DANIELA ROSNER, MARCO ROCCETTI, AND GUSTAVO MARFIA
three categories of new collaborative and crowd-sourced software in the restoration
of specific artifacts and environments (such as paintings and archeological sites):
- digitally reconstructing objects and landscapes from the past;
- broadening access to cultural resources through remote distribution
platforms;
- digitally representing and archiving cultural artifacts and media
• Even as they contribute to the process of digitizing documentary collections,
technologies involving cultural heritage often ignore cultural practices.
• A new kind of research aims to identify how established sociocultural
practices shape and are shaped by digital technologies.
• Technologies for digital preservation can help frame the connections between
tradition and progress in a cultural sense yet fail to connect objects to their
history and to the people who created them.
Inspired by a large body of literature from the digital humanities, we urge
understanding the dynamic nature of cultural forms as an important strategy for
preservation.
However, this view does not fit within the dominant conceptual framework defined by
computing researchers, a rubric grounded in the assumption that cultural histories
are stabilized by the material forms on which they are encoded, stored, and
replicated. (EG: Artist’s View iPad application Palazzo Strozzi in Florence— навоя
айпад на достпремичательность, люди получали реконструированную
картинку из прошлого, т е как бы это выглядело еще тогда.)
Tortellino X-perience, a game designed to teach people how to make the Northern
Italian tortellini
Rosner, had been designing interactive media for the Adler Planetarium and
Astronomy Museum in Chicago. In collaboration with educators and astronomers,
she used Adobe Macromedia software to develop interactive games for exploring
astrophysical data. The software was made available to museum visitors through
kiosks throughout the museum’s exhibit halls.
These projects also highlight new opportunities for sustaining the kinds of data we
might want to preserve. Tortellini apprentices may not care about the precision of
gesture replication, as gestures are often readjusted and reoriented while working.
Knitters may
not care how many stitches it took to make a particular hat or what they were
thinking when making it, since the hat may already embody some shared value or
ideal. In this sense, the data collected through cameras or other sensors has little
value in isolation. Rather, the patterns of social activity that unfold as part of
engaging the devices—rhythms of interaction expressed through annotated stitches
or moments of reflection viewing video sequences—may reveal more about the
history and collective memory of a craft practice than would a gesture alone. In
enabling people to extend the work of their hands through digital media, the system
simultaneously invites the conservation and symbolic transformation of a given
practice.
We thus reach a paradox of preservation: Things change in order to remain the
, same. As we aim to sustain cultural practices, enabling the “replication” of
techniques through digitization, we simultaneously change the replicated forms.
Beyond limitations of codification, cultural practices rely on digital infrastructures
consisting of hardware and software that could ultimately wear
out. As a result, cultural practices not only change but deteriorate as well; for
example, with Spyn, Android phones wear out, as the software used to store the data
becomes incompatible with subsequent versions of the Android operating system,
and users are no longer able to access the data. Preservation yields disruption.
Marc Verboord and Susanne Janssen «internet and culture»
Within communication research, we find three important perspectives. Digital
inequality studies are concerned with audiences and users of ICT and Internet –
more particularly, who have access to new media and who are most likely to actually
use such media for social participations (e.g., in the realm of culture). Increasingly,
however, notions of ‘audiences,’ ‘users,’ and ‘consumers’ are contested for
dismissing the blurring of boundaries between consumers and producers. In
particular, work on peer production – or user-generated content – details the work of
‘prosumers’: nonprofessionals who create cultural content online which sometimes
invokes semi-institutionalized fields on its own, such as the blogosphere (Bruns,
2008). These studies also showed that despite the wide reception and application of
this user-generated content, only a small segment of the population is involved in its
active creation (Van Dijck, 2009). A third and related scholarship analyses computer-
mediated communication and its effects on behaviors and attitudes. While often not
particularly concerned with culture, it has produced relevant insights in how more or
less institutionalized forms of communication (e.g., online reviews of amateurs vs
professionals) influence recipients’ perceptions. The significance of expertise and
authority is among the focal points – particularly in studies on how ‘collective
knowledge’ is produced on the Internet (e.g., online encyclopedia Wikipedia).
the symbolic production of culture on the Internet. One emancipatory manifestation
of such work – emphasizing how fans and other ‘common’ (prod)users – negotiate
the meaning attributed to popular culture – is found within the paradigm of cultural
studies. Most of this work concerns ethnographic accounts that elucidate the place of
audiences in the ‘convergence culture’ (Jenkins, 2006), a constellation in which
media are understood to fulfill increasingly similar functions for ever more indistinct
social groups. As such, often social inequalities in terms of education, age, or gender
are argued to be no longer significant markers for taste and behavior, and notions of
cultural authority are challenged. However, studies in cultural sociology argue that
Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of ‘distinction’ may have weakened due to the
ascendance of more omnivorous cultural consumption patterns – that is combining
highbrow and popular culture – but cannot be completely abandoned. Popular
culture has also become more institutionalized over time, and many of such off-line
configurations tend to be reproduced in online contexts
theoretical publications on cultural production in the digital age, which tend to take
two competing perspectives. Both of them, however, appear to draw on three
underlying argumentative dimensions: economic,
