“Deterritorializing the Canadian Museum for Human Rights”

 This article explains the value of assemblage theory to making sense of a museum like the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), which has struggled with the formidable challenge of comparatively representing human rights in controversial cultural and historical contexts. I argue that “assemblage thinking” permits us to appreciate more richly the way in which the expressive power of the CMHR arises from the dynamic interaction/intersection of overlapping clusters of objects, spaces, ideologies, memories, feelings, structures, histories, and experiences.  Understood as “assemblages,” these clusters in important (but not all) ways lie beyond the scope of formal agency such as that exercised by curators and museum administrators. Accordingly, we must understand museums generally, and the CMHR particularly, as fundamentally unable guarantee the integrity and perdurability of their/its own structures and meanings, and recognize these meanings (and a museum’s identity) as irreducibly open-ended and provisional.

Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library

This report updates and expands on A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services, originally commissioned by the DLF as an internal report in summer 2003, and released to the public later that year. It highlights major developments affecting the ecosystem of scholarly communications and digital libraries since the last survey and provides an analysis of OAI implementation demographics, based on a comparative review of repository registries and cross-archive search services. Secondly, it reviews the state-of-practice for a cohort of digital library aggregation services, grouping them in the context of the problem space to which they most closely adhere. Based in part on responses collected in fall 2005 from an online survey distributed to the original core services, the report investigates the purpose, function and challenges of next-generation aggregation services. On a case-by-case basis, the advances in each service are of interest in isolation from each other, but the report also attempts to situate these services in a larger context and to understand how they fit into a multi-dimensional and interdependent ecosystem supporting the worldwide community of scholars. Finally, the report summarizes the contributions of these services thus far and identifies obstacles requiring further attention to realize the goal of an open, distributed digital library system

Cultural Heritage on line

The 2nd International Conference "Cultural Heritage online – Empowering users: an active role for user communities" was held in Florence on 15-16 December 2009. It was organised by the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale, the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and the Library of Congress, through the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program - NDIIP partners. The conference topics were related to digital libraries, digital preservation and the changing paradigms, focussing on user needs and expectations, analysing how to involve users and the cultural heritage community in creating and sharing digital resources. The sessions investigated also new organisational issues and roles, and cultural and economic limits from an international perspective

Farewell to the ‘childhood of man’: ritual, seasonality, and the origins of inequality

Evidence of grand burials and monumental construction is a striking feature in the archaeological record of the Upper Palaeolithic period, between 40 and 10 kya (thousand years ago). Archaeologists often interpret such finds as indicators of rank and hierarchy among Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. Interpretations of this kind are difficult to reconcile with the view, still common in sociobiology, that pre-agricultural societies were typically egalitarian in orientation. Here we develop an alternative model of ‘Palaeolithic politics’, which emphasizes the ability of hunter-gatherers to alternate – consciously and deliberately – between contrasting modes of political organization, including a variety of hierarchical and egalitarian possibilities. We propose that alternations of this sort were an emergent property of human societies in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age. We further consider some implications of the model for received concepts of social evolution, with particular attention to the distinction between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ hunter-gatherers

Spatial ontologies for architectural heritage

Informatics and artificial intelligence have generated new requirements for digital archiving, information, and documentation. Semantic interoperability has become fundamental for the management and sharing of information. The constraints to data interpretation enable both database interoperability, for data and schemas sharing and reuse, and information retrieval in large datasets. Another challenging issue is the exploitation of automated reasoning possibilities. The solution is the use of domain ontologies as a reference for data modelling in information systems. The architectural heritage (AH) domain is considered in this thesis. The documentation in this field, particularly complex and multifaceted, is well-known to be critical for the preservation, knowledge, and promotion of the monuments. For these reasons, digital inventories, also exploiting standards and new semantic technologies, are developed by international organisations (Getty Institute, ONU, European Union). Geometric and geographic information is essential part of a monument. It is composed by a number of aspects (spatial, topological, and mereological relations; accuracy; multi-scale representation; time; etc.). Currently, geomatics permits the obtaining of very accurate and dense 3D models (possibly enriched with textures) and derived products, in both raster and vector format. Many standards were published for the geographic field or in the cultural heritage domain. However, the first ones are limited in the foreseen representation scales (the maximum is achieved by OGC CityGML), and the semantic values do not consider the full semantic richness of AH. The second ones (especially the core ontology CIDOC – CRM, the Conceptual Reference Model of the Documentation Commettee of the International Council of Museums) were employed to document museums’ objects. Even if it was recently extended to standing buildings and a spatial extension was included, the integration of complex 3D models has not yet been achieved. In this thesis, the aspects (especially spatial issues) to consider in the documentation of monuments are analysed. In the light of them, the OGC CityGML is extended for the management of AH complexity. An approach ‘from the landscape to the detail’ is used, for considering the monument in a wider system, which is essential for analysis and reasoning about such complex objects. An implementation test is conducted on a case study, preferring open source applications

An exploration into the interpretive frameworks of assessors in an interior design moderation event

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-129).How do multiple perspectives enable or disturb the reaching of sound classifications? The question underlying the study arose out of the ostensibly conflicting paradigms that a multi-disciplinary assessor panel imputed to an interior design moderation event. The study seeks to understand how disciplinary specialisations shape their judgements. Given assessors' plausible susceptibility to their individual schemas, the study explores the manner by which a heterogeneous social milieu approximates sound assessment practices and identifies legitimate interior design productions. For the study, the multi-disciplines were explicated as an organised community of individually-embodied social practices upon which coherent discourse and the exercise of power were dependent. Bourdieu's social theory is drawn upon to make sense as to how the theoretical constructs of capital and habitus are located within particular disciplinary groups and, how they are reproduced as the recursive internalisations endemic to individual specialisations. Capital and habitus are used to position the individually specialised assessors within the field. The specialist positions are premised as sites of opposition where dispositions are coterminous with position taking and competition for legitimacy. In this way, the study interrogates whether the act of assessment may be a function of how assessors operationalise their social practices. The assessor values and their corresponding knowledge and attitudes were seen as constituting the means by which appraisals and classifications were being made and calibrated. This necessitated a qualitative analysis of the complex aggregations of values and behaviours, typical of the socially differentiated panel. Primary to the investigation was the need to penetrate the actual moderation debates to access the tacit habitus and pervasive power that lay embedded and thus obscured from scrutiny. These deliberations represent a symbolic, structuring system - produced and interpreted against a common social field. For this reason four moderation cruces, seen as illumining the assessors' habitus that their particular capital resources advocated, were identified as relevant samples. The analysis hones into what the assessors draw on in order to make sense of the productions, i.e. their primary informants, or as encapsulated by Shay, their interpretive frameworks