New Technologies for Cultural Heritage (2010)

Title: Seeing is Believing: New Technologies for Cultural Heritage
Conference: University College London, 9 June 2010
Link: http://www.iskouk.org/...

Description:

Seeing is Believing: New Technologies for Cultural Heritage was yet another successful ISKO UK meeting attended by over 90 participants. The afternoon offered a fascinating and mutually complementary suite of talks that covered topics ranging from how to capture 3D representations of precious artefacts in order to improve access to mass audiences without the damage caused by physical handling, to how crowdsourcing can harness the enthusiasm of online communities to improve collections, speed digitisation, and enhance metadata. [...]

Programme

Shaping Up: 3D Documentation and Knowledge in Cultural Heritage, David Arnold [mp3]

This talk will describe current research targeted to make 3D documentation a practical alternative for Cultural Heritage organisations and cover topics such connecting shape to metadata and the need to interpret the semantics of shape. The talk will also describe some of the challenges that the research faces in the quest to empower the mass digitisation and widespread 3D dissemination that the aspiration demands.


Tales of Things: Archiving and Viewing the Cultural Heritage of Everything, Andy Hudson-Smith [slides] [mp3]

Tales of Things is part of a research project called TOTeM that will explore social memory in the emerging culture of the Internet of Things. Researchers from across the UK have provided this site as a platform for users to add stories to their own treasured objects and to connect to other people who share similar experiences. The system allows any object to be tagged via qrcodes and rfid labels, making it suitable for use by museums, exhibitions, artists and the public at large. The talk explores the project to date and discusses the implications of being able to archive and write memories to everything.

Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage: UCL's Transcribe Bentham Project, Melissa Terras [slides] [mp3]

Crowdsourcing - the harnessing of online activity to aid in large scale projects that require human cognition - is becoming of interest to those in the library, museum and cultural heritage industry, as institutions seek ways to publicly engage their online communities, as well as aid in creating useful and usable digital resources. UCL's Bentham Project has recently set up the "Transcribe Bentham" initiative; an ambitious, open source, participatory online environment to aid in transcribing the 10,000 folios of handwritten documents by the philospher and legal reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) that are currently in UCL special collections. This paper will explore how crowdsourcing can be used, the myths and pitfalls in using crowdsourced effort, and the features that computer applications need to provide, in the context of the development of the Transcribe Bentham project.

Putting the National Maritime Museum online, Fiona Romeo [mp3]


eMuseum Network - a path to Linked Data, Sascha Curzon [slides] [mp3]

eMuseum Network is a search and collaboration platform designed and hosted by Gallery Systems. The project enables member museums to share their collections catalogues and to search and export data across all participating collections from a single access point, in a share-and-share-alike fashion. This presentation will give an overview of the project and how Gallery Systems plans to provide a path for museums to participate in the Linked Data Initiative.