Rethinking the Virtual Museum Sorin Hermon, Susan Hazan

Science and Technology for Archaeological Research Center The Cyprus Institute

Abstract — The paper summarizes initial, theoretical

work carried out by V-Must, a Network of Excellence [1], funded by the European Commission in its efforts to rethink the concept of virtual museums (VM), in light of developing emerging digital technologies. The Network has been active in identifying, and mapping the tools and services that define and support VMs in the heritage sector. Drawing on a series of reports and publications prepared by the Network1, the paper reflects on the VM from several perspectives.

Keywords— virtual museums, digital surrogates.

I. INTRODUCTION Revisiting Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age

of Mechanical Reproduction [1], we look at the implications for Virtual Museums (VM) at a time when life through screens accompanies us through much of our day. They not only drive us around our leisure time but also accompany us home, and not only follow us, but drive us around our social life. We will look at the place of VM that extends, amplifies or even replaces the physical museum in a digital environment - the museum that perhaps represents the last bastion of the veneered, physical object, substituted here by a mere digital surrogate; an empty, Baudrillard simulacra [2]. When once the term ‘museum’ conjured the familiar embodied gallery visit in the company of family or friends, the VM only needs a series of mouse clicks to propel us (on our own) from object to object, from gallery to gallery, from Museum to Museum. We will consider what has been lost in the process, and what has been gained when museums became not only accessible to all (by a simple click) , but also relentlessly reproducible.

Seeking criteria for the definition of VM we re-visit the relationship between the real object and its digital "surrogate”, between the Museum and the Virtual, and the distance between the two. Could one exist without the other; does one, in fact "lives" through the other; or could the VM have a life of its own? Through a series of case studies we will explore what happens when a digital model of the Sistine Chapel is effortlessly accessible to all, and will question whether it’s electronic essentiality stems from the fact that it is famous only because it represents an iconic object of World Heritage. What would happen if we were to remove the label "Cappella Sistina "? Would our digital replica still be as famous?

II. BACKGROUND This paper reflects the work of the V-MUST project,

which is critically analysing the cultural heritage (CH) sector,

1 http://www.v-must.net/library/publications

focusing on the state of the art of VMs in Europe and beyond. One of the Network’s goals is to propose an overview of the VM; based both on best practice2, as well as to set out a series of recommendations; such as practical considerations towards conceptualizing, designing, and implementing a VM.

The term VM has become as ubiquitous as to rend it almost redundant. It is therefore we felt that it is critical to define the VM for our work in order to be able to debate what is, and what is not relevant to this discussion. Once our terms of reference were clarified, at least to ourselves we were able to move on to discuss the VM in finer resolution; even though we are aware of how the term ‘Virtual Museum’ has in fact been used to describe a wide range of activities that are all somehow loosely concerned with this overarching concept. Both the VM that acts as the digital footprint of a physical museum, as well as those VMs that have no reference to material artefacts or physical places; rather deal with concepts and cultural creativity, all drawing on the strength of the term museum; as familiar to all of us as a bricks and mortar building that maintains material collections on behalf of the public. Questions of authority and authenticity inevitably emerge from these kinds of discussions, yet it isn't always clear who does have the authority; and possibly also the professional capability to author, produce, and maintain such projects. As an integral part of this process we are working on a definition of the VM that we currently describe as:

A Virtual museum is a communication product accessible by a public, focused on tangible or intangible heritage. It uses various forms of interactivity and immersion, for the purpose of education, research, enjoyment, and enhancement of visitor experience. Virtual Museums may be typically but not exclusively denoted as electronic when they could be called online museums, hypermuseum, digital museum, cybermuseums or Web museums3.

This discussion has been recently revisited in an ICOM discussion on key concepts where the terms digital or cyber exhibition are preferred to refer to these particular exhibitions that are accessed over the internet. 4Perhaps the easiest way to conceptualize a VM is to imagine a cohesive, yet distributed set of tangible objects, and intangible concepts held together thematically by an overarching theme. The core of a VM can be then loosely described as a location of rich content – representing unique and precious items, works of art, or archaeological objects. Once these assembled collections, or exhibitions have been compiled they can be integrated as

2 http://www.v-must.net/virtual-museums

3 http://www.v-must.net/virtual-museums/what-virtual-museum

4 http://icom.museum/professional-standards/key-concepts-of-museology/

978-1-4799-3169-9/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE 625

different kinds of experiences, with as wide range of different expressions with varying depths of interactivity for their users/visitors. A VM can tell a story; it can inspire you to tell your own story; it can take you to places that no longer exist or help you gather objects that are meaningful to you. Once objects are viewed in sequence they serve to classify their differences as well as their commonalities. The term VM can reflect different ways in which objects have been assembled, presented, and disseminated, both over electronic platforms and physical displays representing artistic expression, re-enacting a forgotten archaeological period, or magically conjuring up a historical setting. For our research, while acknowledging the physical Virtual Museum; perhaps as models5, dioramas6 or miniatures7, we prioritize the digital display and the electronic VM.

Often VMs are developed according to an educational agenda, and the pedagogical aspects of the VM need to be explored in order to establish what it is that they can support, and therefore are able to contribute to formal, and informal learning scenarios. When users seek information about the world around them and ask all kinds of questions about lived life, or artistic, and historical processes, they will probably be searching for them first and foremost online and/or using a smart phone. However, once the term 'museum' is stated, a sense of trust is invoked together with the impression that the content has been professionally collected, curated, and presented in the tradition of the museum. Quality, cultural content that either describes itself, or has been connoted as such by others as a VM when discovered either online, over mobile platforms, or at specific venues, has obvious resonance with both formal and informal education; opening up the potential for advantageous collaborations between cultural institutions that seamlessly deliver their content into the classroom, the home, or community venue.

Where do we, in fact go to in order to discover these kinds of rich CH that can play out in an educational scenario? Where do we find content that we can trust to inspire? Where can we be assured of the quality and integrity that we have learned to expect from the physical museum? CH content is in fact available everywhere; sometimes delivered in professionally curated platform; many times not. So how are users going to be able to recognise what is valuable, accurate and meaningful if the mantle of the museum has melted away?

III. LINKED DATA AND INSTITUTIONAL COLLABORATION The Semantic Web approach addresses the notion of

multiplicity of knowledge claims by multiple coinciding ontologies (i.e. ’multiple overlapping truths’) [3]. Thus, it helps gaining a more comprehensive understanding on the nature of CH objects, by themselves embedding “multiple truths” [4]. Taking advantage of current practice in the Semantic Web, new kinds of sophisticated developments and collaborations are now combining assets in novel and impressive ways. According to the British Museum’s site Semantic Web Endpoint8 the ‘semantic’ element of the

5 See for example the 50:1 scale model of Jerusalem during the Second Temple Period,

http://www.english.imjnet.org.il/page_1382

6 See for example Yale Peabody Museum’s dioramas, in their Museum of Natural History,

http://peabody.yale.edu/exhibits/dioramas

7 See for example The Toy & Miniature Museum of Kansas City, http://www.toyandminiaturemuseum.org/miniatures.aspx

8 http://blog.britishmuseum.org/2011/09/16/the-british-museum-has-created-a-semantic-web-endpoint/

technology means that data is structured in such a way that allows the discovery of connections and relationship between data from different sources that would be difficult, if not impossible, to discover with traditional technologies. As there are currently 2,074,288 objects available in the British Museum’s online database with 766,576 with one or more images they argue when objects are associated with their semantic attribute this helps us improve our understanding, and knowledge of objects and events even further.

From the above, it is clear that VM requires semantic definitions. However, these become clear once we fully understand what is (and what is not) a VM. Such semantic descriptions should capture the whole essence of VM, serving as the base of building ontologies for VM. Taking a step backward for a while, lets explore the analogy with archaeology, as one of the main contributors to CH VMs.

Not all institutions worldwide employ Semantic Web ontologies to facilitate intuitive searches on large data sets. Using information management trials on three Finnish sites, Saari Manor and the castles of Kajaani and Kuusisto, the authors [5] discuss a series of case studies using a web based collaborative semantic wiki to store multiple types of archaeological and historical research data, effectively combining their diverse asserts into a single system accessible to various stakeholders of the data: excavating archaeologists, researchers, general public, CH administrators. Exploiting the potential of these advanced technologies – in this case a semantic, wiki-based system – new kinds of collaboration facilitate the harvesting and editing, of structured data where not only the authors, but more critically the data is distributed.

Could this shared collaboration fulfil the criteria of a VM, even if not declared as such by the team? Data is essentially the core information sources used by archaeologists; the primary materials (e.g. finds and sites), which is also associated to scholarly literature and personal communication. The authors describe how the fully procedural nature of the information builds up as a result of archaeological excavations and surveys. A process that is contrastingly different from other CH disciplines that are based on the more explicit, conscious selection and collection of materials and information, which may be argued, in this case, more resembles an archive than a museum.

Over recent years we have also witnessed an exponential increase in tools facilitating technical and semantic interoperability, efforts in standardizing metadata, and new systems for encoding archives based on rendering explicit, implicit knowledge [6]. An uncontrolled development of ontologies, i.e. formalized and reusable knowledge based on entity, property and relationships, was followed by a recent phase dedicated to the realignment, or mapping, of different ontologies created in the meantime for CH. Efforts have been also directed towards the development of semantic repositories for digital (3D) data, a substantial component of VMs [7].

Work still has to be done however for better understanding the (perhaps sometimes subtle) difference between digital collections, online archives and virtual museums [8], [9]. The V-Must research breaks down the different kinds of museums typographically, drawing on content, experiences, and interactions that are already available as VM's worldwide. VMs have emerged in many ways. Clearly the electronic art museum, or art gallery provides a very different ontological

626

experience than does a virtual walk through a simulated historical site; as does the questions posed by a science museum; or even the kinds of experiences that one might expect to encounter in an ethnographic museum.

In much the same way that VM's may reflect a broad range of experiences – whether representing a bricks and mortar museum, physical site or an imagined collection – the following section discusses delivery rather than content; in spite of the fact that neither content nor delivery can be truly separated in a VM. Knowing where the end user can most benefit from the cultural content, designers and curators of VMs will need to decide where, and how to deliver the experience. The various scenarios introduced in this section clarify the scope and scale at the point of delivery; all factors that affect the quality of experience that is delivered to end-users. The following section discusses what happens when the end-user encounters art works in a VM. Clearly the art; once experienced on a screen – often a tiny smartphone screen - bears little resemblance to the original art work; neither in scale nor more crucially for its auratic presence.

IV. THE AURATIC OBJECT AND WALTER BENJAMIN Jesse Prinz and his team undertook a fascinating

experiment: We told test subjects to imagine that the Mona Lisa was destroyed in a fire, but that there happened to be a perfect copy that even experts couldn’t tell from the original. If they could see just one or the other, would they rather see the ashes of the original Mona Lisa or a perfect duplicate? Eighty per cent of our respondents chose the ashes: apparently we disvalue copies and attribute almost magical significance to originals. (How wonder works, Jesse Prinz, June 21, 20139).

How do we account for this peculiar behavior? How can we venerate ashes over the physical representation of a painting – once we have been told that it is merely replica? A glimpse of what is happening here may be explained by the idea of an auratic experience. For this we can look to the formative moment outlined in W. Benjamin’s 1937 essay 'The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in which he discusses the status of art, and its limitless reproduction through mechanical processes. The seminal essay has inspired critics, and theorists in many fields across the disciplines of visual culture, media studies, and cultural studies, and has informed their writings on photography, cinema, and artistic reinvigoration through mechanical reproduction.

Benjamin argued that the mechanical process of reproduction liberates art, causing it to become detached from a parasitic dependence on ritual. According to Benjamin, the mechanically reproduced art, specifically photography and cinema, when once freed from its shell, may then be exponentially disseminated to new audiences. Clearly a line can be drawn here from the mechanically reproduced, to the digitally reproduced art, and the increasing ways that they, in their turn, may be disseminated even more aggressively across electronic networks. In the same way, according to Benjamin, that photography and cinema became detached from their ritual dependence; art born-digital is liberated, perhaps even more so, than that the mechanically produced art ever was. These kinds of artefacts are no longer tethered to a cinema

9 http://www.aeonmagazine.com/oceanic-feeling/why-wonder-is-the-most-human-of-all-emotions

screen, or gallery wall for their display, and may be circulated freely and unremittingly over the Internet, via mobile platforms, and across electronic networks.

Benjamin also argued that when art has been mechanical reproduced, the copy is detached from the domain of tradition, and emancipated from its cult value. However, coupled with this detachment comes a challenge to the singular qualities of the original object, which, according to Benjamin, causes another kind of loss – the loss of ‘aura’. What has been forfeited here concerns the quality of the art object. Mechanical reproduction causes objects to lose their singularity, and with this loss their historical testimony is jeopardized. ‘Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element’ Benjamin claims: “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership” (1992: 21410).

The mechanically reproduced object’s lost patina is significant for electronic reproduction. When mechanical copies may be seen as similar, the digital copy is identical to the source, and in essence, there is no original, and there is no copy. Benjamin’s ideas are critical for understanding the VM, in that it not only draws on the loss of the aura which has implications of the autonomous art born-digital, and by association the digital VM, but also in the understanding that both kinds of reproduction afford far more and wider channels of distribution. We therefore need to draw on both sides of the Benjamin equation; both the loss and the gain. Where the loss can be described as the loss of the aura, both for the mechanically reproduced, and the digitally produced VM, the gain for the digital artifact is evident in the exponentially increasing circulation of museum texts – 3D scenarios, images, narratives and simulations - all now effortless disseminated across electronic networks that emerge from museums and other centers of CH. The profusion of these electronically driven applications and digital artifacts may be seen as a gain, in that they serve to extend the museum mission beyond the museum walls; often even replacing the museum for remote visitors as our discussion will suggest.

To return to the loss that Benjamin describes, the loss of the aura, crucial to the object-orientated museum and implicit in the presentation of the artwork, is the idea that the museum acts as a stage to present the original object. But why is this originality or presumed lack of originality so critical to the museum experience? Andrea Witcomb draws on Benjamin and the logic operating in 19th-century museum practice. ‘This is the opposition,’ Witcomb argues, ‘between a copy and its original, an opposition which privileges the original as more important, more precious, than a copy’ [10], [11]. Witcomb describes how special attention was given to demonstrate the originality of an object and argues how ‘originality could no longer be taken for granted. It had to be constructed and guaranteed’. She describes how great care was taken not only to locate originality, but also to present the original through erecting a symbolic barrier that was set up ‘between viewer and artifact, between subject and object’.

10 Benjamin, W. (1992) 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,' in Illuminations, London: Fontana.

627

This physical and symbolic barrier, Witcomb argues, ‘served to signify the monetary value of the artifact, thus mixing auratic with monetary values, aesthetics with commercial values’. In this way the visitor was assured that the objects encountered in the museum were valuable, in some way special, and possibly even exemplary, but certainly worthy of taking the time to make a special trip to a dedicated space that guarantees the engagement with the original.

Where Benjamin referred to cinema and photography, V-Must highlights the VM, and our investigations are concerned with both the loss of the aura, as well as the new possibilities for distribution across electronic networks. Electronic networks of distribution allow both digital surrogates of the material artifact as well as new entities of the Museum born-digital to circulate freely, and, where notions of originality and singularity are not only impossible, but also in essence totally irrelevant. How can we connote a website original – when its singular pages essentially appear simultaneously everywhere?

The goal of the digital museum is often not to replace the material object with an electronic surrogate, but instead, open up new possibilities to harness, and to enact reciprocal, user-driven scenarios, as well as furnishing new opportunities for the remote visitor to be able to interact with the physical museum. While the implementation of technology in the museum has been theorized through the rhetoric of the displacement of the treasure house, or as a privileging of information over the object [12] (Fahy, 200111), we can also look to a digital museum that neither replaces, nor prioritises traditional modes of collection and display, but offer new possibilities for novel scenarios, previously not possible.

V. SOCIAL NETWORKS AND WEB 2.0 – RE-SETTING

COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP A Virtual Museum, as standard museum practice does not

always seek to displace or distract from the museum mission, to collect, display, and interpret the material collections for the visitor. Rather, it serves to enhance and extend the museum mandate in novel ways, and even open up new possibilities as the discussions above described. A typically museum will now not only have to invest in a comprehensive institutional website, but will also need to have a robust Web 2.0 presence (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). Many museums are now investing in apps over mobile platforms while developing electronic audio guides for visitors in the museum gallery.

In contrast to the Web 1.0 broadcast model, Web 2.0 platforms locate the user – as prosumer [13] centred, blurring the role of the producer and consumer who in turn produces, consumes, and mixes his own, and others’ micro-content. Peer-to-peer networking is here to stay; according to the Internet World Stats [14] in December 2012 there are more than 835 million Facebook users around the world so that a large percentage of online traffic moves across these sites, rather than stopping off in the deep silos of content that are located as searchable collections on institutional sites. With all these people talking directly to each other, the reality is that museums are in danger of being by-passed unless they maintain their own presence on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social networking platforms that allow them to take part in the day-to-day, often minute-by-minute chatter of their

online conversations. When individuals create their own content – including the kinds once associated with the museum profession – this could be seen as a direct assault on memory institutions, which previously maintained a monopoly of specialised content, as well as the responsibility of disseminating the knowledge related to their collections. Now everyone can be a curator, in just the same way as we are all photographers, musicians, writers and authors – online at least.

Perhaps the most au courant of the Web 2.0 platforms is still the blog. They first appeared in 1997, becoming more visible since 2001, when service management platforms became available to all – and for free. As a hybrid between a diary and journalism on-line, characterised by chronological ordering of information: the blog phenomenon encompasses a horizontal network of bloggers known collectively as the blogosphere, recalling perhaps an electronic, and expediential iteration of Jürgen Habermas's public sphere of the previous century [15]. Once personalised with graphics and layouts in a template, your blog allows you to publish stories, information, and opinions with total autonomy. Articles are linked to a theme (thread), in which readers can write their comments and leave messages for the author. Every article is numbered within the blog and can be specifically indicated through a permalink, pointing directly to a specific article. In some cases there can be a number of bloggers who write for the one blog – it is all seamlessly simple! Moving web publishing from the authority institution straight into your, or my keyboard means that everyone now has both the capability to create anything – including their very own Virtual Museum. The question is then – who has the authority to author CH and launch it with great fanfare into the public domain?

Not only is the method of delivery now available to all, but the traditional division between the memory institution and their public is also blurred. Novel forms of user-generated content are evolving within the museum itself. Social tagging, as a means to become pro-active, enables users to place "tags" into a their blog post, photographs, videos, etc., facilitating new searches within the tagged content base that ‘belongs’ to the public rather the institution. Classification using social tagging is no longer based on a hierarchical order of the content, as we would expect in a typical VM, since the user can insert more than one key word. The more a tag is applied by a number of users, the more the term will increase in popularity and precision in categorization. Main search categories will therefore be created based on themes that are most frequently accessed and tagged by users. Categorization thus becomes "democratic", not imposed from above, but from below, and evolves spontaneously as more users tag content.

The term folksonomy12, coined by Thomas Vander Wal in 200313, derives from the words folk and taxonomy and has often been used in the context of the VM as a form of distributed classification, potentially to be shared by the whole community of users. Tags; as folksomonies, are not a priori structured into the controlled vocabularies such as those that created by institutions, rather denote categories and sub-categories that the user according to his or her own associations. Making individual annotations to content bottom-up in this way means that user generated content (as tags) can shared by other users. One of the disadvantages of

12 http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html

13 http://www.vanderwal.net/

628

this however is the proliferation of variants for a term (synonymies, homonyms, single/plural use, small case/upper case, etc.), which essentially creates a series of unusable tags – often described as the long tail. To avoid these misnomers, clustering techniques can be applied, where some elements are grouped together, so that different tags are treated as if they were one (e.g. Folksonomy, folksonomy or folksonomies).

The folksonomy system is used when it isn't possible, or desirable to centrally manage classification, and where the public is welcome to participate in content classification. However, tags may be seen as highly personal, so much so that idiosyncratic expressions do not really help anyone else find content other than the original tagger. According to V. Wal, the value in this external tagging is derived from people using their own vocabulary and adding explicit meaning, which may come from inferred understanding of the information/object. People are not so much categorizing, as providing a means to connect items (placing hooks) to provide a way into their own expressive understanding.

One of the first examples of tagging in a VM was the Steve Project14, a collaboration of museum professionals and others who argued (according to their website) that social tagging might provide profound new ways to describe and access CH collections, and encourage visitor engagement with collection objects. Their activities include researching social tagging and museum collections, developing open-source tools for tagging collections and managing tags; and engaging in discussion and outreach with members of the community who were interested in implementing social tagging for their own collections.

In a discussion of the VM in a Web 2.0 world is not complete without at least a brief reference to other popular social networking sites such as Twitter, Yahoo-owned Flickr, Tumblr, and the surprisingly popular newcomer Pinterest. All of these platforms contribute the very dynamic social chatter of a connected world and VM’s clearly need to integrate these platforms into their delivery in order to maintain their visibility, and to be able to join in the conversation.

The series of dialogues described in Civic Engagement: A Challenge to Museums, that took place between museums and communities across the US in 200215, challenged the museum in its relationship with its public. Drawing on these dialogues and the prolific literature on visitor research that has emerged from the museum profession over the last decade, the VM may actually provide the ideal opportunity to re-affirm the relationship to its visitors in response to the criticisms cited in the publication. The museums were described as “floating above the community,” and the idea that the museum’s positive self-image was not fully endorsed by the community was raised in these discussions. Questions about authorship and ownership were also broached, instigating a call to museums to present a variety of perspectives, rather than a singular, institutional voice [16].

The new role of the VM and its relationship with the public more resembles the kinds of scenarios as played out in a Web 2.0 world rather in the traditional museum website. They open up new kinds of conversations that may be seen as both an affront to the traditional monopolistic control of CH institutions and, at the same time, for new opportunities for the same institutions to welcome a multi-voiced conversation

14 http://www.steve.museum/

15 Mastering Civic Engagement: A Challenge to Museums, American Association of Museums, 2002

around their collections and situated knowledge. The museums that were described in the dialogues as “floating above the community”, may now be able to re-set this bias and open up CH that belongs to the community, that is essentially authored by the community and can be enjoyed by the community in a true prosumer fashion.

We will now look at three case studies suggesting some of the many possibilities of the VM that illustrate the loss and the gain of the Benjamin aura as well as new kinds of symbiotic relationships where VMs serve to shift ownership of their CH collections and situated knowledge onto their public, creating new scenarios that have been jointly authored together by the museum, with their public. In addition, not only are issues of aura and ownership discussed below but more critically to what extent the physical museum plays a role once the content has been disseminated beyond the museum wall – or has even by-passed the museum altogether – what then?

VI. COULD THE VM EXIST WITHOUT THE PHYSICAL MUSEUM? - A HUMAN SANCTUARY

When the primary source of a VM is essentially a video (Fig. 1), and when that same original video was authored by a museum, does this kind of entity build upon the physicality of the museum, or is it simply experienced as an autonomous entity of its own, regardless of the memory institution that created it? These are perhaps questions that may vex the museum that has, through the professional honing of situated knowledge actually released that same knowledge well beyond the museum walls.

Fig. 1. Snapshot from the movie.

Videos are ideally suited both to the museum’s desire to

retell their stories to their public, as well as the ideal media to share online. Viewing a video in its linear format propels the viewer through the storyline, while the video producer, in this case a museum curator can only hope that the message gets across accordingly, especially when the messages are complex, and demand a fair amount of concentration on behalf of the viewer. If only the viewer could find ways to get into the storyline and investigate the concepts behind the moving images, save them in meaningful ways, and later re-assemble them in new forms for their own agenda, then, perhaps that same knowledge could be better assimilated.

This case study describes “A Human Sanctuary’ a project supported by a grant from the Dorot Foundation, that has created a web based, interactive encyclopedia of historical and biblical knowledge, relating to the Essene community that once lived in Qumran, near the Dead Sea some 2000 years ago. The 20-minute feature film, researched and produced by the Israel Museum [17], is screened in the auditorium on a regular basis inside the Museum campus, and serves as a

629

persuasive context to situate the World-renowned Dead Sea Scrolls, housed in a dedicated gallery space, The Shrine of the Book, located in the heart of the museum campus.

The film introduces us to two young men; one a novice living in the Qumran community, the other an apprentice priest from the Temple in Jerusalem who are more than curious to hear about each other’s lives. Without spoiling the plot for you, this offers the Museum Curator, Dr. Adolfo Roitman ample opportunities to set the scenes, both within the Qumran community, as well as in Jerusalem during Second Temple times. The narrative is complex, and is acted out on both locations. The storyline describes the daily life of the period that relates to historical, social, and religious aspects of their contrasting ways of life. The film depicts the protagonists inevitable meeting, and their dilemmas the viewer gets a glimpse into this historical period that even may resonate with his own, personal life dilemmas.

The platform and tools developed [18] for the interactive encyclopedia (Fig. 2) enable the user to view the film in its entirety as screened in the auditorium, track the plot through a series of annotations, integrate the segments through both annotations, and subject index and relate to the embedded prolific links, images, bibliography and glossary. These kinds of interactions offer the user ideal opportunities to integrate the movie at his or her own pace; watching, exploring, investigating, making associations, linking concepts, and saving segments, images and texts from the rich data repository for future use.

Fig. 2. The virtual encyclopedia.

This case study serves to illustrate the autonomous nature

of these kinds of video-driven VM’s, and while the Museum is clearly evoked as the author and producer of the content and data set it reveals, it is the user who has instantaneously become the owner, and new author of the platform.

VII. DOES THE VIRTUAL MUSEUM IN FACT "LIVE" THROUGH ITS PHYSICAL COUNTERPART? – THE SISTINE CHAPEL

The Sistine Chapel in the Vatican has become more than iconic over the years; serving as a must stop tourist attraction for all who flock to Italy and as focus for pilgrims from all over the world. Numerous print publications have been written on Chapel’s ceiling, painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512 - a cornerstone works of High Renaissance art - while countless movies have been produced in the breathtakingly, stunning space. The reality is, sadly, somewhat less inspirational when visitors are steered in a shoulder-to-shoulder herd through the Chapel, tethered to the color-coded umbrella, or flag of the tourist guide, who shuffles you in and out in less than 15 minutes. Of course that artwork is no less spectacular, but something of the wonder has been

dulled by the relentless shuffle of feet and nudging of elbows that goes on while you strain to enjoy the bedazzling art that surrounds you. Of course this is a must for all of us at least once in our lives, (as the Mona Lisa ashes experiment seems to prove) but being able to appreciate the paintings, perhaps online, does give on a respite from the joggling crowds - just enough to understand what it is we were looking at.

There are, in fact impressive virtual reproductions online, even complete with appropriate liturgical music in the background16 such as the site developed by the Vatican Museum itself. Here we can ‘move’, and ‘pause’ at our own pace; take in various narratives, and learn a little more about Michelangelo’s work. While this does not even compete with the original, it does offer something that is not possible in the real space - an opportunity for peaceful contemplation (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Snapshot from the project’s website. What of course is missing is the sense of self in the

physical space, but this too can be compensated for - in part - by 3D platforms that open up new ways for the visitor to experience some sense of immersion. Created in 2007 by undergraduate student, Steve Taylor, from The Department of Synthetic Reality: The Science and Applications of Virtual, Mixed, and Augmented Reality at Vassar College, NY, US, the Second Life Sistine Chapel invites avatars not only to enter into the ‘physical’ space but to actually to ‘fly up’ to the ceiling and inspect the angels at close range17. This is not only a single user experience, the visit can be shared with a friend – or if you would prefer with a crowd of bustling visitors that simultaneously transverse the space together – following their very own Second Life tourist guide with its very own miniature, color-coded flag.

Since the mid 1990’s, when museums first moved into their electronic showcases on Internet, museum professionals are developing innovative ways to present and represent their collections to their public. In the early days, all a museum had to do was to create some sort of electronic brochure to stake their claim. Over the first decade, they went on to enhance their educational mandate by uploading their collections and exhibitions online; building on library and archive informatics architectures as museum informatics quickly evolved into a distinct field in its own right. Since then the web has moved on and museums are currently concerned with the aggregation of their objects and developing intuitive platforms to make collections accessible to remote visitors around the world.

A truly semantic web; one that grants deep access to information to the web, as this paper has describes offers new in-roads to complex data sets, allowing us to make our own

16 http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/

17 http://secondlife.com/destination/sistine-chapel

630

connections, intuitively and seamlessly. At the same times the Web is also becoming a space that is tempting our public into new kinds of synthetic worlds and it is the VM that is leading the way. The Sistine Chapel in this persistent world invites people – or at least their avatars – to move into and around buildings and across landscapes; all meticulously modeled in 3D. These sites do not follow the web page metaphor, rather are ordered as connected islands, where everyone can build their own home, sell their own wares in their very own shop, even construct an entire library or museum for other avatars; all built with free tools in the in-world environment.

The potential for the museum community is tempting as they function as highly social spaces, whose 3D characteristics lends themselves far more readily to the museum experience than ever did the web-page metaphor of the World Wide Web. These are beautifully crafted virtual environments; spaces where people ‘meet’ as movement avatars, and interact in Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVE’s) exploring isometric, simulated galleries, wander around 3D museums, and visit persuasive historical reconstructions. Second Life has been around for many years now but does not appear to be as popular as was once presumed. Perhaps the peak of the hype curve occurred in the summer of 2007 when the New Scientist ran a three-part special report on Second Life, and around the same time, the virtual world hit the front page of Newsweek. With all this prestigious coverage, and so much public interest, it seemed that Neal Stephenson's fictional vision of the Metaverse in his novel Snow Crash has crossed over from being a fringe fantasy for pure escapists, to one of the best known persistent worlds - worlds that never go away when you log out of the community, and continue to thrive even in your absence. This is a place where you can log in at your convenience; interact with others, in play and commerce, creativity and learning, and entertainment and exploration.

The question that begs to be asked here relates to the branding of these kinds of experiences. What would happen if we were to remove the label "Cappelle Sistina" or even the Vatican Museum? Would our digital replica, either on line or in world still be as famous? Would it still inspire people in the same way as long as they were aware of the original chapel that stands in all its glory in the Vatican located much, much more than a click away?

VIII. COULD THE VM HAVE A LIFE OF ITS OWN? – EUROPEANA 1989: WE MADE HISTORY

Local history museums tend to house a range of objects that at first glance don’t appear to have significant monetary value, and probably exist in the basement of your home and mine. Brought together in sequential presentations however, these often banal objects serve to punctuate local stories with the physical evidence that serves to tell the real story, and produce, in this way, a convincing historical narrative with a visual imperative. Elevated to museum status and spotlight in the gallery, however, these kinds of benign objects take on new qualities when mobilised in the gallery.

According to Michel Foucault, [20] social space has been moving towards de-sacralization since the time of Galileo when he describes a hierarchy of sacred and profane spaces. In order to fulfill this desire for the sacred, contemporary society seeks to define spaces, separate from mundane, everyday living. Foucault describes these spaces as utopias, as spaces

having no real place, as fundamentally and essentially unreal; although acting as an analogy with the real space of society. According to Foucault, every civilization creates real places, actual places that serve to stage experiences and consequently sets them aside for extraordinary action. The liminal spaces, that Foucault calls heterotopias, while based in objective reality, act as the mirror that reflects. While this reflected space may be concrete, in that it exists in a real location, it's social function, at the same time serves to provide society with an abstract locale. A derivation of the heterotopian space, according to Foucault are the heterochronias of time that accumulates indefinitely - for example, museums and libraries.

What happens when we recreate history outside museums? Without the separation from our lived-on mundane spaces that the museum setting affords? This third case study, Europeana 1989: We Made History is an ambitious, pan-European project that accumulates resources from the community, by the community, and presents them in a novel form of VM without actually calling itself a VM but certainly promises to be much more than a singular museum ever could (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Europeana snapshots.

According to their website In 2014, the world will celebrate the 25th anniversary of

an extraordinary year - 1989 - when walls crumbled and the people of Europe were united again. The Europeana 1989 project asks people from every country involved to digitise their own stories, photos, videos and sound recordings of 1989. The result will be a fascinating archive for present and future generations that can be explored for learning, personal interest and research work. Europeana 1989 is collaboration between eleven partner institutions, Historypin and the Europeana Foundation18.

The Europeana 1989 project promises to be far more ambitious that any single museum or group of museums has undertaken on such a scale. Launched by the European Commission in November 2008, Europe’s flagship project Europeana (www.europeana.eu), Europe's digital library, museum and archive has collected and opened up access to over 30 million digitised objects from libraries, archives and museums. It currently brings together more than 2,200 collaborating institutions and its website is accessible in 29 European languages. Europeana invites people from all over the world to discover the collections for themselves, and to explore the cultural and intellectual heritage of Europe through a simple search engine and virtual exhibitions.

This project, similar to several other, both led by Europeana (albeit on a smaller scale) and many other

18 www.europeana1989.eu

631

institutions argues that the way history is recorded isn’t just about what museums and institutions think is important, it’s about what real people lived through and experienced. To this ambitious goal, the public is invited to contribute their own stories, pictures, films or other items relating to the events of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe, to add them to the online collection, and share them with the world. The invitation to let us take you on a journey through the Fall of the Iron Curtain, see it from all sides and draw your own conclusions is a call to not only learn about this memorable moment but a call to action to actively re-write history through personalised micro-histories, and a multitude of voices. Europeana 1989 project kicked off on 8 June, 2013 in Warsaw and you can share the first results on the project website - www.europeana1989.eu

IX. CONCLUSIONS Through this three, brief case studies, we hope that we

have illustrated the kinds of experiences that the VM now opens up for the end-user; shifting the point of entrance of the personal narrative away from the physical museum to the home, the office, or the school; inviting new visitors into dialog with the museum, and thus to become connected in much the same way they already do over Facebook with their friends over their mobile screens. Once connected, remote visitors may find a way to make the unfamiliar familiar, and where they may discover that - with a single click - they have already been initiated into the museum that no longer floats above them. Through electronic connectivity, remote visitors may also discover a place for co-created and reciprocal activities, as these case studies indicate and realize that the museum values their knowledge, experiences and expertise as much as it does their own and is aware that they too have something of value to contribute.

The kinds of innovative scenarios that are now enacted in the VM open up innovative avenues of connectivity between the museum and their audiences and when the VM is conceptualised as augmentations of the museum mandate (rather than as a distraction from traditional practice or as actively displacing the material object) they can be implemented with confidence to extend the museum mission of originality, accuracy and above all integrity.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The results of this research are partially supported by a grant from the V-Must project.

REFERENCES [1] Benjamin, W., L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction méchanisée,

in “Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung” vol. V, pp. 40–68, 1936. [2] Baudrillard, J., “Simulacra and Simulation”, Ann Arbor: University Of

Michigan Press, 2000. [3] Maedche, A., Motik, B., Stojanovic, L., Managing multiple and

distributed ontologies on the Semantic Web. The VLDB Journal—The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases, 12(4), pp. 286-302, 2003.

[4] Hermon, S., Nikodem, J., Perlingieri, C., Deconstructing the VR-data transparency, quantified uncertainty and reliability of 3D models. In Proceedings of the 7th International conference on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Intelligent Cultural Heritage pp. 123-129, 2006.

[5] http://www.istohuvila.se/files/Huvila2011.pdf [6] http://bpfe.eclap.eu/eclap/axmedis/4/464/00000-464c4239-95b1-4725-

9bb2-58b6f8c6b359/2/~saved-on-db-464c4239-95b1-4725-9bb2-58b6f8c6b359.pdf

[7] Serna, S. P., Schmedt, H., Ritz, M., Stork, A., Interactive Semantic Enrichment of 3D Cultural Heritage Collections., “VAST: International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Intelligent Cultural Heritage” The Eurographics Association, pp. 33-40, 2012.

[8] Geser, G., & Niccolucci, F., Virtual museums, digital reference collections and e-science environments, “Uncommon Culture”, vol. 3(5/6), pp. 12-37, 2013.

[9] Stalmann, K., Wegener, D., Doerr, M., Hill, H. J., Friesen, N., Semantic-based retrieval of cultural heritage multimedia objects, “International Journal of Semantic Computing”, vol. 6(03), pp. 315-327., 2012.

[10] Witcomb, A., Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum, Routledge: London, 2003, pp.106.

[11] Kopytoff, I., ‘The cultural biography of things’ in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things, Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

[12] Fahy, A., “New Technologies for Museum Communication,” in E. Hooper-Greenhill (ed.) Museum: Media: Message, Routledge: London, 2001.

[13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosumer [14] http://www.internetworldstats.com/facebook.htm [15] Habermas, J., The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,

Cambridge: Polity, 1999. [16] Hazan S., A crisis of authority: old lamps for new, in Fiona Cameron

and Sarah Kenderdine (eds.) ’Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage’, Massachusets: MIT Press, 2006.

[17] The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, http://www.imj.org.il [18] Damnjanovic, U., Hermon, S., Connecting information as navigation

paths for exploring digital video collections, in M. Dellepiane, F. Niccolucci, S. Pena Serna, H. Rushmeier, L. Van Gool (Eds.), The 12th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage VAST , The Eurographics Association pp. 21–24.

[19] Damnjanovic, U., Hermon, S., “Generating content for digital libraries using an interactive content management system”, In Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, Springer: Berlin, pp. 474-479, 2012.

[20] Foucault. M. “Michel Foucault: Aesthetics: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984”, Vol. 2 J. D. Foubion (ed. ), London: Penguin, 1994.

632