With new eyes I see: embodiment, empathy and silence in digital heritage interpretation

With New Eyes I See (WNEIS) was an immersive and itinerant digital heritage encounter exploring the exploitation of empathy made possible in such emergent formats. Located ‘in the wild’, and timed to coincide with the 2014 Centenary of the First World War, WNEIS transformed Cardiff’s civic centre as previously inaccessible stories and archival materials were projected onto, and playfully manipulated by, buildings and the natural environment. The research that underpinned the project unearthed a hitherto untold story about the experiences and fates of those who left their posts at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales to go and fight in WW1. Focusing on the story of Botanist Cyril Mortimer Green, and moving between past and present, known and unknown, presence and absence, participants encountered a re-scripting and multiple layering of the cityscape, and an uneasy archaeology of the museological endeavour. WNEIS foregrounded opportunities for touching, listening and feeling; as such it was a multimodal form of investigation for participants. This article uses focus group materials to explore the intersecting themes of ‘embodiment’, ‘empathy’ and ‘silence’ that emerged in reflections. It reveals an audience ready for digital cultural heritage that embraces ambiguity in the examination and negotiation of meaning

'Immersive' heritage encounters

This article introduces and analyzes the immersive turn within museum and heritage contexts. Three immersive heritage encounters from the UK are introduced, which demonstrate practice being promoted and sold through the rhetoric of “immersion” and “experience;” Traces (2017), I Swear to Tell the Truth (2018), and The Lost Palace (2016). These case studies are used to test a definition of immersive heritage as story-led, audience and participation centered, multimodal, multisensory, and attuned to its environment. Although immersive heritage often interweaves digital and physical resources, its digitality, I argue, should not itself be understood as a defining feature. The article concludes by summarizing challenges for research and practice in the nascent field of immersive heritage going forward

Angela McRobbie, be creative [Book Review]

Book Review of - Be Creative, Angela McRobbie, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2016. 224 pp. ISBN: 9780745661957, £16.99[pbk

Public heritage and the promise of the digital

The “promise” of the digital has been a democratization of the notion of heritage, and a disruption of ideas about ownership, authorship, and authenticity that might have seemed more straightforward in the recent past. This chapter overviews the possibilities brought about by these developments before introducing a series of ethical questions that they bring sharply into focus for museum and heritage practitioners. It appraises three practices which exemplify this conflicted terrain and demonstrate the issues at stake: heritage institutions’ uses of social media, crowd-based methods, and immersive mobile encounters. The chapter concludes that reflexivity is fast becoming a core professional competency for those working in digital heritage contexts

"A space of negotiation": visitor generated content and ethics at Tate

This article uses Tate as a case study through which to explore the ethical dimensions of museums’ and galleries’ efforts to create participatory digital encounters for visitors. To what extent, it asks, is a framework for a digital museum ethics beginning to emerge at Tate? Using data from a suite of interviews with the digital team at Tate, this article reveals an organization ready for considered engagement with the knottier extensions of the debate about museums’ digital practice in 2015, but a concern about how to ensure staff members have the skills and confidence to lead and take part in those discussions on the ground

Unthinking remembrance? Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red and the significance of centenaries

On 4 August 2014, the now iconic evolving work by Paul Cummins and Tom Piper, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, opened at the Tower of London. Each of the 888,246 poppies in the Tower's moat represented one British life lost in the First World War (FWW). This article uses a unique dataset of 1488 responses to the installation in order to probe the impacts of this high profile intervention. Systematic analysis of that data allows us to explore the centenary as a catalyst for remembrance activity, focusing on the kinds of “unthinking remembrance” that our research made visible. We detail how visitor responses activated a series of familiar tropes about past conflict, which often neglected recent work that has attempted to diversify perspectives about the past. This calls into question the extent to which policy objectives associated with pluralising narratives about the FWW during this centenary had been successful at this early stage in the commemoration and are likely to be successful in the future. As the “cult of the centenary” becomes ever more embedded within education and policy frameworks, and refracted within the programming of national media and cultural organisations, we contend that much can be learned about how to usefully frame commemorative activities from the unprecedented case of Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red

Evaluating digital cultural heritage 'in the wild': The case for reflexivity

Digital heritage interpretation is often untethered from traditional museological techniques and environments. As museums and heritage sites explore the potentials of locative technologies and ever more sophisticated content-triggering mechanisms for use outdoors, the kinds of questions digital heritage researchers are able to explore have complexified. Researchers now find themselves in the realm of the immersive, the experiential, and the performative. Working closely with their research participants, they navigate ambiguous terrain including the often unpredictable affective resonances that are the direct consequences of interaction. This article creates a dialogue between two case studies which, taken together, help to unpack some key methodological and ethical questions emerging from these developments. Firstly, we introduce With New Eyes I See, an itinerant and immersive digital heritage encounter which collapsed boundaries between physical/digital, fact/fiction and past/present. Secondly, we detail Rock Art on Mobile Phones, a set of dialogic web apps that aimed to explore the potential of mobile devices in delivering heritage interpretation in the rural outdoors. Looking outward from these case studies, we reflect on how traditional evaluation frameworks are being stretched and strained given the kinds of questions digital heritage researchers are now exploring. Drawing on vignettes from experience-oriented qualitative studies with participants, we articulate specific common evaluative challenges related to the embodied, multimodal and transmedial nature of the digital heritage experiences under investigation. In doing so, we make the case for reflexivity as a central - and more collaborative - feature of research design within this field going forward; paying attention to, and advocating, the reciprocal relationship between researchers and the heritage experiences we stud

Myths about media studies: the construction of media studies education in the British press

This article examines the construction and representation of Media Studies education in the British press. Drawing on an empirical analysis of five years of newspaper coverage, it concludes that Media Studies has been predominantly represented and framed as a ‘soft’ or ‘Mickey Mouse’ subject, with over half (61.1%) the news stories analysed approaching it through this lens. It shows that the right of centre British press in particular promoted this understanding of Media Studies as a subject devoid of educational value and with low potential for employability, rather than a legitimate option for study. When themes could be approached from either a negative or positive viewpoint (such as employability prospects and subject value), more often than not the negative perspective dominated. This article argues that this perspective has been bolstered by these newspapers largely through their justification of government action and policy towards the subject, which is framed as a positive interjection and opportunity for protecting educational standards. Ultimately, we show that the British debate surrounding Media Studies has been informed by a top-down discourse of elite political and Conservative party sources, with a scarcity of oppositional or broader political representation – a landscape that frames Media Studies education as a delegitimized and worthless pursuit of study