[This introductory week, the outline still very much in note form below, will give an overview of the whole course.]

Contents

• "What do you mean by 'culture' and 'heritage' ... and, come to that, what is informatics?"

• Contextualising practice
• What is a 'museum'?
• The European Renaissance and the Kunstkammer / Wunderkammer
• From 'cabinet of curiosities' to 'memory institution': the transformation of the museum
• 'Social remembering' in popular and non-Western culture
• 'Memory institutions' (archives, libraries, museums) in the 'Knowledge Society'
• The 'cultural economy'
• Who are the main players?
• Readings and resources
  

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"What do you mean by 'culture' and 'heritage' ... and, come to that, what is informatics?"

"Aren't 'culture' and 'heritage' pretty much the same thing? After all, there's an annual conference on Cultural Heritage Informatics, isn't there?

Well, yes and yes ... but ...

Let's start with the first question. Much of what counts as 'culture' also counts as 'heritage', and all that counts as 'heritage' is in one way or another 'culture', but not because the words are effectively synonyms or because whatever counts as one of them is a subset of the other.

'Culture' is an ambivalent term, with probably at least three major areas of meanings that are relevant to this course. (Other meanings, such as its meaning in biology, are of course irrelevant!) In its first meaning it is effectively cognate with "the arts", and often used almost as a value judgment: paintings, sculpture, dance, theatre, music, literature ... pretty much everything that might be deemed worthy of appearing in the 'Arts' or 'Review' supplement to your Sunday paper. Most of it will be contemporary--Spike Lee, Damien Hirst, Arctic Monkeys, Benjamin Zephaniah, Tracey Emin, Yusef Lateef, Antony Gormley, Hanif Kureishi, Banksy, Rachid Taha, and the like--and thus rather hard to think of, at least for many years yet to come, as our 'heritage'.

A second meaning of 'culture' equates it loosely with, in an historical sense, 'civilisation': we speak, for example, of 'Classical Greek Culture' and 'Classical Greek Civilisation' almost interchangeably, but again often using the terms almost as a value judgment. It's that component of the Greek, or Khmer, or Islamic, or Renaissance, or Chinese, etc, world that stands out as 'high art'. As historically heirs to such cultures, we legitimately also sometimes may refer to them as our 'heritage', or our 'cultural heritage'.

For anthropologists the word 'culture' has a broader meaning: "the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another". Museums whose business it is to "communicate and exhibit the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment" (see later) will understand and promote 'culture' in pretty much that third sense. Of course occasionally there may arise within a community a short-lived culture that, though not transmitted across generations, is or has been sufficiently significant historically or socially both to earn itself or its period in time an identifying name--the 'Swinging Sixties', the 'Roaring Twenties', Punk, the 'Beat Generation', for example, may come to mind--and to make it worth preserving, documenting and exhibiting as "the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group".

'Heritage', on the other hand, is paradigmatically understood to be inseparable from the notion of identity, of who we are and where we come from; of what we own in common as a community, nation, or people: our 'national heritage', 'architectural heritage', 'industrial heritage', 'natural heritage', etc, "the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that are inherited from past generations, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations". Thus its scope is far broader and more inclusive than what we would typically think of as 'culture' (for example, as characterised in the paragraphs above). Significantly, Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London set up a Commission on Black and Asian Heritage, not specifically on Black and Asian culture.

But even this is not quite as unproblematic as it may seem. For Laurajane Smith, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Heritage Studies and Archaeology at the University of York, "There is, really, no such thing as heritage ... there is rather a hegemonic discourse about heritage ... this discourse validates a set of practices and performances, which populates both popular and expert constructions of 'heritage'" (my italics). In other words, what counts as heritage is much more a matter of negotiation and (often political) decision than of fact. We shall return to this point many times during this course when asking questions about what is collected, for what purpose, and how it is presented to the museum or gallery visitor

But in general, for the purposes of this course, we shall understand 'culture' and 'heritage' in broad and value-neutral terms to include: museums, libraries, and archives, the natural and built environment, archaeology and archaeological sites, public spaces and monuments, walking tours and heritage trails, (cultural) tourism, pageantry, the culture and media industries (art and sculture, music, film, dance, theatre, ..., etc), festivals and carnivals, national days and celebrations. Although what counts as 'culture' and 'heritage' is determined by its subject matter rather than by the technologies employed in its preservation, cataloguing, digital curation, and presentation, [t.b.c.]

Contextualising practice

'Culture and Heritage Informatics' as course of study, as object of (intellectual, analytical, critical) study, and as a professional practice is, and must be, construed as more than simply and narrowly the acquisition and application of the technical knowledge and skills required for the deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs) within archives, libraries, and museums.

@@@[t.b.c.]

In this introductory week we shall be asking what exactly a 'museum' is; looking at the history of museums, archives, and libraries from the Library of Alexandria to the present day; at the changing role of the museum over the past century from 'cabinet of curiosities' to 'memory institution'; at the relationship between museums, audiences, and artefacts; and asking how ICTs are opening up novel opportunities for the discovery, creation, management, display, and interpretation of cultural and heritage materials.

Note that I write "we shall be asking": these are big questions, @@@ issues that will sometimes elude easy answers, and [t.b.c.]

What is a museum?

There are many definitions and characterisations of museums. One that we shall return to frequently in this course is, for obvious reasons, that published in the statutes of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). But the characterisation I want to begin with comes from Ken Arnold, Head of Public Programmes at the Wellcome Trust and co-curator of the permanent galleries at Wellcome Collection, London. In his 2006 book, Cabinets for the Curious, he writes that "museums are most fruitfully thought of as places where people release the knowledge potential of objects" (p.5; my italics).

there is first the question of how verbally to identify, describe and tell stories about objects in museums ... Next is the question of what constitutes an object's essence: what makes it uniquely what it is and not something else. ... Finally ... the question of how to order and arrange the gathered objects--a practical dilemma at the heart of the "taxonomic strategy" for analysing how objects relate to each other. (Arnold, 2006, p.5-6)

In the beginning ...

The Library of Ashurbanipal (7th century BCE)

The Musaeum at Alexandria (Greek: Μουσείον της Αλεξάνδρειας) and Library of Alexandra (3rd century BCE)

The University of Sankoré and the Chronicles of Timbuktu (15th-16th century)

The European Renaissance and the Kunstkammer & Wunderkammer

"First, the collecting of a most perfect and general library, wherein whosoever the wit of man hath heretofore committed to books of worth … may be made contributory to your wisdom. Next, a spacious, wonderful garden, wherein whatsoever plant the sun of divers climate, or the earth out of divers moulds, either wild or by the culture of man brought forth, may be … set and cherished: this garden to be built about with rooms to stable in all rare beasts and to cage in all rare birds; with two lakes adjoining, the one of fresh water the other of salt, for like variety of fishes. And so you may have in small compass a model of the universal nature made private. The third, a goodly, huge cabinet, wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included. The fourth such a still-house, so furnished with mills, instruments, furnaces, and vessels as may be a palace fit for a philosopher's stone."
Francis Bacon, Gesta Grayorum (1594)

Appearing first in Italy from the mid-1500s, the earliest private collections, precursor to the modern museum, were not only a product of the European Renaissance but might equally be said to have--as persuasively argued by Paula Findlen (1994, 2008)--"created and defined the Renaissance". The Universe--a macrocosm--would be reflected in the collection as a microcosm. As such, the Universe was represented by the naturalia created by God - all kinds of zoological, botanical and geological material - and by the man-made artificialia - antiques, works of art, ethnographic items and weapons, scientific instruments and models. Also to be included were libraries, botanical gardens and menageries.@@@ the Kunstkammer and Wunderkammer]

Renaissance collectors and early pioneers of the museum

Francesco Calzolari, Verona (1521-1600)
Ferrante Imperato, Naples (1550-1631)
Ole Worm, Copenhagen (1588-1655)
Manfredo Settala, Milan (1600-1680)
Athanasius Kircher, Rome (1602-1680)
Ferdinando Cospi, Bologna (1606-1686)
Levinus Vincent, Amsterdam (1658-1727)

'Exosomatic memory' (includes not only dedicated buildings such as museums and libraries, but also cultural products and practices that, even if not housed in museums, express and enshrine cultural knowledge, including 'intangible heritage'.)

From 'cabinet of curiosities' to 'memory institution': the transformation of the museum.

"Memory is the human faculty of retaining and reproducing present and past thoughts, objects, habits, culture for future generations independently from circumstances that inspired them."
DPE Consortium

"Memory institutions are social entities that select, document, contextualize, preserve, index, and thus canonize elements of humanity's culture, historical narratives, individual, and collective memories. Archives, museums, and libraries are paradigmatic examples for traditional memory institutions. Content-sharing platforms, social networks, peer-to-peer file-sharing infrastructures, digital image agencies, online music stores, and search engines' utilities represent emerging novel entities with a de facto derivative function as networked memory institutions."
Guy Pessach, '(Networked) Memory Institutions: Social Remembering, Privatization and its Discontents', Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, Volume 26, Number 1. Pp.71-149

[t.b.c.]

'Social remembering' in popular and non-Western culture

@@@MLIMM/Bam&Visser[t.b.c.]

See also the section on Popular culture and community memory

'Memory institutions' (archives, libraries, museums) in the 'Knowledge Society'

Who decides what should be preserved from the past as our heritage? how are such decisions made? Who decides what should be publicly displayed? why might most of a collection be packed away in boxes?

[t.b.c.]

The re-invention of the museum and the dilemma of 'edutainment'

Museums have re-invented themselves. Ken Arnold writes:

During the last quarter of the twentieth century museums attempted to save themselves from becoming dusty, forgotten, culturally isolated institutions by focusing on audiences and experiences rather than collections and knowledge. Seeking visitors through marketing a de-intellectualised heritage or easy-to-enjoy science and technology--both served up in the form of flickering screens, user-friendly keyboards and interactive exhibits--museums have invented for themselves new roles based on a social ethos far removed from the collections that once defined them. As Hilde Hein has put it, museum missions have become focused on fabricating experiences rather than taking the measure of reality. Techniques of collecting objects are replaced with technologies that produce experiences. (Arnold, 2006, p.6-7)

Computing, culture, and the wired museum: a brief history

Hereunder is a very brief history. For more extensive documentation, read Parry (2007).

Computers entered the museums and culture sector through two unrelated routes, the one concerned principally with management and access, the other with creativity.

The earliest institutional foray into computing was probably in 1963 when the Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institute, in Washington appointed a committee to consider the potential for the application of computing technology to information management and retrieval.

In 1967, and again in 1968, the Smithsonian Institution submitted proposals for substantial public investment in the development of its automated information retrieval system. A major pillar of its rationale was the need to catalogue its rapidly expanding Museum of Natural History collections, growing at a rate of around one million specimens each year according to a 1969 report (Creighton & King, 1969).

But a second rationale underpinning their proposal was 'access': the computer cataloguing of their collections would, it was argued, "permit greater accessibility of fundamental resource materials of specimens and related data to students at all levels as well as senior scholars" (Smithsonian Institution, 1967).

As museum audiences everywhere continue to grow, we are coming to recognise that the textual and visual data descriptive of our public collections of art and of scientific and historical material must be made more accessible and employed in far more imaginative ways than are possible by conventional means. Museums are fast approaching the point of stagnation in serving their own requirements for information, not to mention the intensified demands made of them by the scholarly community and the public. (Ellin, 1968: 63, quoted in Parry, 2007:26)

Museums consequently were recasting themselves @@@

@@@ creativity--the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA, 1968

The 'cultural economy': an introduction to culture, creativity, and the economy

The term 'cultural economy' has been used in recent years to mean different things in a number of different contexts and disciplines (anthropology, geography, economics, sociology, ...). In this course we shall use the term with quite specific meaning: in much the way that 'knowledge economy' and 'information economy' refer to the use of knowledge and information to produce economic benefits, so 'cultural economy' (sometimes also, but too narrowly, called the 'creative economy') will refer to the part played by creative media, cultural institutions and the creative industries, and the exchange and use of cultural goods and services in the production of economic wealth.

There are two interesting corollaries. The first is that, pioneered by Napster and by peer-to-peer networks such as Gnutella, digitized cultural and creative objects themselves--pre-eminenly music (MP3s) and film--become tradeable, exchangeable, and shareable commodities, independently of their monetary value, in ways inconceivable a mere decade ago. The second interesting corollary is that 'culture', in the quite specific sense of peoples' cultural heritage, has become @@@ for commercial exploitation (see, e.g., Michael Brown's Who Owns Native Culture?); the term 'biopiracy' is now well established with our political discourses, though we as yet have no term to name the appropriation for commercial gain of cultural capital. In this unit of the course, and again in more depth in the Memory, Privatisation, and Power and Intellectual Property and Copyright units, we shall in particular look at the commodification of culture in the era of digital reproduction, the breakdown of the traditional concept of property, online file-sharing, and technologies supporting digital rights management and enforcing digital restrictions.

Some examples:

[t.b.c.]

Intellectual property, digital rights, copyright law and licences, 'fair use'

This section offers only an overview of the issues relating to copyright, digital rights, and the law, covered in greater depth in the section on Intellectual Property and Copyright.

• Copyright law
• File sharing and the law
  
• Public domain
• Copyleft
• Creative Commons
• Open content and open source licences
• Digital Rights Management (DRM)
  

See also the section on Intellectual Property and Copyright

Who are the main players?

• International Council of Museums

"Created in 1946, ICOM is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) maintaining formal relations with UNESCO and having a consultative status with the United Nations' Economic and Social Council."

• regional:
• International Council of African Museums
  
• ICOM-Europe
  
• UNESCO
• World Heritage Centre
  
• European Commission (FP7)

Long-term networks and initiatives supported by the European Commission:

• European Heritage Network
• EPOCH (European Research Network on Excellence in Processing Open Cultural Heritage)
• Digicult
• DigitalPreservationEurope
• Open Archives Forum
  

• Department for Culture, Media and Sport
• Heritage
  
• Museums and galleries
• Historic environment
• museums, archives, and libraries themselves
• major UK bodies developing significant digital and online resources:
  
• the British Library
• the National Archives
• the British Museum
• the Science Museum (London)
• the Natural History Museum (London)
• Culture24: The National Virtual Museum
  
• the Wellcome Trust (London)
• major museums, archives, and libraries support bodies and services in the UK
  
• the MLA (the UK Museums, Libraries and Archives Council) and MLA London
• UKOLN (United Kingdom Office for Library and Information Networking)
• the National Museum Directors' Conference
• Ariadne ("web magazine for information professionals in archives, libraries and museums in all sectors")
• transnational and regional:
• the European Library, from the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL)
• Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies (SCEMS)
  
• Aluka: 'Building a digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa'
• Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN)
• Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage (CULTNAT), Egypt
• universities & research bodies
• the private and corporate sector
• Microsoft
• Live Search Books
  
• Google
• Google Book Search
• Non-profit / open source
• Project Gutenberg
• Internet Archive
• OpenLibrary

Over the next couple of weeks, before we look in earnest at the technologies themselves, we'll need to understand some of the broader (contextualising) 'soft issues' with respect to working with museums, culture, and heritage that will provide a theoretical and conceptual framework not only for doing 'heritage informatics' (we'll learn what museums and heritage are all about) but also for using 'heritage informatics' appropriately in the communication and presentation of culture. Where reference is made to technologies, however, our general focus in these first couple of weeks--under the broad rubric of 'Virtual Communities and Collaboration' (=Digicult Thematic Issue 5)--will be on the nature of knowledge, on who 'owns' knowledge, and on how participatory culture (e.g. through 'social tagging' of digital museum artefacts) is revolutionising our view of the relationship between the museum and the museum visitor.

We'll revisit some of these issues (for example, diversity) towards the end of the course in order to retrospectively review how successfully the technologies that support culture and heritage work have provided the mechanisms for managing such issues.

Our starting point will be Article 3, Section 1 of the ICOM Statutes, which states that:

"A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment."
»http://icom.museum/statutes.html

The topics and issues in the statement that I'll want to examine in depth over the next couple of weeks are:

• "communicates and exhibits". What is communicated? who selects what is communicated? what design decisions have gone into deciding how artifacts are to be exhibited?
• "tangible and intangible heritage"
• "for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment"

Readings and resources

Web

Wikipedia, 'Museum'. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum [Accessed April 27, 2008]

Wikipedia, 'Great libraries of the ancient world'. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_libraries_of_the_ancient_world [Accessed April 27, 2008]