- Helping the cultural and creative sectors to seize the opportunities of the ‘digital age’ and globalisation.
- Enabling the sectors to reach their potential so that they can contribute to the Europe 2020 goals for sustainable growth, jobs and social cohesion.
- Opening up new international opportunities, markets and audiences Builds on the success of the MEDIA and Culture programmes.
Friday, 31 January 2014
Creative Europe: support programme for Europe's cultural and creative sectors from 2014
Principal aims of Creative Europe are defined as:
Wednesday, 29 January 2014
The Guardian's 'Real books should be preserved like papyrus scrolls' Article
The Guardian features an article by Rick Gekoski this week, who writes, "in a future electronic world, there will be a ghastly contingency about the written word. Books will have a new place as sacred objects, and libraries as museums". The article can be accessed here:
Friday, 17 January 2014
Some of my interests...
Just to remind myself:
Over the past 15 years the digitisation agenda for cultural heritage has been shaped by a number of key policy statements, frameworks and funding calls. As well as enabling major projects such as Europeana, these have informed shifting understandings of the relationship between 'heritage' and 'the digital'. My research is concerned with the influence of discourses of collective memory in debates about digitisation and the preservation of cultural heritage. My thesis explores the politics of this relationship further through analysis of the projects, press and policies that have the digitisation of cultural heritage as their goal, within major organisational and cultural settings.
There are several areas of interest within this broader project that are of interest. These are:
* The Museum as Memory Institution: how large-scale digitisation projects potentially re-define parameters between museums, libraries and archives.
* Going beyond a notion of the digital object as a supplement to but not a replacement for the physical object. Thinking about digital objects in their own right, techniques for curation and engagement.
* Search engine culture as a potential barrier to digital heritage collections (i.e. you need to know what you're looking for in order to find it).
The issue I've been working on recently is about approaches to preserving digital objects, or more prescisely, the question of what to preserve - not in terms of which artefact but which component of the digital object. For example, the Science Museum takes an approach informed by the privileging of material culture; even if you could view a digital object through running software on some of their old models, they wouldn't risk turning it on since there's a threat of fire or damage to the physical object. This issue forces us to think about the format of intellectual content as a sort of performance (the process by which it can be rendered and read or viewed). So potentially we're preserving the performance of an object in digital culture.
Over the past 15 years the digitisation agenda for cultural heritage has been shaped by a number of key policy statements, frameworks and funding calls. As well as enabling major projects such as Europeana, these have informed shifting understandings of the relationship between 'heritage' and 'the digital'. My research is concerned with the influence of discourses of collective memory in debates about digitisation and the preservation of cultural heritage. My thesis explores the politics of this relationship further through analysis of the projects, press and policies that have the digitisation of cultural heritage as their goal, within major organisational and cultural settings.
There are several areas of interest within this broader project that are of interest. These are:
* The Museum as Memory Institution: how large-scale digitisation projects potentially re-define parameters between museums, libraries and archives.
* Going beyond a notion of the digital object as a supplement to but not a replacement for the physical object. Thinking about digital objects in their own right, techniques for curation and engagement.
* Search engine culture as a potential barrier to digital heritage collections (i.e. you need to know what you're looking for in order to find it).
The issue I've been working on recently is about approaches to preserving digital objects, or more prescisely, the question of what to preserve - not in terms of which artefact but which component of the digital object. For example, the Science Museum takes an approach informed by the privileging of material culture; even if you could view a digital object through running software on some of their old models, they wouldn't risk turning it on since there's a threat of fire or damage to the physical object. This issue forces us to think about the format of intellectual content as a sort of performance (the process by which it can be rendered and read or viewed). So potentially we're preserving the performance of an object in digital culture.
Thursday, 9 January 2014
European Heritage Online: A Visual Discourse of the Universal and the Particular
On the 27 September 2007, the European Parliament voted in favour of a European digital library. The vision was to establish ‘[a] digital library that is a single, direct and multilingual access point to the European cultural heritage’ (European Commission, 2006). Launched in November 2008, the database, called Europeana, brought together items from over 1000 of Europe’s libraries, museums, galleries and archives. The popularity of Europeana initially caused it to crash, and a spokesperson was quoted as saying: ‘Thousands of users were searching for the words 'Mona Lisa' at the same time […] European culture is more popular than we had anticipated in our wildest dreams’ (BBC, 2008). While the stated goal of creating a multilingual search facility is still in development, it is evident that this potential obstacle did not present a problem when searching for an artwork as canonical as the Mona Lisa. In a global age of emerging supranational structures, iconic works of art, manuscripts and other heritage items function as part of a powerful visual discourse, which in the case of Europeana, funded by the European Commission (EC), bolsters the notion of a broader cultural framework across European nations. The consolidation of heritage collections within this online framework thus advances the EC’s strategic aim of constructing a strong European identity, in line with the view that culture is at the heart of European integration (cf. Europa, 2008). My article analyzes the representation of these digital collections, focusing on how they operate as a mode of visual communication within the narrative of global ‘Europeanness’. I also examine the extent to which Europeana promotes the diversity of its content, and the contradictions and opportunities that arise from attempting to negotiate a visual discourse of the universal and the particular.
The symbolic difference by which Europe has historically distinguished itself from others (Hall, 2003) is reflected in the EC’s trans-national vision and in Europeana’s emphasis on collections that conform to unified cultural and historical themes; online exhibitions include ‘Being European’ and ‘European Sport Heritage’. However, there are difficulties in attributing generic meanings to manuscripts and artworks that evoke specific national-historical narratives. The mobilization of these icons in the service of a unified European state, works against the very different political circumstances from which the nation states of Europe have developed. As with European identity, the rise of national consciousness has been characterized by a tendency for nations to define themselves against others (see, e.g., van der Leeuw-Roord, 2000). By extension, the development of national archives and heritage was traditionally part of the process of state building. While the Europeana project does acknowledge that much of Europe’s cultural heritage is also relevant to a local or national setting, it does not address the concern that the cultural richness of national collections could be diluted by an overly integrative outlook. The concept of a trans-national European identity has been widely criticized (Hobsbawm, 1990; Kansteiner, 2002; Passerini, 1998), because of such tendencies and because its vision of Europe is based on a highly selective set of cultural influences, notably Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christianity, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution (cf. Shore, 2001). Cultural heritage icons may be prone to reinforce rather than challenge these influences but the breadth and volume of Europeana’s content has the capacity to reconcile dominant narratives with the full spectrum of symbolic representations in heritage collections; a dialogue between the whole and its component parts that mirrors the relationship between Europe and its nation states.
Europeana’s format as an online database is the key to the integration of its collections, and the project took shape in part because the technology enabled it. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the relational structure of the database, a physical iteration of the concept of the network, maps and adapts systems of communication (Castells, 1996; Manovich, 1999). Like the Internet, its architecture and mode of interaction are geared less toward building a consensus. This new model is indicative of a more pluralistic, diverse, and possibly less unifying societal restructuring. A transformation of the national imaginary is implied here; Homi K. Bhabha has investigated the nature of this change. On his reading:
Bhabha’s revised account of the nation introduces the idea of a more shifting, unstable national consciousness, which squares well with the view gaining ground in some circles that the ascendancy of the Internet signals the birth of a new era of borderless communities (see, e.g., Lévy, 2010). However, while the blurring of these borders presents new opportunities for trans-national collaboration, it also threatens to accelerate the break down of cultural and symbolic structures. Any attempt to embed online image collections within a unified European narrative is potentially undermined by the database’s relational and temporally displaced form.
While critical linguistic approaches to EC policy motifs such as ‘unity in diversity’ and ‘cultural integration’ are well documented (see, e.g., Shore, 2001), until relatively recently less attention has been given to the visual practices that contribute to this discourse. Within the last ten years, several studies have started to address the issue of European identity through analysis of explicitly cultural visual texts (Aiello, 2012; Aiello & Thurlow, 2006; Thurlow et al, 2005). In exploring Europeana’s representation of heritage collections, my article seeks to extend the growing visual communication scholarship on the symbolic and ideological significance of cultural icons in the context of the EC’s trans-national project for Europe. The online framework of these collections raises new questions about the shifting frame of cultural reference, which defines the experience of being European in a globalized world.
References
Aiello, G. (2012) ‘All Tögethé® Now: The Recontextualization of Corporate Branding and the Stylization of Diversity in EU Public Communication’, Social Semiotics. 22(4), 459-486.
Aiello, G. and Thurlow, C. (2006) ‘Symbolic Capitals: Visual Discourse and Intercultural Exchange in the European Capital of Culture Scheme’, Language and Intercultural Communication. 6(2), 148-162.
BBC (2008) European online library crashes. London. URL = http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7742390.stm
Bhabha, H.K. (ed.) (1990) Nation and Narration. London: Routledge.
Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwells.
Europa (2008) ‘Europeana’, Europe's Digital Library. Brussels. URL = http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-08-1747_en.htm
European Commission (2006) Commission recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation. Brussels, European Union.
Hall, S. (2003) ‘‘In but not of Europe’: Europe and its Myths’. In L. Passerini (ed.) Figures d’Europe: Images and Myths of Europe. Brussels: Peter Lang, pp. 35-46.
Hobsbawm, E. (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lévy, P. (2008) ‘Building a Univeral Digital Memory’. In R. Parry (ed.) Museums in a Digital Age. London: Routledge, pp. 107-115.
Manovich, L. (1999) ‘Database as Symbolic Form’, Convergence. (5), 80-99.
Passerini, L. (ed.) (1998) The Question of European Identity: A Cultural Historical Approach. Florence: European Historical Institute.
Shore, C. (2001) 'European Union and the Politics of Culture', Paper no: 43. The Bruges Group, London.
Thurlow, C., Jaworski, A. and Ylänne-McEwen, V. (2005) ‘‘Half-hearted Tokens of Transparent Love’? ‘Ethnic’ Postcards and the Visual Mediation of Host-tourist Communication’. Tourism, Culture and Communication. 5 (2), 93-104.
Van der Leeuw-Roord, J. (2000) ‘Working with History – Developing European Consciousness’. In S. Macdonald (ed.) Approaches to European Historical Consciousness – Reflections and Provocations. Hamburg: Körber-Stiftung, pp. 114-124.
The symbolic difference by which Europe has historically distinguished itself from others (Hall, 2003) is reflected in the EC’s trans-national vision and in Europeana’s emphasis on collections that conform to unified cultural and historical themes; online exhibitions include ‘Being European’ and ‘European Sport Heritage’. However, there are difficulties in attributing generic meanings to manuscripts and artworks that evoke specific national-historical narratives. The mobilization of these icons in the service of a unified European state, works against the very different political circumstances from which the nation states of Europe have developed. As with European identity, the rise of national consciousness has been characterized by a tendency for nations to define themselves against others (see, e.g., van der Leeuw-Roord, 2000). By extension, the development of national archives and heritage was traditionally part of the process of state building. While the Europeana project does acknowledge that much of Europe’s cultural heritage is also relevant to a local or national setting, it does not address the concern that the cultural richness of national collections could be diluted by an overly integrative outlook. The concept of a trans-national European identity has been widely criticized (Hobsbawm, 1990; Kansteiner, 2002; Passerini, 1998), because of such tendencies and because its vision of Europe is based on a highly selective set of cultural influences, notably Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christianity, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution (cf. Shore, 2001). Cultural heritage icons may be prone to reinforce rather than challenge these influences but the breadth and volume of Europeana’s content has the capacity to reconcile dominant narratives with the full spectrum of symbolic representations in heritage collections; a dialogue between the whole and its component parts that mirrors the relationship between Europe and its nation states.
Europeana’s format as an online database is the key to the integration of its collections, and the project took shape in part because the technology enabled it. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the relational structure of the database, a physical iteration of the concept of the network, maps and adapts systems of communication (Castells, 1996; Manovich, 1999). Like the Internet, its architecture and mode of interaction are geared less toward building a consensus. This new model is indicative of a more pluralistic, diverse, and possibly less unifying societal restructuring. A transformation of the national imaginary is implied here; Homi K. Bhabha has investigated the nature of this change. On his reading:
The nation is no longer the sign of modernity under which cultural differences are homogenized in the ‘horizontal’ view of society. The nation reveals, in its ambivalent and vacillating representation, the ethnography of its own historicity and opens up the possibility of other narratives of the people and their difference. (Bhabha, 1990: 300)
While critical linguistic approaches to EC policy motifs such as ‘unity in diversity’ and ‘cultural integration’ are well documented (see, e.g., Shore, 2001), until relatively recently less attention has been given to the visual practices that contribute to this discourse. Within the last ten years, several studies have started to address the issue of European identity through analysis of explicitly cultural visual texts (Aiello, 2012; Aiello & Thurlow, 2006; Thurlow et al, 2005). In exploring Europeana’s representation of heritage collections, my article seeks to extend the growing visual communication scholarship on the symbolic and ideological significance of cultural icons in the context of the EC’s trans-national project for Europe. The online framework of these collections raises new questions about the shifting frame of cultural reference, which defines the experience of being European in a globalized world.
References
Aiello, G. (2012) ‘All Tögethé® Now: The Recontextualization of Corporate Branding and the Stylization of Diversity in EU Public Communication’, Social Semiotics. 22(4), 459-486.
Aiello, G. and Thurlow, C. (2006) ‘Symbolic Capitals: Visual Discourse and Intercultural Exchange in the European Capital of Culture Scheme’, Language and Intercultural Communication. 6(2), 148-162.
BBC (2008) European online library crashes. London. URL = http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7742390.stm
Bhabha, H.K. (ed.) (1990) Nation and Narration. London: Routledge.
Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwells.
Europa (2008) ‘Europeana’, Europe's Digital Library. Brussels. URL = http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-08-1747_en.htm
European Commission (2006) Commission recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation. Brussels, European Union.
Hall, S. (2003) ‘‘In but not of Europe’: Europe and its Myths’. In L. Passerini (ed.) Figures d’Europe: Images and Myths of Europe. Brussels: Peter Lang, pp. 35-46.
Hobsbawm, E. (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lévy, P. (2008) ‘Building a Univeral Digital Memory’. In R. Parry (ed.) Museums in a Digital Age. London: Routledge, pp. 107-115.
Manovich, L. (1999) ‘Database as Symbolic Form’, Convergence. (5), 80-99.
Passerini, L. (ed.) (1998) The Question of European Identity: A Cultural Historical Approach. Florence: European Historical Institute.
Shore, C. (2001) 'European Union and the Politics of Culture', Paper no: 43. The Bruges Group, London.
Thurlow, C., Jaworski, A. and Ylänne-McEwen, V. (2005) ‘‘Half-hearted Tokens of Transparent Love’? ‘Ethnic’ Postcards and the Visual Mediation of Host-tourist Communication’. Tourism, Culture and Communication. 5 (2), 93-104.
Van der Leeuw-Roord, J. (2000) ‘Working with History – Developing European Consciousness’. In S. Macdonald (ed.) Approaches to European Historical Consciousness – Reflections and Provocations. Hamburg: Körber-Stiftung, pp. 114-124.
Wednesday, 8 January 2014
Brewster Kahle: A Free Digital Library
Brewster Kahle is an inventor, philanthropist and digital librarian, and founder of The Internet Archive. The Archive offers 85 billion pieces of deep Web geology. Kahle's TED talk is a fascinating look at the formation of the Internet over the years, and a challenge to those who would keep knowledge buried:
http://www.ted.com/talks/brewster_kahle_builds_a_free_digital_library.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/brewster_kahle_builds_a_free_digital_library.html
Science Museum: Making Modern Comunications Gallery
In 2012 The Science Museum received a confirmed award of £6 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for a new gallery, Making Making Modern Communications. It will tell the story of 200 years of innovation in communication technology and focuses on how people connect and share information with each other. The gallery is set to open in Autumn 2014.
For further information see:
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/about_us/press_and_media/press_releases/2012/04/HLF%20Award.aspx
For further information see:
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/about_us/press_and_media/press_releases/2012/04/HLF%20Award.aspx
Fundus
The Operational Media Archive of 'epistemological toys', or Fundus, as it is also called is based at the Berlin Humboldt University Institute for Media Studies. Of the Archive, Jussi Parikka has written:
For further information see:
http://www.medientheorien.hu-berlin.de/fundus
Branded as an archive of
media-epistemological toys, the name captures the two-fold mission of the
place, materiality and play/learning: first through a concrete hands-n approach
to investigating the non-linguistic modes of media objects, that they do not
speak in human languages, but there seeming silence as artefacts can hide a
very active, other kind of processuality; and second, that this epistemological
gaze is seen as a playful attitude of engagement and a didactic media-archaeological
method of learning how hardware is coupled with discourse: in other words how
modern (technical) media are a coupling of symbolic mathematical operations
with the hardware in which they become an engineered signal (p. 131).
For further information see:
http://www.medientheorien.hu-berlin.de/fundus
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)