Saving temporary exhibitions in virtual environments: The Digital Renaissance of Ulisse Aldrovandi – Acquisition and digitisation of cultural heritage objects

As per the objectives of Project CHANGES, particularly its thematic sub-project on the use of virtual technologies for museums and art collections, our goal was to obtain a digital twin of the temporary exhibition on Ulisse Aldrovandi called “The Other Renaissance”, and make it accessible to users online. After a preliminary study of the exhibition, focusing on acquisition constraints and related solutions, we proceeded with the digital twin creation by acquiring, processing, modelling, optimising, exporting, and metadating the exhibition. We made hybrid use of two acquisition techniques to create new digital cultural heritage objects and environments, and we used open technologies, formats, and protocols to make available the final digital product. Here, we describe the process of collecting and curating bibliographical exhibition (meta) data and the beginning of the digital twin creation to foster its findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability. The creation of the digital twin is currently ongoing

Campanhas publicitárias na revista Veja: construções da globalização

Neste artigo, analisam-se quatro peças publicitárias extraídas da revista Veja em diferentes décadas, procurando perceber como o discurso publicitário engendra visões da globalização. Aborda-se a publicidade enquanto uma ferramenta a serviço da lógica do capitalismo e do consumismo. Verificou-se que a passagem temporal, embora implique modificações formais e de conteúdo nas peças analisadas, revela-se também uma constante em que, a partir da publicidade, promete-se a inserção dos públicos alvos na globalização tomada somente em seus aspectos positivos, fortalecendo a idéia de globalização perversa e à maneira de fábula, tipologia proposta pelo pensador Milton Santos que se debruçou sobre as relações entre publicidade e mundialização

An approach to extend the metadata schema of Zenodo for Cultural Heritage datasets

In this article, we present an approach designed to extend the metadata schema of the Zenodo data management platform to strengthen the FAIRness of the published dataset. We focus on a bottom-up approach starting from a series of datasets ranging from the 3D digitalisation of monuments and sites to the creation of reconstructive records (including the scientific documentation they are based on), to the implementation of digital storytelling and to the development of open source-based web-apps. We propose the simplest possible set of metadata to be included in the Zenodo platform with the possibility, for the community, to adopt and further develop/modify them. This article will describe in detail the formalisation and the digital formats adopted providing the related metadata templates developed within the projects

Macaque area V4 neurons translate the attended features of a visual stimulus into behaviorally relevant categories

It is well known that visual attention can enhance processing of restricted regions of space or of individual objects. Recent work has shown that visual attention can also lead to selective processing of individual object features, but clear demonstrations of these feature-specific modulatory effects are still lacking at the level of single neurons. In the present study we cued two macaque monkeys to discriminate either the color or the orientation of a stimulus, while ignoring the other feature of the same stimulus. Sixteen different stimuli varying in color and orientation were presented inside the receptive field (RF) of isolated, dorsal area V4 neurons, while the animal was centrally fixating. We recorded the responses of around 150 cells in the two animals. Attending to a given feature might be expected to sharpen neural selectivity for that feature at the expense of selectivity for the other feature. We assessed this possibility by comparing selectivity for the color and the orientation of the stimuli when either feature was behaviorally relevant. Although ∼40% of the recorded cells were significantly modulated by feature-selective attention, no consistent changes in tuning were found across the cell population, in agreement with previous studies of V4. However, for about one third of the cells, while activity in an early phase post-stimulus onset mainly encoded the features of the RF stimulus, regardless of the specific feature to be attended, activity in a later phase developed to encode which of two alternative behavioral responses was required by the relevant feature of the stimulus. Thus, it appears that feature-selective attention can modulate neural activity in area V4 by translating the attended feature of a visual object into a task-relevant category, i.e., by explicitly representing only the information that is relevant to guide behavior

Building Blocks for Multi-dimensional WebXR Inspection Tools Targeting Cultural Heritage

Data exploration and inspection within semantically enriched multi-dimensional contexts, may benefit of immersive VR presentation when proper 3D user interfaces are adopted. WebXR represents a great opportunity to investigate, experiment, develop and assess advanced multi-dimensional interactive tools for Cultural Heritage, making them accessible through a common web browser. We present and describe the potential of WebXR and a set of building blocks for crafting such immersive data inspection tools, exploiting recent web standards and spatial user interfaces. We describe the current state of the EMviq tool - developed within SSHOC European project - and how it is taking advantage of these components for online immersive sessions. The EMviq tool allows to visually inspect and query an Extended Matrix dataset, allowing to query and explore all the information within the knowledge graph relating to the interpretative datasets - in this paper applied to the case studies of the Roman theatre of Catania and Montebelluna smithy. The main functionalities discussed are spatio-temporal exploration, search and selection of stratigraphic units, and the presentation of metadata and paradata related to the data provenance (both objective and interpretative)

Macaque area V4 neurons translate the attended features of a visual stimulus into behaviorally relevant categories

It is well known that visual attention can enhance processing of restricted regions of space or of individual objects. Recent work has shown that visual attention can also lead to selective processing of individual object features, but clear demonstrations of these feature-specific modulatory effects are still lacking at the level of single neurons. In the present study we cued two macaque monkeys to discriminate either the color or the orientation of a stimulus, while ignoring the other feature of the same stimulus. Sixteen different stimuli varying in color and orientation were presented inside the receptive field (RF) of isolated, dorsal area V4 neurons, while the animal was centrally fixating. We recorded the responses of around 150 cells in the two animals. Attending to a given feature might be expected to sharpen neural selectivity for that feature at the expense of selectivity for the other feature. We assessed this possibility by comparing selectivity for the color and the orientation of the stimuli when either feature was behaviorally relevant. Although ∼40% of the recorded cells were significantly modulated by feature-selective attention, no consistent changes in tuning were found across the cell population, in agreement with previous studies of V4. However, for about one third of the cells, while activity in an early phase post-stimulus onset mainly encoded the features of the RF stimulus, regardless of the specific feature to be attended, activity in a later phase developed to encode which of two alternative behavioral responses was required by the relevant feature of the stimulus. Thus, it appears that feature-selective attention can modulate neural activity in area V4 by translating the attended feature of a visual object into a task-relevant category, i.e., by explicitly representing only the information that is relevant to guide behavior