Digital Cultural Content Research Articles

Digital Transformation in Jordan and Poland - Implications on the Legal Protection of Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development

This paper aims to clarify the principles of Jordanian and Polish copyright laws applicable to the preservation of cultural heritage, and to recommend the adoption of certain policies to facilitate this task. It is meant to serve as a guide for stakeholders who deal with digital cultural heritage, directed particularly at museums, but also institutions such as libraries, archives, and art galleries. The research aims to discuss the role of copyright law in protecting cultural heritage in the face of the rapid development of ICT technologies. This includes identifying the risks and challenges associated with digital heritage, framing the relationship between authors of digital cultural content, rights holders, and institutions responsible for documenting and preserving it, and the need to establish a fair mechanism that guarantees their rights. The study aims to provide a presentation of the importance of compliance with copyright principles related to the digitization of cultural heritage and other relevant regulations in the Jordan region and the Polish legislation. The article was created as a result of international scientific cooperation in combination with an innovative view at the law-making and application processes in the era of dynamic development of science and technology. The analysis will include identification of legal acts, which aim to ensure the effective, future-oriented, and long-term protection of cultural heritage in Jordan and Poland.

The role of languages: adopting the motivation-opportunity-ability (MOA) model to explore information sharing patterns among multilingual users in the Chinese cultural context

PurposeCulture is considered a critical aspect of social media usage. The purpose of this paper is to explore how cultures and languages influence multilingual users' cross-cultural information sharing patterns.Design/methodology/approachThis study used a crowdsourcing survey with Amazon Mechanical Turk to collect qualitative and quantitative data from 355 multilingual users who utilize two or more languages daily. A mixed-method approach combined statistical, and cluster analysis with thematic analysis was employed to analyze information sharing patterns among multilingual users in the Chinese cultural context.FindingsIt was found that most multilingual users surveyed preferred to share in their first and second language mainly because that is what others around them speak or use. Multilingual users have more diverse sharing characteristics and are more actively engaged in social media. The results also provide insights into what incentives make multilingual users engage in social media to share information related to Chinese culture with the MOA model. Finally, the ten motivation factors include learning, entertainment, empathy, personal gain, social engagement, altruism, self-expression, information, trust and sharing culture. One opportunity factor is identified, which is convenience. Three ability factors are recognized consist of self-efficacy, habit and personality.Originality/valueThe findings are conducive to promoting the active participation of multilingual users in online communities, increasing global resource sharing and information flow and promoting the consumption of digital cultural content.

Real-time Multi-CNN-based Emotion Recognition System for Evaluating Museum Visitors’ Satisfaction

Conventional studies on the satisfaction of museum visitors focus on collecting information through surveys to provide a one-way service to visitors, and thus it is impossible to obtain feedback on the real-time satisfaction of visitors who are experiencing the museum exhibition program. In addition, museum practitioners lack research on automated ways to evaluate a produced content program's lifecycle and its appropriateness. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel multi-convolutional neural network, called VimoNet, which is able to recognize visitors emotions automatically in real-time based on their facial expressions and body gestures. Furthermore, we design a user preference model of content and a framework to obtain feedback on content improvement for providing personalized digital cultural heritage content to visitors. Specifically, we define seven emotions of visitors and build a dataset of visitor facial expressions and gestures with respect to the emotions. Using the dataset, we proceed with feature fusion of face and gesture images trained on the DenseNet-201 and VGG-16 models for generating a combined emotion recognition model. From the results of the experiment, VimoNet achieved a classification accuracy of 84.10%, providing 7.60% and 14.31% improvement, respectively, over a single face and body gesture-based method of emotion classification performance. It is thus possible to automatically capture the emotions of museum visitors via VimoNet, and we confirm its feasibility through a case study with respect to digital content of cultural heritage.

User versus institutional perspectives of metadata and searching: an investigation of online access to cultural heritage content during the COVID-19 pandemic

Findings from log analyses of user interactions with the digital content of two large national cultural heritage institutions (National Museums of Scotland and National Galleries of Scotland) during the COVID-19 lockdown highlighted limited engagement compared to pre-pandemic levels. Just 8% of users returned to these sites, whilst the average time spent, and number of pages accessed, were generally low. This prompted a user study to investigate the potential mismatch between the way content was indexed by the curators and searched for by users. A controlled experiment with ten participants, involving two tasks and a selected set of digital cultural heritage content, explored: (a) how does the metadata assigned by cultural heritage organisations meet or differ from the search needs of users? and (b) how can the search strategies of users inform the search pathways employed by cultural heritage organisations? Findings reveal that collection management standards like Spectrum encourage a variety of different characteristics to be considered when developing metadata, yet much of the content is left to the interpretations of curators. Rather, user- and context-specific guidelines could be beneficial in ensuring the aspects considered most important by consumers are indexed, thereby producing more relevant search results. A user-centred approach to designing cultural heritage websites would help to improve an individual’s experience when searching for information. However, a process is needed for institutions to form a concrete understanding of who their target users are before developing features and designs to suit their specific needs and interests.

Consumption of Cultural Content in the Digital Environment in the Post-Pandemic Latvia

Abstract Research purpose. COVID-19 has a huge impact on the life-style in modern society, including the switching to online studies and remote work. The majority of the studies view the consequences as negative, while at the same time the pandemic have enhanced some positive changes. The goal of the research is to find out, how the time spent online and the content consumed online are changed due to pandemic as well as to determine what cultural content young people are consuming online. Design / Methodology / Approach. To achieve the research purpose author conducted a survey, using own developed instrument – questionnaire. In total, 1029 respondents participated and 934 questionnaires were valid. The survey was conducted in December 2020 using snowball sampling. The developed questionnaire contained 14 questions were grouped into 2 sections: A) Questions about consumption on cultural content online before and during the pandemic and B) Respondent profile. Findings. Totally the number of hours young people are spending online in post-pandemic period increased because of COVID, but most fastest growth is by those who spent more than 8 hours (from 15 to 100 persons). 53,2% from all respondents are spending about ¼ of all time online consuming cultural content, and 23,2% are not consummating cultural content online at all. 3 main significant reasons why the youth is spending time online are: it is easy and fast (77%); the digital environment is always along in the phone (77%); in the digital environment it is possible to communicate with friends (65%). Spending time online most respondents are consuming informative content, including news and blogs (64%) and the content related to hobbies or leisure (60%), but the cultural content was ranked with just 26%. The most used digital cultural content is movie watching (30,5%), seminars and courses about culture (18,6%), conferences dedicated to culture topics (17,1%), tours in world museums (16,3%) and study books (15,9%). Further, gender, like gender, can not be considered both a significant factor and a predictor of digital consumption. Unlike the two, occupation and place of living are predictors for share of online cultural consumption: occupation appeared to be a moderating factor for digital consumption of cultural content, which make Latvian findings different from what appears in literature. Originality / Value / Practical implications. The results of the research are representing changes in online consumption of culture goods and services caused by COVID-19. As the target group of this survey are youth from 18 to 25 years old, they can be used by evaluating potential and planning of culture goods and services online for this target group. It because evident, that some of the post-pandemic cultural consumption trends appeared as the impact of pandemic, enhancing cultural consumption growth in certain areas, involving more youngsters to cultural consumption compared to pre-pandemic period.

A Comparative Analysis of the International Competitiveness of the Digital Cultural Content Industry in Korea, China and Japan

A Comparative Analysis of the International Competitiveness of the Digital Cultural Content Industry in Korea, China and Japan

A Crowdsourcing Recommendation Model for Image Annotations in Cultural Heritage Platforms

Cultural heritage is one of many fields that has seen a significant digital transformation in the form of digitization and asset annotations for heritage preservation, inheritance, and dissemination. However, a lack of accurate and descriptive metadata in this field has an impact on the usability and discoverability of digital content, affecting cultural heritage platform visitors and resulting in an unsatisfactory user experience as well as limiting processing capabilities to add new functionalities. Over time, cultural heritage institutions were responsible for providing metadata for their collection items with the help of professionals, which is expensive and requires significant effort and time. In this sense, crowdsourcing can play a significant role in digital transformation or massive data processing, which can be useful for leveraging the crowd and enriching the metadata quality of digital cultural content. This paper focuses on a very important challenge faced by cultural heritage crowdsourcing platforms, which is how to attract users and make such activities enjoyable for them in order to achieve higher-quality annotations. One way to address this is to offer personalized interesting items based on each user preference, rather than making the user experience random and demanding. Thus, we present an image annotation recommendation system for users of cultural heritage platforms. The recommendation system design incorporates various technologies intending to help users in selecting the best matching images for annotations based on their interests and characteristics. Different classification methods were implemented to validate the accuracy of our work on Egyptian heritage.

Financial Sustainability of Digitizing Cultural Heritage: The International Platform Europeana

In recent years, the increasing demand for digital cultural content has intensified the digitization challenges for cultural organizations. Among these difficulties, cultural organizations have been struggling to find the financial resources for digitizing their cultural heritage, as well as for storing data, developing digital skills, and implementing enhancement and management processes for their digitized materials. The financial sustainability of digitization projects has therefore been problematic, especially for small and medium organizations. In this framework, among its attempts to solve these issues, the European Union has launched the project Europeana, a digital platform uniting European digitized heritage and empowering cultural organizations through a variety of services. The aim of our research was to investigate the Europeana project to understand how it eases the financial costs of digitization for cultural organizations, and how the Europeana model could bring insights into how to improve the financial sustainability of digitization of cultural heritage.

디지털 문화콘텐츠 특성이 이용자 만족도와 지속이용의도에 미치는 영향

4차 산업혁명으로 디지털 기술 기반이 성장하면서 산업 시장에 다양한 디지털 플랫폼이 제공되고 있다. 이와 함께 COVID-19로 비대면 중심의 온라인 시장환경이 구축되면서 21세기 세계 시장을 주도하는 문화콘텐츠가 디지털 영역에서 주목받으며 다양한 플랫폼과 융합되고 있다. 이에 디지털 문화콘텐츠 특성이 콘텐츠를 이용하는 이용자를 대상으로 만족도와 지속이용의도 미치는 영향 관계를 살펴보고자 하였다.BR 분석결과, 본 연구에서 설정한 가설 모두가 채택된 것은 우선 디지털 콘텐츠의 특징인 양방향 소통이 이용자에게 중요하게 작용하고 있기 때문이다. 즉, 디지털 플랫폼을 통해 콘텐츠와 이용자, 제공자와 이용자, 이용자와 이용자 간 상호작용 효과가 플랫폼상에서 증대되고 있어 이용자의 만족도에 영향을 미치고 있다는 것을 알 수 있었다. 다음으로, 다양해진 디지털 문화콘텐츠가 제공되고 있는 현재 이용자 대부분은 독창적이면서 창의적인 콘텐츠를 수용하고자하는 욕구가 충족될 때 소비한다. 이는 창의적인 콘텐츠를 이용할 때 호기심과 즐거움이 충족되어 문화콘텐츠 이용자의 만족도가 형성되고 지속해 이용 의도를 가진다는 것을 알 수 있다.

Workshop on New Educational Applications of Digital Cultural Content

The workshop on New Educational Applications of Digital Cultural Content presents outcomes of the National Scientific Program “ Cultural and Historical Heritage, National Memory and Social Developmen t”, funded by the Ministry of Education and Science (approved by DCM No 577 of 17 August 2018), achieved during the third year under the Work Package No. 4 “Activities for the Development of Scientific and Applied Products” (Activity "Digitization and virtualization of cultural heritage"). The workshop outlines also some future trends for educational applications of digital cultural content.

Virtual museums: interpreting and recreating digital cultural content

Virtual museums: interpreting and recreating digital cultural content

디지털 한국문화콘텐츠가 한국문화상품 추천에 작용하는 역할과 과정에 관한 연구: 중국 웹 사용자를 대상으로

With the rapid development of information and communication technology, globalization is remarkable and international exchanges in various fields are becoming more active. In China, interest in Korea is increasing due to the Korean Wave fever, and digital Korean culture contents in particular play a central role in Korean programs. In addition, recent web makers import popular Korean programs and provide Korean programs to Chinese users through the web. Accordingly, This study focuses on digital Korean culture contents through the Chinese web. This study attempted to clarify that the basic starting point of Chinese evaluation centered on digital Korean culture contents through the Chinese web is cultural proximity and values identity in a situation where cultural exchanges with Korea are gradually increasing. As an example of digital Korean culture contents through the Chinese web, the influence of Korean programs on Chinese web users’ attitudes toward Korean programs, Korean culture acceptance intentions, and in connection with Korean cultural products recommendation intentions. Based on these results, it was confirmed that cultural factors play an important role in the acceptance of foreign cultures and the recommendation of foreign cultural products. It is believed that this can contribute to Korean companies in establishing business strategies in China.

CrowdHeritage: Crowdsourcing for Improving the Quality of Cultural Heritage Metadata

The lack of granular and rich descriptive metadata highly affects the discoverability and usability of cultural heritage collections aggregated and served through digital platforms, such as Europeana, thus compromising the user experience. In this context, metadata enrichment services through automated analysis and feature extraction along with crowdsourcing annotation services can offer a great opportunity for improving the metadata quality of digital cultural content in a scalable way, while at the same time engaging different user communities and raising awareness about cultural heritage assets. To address this need, we propose the CrowdHeritage open end-to-end enrichment and crowdsourcing ecosystem, which supports an end-to-end workflow for the improvement of cultural heritage metadata by employing crowdsourcing and by combining machine and human intelligence to serve the particular requirements of the cultural heritage domain. The proposed solution repurposes, extends, and combines in an innovative way general-purpose state-of-the-art AI tools, semantic technologies, and aggregation mechanisms with a novel crowdsourcing platform, so as to support seamless enrichment workflows for improving the quality of CH metadata in a scalable, cost-effective, and amusing way.

Improving the User Experience with Audiovisual Content: The Project “Europeana Media”

Abstract Europeana is the EU flagship initiative for digital cultural heritage that gives free access to more than 50 million digital objects coming from more than 3,500 libraries, archives and museums across Europe. Of this huge amount of digital cultural heritage content, over a million are videos and more than seven hundred thousand are audio documents. Audio and video materials keep users engaged on a website longer than any other content type and this is the kind of content most web users look for, and user statistics confirm this also on Europeana.eu. Hence the aim of the project Europeana Media was to improve the user experience with audiovisual material on the Europeana portal and deliver functionalities to better access and incorporate AV content from Europeana.eu into the working environments of researchers, educators and citizens by developing an Enhanced Unified Playout Service. This unified player is based on theInternational Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), which provides a standardised method of describing and delivering images, video and audio over the web.

Design and Production of Digital Interactive Installation for the Cultural Theme of the Belt and Road Initiative

Chinese traditional culture provides an endless source of ideas for the digital creative cultural industry. Nowadays, in the cultural industry chain, IP contains a huge potential value. The combination of digital interactive technology and cultural content as well as industry is one of the paths of cultural innovation. This paper takes the Dunhuang caisson patterns under the cultural theme of the Belt and Road Initiative as the subject of expression. By integrating the pattern elements into digital animation and digital interaction, its design and production with the digital interactive installation display form finally show the historical and cultural connotation of the traditional silk road. Through the performance of the interactive installation in the form of digital art display and the application analysis in the design fusion of digital media, this paper explains the construction and implementation of the digital visualization and digital interactive installation of Dunhuang art, aiming to raise awareness. It also hopes to enhance the viewer’s sense of integration and participation with interactive technology of digital media, thus helping the protection and inheritance, dissemination and promotion of traditional culture.

The enforcement of laws regulating digital cultural content: a proposal

ABSTRACT Law is becoming increasingly digital in nature, and the State is increasingly using digital technology for the purposes of physical legal enforcement. This paper argues that this poses unique issues for legal regulation of cultural content, changing the relationship between the individual and the State. The paper focuses on laws in the UK and China to demonstrate how these issues have arisen, and what the potential consequences of this change could be. The paper culminates in arguing that legislatures and courts should be required to explicitly consider how digital technology influences, in a given law or case, the enforcement of law.

Development Status and Innovation Direction of China’s Digital Creative Industry

Digital creative industry is the collective name for the creative content industry and creative manufacturing industry that make effective use of digital technology; it takes science and technology, culture and art as input, and economic value and cultural influence as output. The digital creative industry is identified as one of the national strategic emerging industries for the first time during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, and has played an important role in advancing China’s industrial transformation and upgrading and in prospering the digital economy. This paper aims to study the innovation and development direction of the digital creative industry at a macro level, summarizes the development experiences in China, and discusses the future development of the industry. Through a comparative analysis of the concepts and implications of the digital creative industry in China and abroad, the development characteristics, status, and problems of the digital creative industry in China are systematically sorted out, and the overall development ideas of the industry in China are formed accordingly. Furthermore, four major directions is proposed for the continuous innovation and development of China’s digital creative industry, namely, digital cultural creative technology and equipment innovation, digital cultural content innovation, innovative design, and integrated innovation. Moreover, countermeasures and suggestions are put forward on the development and expansion of the digital creative industry, in terms of scientific and technological research, innovation institutions, platform enterprises, talent training, supervision services, and industrial clusters.

Knocking on Heaven’s Door: User preferences on digital cultural distribution

This paper explores the social, demographic and attitudinal basis of consumer support of a Copyright Compensation System (CCS), which, for a small monthly fee would legalise currently infringing online social practices such as private copying from illegal sources and online sharing of copyrighted works. We do this by first identifying how different online and offline, legal and illegal, free and paying content acquisition channels are used in the media market using a cluster-based classification of respondents. Second, we assess the effect of cultural consumption on the support for a shift from the status quo towards alternative, CCS-based forms of digital cultural content distribution. Finally, we link these two analyses to identify the factors that drive the dynamics of change in digital cultural consumption habits. Our study shows significant support to a CCS compared to the status quo by both occasional and frequent buyers of cultural goods, despite the widespread adoption of legal free and paying online services by consumers. The nature of these preferences are also explored with the inclusion of consumer preference intensities regarding certain CCS attributes. Our results have relevant policy implications, for they outline CCS as a reform option. In particular, they point evidence-based copyright reform away from its current direction in the EU of stronger enforcement measures, additional exclusive rights, and increased liability and duties of care for online platforms. This work shows that CCS may be an apt policy tool to hinder piracy and potentially increase right holder revenues, while respecting fundamental rights and promoting technological development.

Semantic Approaches for the Use of Cultural Data

Cultural heritage information, stored increasingly in a digital form in cultural institutions such as museums, archives, and specialized libraries is being used for several applications and by several actors, from public policy, tourism, app developers and software companies, schools and the general public at large. Due to the proliferation of digital cultural content sources there has been a boom in applications, and cultural heritage is seen as a valuable asset for tourism, culture, education and entertainment. The information from those sources must be format independent, multi-lingual to attract a global audience, multi-purpose, and make use of standards, norms and national and international recommendations in order to fulfill different requirements of a diverse range of users, essentially mobile. The authors describe an inventory and content management system and the conceptual and architectural choices that were made to allow its evolution, standards' compliance and multi-purpose use as a cultural data provider. This article also describes current metadata efforts, metadata formats and ontologies specific to the cultural heritage domain and how they have been used to face the current challenges in this area such as providing engaging user experiences.

Culture as a Prerequisite for Sustainable Development. An Investigation into the Process of Cultural Content Digitisation in Romania

In an age of rapid technological changes, new ways of cultural production–consumption and dissemination–access to cultural content are creating great opportunities for promoting cultural heritage at home and abroad as a prerequisite for sustainable development. The aims of this paper are to scrutinize the main opportunities of the process of cultural content digitisation with a focus on Romania and to highlight the main fields in which the country is still lagging behind. The article discusses technical internet-related endowment and use of internet by households in urban and rural areas, the existing digital cultural content, the importance of open access, e-accessibility, digital archives, e-museums, e-libraries, etc., as well as the main national and European strategies and agendas that Romania has based its cultural digitisation and heritage preservation priorities on. The paper is an empirical inquiry into the progress achieved, the positioning among the other European countries and the perspectives of cultural digitisation for Romania. Such matters are important determinants of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth, as long as access to public services and cultural content is a major objective of Europe 2020 Strategy.