Advanced Cultural Heritage Training

Digital Collections and the Presentation of Cultural Heritage: The Dialectic Relation of Informative Knowledge and Storytelling in Digital Curation

In the last couple of years great progress has been made in transferring cultural heritage collections to the semantic web by carefully designing large, interconnected digital databases. Despite their flexibility and availability, the potential to use these digital collections in education and exhibitions has not yet been fully explored.

Here are the main questions that we would like to discuss:

1. How can we use the existing resources to create engaging interactive experiences that would still adequately represent cultural heritage and communicate current research insights?
2. How could these new digital tools be successfully integrated in exhibitions and guided tours without losing focus on physical collections?

This workshop aims to stimulate a discussion on these topics by bringing together researchers and professionals who work with physical and digital collections of historical objects, are engaging in the development and implementation of digital tools for education, or create semantic databases for the cultural sector.

The focus of this workshop will be on numismatic collections. Numismatics already makes use of digital tools and standards for digitization of coin collections around the world. Although small and often overlooked, coins are extremely interesting objects with colourful biographies, spanning long distances and different uses and meanings on their way from the mint to their current place in a collection. Connecting past and present, coins tell stories about trade, value, trust, social conventions, prosperity and inequality, rise and fall of states and dynasties, power and political propaganda, but also about art, religion, and gender equality.

In this workshop we will address the concept of digital interactive challenges and propose some solutions by combining pedagogical approaches and experience-based learning concept developed by the Wandering Team.

Participants are invited to explore some activities prepared by the organisers on their mobile devices. Based on these examples, participants will have an opportunity to develop and present their own ideas for similar interactive challenges individually or in small groups. This practical part will be focused on the physical and digital collection of the Department of Numismatics and Monetary History at the University of Vienna, but participants are encouraged to discuss their own experiences and projects as well.

Due to its practical nature, the workshop is offered only to on-site participants. To ensure you will get most of this workshop, we kindly ask you to register until 4^th of November 2022, and fill out a short pre-workshop questionnaire on your interests and expectations at this link.

We look forward to an interesting workshop!

Talila Yahiel, Shani Ziv, Mor Haimovitz I Israel &
Marc Philip Wahl, David Weidgenannt, Barbara Pavlek Löbl I Austria