Encouraging persons to visit cultural sites through mini-games

Gamification has been recently proposed as a technique to improve user engagement in different activities, including visits to cultural sites and cultural tourism in general. We present the design, development and initial validation of the NEPTIS Poleis system, which consists of a mobile application and a Web interface for curators, allowing the definition, and subsequent fruition by users, of different minigames suitable for open-air assets

Death and memory on the Home Front: Second World War commemoration in the South Hams, Devon

This is the publisher's PDF of an article published in Cambridge archaeological journal© 2010. The definitive version is available at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=CAJThis article discusses two World War II monuments - the Slapton Sands Evacuation Memorial and the Torcross Tank Memorial - as commemorations of events and as a method of defining the identities of local people

The Residences of the Bishop's of Durham: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives

Bishops were amongst the wealthiest and most influential people in medieval England and Wales. They held a dual role as both spiritual leaders and secular lords, and their residences provided the infrastructure from which they enacted their duties. Therefore, understanding these buildings offers unique insights into the lives and duties of these people. In the case of the bishops of Durham, their residences were numerous and diverse, with only a few having received significant scholarly attention. This thesis adopts a multifaceted approach to understanding these buildings. Using sources ranging from episcopal registers and itineraries, archaeological evidence and standing building reports, this thesis aims to be a holistic and wide-ranging study of the episcopal residences of the bishops of Durham with a consideration of how these buildings relate socially to the episcopal role

Producing the Dead Sea Scrolls: (Trans)national Heritage and the Politics of Popular Representation

This thesis explores the politics of representing the assemblage of ancient manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls to popular audiences in Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the United States. I demonstrate that these objects of national heritage are circulated along transnational routes to maintain the legitimacy of nationalist discourse abroad. Three sites—the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Qumran National Park in the West Bank, and a travelling exhibit presented at the Boston Museum of Science—are examined for textual narrative, spatial arrangement, and visitor behavior. Analysis of these observations illuminates two recurring motifs common to all three sites: the restoration of an ancient ethno-national landscape (“land of Israel”) in the contemporary landscape of Palestine/Israel and the important legacy of ancient Jewish society in contemporary Israel and “the West.” These motifs and the way they are presented through a framing of cultural heritage can be associated with a larger nationalist discourse maintained by Israeli state authorities and mainstream media that perpetuates a linking of western liberal and Zionist ideologies. I contend that the transnational circulation of this nationalist heritage narrative works to legitimize—at a global scale—an ongoing Israeli program of occupation and settlement in Palestinian territory subsumed under the biblical/Zionist frame of the “land of Israel.” While making preliminary suggestions toward critical interventions, I also suggest that the analysis of transnational encounters with nationalist heritage merits deeper ethnographic investigation towards understanding its impact on individuals’ political (in)action towards the Israel/Palestine conflict