Introduction
Culture is an essential part of every community that reflects their past, present, and future expectations of behavior and beliefs. To display the rich heritage, many cultural heritage institutions and repertoires have attempted to stock their facilities with artifacts essential for discovering and appreciating history. However, there is a huge difference between what is shown to the public and what is contained in the facilities (Gonzalez & Hale, 2016).
Researchers have been looking for alternatives that will enhance the experience by reducing the gap between digital and offline access. The main challenge with past designs of visible storage is their emphasis on items and collections displayed while ignoring the aspect of exploration. The present visual storage designs have widened the gap between experience and view, thus necessitating the development of a digital bridge to close the gap.
According to Gonzalez & Hale (2016), many museums and public repertoires display a mere five percent of what they have in their physical store locations. An example is the Victoria and Albert Museum which displays 233,742 collections, while it has 2,044,441 different collections in its study rooms (Gonzalez & Hale, 2016). This disparity shows an urgent need to bridge the gap to allow the public to access and experience more collections in museums and repertoires. This essay analyzes the research project on digital bridges, examining the technological solution to visible storage techniques.
Project Description and Goals
The Magnes 360 is a research project created by Aiko Gonzalez and Clayton Hale while working as apprentices in their undergraduate research. The research was based on the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life located at UC Berkeley, which is among the country’s leading Jewish museums, and the single one housed within a research university. It houses over 15,000 artifacts, drawings, books, prints, manuscripts, photos, sound recordings, archival collections, and reference works. It serves as an instructional museum as well as a research center focusing on international diasporas, material traditions, and digital humanities (Gonzalez & Hale, 2016).
In the Helzel Collection Study, approximately 300 objects are on view at any particular time, and 95 percent of the total collections are available on-site. The Magnes aggressively raises money and hires new employees to make most of its assets digitally accessible, with about 8,000 digital surrogates reflecting collection holdings available online.
The Magnes facility (opened in 2012) devotes a significant portion of its space to collection storage, which is accessible to visitors behind large glass panels. Visitors will see where the quasi-totality of the remaining holdings are permanently housed and experience in real-time the research work performed by curators, collections personnel, and academics, in addition to rotating research-based shows that display select collection items ( Gonzalez & Hale, 2016). However, four years after the facility opened, most visitors still struggle to understand the proximity and relationships between visible storage and public display areas.
The project goals were founded on the variation between the accessible artifacts online and those only found offsite. Despite its innovative features that have placed it above other museums, the Magnes facility demonstrates the reality of what the authors call a “dusty archive” ( Gonzalez & Hale, 2016). As a result, Digital Bridges had a two-pronged scope of research. On the one side, the researchers wanted to assess and challenge the effectiveness of emerging technologies (like iBeacon and VR) in bridging the gap between storage and show, archive, and repertoire. It entailed an analysis and curation of the museum’s ability to handle digital and offsite exhibitions (Gonzalez & Hale, 2016).
On the other hand, this initiative was intended to investigate how metadata-based access enables a deeper engagement with cultural artifacts, continuing the “loop” established with the 2015 exhibition labeled “The Future of Memory,” analog museum objects, digital research, on-site exhibits, and online dissemination.
The Project’s Strengths and Weaknesses
The first significant strength of the project is its relevance to global digital humanities. The design of a digital bridge to close the gap between online and offline access to artifacts is highly relevant. Many museums have struggled with various technologies and innovations, but they have shown that a gap still exists ( Gonzalez & Hale, 2016). The proposed project would solve this problem and ensure that the public can virtually access all resources available at museums and repertoires.
The second strength is the availability of literature and data from past innovations. The authors have sufficient data from other museums and access to all available technological innovations. This way, they can attempt to incorporate these technological solutions into their project and evaluate the outcomes against their expectations. Availability of support and funding is the third strength of this project ( Gonzalez & Hale, 2016). The researchers received funding from the Digital Humanities department at Berkeley since they were on apprenticeship, which enabled them to carry on with their research and successfully achieve their objectives.
Assumptions, Audience, and Technologies
The researchers’ motive for enhancing digital access to museum collections is based on the assumption that the solution lies in virtual reality. The project was designed for the Magnes Collection of Jewish art for the benefit of the public. The primary beneficiaries of this project are the public, who will be able to view all exhibitions at the facility using a 3-D virtual reality( Gonzalez & Hale, 2016). The researchers focused on two leading technologies; iBeacon and Virtual Reality (VR).
History has it that Apple launched the iBeacon Bluetooth communication channel in 2013. When smartphones and other devices are close to an iBeacon-transmitting system, the iBeacon allows them to activate actions (Dalkilic et al., 2017). iBeacon transmits a unique ID that can be identified by a smartphone’s mobile app or operating system using Bluetooth low-energy software. This unique ID is used to study the actual location of the smartphone and, as a result, monitor customers’ location in a store or activate a location-based operation on the device, such as sending a push notification with a bid (Dalkilic et al., 2017. The iBeacon service is provided by a beacon unit made up of three parts: a CPU, a radio, and batteries. Beacons come in a variety of sizes and colors. Accelerometers, temperature sensors, and other special features are used in some beacons.
The application of computer technology to construct a realistic world is known as virtual reality (VR). In contrast to conventional user interfaces, virtual reality immerses the user in an experience. Users are absorbed and able to connect with 3D environments rather than watching a screen in front of them. The machine is turned into a gatekeeper to the artificial environment by simulating as many senses as possible, including vision, hearing, touch, and even smell (Coburn et al., 2017. The head-mounted display is the most readily identifiable feature of Virtual Reality (HMD). According to Coburn et al. (2017), humans are visual species, and the display technology that separates interactive Virtual Reality systems from conventional user interfaces is often the most significant difference. CAVE automatic virtual worlds, for example, actively project virtual content onto room-sized displays.
Scholarly Primitives Used
Researchers are believed to have something in common; their research methods. According to Unsworth (2000), humanities researchers display some common behavior termed primitives that include comparing, discovering, illustrating, sampling, referring, representing, and annotating. The research project addressed in this essay applied the discovery and illustration primitives. Discovery is the journey followed by a humanities researcher to identify patterns and causes of a phenomenon along with its implications (Unsworth, 2000). In this project, the researchers wanted to discover how they could develop a deeper engagement with cultural objects based on metadata access. The concern was to establish how virtual reality and iBeacon could be applied to museums and repertories to facilitate virtual access.
After discovering the application, the authors were to illustrate it using the Magnes 360 project. The illustration is where researchers demonstrate how their projects and innovation function to create awareness and facilitate application by the majority of the intended audience (Unsworth, 2000). Incorporating virtual reality and iBeacon into the virtual exhibits at Magnes museum would enable the public to experience how these technological innovations could enhance their experience of digital humanities.
Conclusion and Project’s Contribution to Digital Humanities
In conclusion, it became obvious the researchers found that the ability to permit iBeacon/VR access enables users to experiment with different ways to make stored collections available to the general public. Collection visibility facilitates data gathering and metadata formulating associated with publically accessible stored collections, influencing how visitor-generated data regarding collection storage is captured, interpreted, and enabled.
iBeacon and virtual reality are two innovations that have significant implications for cultural exhibitions because they facilitate a 360 real-time view and access to all artifacts stored in museums and repertories. Through their research, the authors discovered that the failure of past virtual-shows designs is based on their inability to bring everything that is accessible on the facilities to the digital space. Essentially, the digital bridge required in this case can be obtained through the integration of VR and iBeacon.
These research findings on digital humanities imply that they address the gap in literature and applications regarding virtual exhibitions. Cultural heritage and histories kept in museums and repertoires represent a wealth of resources that are instrumental to nations’ growth. These resources should be accessible to everyone at any place especially considering the digitization that has rendered almost everything digital. Current technologies bear the solution to present n future changes in digital humanities. iBeacon and VR have shown significant positive results in businesses and entertainment functions. Such resources can be utilized in digital humanities since their operation is based on location, access, and near-reality shows.
The focus on VR aims to raise the standard of digital humanities by facilitating a near-real experience of cultural and historical objects. The application and availability of iBeacon’s location and access features illustrate how the present innovations could be harnessed and improved to offer much-needed solutions. This research brings to reality the idea and motivation of digital humanities by bridging the gap between online and on-site access to cultural and historical resources in museums and repertoires.
References
Coburn, J. Q., Freeman, I., & Salmon, J. L. (2017). A review of the capabilities of current low-cost virtual reality technology and its potential to enhance the design process. Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, 17(3). Web.
Dalkilic, F., Cabuk, U. C., Arikan, E., & Gurkan, A. (2017). An analysis of the positioning accuracy of iBeacon technology in indoor environments. 2017 International Conference on Computer Science and Engineering (UBMK). Web.
Gonzalez, A., & Hale, C. (2016). Digital Bridges: (In)Visible Archives and Public Repertoires. Digital Humanities at Berkeley, University of California. Web.
Unsworth, J. (2000). Scholarly primitives: What methods do humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this. In Symposium on Humanities Computing: Formal Methods, Experimental Practice. King’s College, London (Vol. 13, pp. 5-00).