Collection Challenges (Asynchronous Session)
Unesco 4 All Project: Accessibility through Digital Tactile Surfaces View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fabio D'agnano
This paper describes the EU UNESCO4ALL TOUR project, which aims to create an innovative, thematic, transnational tourism product based on the UNESCO World Heritage (WH) sites and targeted to visually impaired people. The scope is to develop an accessible, transnational cultural tourism package mixing together culture, the outstanding UNESCO WH sites by the exploitation of a custom technology enabling the blind and visually impaired to experience cultural heritage by integrating tactile exploration with audio data. This will be possible by the use of a high-tech "ring" detecting and reading the NFC tags included in the 3D printed replicas of the artworks (tactile surface tagged with NFC sensors) and then to communicate in wireless mode with a smart device (through a mobile app for tablets or smart phones).". I would like to present the making of and the outcomes of the project, ended in 2021, during pandemic. My role within the UWE Centre for Print Research group has been to find innovative solutions for the production of three-dimensional models in small series for tactile exploration. I have also taken care of the coherence between the significance of the works and architecture of the four UNESCO sites and tactile translation for the blind.The project EU UNESCO4ALL TOUR won the “Shaping Europe’s Digital Future” award during the EUIndustryDays.
Featured Museum Audio Description: From Accessibility to Inclusivity View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Chiara Bartolini
This paper focuses on museum audio description (AD) as a form of interpretation offered by museums as cultural creators and an instance of intersemiotic translation, primarily conceived as an accessibility tool addressed to blind people. More specifically, the contribution seeks to explore the potential of AD of cultural artifacts and artworks for non-sighted and sighted alike, thus acknowledging a shift to ‘Universal Design’ and a new ‘universality’ that recognizes diversity and particularity while fostering inclusivity, without dividing individuals into separate categories. This seems to be particularly topical, even more now that the pandemic has forced museums to rethink the ways in which they could become more inclusive, also online. By drawing on an analysis of museum-specific AD guidelines from different contexts (Italy, the UK and the US), the paper considers ADs and other interpretive texts provided online by two art museums – the Italian Pinacoteca di Brera and the Museum of Modern Art in New York – as the results of various interpretive processes about single items: the online description, the general audio guide and the AD. Selected texts describing artworks belonging to the two museums are compared to shed light on the differences between distinct layers of interpretation. Museum AD may arguably be revisited as a form of museum translation for everybody, by configuring it not only as an instrument improving access to vulnerable groups (e.g. the elderly, migrants and individuals with cognitive needs) but also as ‘guided looking’ for all, which may truly promote social inclusion.
(In)Visible Storage: Museum Studies Graduate Students Reinterpret Victorian-era Technology as Material Culture View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anne Ricculli
Comprised of 750 mechanical musical instruments and automata objects manufactured during the late nineteenth and early 20th century, the Murtogh D. Guinness Collection at the Morris Museum (Morristown, NJ) presents challenges for contemporary museum studies graduates students aiming to craft narratives relevant for today's audiences. This study considers these curatorial students who are not the first to grapple with issues of representations, for example, of race, ethnicity, and orientalism which infuses artifacts from the Victorian era currently in museum Visible Storage holdings.
Seeking Inclusion and Democracy Through Co-curating Projects View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Theoktisti Misirloglou, Niki Nikonanou
Participation is an umbrella term used in the museum world promising to enhance inclusion, democratization and social responsibility. Co-creating projects, such as co-curating exhibitions, require a high level of visitor involvement and engagement, providing opportunities and challenges regarding decision-making and power transition from the institution to the public. In the frame of the museums’ reflexive and participatory turn and given that curation has rarely been used as an inclusive practice, the program ‘Together We Curate’ initiated by the MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts (Thessaloniki, Greece) after the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic gave to non-professionals the power to co-curate an exhibition. The project has served as an attempt to break with established theory and practice and to question mono-dimensional approaches to authorship, to authority and to power relations. The paper reflects on how a radical shift in the institution’s received practices can serve as a vehicle for togetherness, and discusses the possibilities of co-curating projects in opening new dimensions in the process of democratizing art and culture.
Beta Testing a Digitized Condition Report Using Handheld Technology in a Fashion Collection View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Grace Woodson
Information accurately recorded about an object when it is accessioned into a collection is vital for assessing short-term and long-term conservation needs and storage considerations. Advances in technology have provided unique opportunities to streamline previously time-consuming tasks within this process. Resulting data can be immediately accessible, linked, and imported and exported into a variety of systems. Using hand-held devices such as a tablet provides the user with the ability to complete tasks on a single device which is mobile in its technological abilities and mobile in its physical nature. The focus of this project is on the use of a fillable digital condition report form created using Adobe Acrobat and objects from a small capsule collection recently donated to The Fashion Archive containing 19 objects. The objects range in date from the 1900s-1940s and are constructed in a variety of materials. The condition reports were completed entirely on an iPad using the Adobe Acrobat app, an Apple Pencil, the iPad’s camera, and the GoodNotes app. The terminology and classification systems of ICOM were also used. The findings from this study showcase the potential of technology’s role in the object accessioning process. The iPad provided advantages related to accessibility of resources/tools and maximizing efficiency in the completing of condition reports and linking them to The Fashion Archive’s database. Overall, this process improved on the traditional way of completing an object condition report in both time and accessibility.
