What we need to know about digital heritage?

After introducing the virtual museum in the last three posts, I feel like many of you may not familiar with the digital heritage. In virtual museum, all the virtual objects we have experienced through the screen device can be referred as digital heritage, on the other hand, the virtual museum is also a kind of digital heritage. We'd better to clarify the concept of digital heritage, what are the digital technologies applied in heritage conservation and interpretation. It may help us to gain a better understanding of the digital technology in the museum education field.

A popular TV show of Ancient heritage called Files of National Treasures (with many virtual presentations )

There are five main questions I will try to answer in this and next posts.

1. What is digital heritage?
2. What are the scope of digital heritage? What can be seen as digital heritage?
3. What are the principles or guidelines for the preservation of the digital heritage?
4. What are the application scenarios for digitalization of cultural heritage?
5. What are the common technologies for digitalization of cultural heritage?

What is digital heritage? We probably to understand the concept of heritage first. As UNESCO states that heritage refers to something that has been or should be passed down from generation to generation because it is valued.

According to the UNESCO Charter for the Protection of Digital Heritage:

"Human knowledge or expressed resources, whether cultural, educational, scientific, and administrative, or containing technology, law, medicine, and other types of information, are increasingly digitally created or converted from existing analog resources. In the form of numbers.

Where resources are “digital births”, there are no other formats than digital ones.

Digital materials include text, databases, still images and moving images, audio, graphics, software and web pages, and are increasingly available in formats. They are usually short-lived and require purposeful production, maintenance and management.

Many of these resources have lasting value and meaning and thus constitute a legacy that should be protected and protected for present and future generations. This heritage can exist in any language, anywhere in the world, and in any field of human knowledge or expression.

People are using computers and related tools to create and share digital resources—information, creative expressions, ideas, and knowledge encoded for computer processing—that they value and hope to share with others over time and across space. This is evidence of a digital heritage. It is a heritage of many parts, with many common characteristics and many common threats."

It can be seen that the concept of digital heritage here is very broad. From the perspective of material culture, all the materials left by human activities are human cultural heritage. Therefore, some scholars also referred digital heritage as a digital cultural heritage. The digital cultural heritage we often say should be cultural heritage digitalization. Under a narrow concept, digital preservation, protection and utilization of all movable and immovable cultural relics.

             Application of Panorama Technology in Ancient Building Information Collection in China (image source: WMWB Technology &Culture ltd.co, Peking University)

What can be seen as digital heritage? Type of digital heritage, it has constantly changed and grew, here based on the UNESCO's definition, I listed the main types of digital heritage.

• Publications disseminated in a variety of ways, including online retrieval via the World Wide Web, CD-ROMs, DVDs, floppy disks, and various e-book devices;
• “Semi-published” materials, including pre-printed papers in the form of e-prints and other various files used within a specific scope;
• Institutions and individuals' activities, affairs, communications, etc. At present, a large part of the world's commercial and government records are kept in the electronic record system. Email and discussion group information can also be important digital records;
•  Record and analyze data sets for science, geography, space, society, population, education, health, environment and other phenomena;
• Technology-assisted teaching tools;
•  Database tools, models, simulations and other software tools and application software;
• Unpublished materials stored as digital files, including reports, dissertations, oral history, folk recordings, and drafts of published works;
• Entertainment products, including mobile images, music, computer games;
• digital broadcasting;
• digitally generated works of art;
• A collection of digital copies of images, sounds, and text copied from non-digital originals.

After the basic introduction on digital heritage, I have strong feeling about the digital heritage in education field, we can find many connections according to this the UNESCO's definition and scope of digital heritage. The E-learning, technology assistant tool for education, digital broadcasting like Podcast, e-books, database are all digital heritage. To some extent, we are producing the digital heritage during our study via computer, mobile and Internet every day.

In my next post, I will focus on the last three questions, and will provide more actual examples of the technologies in digital cultural heritage conservation.

Reference: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/resources/publications-and-communication-materials/publications/full-list/guidelines-for-the-preservation-of-digital-heritage/

https://en.unesco.org/themes/information-preservation/digital-heritage/concept-digital-heritage