Cultural Heritage Initiatives Research Articles

Dilemmas of making and unmaking environmental and cultural heritage in Southern Belize

ABSTRACT Heritage is defined and maintained through complex and changing processes. In what ways might heritage scholars and practitioners understand dynamic complexities theoretically, methodologically and ethically? Through reflections on involvement in environmental and cultural heritage initiatives with Maya communities in southern Belize, this paper argues for an explicit forefronting of community aims and goals in heritage-focused project design and implementation. It demonstrates how cultural anthropologists involved in collaborative projects with archaeologists, non-governmental and/or community organisations may use ethnographic approaches to push collectively towards decolonial, community archaeologies. The challenges of ethnographers and archaeologists working together to document heritage past and present are critically and reflexively analysed, using frameworks rooted in environmental anthropology to capture the fluid and negotiated nature of heritage constructions by exploring what it means to live a ‘good life’ in Maya communities in Belize. The insights generated for developing a decolonising approach for future work of this type are also considered. By challenging what constitutes project ‘success’, and discussing the questions simultaneously posed and revealed by the long-term community projects detailed here, the paper argues for a more collaborative, nuanced and fluid conceptualisation of what constitutes heritage, and who is served by its documentation and dissemination.

Cultural Heritage Service Design and Experience Innovation: A Case Study of Taiwan

This paper delves into the evolving landscape of community engagement, exploring innovative methods to enhance the involvement and awareness of young individuals. Employing a comprehensive content analysis through a multiple case study approach, this research investigates cultural heritage initiatives in Taiwan, emphasizing the pivotal role of technology and digital platforms in engaging young audiences. The study utilizes theoretical sampling and triangulation methods, incorporating semi-structured interviews, secondary sources, and participant observation. The findings underscore the significance of digital experiences as supplements to physical presence, offering a gateway to cultural heritage. The practical implications advocate for heritage sites to leverage digital platforms, collaborating with external partners to enrich visitor experiences. The paper furnishes valuable recommendations for enhancing customer engagement and communication with the younger demographic, contributing to the field of cultural heritage in Asia. This research marks a transition from physical to online service design, harnessing technology to inspire and engage, ultimately attracting diverse generations and retaining the interest of existing visitors.

Revitalization of cultural heritage in the digital era: A case study in Taiwan

<p>Cultural heritage organizations worldwide face daunting challenges, grappling with workforce shortages and financial constraints that often result in service closures, postponements, or cancellations. In response to these difficulties, we delved into the evolving interaction between cultural heritage sites and society, especially considering the profound socio-economic repercussions of the global pandemic at these sites. We scrutinized the dynamic heritage of community engagement, with a particular focus on pioneering methods to augment the participation and awareness of younger individuals. We focused on innovative methods to enhance the involvement and awareness of young individuals. Employing a comprehensive content analysis through a multiple case study approach, cultural heritage initiatives in Taiwan were investigated, emphasizing the pivotal role of technology and digital platforms in engaging young audiences. Using a comprehensive content analysis approach within a multiple case study framework, we examined various cultural heritage initiatives in Taiwan. Notably, we accentuated the crucial role played by technology and digital platforms in captivating younger audiences. Through theoretical sampling and triangulation methods, including semi-structured interviews, secondary sources, and participant observation, we sought to obtain a holistic understanding of the subject matter. The research findings underscore the pivotal importance of digital experiences as supplements to physical presence, providing a gateway to cultural heritage exploration. Moreover, we advocate for heritage sites to harness digital platforms effectively, encouraging collaborations with external partners to enrich visitor experiences. We also offer valuable recommendations aimed at enhancing customer engagement and communication with the younger demographic, thus making significant contributions to the cultural heritage sector in Asia. Furthermore, this research signifies a notable transition from traditional physical service design to online platforms, leveraging technology to inspire and engage diverse generations. By embracing digital tools, cultural heritage sites not only attract new visitors but also retain the interest of existing ones amidst an ever-evolving societal landscape. Ultimately, this study sheds light on the imperative nature of cultural heritage preservation and adaptation in the face of contemporary challenges, emphasizing the need for innovation and resilience in this vital sector.</p>

“How Do You Measure a Relationship?” Assessment and Evaluation Challenges of Knowledge Exchange Activities in Information Work

ABSTRACTToday there is increasing emphasis on knowledge exchange (KE), the movement of knowledge and expertise amongst diverse groups to enhance research uptake, use, and impact in healthcare, government, and community settings. Library and information science (LIS) professionals are central actors in KE though community engagement, scholarly communication, literacy, and cultural heritage initiatives, but (how) is this work formally documented and evaluated? Through interviews with 24 information professionals working in varied settings, we considered how KE activities fit into the current library assessment and evaluation landscape. Using thematic analysis, we identified challenges with placing this work within current assessment practices and evaluation frameworks and showing its value, as well as a desire for alternative, more dynamic assessment and evaluation methods. We discuss these findings with respect to previous research in LIS and KE more broadly to consider professional and organizational implications.

Product Creation and Protective Developments of National Intangible Cultural Heritage Tourism Under the Background of "The Belt and Road"

Objective: "The Belt and Road" has wide variety product creation and protective development programmed preserving has own intangible cultural treasures.
 
 Theoretical Framework: The Belt and Road’s traditional handicrafts are one of the several national intangible cultural heritage initiatives have been successfully created with preservation and protection development in mind.
 
 Methods: They have succeeded in preserving and reviving traditional handicrafts and in creating a system of industrial development that is essentially tuned under the background of “The Belt and Road”.
 
 Results and Conclusion: However, the production and sale of tourism-related crafts is still in its early stages, as is the general development progress of "The Belt and Road"'s traditional handicrafts as intangible cultural property. The paradigm for developing tourism as a commodity must give way for new tourism as well as intangible cultural heritage tourism for the combined intangible cultural heritage product creation and protective developments.
 
 Originality/Value: It is recommended that future research compare the various language databases used in the industry.

The Impact of Cloud Technologies on Preserving and Promoting Cultural Identity

This study explores cloud technologies' role in cultural preservation and promotion, analyzing accessibility, collaboration, and cost-effectiveness. The paper identifies challenges, including the digital divide and cyber-security concerns, and emphasizes addressing them to harness cloud technologies' full potential in cultural heritage initiatives.

Understanding the Needs of Institutional Stakeholders in Participatory Cultural Heritage and Social Innovation Projects

This article investigates the current practices and needs of institutional actors operating at the intersection of cultural heritage and social innovation. Through a mixed-methods approach that includes a survey and in-depth interviews, responses have been collected from GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums), social enterprises, public administration, cultural and artistic associations, and educational institutes. A key focus is given to exploring cultural-based participatory practices aimed at engaging disadvantaged communities. The article explores problems and barriers hindering quality engagement, beneficial participation, and impactful outputs, as well as collecting instances of good practice, suggestions, and lessons learnt. The overall goal of this work is to outline the lessons learnt from fields of action to develop guidelines and recommendations for facilitating participatory, collaborative, and inclusive cultural heritage initiatives, including when planning for the use and adoption of digital tools and technologies.

Semantic Analysis of Cultural Heritage News Propagation in Social Media: Assessing the Role of Media and Journalists in the Era of Big Data

In the era of big data, within the intense environment of social media, the effective communication of cultural heritage initiatives is considered of equal or—in some cases—even greater importance than heritage data themselves. Media and journalists play a critical and in some cases conflicting role in audience engagement and the sustainable promotion of cultural heritage narratives within the social media environment. The aim of this study was to assess the role of media and journalists in propagating cultural heritage news through social media platforms, and the narratives they tend to create in the digital public sphere. A qualitative approach is employed as a means of examining in-depth specific narratives, their meaning(s) and connotation(s), using semantic analysis.

Digital cultural heritage: Collaborating with students and discovering lost museums

Our paper consists of two parts. First, we review the history of the Royal United Service Institute (RUSI) museum, its collections, its closure and the dispersal of its collections. Second, we synthesize this analysis with a summary and reflection on the challenges of undertaking a collective memory project that represents the rise and fall of empire. To synthesize these two points, we discuss the museum’s history and highlight how digital cultural heritage initiatives have catalyzed an interest in digitizing and archiving RUSI’s collection records. Following our review of RUSI and its museum collection, we discuss the value of academics forming partnerships with cultural heritage institutions, and we analyze our experiences managing two student projects hosted at RUSI. Our discussion of student work will reflect on methods for designing engaging curriculum that encourages students to practice record keeping for cultural heritage institutions.

The politics of disdain

The aim of the article is to examine the situation of cultural heritage education in Rio de Janeiro. The main argument indicates that the cultural heritage education is neglected in the city. The abandonment of the tangible heritage and the disregard for the intangible heritage are associated to the lack of significant experiences recorded in the citizens’ memories. This situation is linked to the lack of major efforts by the government in cultural ​​heritage education, which creates a scenario where heritage does not appear significantly in the reinterpretations of the past by a vast part of the population to the point of establishing links of affection, essential for the conservation of heritage assets. The abandonment of cultural heritage by the public institutions and the neglect of civil society in relation to the “places of memory” are accentuated in Rio de Janeiro by the pressure of the increased demand for housing spaces and formal and informal commerce, which has particularly accelerated the destruction of tangible heritage, and the action of elites that highlight specific past experiences linked to them and try to impose their specific memory on other social segments, which does not generate the identification between a huge part of the population and the cultural heritage. The solution for the crisis becomes harder with the lack of economic resources to promote cultural heritage initiatives and even preserve cultural assets, the misuse of money devoted to cultural heritage because of corruption schemes and the maintenance of a pragmatic perspective on education that directs efforts for functional activities and lacks the critical view about past political, economic and social issues.

The American Schools of Oriental Research Cultural Heritage Initiatives: Monitoring Cultural Heritage in Syria and Northern Iraq by Geospatial Imagery

The American Schools of Oriental Research Cultural Heritage Initiatives (ASOR CHI) continues to address the cultural heritage crisis in Syria and Northern Iraq by: (1) monitoring, reporting, and fact-finding; (2) promoting global awareness; and (3) conducting emergency response projects and developing post-conflict rehabilitation plans. As part of this mission, ASOR CHI, through a public–government collaboration with the United States of America (US) Department of State, has been provided with access to hundreds of thousands of satellite images, some within 24 h of the image being taken, in order to assess reports of damage to cultural heritage sites, to discover unreported damage, and to evaluate the impacts of such incidents. This work is being done across an inventory of over 13,000 cultural heritage sites in the affected regions. The available dataset of satellite imagery is significantly larger than the scales that geospatial specialists within archaeology have dealt with in the past. This has necessitated a rethinking of how the project uses satellite imagery and how ASOR CHI and future projects can more effectively undertake the important work of cultural heritage monitoring and damage assessment.

Public folklore dialogism and critical heritage studies

Public folklore’s dialogic engagement with communities incorporates methodologies for sharing representational and interpretive authority, collaborative programme development, mutually constructed modes of presentation and stakeholder participation in policy-making. While recognising that heritage interventions inevitably involve power asymmetries, public folklore seeks to mitigate and diminish these imbalances as it develops approaches to enable communities to present their culture on their own terms. This paper explores dialogic public folklore practice through community self-documentation projects, folklife festivals, government folk arts funding programmes and a project promoting places of local cultural significance. It provides examples of the integration of multiple roles of public folklorists as scholars, administrators, producers of folklore presentations and government heritage officers. Public folklore praxis achieved through the integration of these roles is seen as a potential model for critical heritage studies praxis for scholars who are advisors and researchers in intangible cultural heritage (ICH) initiatives. Critical heritage scholars involved with ICH can learn from how public folklorists engage with communities and foster cultural self-determination. For public folklorists, collaboration and increased dialogue with critical heritage scholars could foster greater awareness of hegemonic discourses, reconceptualisation of the social base of ICH and recognition of the pitfalls of fostering economic development through heritage.

Cultural Heritage Information: Access and Management. Ian Ruthven and G. G. Chowdhury (eds).

Cultural Heritage Information: Access and Management. Ian Ruthven and G. G. Chowdhury (eds). London: Facet Publishing, 2015. 253 pp. ISBN: 9781856049306. £64.95 (paperback). This monograph presents a comprehensive overview of digital cultural heritage initiatives and issues from a broad theoretical perspective as well as through current research projects and activities. Both recognized experts in the field, Ian Ruthven (Professor of Information Seeking and Retrieval, University of Strathclyde, UK) and Gobinda Chowdhury (Professor of Information Science and Head of the Department of Mathematics and Information Sciences, Northumbria University, UK) have assembled a volume of well-structured contributions written in accessible terms that explain complex concepts clearly. This book will be invaluable to information science students, professionals working in libraries, museums, and archives, and those interested in learning about the current state of affairs in the field of digital cultural heritage information management from an information science perspective. The title of this collection is slightly imprecise, since the volume focuses almost exclusively on the ‘digital’ landscape of cultural heritage—rather than cultural heritage generally speaking—from digitization to information systems architecture to crowdsourcing projects and user outreach, and the consideration of relevant social, cultural, and economic factors at all stages. There is no discussion of material selection or acquisition policies and processes, since most of the cultural heritage materials under discussion are already in institutional holdings. Instead, this work emphasizes initiatives at cultural heritage institutions to create digital resources for existing collections, and to make them available to a wider audience: as one contributor notes, ‘we are now at a juncture where institutions are expected to provide digital versions of their holdings’ (p. 82). The two fundamental challenges at this point are therefore dealing with ‘the heterogeneous nature of many cultural heritage collections and the growing need to provide non-specialist users with access to cultural heritage content’ (p. 197). Awareness of cultural heritage preservation techniques and issues in … ksmith11{at}stanford.edu

Ground-Based Observations of Cultural Heritage Incidents in Syria and Iraq

ASOR Cultural Heritage Initiatives (ASOR CHI) uses a wide range of ground-based observations to report on the cultural heritage situation in Syria and northern Iraq. Coupled with analyses of high-r...

Patrimony for Peace:

Patrimony for Peace:

Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage Initiatives in Tanzania and Mozambique

The aim of this paper is provide an overview of the capacity building programmes in maritime and underwater cultural heritage (MUCH) conducted by the authors in Tanzania and Mozambique. Tanzania and Mozambique have long histories of indigenous cultures, foreign contacts and influences and African adaptations beginning in the late Greco-Roman period, when the coastal populations exploited the peoples and riches of the interior. Today the coastline contains numerous examples of indigenous tangible and intangible heritage and many sites and histories related to the Swahili culture. Some exploratory research and training has been conducted in Tanzania and Mozambique, but the implementation by local residents of their own MUCH programme is still at an early stage. Under a UNESCO agreement framework, Tanzania in particular has started to develop a MUCH programme, which can assist in highlighting their extensive histories, cultural landscapes and cultural identity.

Reconstructing the “Cradle of Brazil”: The Detachability of Morality and the Nature of Cultural Labor in Salvador, Bahia's Pelourinho World Heritage Site

AbstractThis essay examines theories of value and property in relation to conceptions of morality, correct comportment, and their influences on Afro-Bahians subject to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cultural heritage initiatives in the Pelourinho neighborhood of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. This urban space is the nation's most expressive site for the performance of Afro-Brazilian identity and the commemoration of tradition. In analyzing the role of morality in Pelourinho-based cultural property-making, I focus on popular critiques of heritage discourse to argue that, in conjuring a particular form of cultural heritage that bears a distinct resemblance to UNESCO's immaterial patrimony programs, the Bahian state has piggybacked on social scientific evaluations of local people's moral comportments in order to put together an archive of everyday life that exists as a standing reserve for histories of Brazil and the marketing of cultural heritage. This data produced in an effort to regulate the historical center has revolved around the state's evaluation of the moral probity and everyday habits of the Pelourinho's overwhelmingly Afro-Brazilian populace. The result is a conceptualization of cultural labor that emanates not from the capacities and struggles of producers, but from a decentered or distributed view of production, which I tie to the existence of this archive. Consumers, or visitors to the historical center, as well as historical archives thus play a critical role in this form of constructing property and understanding the sources and fungibility of labor in a global economy for multicultural difference that depends on an emphasis on futurity and market reflexivity.

Development of the Digital Repository of Indian Cultural Heritage Initiatives at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts

The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) in New Delhi, India, established in 1987, was designed as an autonomous center providing for the study and experience of all the arts. Kala Nidhi, a national information system and databank, consists of a reference library of print collections, a large microfilm/microfiche library, a collection of slides, and photographs covering many disciplines related to Greater India, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and West Asia. A cultural archives consisting of rare collections, a conservation laboratory, and a multimedia unit also form part of the organization. The basic mission of Kala Nidhi is to support the research of the different divisions of the center as well as researchers and scholars from other academic institutions. This article describes the Indian cultural heritage resources at the IGNCA and provides some details about the digitization initiatives underway.

Good governance principles for the cultural heritage sector: lessons from international experience

Purpose – The collapse of some prominent corporations over the last ten years has been attributed to poor governance. Not-for-profit agencies are now examining their own governance policies and practices in an attempt to prevent the calamities that have plagued the private sector. Because heritage sites, conservation organizations and heritage-based tourism are significant factors in the social life and economies of many countries, the proper management of cultural heritage initiatives is vital. This paper seeks to undertake the development of a set of good governance principles applicable to the oversight and operation of cultural heritage institutions. Design/methodology/approach – The fifth World Parks Congress, in South Africa in 2003, encouraged the development of governance principles for protected areas based on the UNDP document Governance for Sustainable Human Development. Using these standards as a reference for the cultural heritage setting, UNESCO and ICOMOS charters and conventions, along with documents from National Trusts in specific countries are examined with regard to their relevance to good governance. Findings – A set of good governance criteria and principles including legitimacy and voice, direction, performance, accountability, and fairness, is developed. Practical implications – The paper addresses governance issues and principles relevant to non-governmental and public sector governance in the cultural heritage sector. Originality/value – The paper draws on principles of good governance from several international heritage related agencies, trusts and organizations to develop a set of principles that can be recommended for use in the cultural heritage sector.