Museums and Digital Culture: New perspectives and research

This richly illustrated book offers new perspectives and research on how digital culture is transforming museums in the 21st century, as they strive to keep pace with emerging technologies driving cultural and social change, played out not only in today’s pervasive networked environment of the Internet and Web, but in everyday life, from home to work and on city streets. In a world where digital culture has redefined human information behavior as life in code and digits, increasingly it dominates human activity and communication. These developments have radically changed the expectations of the museum visitor, real and virtual, the work of museum professionals and, most prominently, the nature of museum exhibitions, while digital art and life in a digitally saturated world is changing our ways of seeing, doing, our senses and aesthetics. Overall, this book creates a new picture of the 21st-century museum field. As museums become shared spaces with their communities, local, national and global and move from collection-centered to user-/visitor-centered institutions, they are assuming new roles and responsibilities tied to new goals for engaging their audience, conveying meaning through collections, creating learning experiences and importantly, connecting to daily digital life and culture integral to the museum ecosystem. Our studies of recent exhibitions at museums leading change are used to exemplify new directions, while they point to a reimagined vision for museums of the future at the heart of which is the integration of digital culture and visitor experience and participation in real and virtual space

Locally focused and digitally oriented: examining eco-museums’ digitization in a service quality management perspective

Purpose: Eco-museums safeguard the cultural authenticity and the historical identity of the place in which they operate. Conventional organizational models and management practices are generally employed to achieve this institutional aim. Conversely, innovative solutions – such as digitization – are overlooked. Adopting a service quality management perspective, the article intends to examine the role of managerialization and professionalization in triggering eco-museums’ digitization. Methodology: An empirical analysis involving 126 eco-museums operating in Italy as of 2018 was designed to investigate the implications of managerialization and professionalization on the eco-museums’ propensity to embark on a digitization process. Two different forms of digitization were examined: 1) the presence of eco-museums in the digital environment; and 2) the exploitation of digital tools for service delivery. The mediating role of two “soft” Total Quality Management (TQM) practices, i.e. people centredness and strategic focus on visitors’ experience, was contemplated in the empirical analysis. Findings: The research findings suggest that managerialization and professionalization have ambiguous effects on eco-museums’ digitization. Nevertheless, they indirectly contribute to a greater digital presence of eco-museums and to a larger use of digital tools for service delivery through an increased use of soft TQM practices. Practical Implications: Managerialization and professionalization are likely to foster the digital transition of eco-museums, which advances their ability to protect and promote the local cultural heritage. Soft TQM practices intended to achieve people-centredness and to enhance the visitors’ experience should be exploited to stimulate the eco-museums’ digitization. Originality: The article examines the triggers of eco-museums’ digitization, providing some food for thought to scholars and practitioners

Writing the Digital History of Nazi Germany

This book will consider how the outcomes of “doing history digitally” include different kind of sources and data, as well as new ways of researching historical questions, and innovative forms of presenting history. All contributions focus on aspects related to the history of National Socialism, World War II and the Holocaust

O ecossistema Média Arte: entre nomenclaturas, exposição e arquivo - O caso do gnration 2014-2022

O presente trabalho desenvolve-se no âmbito do Mestrado em Multimédia, especialização Cultura e Artes, onde exploramos o ecossistema Média Arte nas ramificações de taxonomia, exposição e arquivo nos seus desenvolvimentos mais recentes e nos paralelos que encontram com antecedentes de todo o século XX. Na ligação histórica e contextual destas conjunturas deu-se especial atenção à literatura produzida que se debruça nestas condições que permitiu apresentar os pontos discutidos por ela e evoluções de conceito e problemas propostos ou contrariados. Como correspondente ao acima debruçado, analisa-se o caso de estudo do espaço gnration do ponto de vista comparativo com as práticas discutidas na literatura. Onde se procurou aferir as estratégias utilizadas e aquelas que se pensa adoptar no futuro, e o seu acordo com a discussão teórica e suas contribuições para ela mesma. Pontos discutidos directamente com os envolvidos e com o material que disponibilizam à comunidade.The present work is developed in the scope of the master's degree in Multimedia, specialization in Culture and Arts. It explores the Media Art ecosystem's ramifications of taxonomy, exhibition and archive on its most recent developments and the parallels it found along the entire twentieth century. Special attention has been given to the historical and contextual connection of these terms to the literature dealing with these subjects that enabled us to present the points discussed by them and concept evolutions, and problems raised or countered. In correspondence with the above, the gnration case study is analyzed from a comparative point of view with the practices discussed in the literature. We have tried to gauge the strategies used and those planned to be adopted in the future, and their agreement with the theoretical discussion and their contributions to it. Points are directly discussed with those involved and with the material they provide to the community

EVA London 2022: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts

The Electronic Visualisation and the Arts London 2022 Conference (EVA London 2022) is co-sponsored by the Computer Arts Society (CAS) and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, of which the CAS is a Specialist Group. Of course, this has been a difficult time for all conferences, with the Covid-19 pandemic. For the first time since 2019, the EVA London 2022 Conference is a physical conference. It is also an online conference, as it was in the previous two years. We continue with publishing the proceedings, both online, with open access via ScienceOpen, and also in our traditional printed form, for the second year in full colour. Over recent decades, the EVA London Conference on Electronic Visualisation and the Arts has established itself as one of the United Kingdom’s most innovative and interdisciplinary conferences. It brings together a wide range of research domains to celebrate a diverse set of interests, with a specialised focus on visualisation. The long and short papers in this volume cover varied topics concerning the arts, visualisations, and IT, including 3D graphics, animation, artificial intelligence, creativity, culture, design, digital art, ethics, heritage, literature, museums, music, philosophy, politics, publishing, social media, and virtual reality, as well as other related interdisciplinary areas. The EVA London 2022 proceedings presents a wide spectrum of papers, demonstrations, Research Workshop contributions, other workshops, and for the seventh year, the EVA London Symposium, in the form of an opening morning session, with three invited contributors. The conference includes a number of other associated evening events including ones organised by the Computer Arts Society, Art in Flux, and EVA International. As in previous years, there are Research Workshop contributions in this volume, aimed at encouraging participation by postgraduate students and early-career artists, accepted either through the peer-review process or directly by the Research Workshop chair. The Research Workshop contributors are offered bursaries to aid participation. In particular, EVA London liaises with Art in Flux, a London-based group of digital artists. The EVA London 2022 proceedings includes long papers and short “poster” papers from international researchers inside and outside academia, from graduate artists, PhD students, industry professionals, established scholars, and senior researchers, who value EVA London for its interdisciplinary community. The conference also features keynote talks. A special feature this year is support for Ukrainian culture after its invasion earlier in the year. This publication has resulted from a selective peer review process, fitting as many excellent submissions as possible into the proceedings. This year, submission numbers were lower than previous years, mostly likely due to the pandemic and a new requirement to submit drafts of long papers for review as well as abstracts. It is still pleasing to have so many good proposals from which to select the papers that have been included. EVA London is part of a larger network of EVA international conferences. EVA events have been held in Athens, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, California, Cambridge (both UK and USA), Canberra, Copenhagen, Dallas, Delhi, Edinburgh, Florence, Gifu (Japan), Glasgow, Harvard, Jerusalem, Kiev, Laval, London, Madrid, Montreal, Moscow, New York, Paris, Prague, St Petersburg, Thessaloniki, and Warsaw. Further venues for EVA conferences are very much encouraged by the EVA community. As noted earlier, this volume is a record of accepted submissions to EVA London 2022. Associated online presentations are in general recorded and made available online after the conference

ART THROUGH A DIGITAL LENS: A STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF NEW MEDIAS ON THE MUSEUM, ITS WORKS, AND THE PUBLIC.

Over the last two decades imagery viewed on the internet has grown immensely. Museums, though slow to embrace it, have begun to upload digital images of their traditional artwork to their websites and onto their social media channels. In large measure, the COVID pandemic accelerated this move to engage audiences they feared would dissipate as museum doors closed. Moving digital images online though means giving over control to the protocol and systems of the internet, to profit-seeking corporations, and the volatility of social media platforms. The museum’s long-established authority over artists, artworks, and exhibitions is usurped by power structures existing in capitalization, digitization, and optimization. A digital image of a traditional artwork moves away from its role as a copy of the original to become a new artefact in novel territory as a separate entity. An artwork on a social media feed is detached from the organizational and curatorial oversight of the museum and its work as a representative of the original work of art. It joins a stream of pictures in the ceaseless social media flow where it loses narrative and context to become instead a form of communication. It is also subject to unknowable algorithms designed by large conglomerates. Museums, with stretched budgets and limited staff, place their digital collections into these frameworks without considering what may be lost in efforts to “digitize”. This research uses theories of digimodernism, hypermodernism, and mediation at the interface between viewer, screen, and original object to take a broad look at what digitizing means for the artwork and the museum. It offers suggestions and discussion on how museums can use their institutional abilities and public trust to be engaged and active in their communities in the age of the internet

Proceedings of EVA London 2024

The Electronic Visualisation and the Arts London 2024 Conference (EVA London 2024) is co-sponsored by the Computer Arts Society (CAS) and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, of which the CAS is a Specialist Group. As for 2022, the EVA London 2023 Conference is a physical and online “hybrid” conference. We continue with publishing the proceedings, both online, with open access via ScienceOpen, and also in our traditional printed form, in full colour. The main conference presentations run during 10–13 July 2023, with workshops and other activities, especially for students, on 14 July 2023