Looking Toward the Future : heritage Presentation and Interpretation and their Relation to ICT

If the aim of public heritage presentation and interpretation is to share insights and reflection about historical and cultural significance with the genera l public, to what extent and by what methods are those objectives now being achieved? In recent decades we have all witnessed an explosion of interest and investment in public interpretation in schools, sites, archives, libraries, and museums in which the new digital technologies have played an increasingly prominent role (MacDonald 2006). In the interactive touch screens of national museums and local visitor centers, in the interpretive applications at archaeological sites and monuments visited by school groups and tourists in their millions, and in countless websites and on-line archaeological databases, the past has become an e ve r-present reality that is simultaneously more real and more virtual than ever before. No longer the exclusive domain of specialized scholars trained in arcane lore of ancient languages, ceramic chronology, and architectural history, the past is now seen as a resource for the economic development of local communities and regions, a medium for cultural identity and cross cultural communication, an edifying destination for cultural tourists, and a focus for educational enrichment. As the presentations at this conference will vividly show, Virtual Re a l i t y offers a compelling range of techniques for visualization and immersive experience; multimedia, in its interactivity, flexibility, and wide variety of applications provides interpretive tools of far-reaching potential; online events and digital projects can provide anyone with a computer and an internet connection with a direct link to historical monuments, archaeological sites and laboratories all over the world. In this opening presentation, I'd VIè Seminari Arqueologia i Ensenyament Barcelona, 26-28 d’octubre, 2006 Treballs d’Arqueologia 12, 2006 Looking Toward the Future: Heritage Presentation and Interpretation and their Relation to ICT Neil Silberman Ename Center for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation 5 like to concentrate on one particular element of this emerging digital world: namely, that unique nexus of scholarship, public administration, tourism, town planning, and community activities that are connected with the on-site public interpretation of particular places deemed to be of archaeological historical significance. By their very context and setting, listed monuments, archaeological parks, and historic districts are quite distinct in their use of digital technologies from museums, classrooms, and cyberspace. For the site is not only the venue for digital presentation, it is the reason for the interpretation itself. Museums can be moved, rebuilt, redesigned, and reconfigured. Websites can pop up and disappear everyday. But the historical site is the tangible embodiment of our legacy from past generations, and as such, should it be altered, damaged, or disappear, a part of our heritage would be permanently lost. Public heritage is not just an optional social luxury but a vital component of the every human society (Lowenthal 1985). Our perceptions of the past as both individuals and communitieswhether they come from schoolbooks, grandmothers' stories, neighborhood landmarks, or d i g i t i zed archaeological dataVIè SEMINARI D’ARQUEOLOGIA I ENSENYAMENT 6 offer us an almost biologically necessary sense of chronological balance, without which we simply would not know who, where, or even when we are. The iconic images of famous monuments, ty p o l o g i c a l l y-a r ranged pottery sherds and flint tools in glass cases, the architecture of historic urban districts, elaborate archaeological parks, and even over-grown, fenced-off ruins in remote places evoke powerful emotional associations and inspire complex mental associations about past and present, about progress and decay for everyone. The visual and tactile network of fragments of ancient or merely "old" material culture is everywhere around us and our physical immersion in a variegated landscape of new and old and ancient creates a deep personal relationship with the pastthat may or may not be exactly the same as what heritage experts, preservation societies, academic studies or authoritative text panels tell us that relationship should be. Here I would like to make a crucial distinction between the terms "Presentation" and "Interpretation". In the last two years of working with ICOMOS on the Ename Charter for the Interpretation of Cultura l Heritage Sites (Silberman 2006), it has become evident just how confused and unclear two distinct approaches to communicating information about the past to the public have become. The essential meaning of Presentation is "making a collection of condensed, compreh e n s i ve, systematic information; a summary or synopsis"-a digest-and that is how Heritage Presentation has tra d i t i o n a l l y been done. On the basis of scholarly research and expert opinion, a carefully planned arrangement of information and physical access to a cultural heritage site is designed and presented to the public, usually by scholars, designers, and heritage professionals. Heritage Presentation in that sense is a largely one-way mode of communication in which scholarly or officially sanctioned perspectives are presented to the public in the form of physical and virtual reconstructions, historical n a r ra t i ves, and systematically arranged collections of facts. In contrast, "Interpretation" places the stress on the understanding of the receiver of the message as much as the content of the message conveyed. In that sense, interpretation is not complete or successful until some channel of communication has been established. What good, after all, is a trained language interpreter if the translation is not accepted or understood? Interpretation has the active sense of "sharing a personal sense of understanding," and that process of reflection and association can be done by anyone who experiences a heritage site. Interpretation must, or should, include the full range of activities, reflection, research, creativity, and creative associations stimulated by a cultural heritage site. Although heritage professionals and scholars play important roles and often initiate this process, it continues and matures only with the input and invo l vement of visitors, local community groups, and other stakeholders of va r i o u s ages and educational backgrounds. For every generation's view of the past is a common, composite creation-a shared recognition of the burdens, the pleasures, the achieve m e n t s , and the legacies we have inherited in many different ways. Digital technologies have now become major elements in the c o n t e m p o r ary shaping of our perceptions of the past, in both presentation and interpretation modes (Hemsley et al. 2005). N e ver before, have so many people, in so many walks of life in so many places, been offered so many avenues to the past. But do these avenues all lead in the same direction? Should Looking Toward the Future: Heritage Presentation and Interpretation... 7 they? And what is the larger role in our society can the digital heritage technologies most effectively play? Creating an Information Infrastructure for Cultural Heritage There is no question that the new digital technologies have already greatly enhanced public heritage and archaeology prog rams, but they have also become integral components of c o n t e m p o rary historical and archaeological research itself (Evans 2005). Remote imaging, field data recording, database construction, the analysis of subtle statistical patterns, and the creation of dynamic visualizations have all profoundly altered the very character of archaeology. The enormous data processing power of the digital technologies now make recording much more precise and flexible. They also possess an unprecedented ability to detect subtle patterns in the material record both through time and space. Yet, as we all know, the digitization of archaeology is, if not in its infancy, then at least in its youth. It faces a wide variety of technical challenges (Addison 2003). The wide range of applications and data formats in VIè SEMINARI D’ARQUEOLOGIA I ENSENYAMENT 8 which archaeological information is currently collected and processed results in isolated clusters of data and visualizations that are not easily transferable or even comparable. This is a particular problem because of the current global scale of archaeology. For there once was a time when historians and archaeologists worked entirely within regional or thematic traditions; there were, for example, prehistorians, Classicists, Near Eastern archaeologists, Mesoamericanists, and indeed specialists in regional histories and archaeologies all over the world (Trigger 1990). But today, no branch of historical studies is entirely isolated from the others. New approaches and methods developed in one place are readily adopted in others. Although the specific historical context of a 19th century factory site may be worlds away from a Late Bronze Age temple, it is not uncommon for their excavation and data analysis to be conducted in similar ways. No less important, the increasing influence of anthropological approaches over traditional artor culture-historical methods, make universal themes such as urbanization, migration, social relations, and technological innovation increasingly relevant e v erywhere (La Bianca and Scham 2006). In keeping up w i t h -and even increasing the pace of these theoretical and methodological deve l o p m e n t s , the digital technologies have a central role to play. In fact, one of the most important initiatives in this direction is the EPOCH network (an European Sixth F ramework network of exc e llence), whose mandate and challenge is to coordinate the research of dozens of institutions working in of Cultura l Heritage ICT throughout the world to forge a common information infrastructure for all of c u l t u ral heritage (EPOCH a. n.d.). This has so far been conceived primarily as an engineering challenge. In EPOCH's original vision, the basic strategy to overcome the fragmentation of information is integra t i o n - t h e seamless merging and interchange of digitized data along a c u l t u ral heritage informatics production pipeline (EPOCH b n.d.). At the start of this pipeline are the applications for data collection and documentation, followed those for processing and archiving information, management, curatorship, and preservation, image processing and enhancing, reconstruction and narration. At the very end, after the scientific work has been concluded and the scientific judgments formulated, come authoritative, accessible, and complexly hyperlinked dissemination, in the form of academic publications, closely followed by popul a r i z ed presentations for the general public in the form of effectively crafted CDs, DVDs, websites, and multimedia applications for use in education, community edification, and the valorisation of museums, historical monuments, and archaeological sites. The goal of EPOCH's integrated pipeline is thus "to provide a clear organisational and disciplinary framework for increasing the e f f e c t i v eness of work at the interface between technology and the cultural heritage of human experience represented in monuments, sites and museums". Another ambitious initiative toward integration of Cultural Heritage ICT, deals more with the centralization of content than the technological structure. It is the proposed SAVE Project, formulated by Bernard Frischer of the Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities of the Unive r s i ty of Virginia (Frischer 2004). SAVE, whose acronym stands for "Serving and Archiving Virtual Environments," is conceived as a global framework for creating, archiving, and distributing an online real-time Looking Toward the Future: Heritage Presentation and Interpretation... 9 visualization of the entire cultural history of humanity. Linking together digital reconstructions of scattered sites and periods, it would, in Frischer's words, "become a powerful omnidisciplinary tool for research and education. It would help us to v i s u a l i ze the development of human culture and to analyze the continous intera c t i o n between humanity and the natu ral world on various scales from the atomic and cellular to the planetary and galactic". In its envisioned global integration and interopera b i l i t y, it would become the definitive archive, library, and showcase for all digital heritage. Many obstacles remain to the achievement of this vision of an i n t e g rated cultural heritage information infrastructure, both in terms of the enormous computing power and capacity required for such a grand challenge and in light of the current f ragmentation of information sources and types. But the natural capacity of digital technologies to speak in a unified, flexible language offers it offers the real possibility of becoming the obvious medium for a global collective memory. It is important to note, however, that these ICT projects envision heritage presentation and education programs essentially as the endVIè SEMINARI D’ARQUEOLOGIA I ENSENYAMENT 10 point of a production process. That is to say, that the general public are seen as end-users of definitive scientific information about the past that is presented in increasingly vivid realistic ways. Yet are the digital technologies essentially value-neutral recording devices that can powerfully capture the unambiguous essence of ancient societies? (Cameron & Kenderdine in press). In fact, do ancient monuments and the societies that built them even have an unambiguous essence that can be agreed upon by all researchers and digitally visualized that will survive into an indefinite future despite the continuing, dramatic evolution of historiography itself? David Lowenthal (1994) put it b e s t -and with chara c t e r i s t i c frankness-when he wrote that "the more realistic a reconstruction of the past seems, the more it is a part of the present". This is especially true of visualization, in which the digital technologies excel. Just compare an artist's rendering of a pharaonic temple from the massive 18th century Description de l'Egypte, with an early 20th century Egyptologist's reconstruction, with the latest computer-generated imagery. The differences are not only due to the progressive accumulation of scientific data or increasingly advanced techniques of reconstruction. Each of them also embodies the deepest cultural sensibilities of the era in which they were made (Molyneaux 1997). That cannot be avoided; we can only see the past from the perspective of the present and that inevitably time-bound perspective is what makes every generation's vision of the past so valuable and unique. And so we must ask if the most important element of this digital vision is its scientific conclusiveness -which will surely be superseded by the research and insights of future generations of scientistsor its unique digital capacity to expand, revise, and update its tightly interwoven content with new facts, new discoveries, and e ver changing hy p o t h e s e s , emphases and ideas. New Heritage and New Forms of Interpretation Scholarly research and its digitized public presentations are only one part of the story. We are confronted today with new kinds of heritage whose significance defies analysis by scientific methods alone (Pe c k h a m 2003). Our material legacy is no longer seen in only stately buildings or prehistoric settlement levels, but in an increasingly broad and sometimes unpleasant sampling of the achievements -and failingsof human history. The World Heritage List now includes the grisly remains of World War I trench warfare, c o n c e n t ration camps, colonial prisons, and rusting, crumbling 19th century factories and mines where children worked, workers died, and the very idea of a production pipeline wa s born. Can statistical patterning of shell holes in No Man's Land at the Battle of Ypres, or a detailed database of the eyeglasses and shoes collected from the victims at Auschwitz, or a precise 3D reconstruction of the 18th-century slave terminal on the island of Gorée off the coast of Senegal help us better to understand and to productively reflect upon the unpleasant realities of the past still painfully embedded in the fabric of our society-that those heritage sites symbolize? I spoke before about the distinction between Presentation and Interpretation, and want to return to this subject, because heritage is not only about scientific results and official comm e m o r ation, but about the o p p o r t u n i ty for serious public reflection as well. For interpretation, in contrast to carefully prepared presentations, is based on a dynamic relationship between a site, its specialize d Looking Toward the Future: Heritage Presentation and Interpretation... 11 researchers, and the public at large. And that public is changing. To d ay, formerly coherent ethnic, national, and cultura l identities are in the process of transformation, with increasing globalization closely para l l e l e d matched by the resurgence of regional, ethnic, and religious identities (Barber 1996). The historic districts of many cities have become home to struggling i m m i g rant communities for whom the official epics presented by antiquities services and national monument administrations-and even the concept of a d i s t i n c t i ve "national" identityhave a sharply different interpretations and, all too often, little practical relevance. "Heritage" can indeed mean many things to many people in the multi-ethnic landscapes of the 21st century and the growing acknowledgment of the claims of non-academic, nong overnmental heritage stakeholders such as community groups, religious bodies, newcomers, and diasporic communities for participation in the design and management of heritage sites implies an obligation not merely to homogenize all their separate heritage perceptions into a master narrative but to offer respect and dignity to a wide variety of approaches and perspectives on the past. It is VIè SEMINARI D’ARQUEOLOGIA I ENSENYAMENT 12 evident that digital technology has the potential of increasing public access to heritage, not only on the development of ever more complexly created and scientifically documented presentations, but also to create information avenues of two-way communication, in which, alongside traditional archaeological and historical data, questions of relevance and significance of the past to the present are discussed. For the value of the past is precisely to teach us new things, to offer difficult themes for public discussion and reflection. We must apply our technology to more closely monitoring current heritage practices and developing new forms of cultural communication programs -in which success lies not only in professional competence, technology and rational planning, but in the creation of lively local institutions, not static monumentssustainable in the long run not because of how they look or what information they contain, but for how effectively they function as centers for common reflection, productive questioning, and historical awa r e n e s s within every community. Fo r this, a more inclusive vision-and infrastructure-is needed to facilitate serious and creative reflection in society at large. And what of the places where heritage is in direct conflict? The legacy of narratives of promised lands and chosen peoples can make one warring party's proudest heritage an object of resentment and target for destruction by its adversaries. In our world, heritage has in some places become the battle banner of demagogues of ethnic exclusiveness and cultural purity, seeking to erase from the landscape and from public consciousness the d i v e r s i ty and complexity of human culture. We have seen the destruction of the Mostar Bridge in the battle for Sarajevo, the detonation of the Buddhas of B a m i yan, and the continuing historical conflict between I s raelis and Palestinians ove r their heritage in a twice-promised land. How can technology help to restore or preserve pasts that are slated for selective destruction, with or without the consent of the gove r n m e n t s concerned? Interopera b i l i ty, I would suggest, is more than just a technological slogan. If integration of information is indeed one of the great potentials of digital technology, it is our r e s p o n s i b i l i ty to construct an infrastructure in which recognition and respect for the diversity and wholeness of human heritage is no less importance than the perfection of scientific techniques. New data sources also have to be considered-beyond those functionally useful for academic research. Elements of intangible heritage such as folk traditions, music, dance, literature, foodways connected with heritage sites and historical cultures defy the standard organization or analysis of the production pipeline. In new analyses of ancient foodways and trading connections, the past has proved to be anything but static or pure. Waves of immigration, trading connections, and shifting networks of military alliances and commerce through the millennia have left a complex and multifaceted record of human i n t e r action -and new understandings of what global, national, regional, and ethnic identity might include. All these factors are relevant to the reshaping of the heritage pipeline from a oneway process of production into an ongoing, multi-channel public discussion-informed by reliable and meticulous scientific investigation but also enriched by the feedback of a wide range of cont e m p o rary perspectives about the value and significance of the past. In fact, what I'm suggesting is the reconceptualization of the heritage pipeline to go beyond the confines of the popularization of scientific data to enrich collective memory. Looking Toward the Future: Heritage Presentation and Interpretation... 13 FRISCHER, B. (2004). 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