational devices 327 Neolithic project, Çatalhöyük, Turkey 147–153 Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision 219–226 network: the distributed museum 81, 83; v. hierarchy 87–88 network culture 70–71 ‘network effect’ 231 the networked image: the art museum in the age of the Anthropocene 79–80; the digital as medium 74; and the digital condition 76; post-digital 76–77; technological obsolescence 78 networked objects 192 ‘networked social movements’ 238

Index

With New Eyes I see (WNEIS) 441, 445 New York: innovation 18; Metropolitan Museum of Art 16, 64; Visual AIDS digitisation project 164–166 New Zealand, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu 353–357 Newcastle, Succession 389–395 newspapers, digitisation 121, 122 Nigeria, archives 179, 185 Noble, Safiya 99, 120 novelty 320–321 Nowviskie, Bethany 128, 391, 392–393 object copies 350 ‘object time’ 45 objects: descriptive notes 358; digital displays 23–25, 26–27, 29–30, 30; history of museums 35, 36, 37; online collections 49; purpose of museum objects 247–248; Rory Hyde interview 37; tactile learning experiences 329–330; thingness and digitisations 60–64; three-dimensional (3D) models 243–254; Virtual Reality 30, 33 obsolescence 78, 486 O’Donnell, Nicholas Michael 358, 359–360 O’Donnell Marginalia Project 358–359, 360–365 Olion 441 Omeka 358, 361–364 online visitors: the distributed museum 81–82; websites as a publishing platform 353–357 Open Heritage 412 Open Images platform 220 Open Media Art (OMA) 220–226 openness: academic library collecting keynote talk 92–93, 100; digital access 49; future of 50–51; see also access optical character recognition (OCR) 117, 118, 120, 193 Osbourne, P. 70, 77–78 other-than-human ecological alliances 64–65 Owens, Trevor 127–128 Oxford University museums 306 PageRank (Google) 412 papyrus displays 330–331 parent-copy relationships 57–59 Parisi, Luciana 63 Parry, Ross 18, 19 PastPort 397, 403, 452–453, 454–456, 458–460 Patten, Dave interview 3, 23–34 pen project 20–21 personal library, William J. Mitchell collection 204–205 personalised experiences 28–29, 106, 434–435 personnel see staff Perth, Rivers of Emotion digital archive 471–481 Petrie museum, Tarkhan dress 249–250

Phillips, Rasheedah 95 photography: Agan Harahap 227–238; Art of Nation 378; community use of Historypin 467–468; Google Maps 416–419; modern tourism 425; rephotography 397–408; time 401–402; ‘visualisation’ 230–231 Phototopy 327 physical, v. digital 83 Picasso exhibition 71, 73 Pickering, Gina 476, 481 Pinterest 48, 64 place: digital place-making 481–482; locating in place 477–478; physical v. digital 83; visitor experiences 3, 9–10 place attachment 451–452, 456–458, 459–460 Playzone, Millennium Dome 326–327 political context: Brazilian cultural politics 134–136; museum purposes 22 popular culture, Agan Harahap 231–234 Port Melbourne 453, 454–456 postcolonialism, ‘contact zone’ 84–85 post-digital, technology and the cultural 76–77 post-digital museums 4, 18, 19 postmodernity 77 Powerhouse Museum 15, 17, 19 privacy: Agan Harahap’s photography 227; care ethics 159, 164, 165, 166; Digital Museum initiative 138, 139, 141; Google Street View 419; online access 118, 124–127 Proctor, Nancy 81–83 professional development, digital literacy 88–89 programming, ease of updating 23–24 Project 300 63 Project Blacklight 99 projection domes 308–316 projections: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead 330–331; China’s cultural heritage 110; Mogao Grottoes exhibition 287–293; see also 3D projection prototyping: Dave Patten interview 29–30; Rory Hyde interview 38; Seb Chan interview 18; see also exhibition development public see visitor experiences public access see access public space: civil exchange 39–40; what happens in the space of the museum? 70–71 Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang 350 Putnam, Lara 118 QueryPic 119–121 Ra, Sun 97 the real in museums 326, 370–371 RecordSearch 125–127 Reed, Barbara 123 reference libraries, museums as 16, 21

495

Index

reflection: ‘active interviews’ 271; Augmented Reality experience 266–267 reflective practice: human-centred design 324, 324; tradition v. design 86 reflexive modernisation 69 rephotography 397–408 Repton, Humphrey 400 research-through-design (RtD) approach 258, 260–261 Reset Modernity 78 revenue: charges for exhibits 33–34; experimentation and risk-taking 46 RE:VIVE 220, 223–225 rhizomatic 82 rhizome, v. arborescence 87–88 Richard, Kate 392 Rihanna 227, 228 Rivers of Emotion digital archive 471–481 riverscapes 471–472 Roach, Catherine 383 Robertson, Tara 118 Roppola, Tina 322 St Fagans National Museum of History 441–448 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) 42–44, 45–46, 48 scaffolding 107 scanning devices 332 Schön, Donald 86 school exhibit, virtual Indian Residential School 296–303 school visits 31, 149 the Science Museum, London: Dave Patten interview 23, 25–27; Shipping Gallery 250–254 scopic regimes 106–107 screens: Dave Patten interview 24–25, 26; interface design 327, 328–329, 331–332, 334; public expectations 24–25 Seaman, Bill 392 search engines: Google’s influence 410, 412; limitations of information 119–121 search itself 99 self-reflection, Catalhöyük 151 semantic identity 332–333 Seven Sisters Songlines 313 shadow puppetry culture 210–217 Shellal mosaic, Art of Nation 382 Sherratt, Tim 98 Shipping Gallery, the Science Museum 250–254 Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly Unmasked 350 Situationists 425 the Sketchbot, Science Museum 25, 26, 26–27 skills: Dave Patten interview 34; digital literacy 88–89; Keir Winesmith interview 47–48 slides, William J. Mitchell collection 201–203

496

slow technology 258–259, 266–268 small museums, digitalization 19–20 smart homes 36 Smithsonian 17–18, 20, 306, 316 SMS project, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 48 Snow, C. P. 94 social capital, National Library of Colombia 468–470 social construct of archives 174 social experience of museums: Augmented Reality experiences for children 260–266; Dave Patten interview 28–29; an emotive shared digital experience at Çatalhöyük 147–153; issues with group experiences 145; the museum as a social space 144–145; relationship-making 335–343; successful digital group experiences 145–148 social media: Agan Harahap 231, 235–237; Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu 355; creative filtering 50 ‘soft thought’ 63 software, ease of updating 23–24 Sommerer, Christa 327 Sontag, Susan 405, 425 South America 19–20 South Asian American digital archive (SAADA) 159–160, 162–164 space 451; children’s experience of 261; National Museum Wales 445–447; physical v. digital 83; what happens in the space of the museum? 70–71; see also public space Space Probe 277–278 speculative collections: academic library collecting keynote talk 92–100; access 128 speculative computing 391–392 staff: Dave Patten interview 33, 34; digital literacy 88–89; Keir Winesmith interview 47–48 Stalder, F. 76, 77 ‘stark materiality’ 253 Stephan, Annalisa 88 storytelling: Augmented Reality experiences 261–262; CHESS 145; and empathy 302–303; National Library of Colombia 468; Rivers of Emotion digital archive 476; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 50; Soho stories digital tour 435–438; successful digital group experiences 147; Traces 442, 445–446 strategy, culture v. values 89 Streetmuseum 400, 407–408 Strongman, Lara 357 ‘subtlemob’ 441, 444, 448 Succession 389–395 ‘surface’ 451–452, 456–458 Survivors Advisory Group (SAG) 300 Swansea National Waterfront Museum 331–332, 334

Index

Sydney: Australian Museum 319, 320, 321, 322, 322–323; Powerhouse Museum 15, 17, 19 Syliphone archive, Guinea 171–172, 174 tactile learning experiences 329–330 Taiwanese shadow play 210–217 Tang: Treasures from the Silk Road Capital 350 Taras, Seth 405 Tarkhan dress, Petrie museum 249–250 Tate Encounters programme 75, 84, 89–90 Tate Modern: condition of knowledge 74–75; digital as archive 74; digital as medium 73–74; digital as tool 71–73; extension 70–71, 71 technocracy 77 technological development: digitisations 59–64; laboratories 307; new methodologies 105; obsolescence 78, 486; online access 118 technological obsolescence 78, 486 technology: ease of updating 23–24; and empathy 301–302; GLAM sector futures 484–486; human-centred design 319–325; interpreting the future 367–372; novelty 320–321; public expectations 24–25 technology and the cultural: the academy and the condition of knowledge 74–76; the art museum in the age of the Anthropocene 79–80; contemporaneity, modernism and heritage 77–78; the digital as medium 73–74; the digital as tool 71–73; and the digital condition 76; the museum’s audience and the paradoxical present 77; post-digital 76–77; progressive futures 68–70; technological obsolescence 78; what happens in the space of the museum? 70–71 Technosphere 59, 62 temporary exhibitions 24, 381 testing: Dave Patten interview 29–30; Rory Hyde interview 38; Seb Chan interview 18; see also exhibition development ‘The O’ 368–370 ‘then-and-now’ photography 397–408 thingness 60–64 the thob wedding dress, digitisation case study 57–59, 61–62, 66 Thomas, Deborah 95, 100 three-dimensional (3D) models 243–254 Thrift, N. 452, 453 time: rephotography 401–402; role in GLAM sector 484–486 Timera 407 touch screens: interface design 327, 328–329, 331–332, 334; public expectations 24–25; ‘The O’ 368–370; Yolngu museology 337–338, 338 touring apps: case studies 426–438; history walking tours 424; limitations 438–440; PastPort 452–453, 454–456, 458–460; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 42–44

Traces 441–448 tradition: role of museums 69–70; v. design 86 transformation, v. change 86 translation: mobile phones 32; Welsh and English language digital encounter 441, 447–448 transparency, digital access 49 Travelling Kungkarangkalpa 313–315, 314 trickery: Agan Harahap’s digital hoaxes 227–238; projection and superimposition. 405–406 Trove 117, 119–120, 121, 122 trust: creative filtering 50; experimentation and risk-taking 46 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 301, 303 Tuan, Yi Fu 451–452 Turkey, an emotive shared digital experience at Çatalhöyük 147–153 Ulrich, Lars 232 UNESCO: African heritage 184–185, 186; archaeological site, Çatalhöyük, Turkey 147–153; Hospicio Cabañas site 410–411; Mogao Grottoes 283; Open Heritage 412 United Arab Emirates (UAE) Expo Pavilion 332–333 United Kingdom, online heritage access 116 universities: museums set up by 306; museum-university collaboration 305–316 urban heritage: everyday 450–451, 457; place attachment 451–452, 456–458, 459–460 Urry, John 404, 425 users see online visitors; visitors V&A Museum, London 19, 35–37, 36 values, v. culture 89 Vaughan-Richards, Alan 178–180; see also Alan Vaughan-Richards archive Vaughan-Richards, Remi 179, 180, 186 Vergeront, Jeanne 89 video: shadow puppetry culture 212; Shipping Gallery exhibition 251–253; William J. Mitchell collection 204 video games: empathy 301–302; navigating through virtual space 331–332; Seb Chan interview 21–22 Viollet-le-Duc, E. 401 virtual auras 243, 249–254 virtual environments (VEs) 299 Virtual Reality (VR): affect-oriented Virtual Reality exhibitions 345–352; Dave Patten interview 27, 30, 33; development of AR and VR technologies in Western cultural institutions 105–107; Google Street View 417–421; Indian Residential School exhibition 296–303; Mogao Grottoes exhibition 286; MR (merging of real and virtual worlds) 370–371

497

Index

visitor experiences: Augmented Reality 104–105, 350; children 261; Dave Patten interview 30–31; digital media 319–320; expectations of museums 31–32; human-centred design 319–325; interaction 40; interpreting the future 367–372; Mogao Grottoes exhibition 293–294; personalisation 28–29, 106; Rory Hyde interview 38, 40; technology expectations 24–25; see also individualised experiences; social experience of museums visitors: as more-than and other-than-human ecological alliances 64–65; the museum’s audience and the paradoxical present 77; see also online visitors Visual AIDS digitisation project 164–166 visual hoaxes, Agan Harahap 227–238 visual research methodologies 451, 453–454, 458–460 Visual World iLab (VisLab) 306 ‘visualisation’ in photography 230–231 walking tours see digital walking tours: digital tour case studies 426–438; digital tour limitations 438–440; historical context 424–425, 438 Walsh, David 367–368 war art, Australian War Memorial 384–385

498

Warwuyun (worry) 337–338, 338 Watts, Gina 162 websites: Art of Nation 377–381, 378; PastPort 452–455, 456–457, 459; as publishing platform 353–357; Rivers of Emotion 473–474; Succession 390–395 Wellcome Wing, Science Museum 25 Western cultural heritage institutions, and development of augmented reality 103, 105–107 Where2Tech 412, 413 Whitechapel Gallery 73–74 Whitelaw, Mitchell 98, 121 wiki workplace 195 Wikimedia Foundation 195 Wilson, Ian E. 104 Winesmith, Keir 3, 42–51 World Heritage List 410, 414; see also UNESCO World Wonders Project 412 Yolngu museology 335–343 yU+co 286–287, 288, 292, 293, 295 Zielinski, Siegfried 316 zip disks 206–207