The Internet’s dominant role in recent years has caused a change in the relationship between media producers, suppliers and consumers in the traditional media landscape. The cultural sector must therefore decide what to do with today’s digital media in response to the general public’s changing role, and for the purpose of improving accessibility. The use of multiple media resources and particularly resources like the Internet and mobile telephony seems to be inevitable. The only question that remains is: how? This paper addresses this question by focussing on social tagging and storytelling, and reports the results of an empirical study on tagging behaviour using the social tagging platform (see also Van Vliet et al., 2010).
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Ameland, a Dutch Wadden Sea island, is blessed with many historical buildings, such as captains’ houses, which make up picturesque townscapes. Together with the attractions of sandy beaches, these quaint villages attract hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. Ameland also has the ambitious goal to become self-sufficient in renewable energy. Our (practical) aim is to support local stakeholders with the design of energy transition strategies that take account of heritage values.Theoretically, we rely on a layered framework, where meanings and values of individual buildings, townscapes, landscapes, local historical narratives, as well as economic and social values can find a place. In our project, we encountered value conflicts and will discuss how these conflicts can be resolved. In this respect, we refer to the concept of a value hierarchy.We investigate heritage values held by inhabitants of Ameland. What aspects of their built environment do they value in particular? How are specific building types, historical townscapes and landscapes evaluated? What impact of energy measures and scenarios do they find acceptable? To this end, we developed an online questionnaire, which was distributed by local stakeholders. We found a range of heritage and sustainability values held by the inhabitants and stakeholders of Ameland. In the discussion section we will return to the conflicting values in the Ameland case. We find that the presence of heritage values leads to the specification of conditions for the application of energy measures; these should be as invisible as possible. Thus, to combine the values of heritage and sustainability, setting norms and requirements for the implementation of new energy measures is advisable.
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The online presence of organizations is long gone from being just a web page. Social media have enabled easy and inexpensive interaction between millions of individuals and communities. This has not gone unnoticed by cultural heritage institutes. The question is what all these social media activities bring. Even if an institute knows what it tries to achieve online, the metrics often consist of confusing accumulation of statistics, across several systems and reveal little about online user behaviour, engagement and satisfaction. In the research project Museum Compass a prototype of a social media monitor is developed, which will contain data of current and historic online activities on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and Flickr of all registered Dutch museums. The first version of this monitor has been developed, and we believe that this is a good moment to discuss – mostly in a practical sense – our general approach and preliminary results.
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This Professional Doctorate (PD) project explores the intersection of artistic research, digital heritage, and interactive media, focusing on the reimagining of medieval Persian bestiaries through high dark fantasy and game-making. The research investigates how the process of creation with interactive 3D media can function as a memory practice. At its core, the project treats bestiaries—pre-modern collections of real and imaginary classifications of the world—as a window into West and Central Asian flora, fauna, and the landscape of memory, serving as both repositories of knowledge and imaginative, cosmological accounts of the more-than-human world. As tools for exploring non-human pre-modern agency, bestiaries offer a medium of speculative storytelling, and explicate the unstable nature of memory in diasporic contexts. By integrating these themes into an interactive digital world, the research develops new methodologies for artistic research, treating world-building as a technique of attunement to heritage. Using a practice-based approach, the project aligns with MERIAN’s emphasis on "research in the wild," where artistic and scientific inquiries merge in experimental ways. It engages with hard-core game mechanics, mythopoetic decompressed environmental storytelling, and hand-crafted detailed intentional world-building to offer new ways of interacting with the past that challenges nostalgia and monumentalization. How can a cultural practice do justice to other, more experimental forms of remembering and encountering cultural pasts, particularly those that embrace the interconnections between human and non-human entities? Specifically, how can artistic practice, through the medium of a virtual, bestiary-inspired dark fantasy interactive media, allow for new modes of remembering that resist idealized and monumentalized histories? What forms of inquiry can emerge when technology (3D media, open-world interactive digital media) becomes a tool of attention and a site of experimental attunement to cosmological heritage?
PhD research in progress@Wageningen University and ResearchPromotors: Prof. dr. Joks Janssen, Prof. dr. Hans Renes
In de toekomst zullen wateroverlast en droogte steeds vaker voorkomen. Hoewel water van grote betekenis is voor ons dagelijks leven - en Nederland een rijke traditie heeft van waterbeheer - maken sociale, culturele en historische waarden slechts sporadisch deel uit van watergerelateerd beleid. Omdat er bij wateropgaven veel verschillende partijen aan tafel zitten, is het belangrijk te snappen welke waarden meespelen bij besluitvormingsprocessen. Een serious game kan helpen bij het formuleren van die waarden om bij te dragen aan een beter ‘waterbewustzijn’ van zowel beleidsmakers als bewoners, en bewoners beter te betrekken bij hun eigen leefomgeving. Six Architecten, actief in bouw- en renovatieprojecten waarin water en erfgoed een rol spelen, lopen aan tegen een beleidsomgeving van tegengestelde belangen. De gameontwikkelaar IJsfontein in Amsterdam ontwikkelt serious games en heeft veel ervaring met het visualiseren van historisch materiaal voor musea en archieven, maar zoekt naar de kennis om deze vaardigheden toepasbaar te maken binnen de hedendaagse klimaatopgave. Met deze twee praktijkpartners werken onderzoekers van de TU Delft, op het gebied van watererfgoed, ontwerpen voor waarden (Delft Design for Values) en games (TPM), samen aan de WaterWaarden-game. Voor dit project gaan we in gesprek met beleidsmakers en bewoners om te achterhalen welke waarden er meespelen bij een selectie van objecten (zoals kades, dijken, gemalen) binnen de casus Amsterdam. Waternet, het waterbedrijf van de gemeente Amsterdam en het waterschap Amstel, Gooi en Vecht, zal bijdragen bij het contacten leggen met betrokken en het toetsen aan de beleidswerkelijkheid. Door de waarden en uitdagingen in specifieke opgaven in Amsterdam te analyseren en in de game te verwerken, werken we toe naar een prototype en een aanvraag om deze serious game te ontwikkelen tot een gameplatform dat in de toekomst ook bij wateropgaven in andere gebieden gebruikt kan worden.