Heritage and Social Media explores how social media reframes our understanding and experience of heritage. Through the idea of ‘participatory culture’ the book begins to examine how social media can be brought to bear on the encounter with heritage and on the socially produced meanings and values that individuals and communities ascribe to it. To highlight the specific changes produced by social media, the book is structured around three major themes: Social Practice. New ways of understanding and experiencing heritage are emerging as a result of novel social practices of collection, representation, and communication enabled and promoted by social media. Public Formation. In the presence of widely available social technologies, peer-to-peer activities such as information and media sharing are rapidly gaining momentum, as they increasingly promote and legitimate a participatory culture in which individuals aggregate on the basis of common interests and affinities. Sense of Place. As computing becomes more pervasive and digital networks extend our surroundings, social media and technologies support new ways to engage with the people, interpretations and values that pertain to a specific territorial setting. Heritage and Social Media provides readers with a critical framework to understand how the participatory culture fostered by social media changes the way in which we experience and think of heritage. By introducing readers to how social media are theorized and used, particularly outside the institutional domain, the volume reveals through groundbreaking case studies the emerging heritage practices unique to social media. In doing so, the book unveils the new issues that are emerging from these practices and the new space for debate and critical argumentation that is required to illuminate what can be done in this burgeoning sector of heritage work.

Heritage and Social Media explores how social media reframes our understanding and experience of heritage. Through the idea of 'participatory culture' the book begins to examine how social media can be brought to bear on the encounter with heritage and on the socially produced meanings and values that individuals and communities ascribe to it. To highlight the specific changes produced by social media, the book is structured around three major themes: Social Practice. New ways of understanding and experiencing heritage are emerging as a result of novel social practices of collection, representation, and communication enabled and promoted by social media. Public Formation. In the presence of widely available social technologies, peer-to-peer activities such as information and media sharing are rapidly gaining momentum, as they increasingly promote and legitimate a participatory culture in which individuals aggregate on the basis of common interests and affinities. Sense of Place. As computing becomes more pervasive and digital networks extend our surroundings, social media and technologies support new ways to engage with the people, interpretations and values that pertain to a specific territorial setting. Heritage and Social Media provides readers with a critical framework to understand how the participatory culture fostered by social media changes the way in which we experience and think of heritage. By introducing readers to how social media are theorized and used, particularly outside the institutional domain, the volume reveals through groundbreaking case studies the emerging heritage practices unique to social media. In doing so, the book unveils the new issues that are emerging from these practices and the new space for debate and critical argumentation that is required to illuminate what can be done in this burgeoning sector of heritage work.

The use of new media in the service of cultural heritage is a fast growing field, known variously as virtual or digital heritage. New Heritage, under this denomination, broadens the definition of the field to address the complexity of cultural heritage such as the related social, political and economic issues. This book is a collection of 20 key essays, of authors from 11 countries, representing a wide range of professions including architecture, philosophy, history, cultural heritage management, new media, museology and computer science, which examine the application of new media to cultural heritage from a different points of view. Issues surrounding heritage interpretation to the public and the attempts to capture the essence of both tangible (buildings, monuments) and intangible (customs, rituals) cultural heritage are investigated in a series of innovative case studies.

Exploring the impact of the rise of digital media over the last few decades, this timely Handbook highlights the major role it plays in preserving and protecting heritage as well as its ability to promote and support sustainable tourism at heritage sites. Particularly relevant at this time due to the diffusion of smartphones and use of social media, chapters look at the experience and expectation of being ‘always on’, and how this interacts with heritage and tourism.

Online activities present a unique challenge for museums as they harness the potential of digital technology for sustainable development, trust building, and representations of diversity. This volume offers a holistic picture of museum online activities that can serve as a starting point for cross-disciplinary discussion. It is a resource for museum staff, students, designers, and researchers working at the intersection of cultural institutions and digital technologies. The aim is to provide insight into the issues behind designing and implementing web pages and social media to serve the broadest range of museum stakeholders.

This book provides an overview of various application spheres and supports further innovations needed in information management and in the processes of knowledge generation. The professions, organizations and scientific associations involved are unusually challenged by the complexity of the data situation. Cartography has always been the central field of application for georeferencing digital cultural heritage (DCH) objects. It is particularly important in enabling spatial relation analysis between any number of DCH objects or of their granular details. In addition to the pure geometric aspects, the cognitive relations that lead to knowledge representation and derivation of innovative use processes are also of increasing importance. Further, there is a societal demand for spatial reference and analytics (e.g. the extensive use of cognitive concepts of "map" and "atlas" for a variety of social topics in the media). There is a huge geometrical-logical-cognitive potential for complex, multimedia, digital-cultural-heritage databases and stakeholders expect handling, transmission and processing operations with guaranteed long-term availability for all other stakeholders. In the future, whole areas of digital multimedia databases will need to be processed to further our understanding of historical and cultural contexts. This is an important concern for the information society and presents significant challenges for cartography in all these domains. This book collects innovative technical and scientific work on the entire process of object digitization, including detail extraction, archiving and interoperability of multimedia DCH data.

Hands on Media History explores the whole range of hands on media history techniques for the first time, offering both practical guides and general perspectives. It covers both analogue and digital media; film, television, video, gaming, photography and recorded sound. Understanding media means understanding the technologies involved. The hands on history approach can open our minds to new perceptions of how media technologies work and how we work with them. Essays in this collection explore the difficult questions of reconstruction and historical memory, and the issues of equipment degradation and loss. Hands on Media History is concerned with both the professional and the amateur, the producers and the users, providing a new perspective on one of the modern era’s most urgent questions: what is the relationship between people and the technologies they use every day? Engaging and enlightening, this collection is a key reference for students and scholars of media studies, digital humanities, and for those interested in models of museum and research practice.

European Heritage, Dialogue and Digital Practices focuses on the intersection of heritage, dialogue and digital culture in the context of Europe. Responding to the increased emphasis on the potential for heritage and digital technologies to foster dialogue and engender communitarian identities in Europe, the book explores what kind of role digital tools, platforms and practices play in supporting and challenging dialogue about heritage in the region. Drawing on fieldwork involving several European museums and heritage organisations, the chapters in this volume critically engage with the role of digital technology in heritage work and its association with ideas of democratisation, multivocality and possibilities for feedback and dialogic engagement in the emerging digital public sphere. The book also provides a framework for understanding dialogue in relation to other commonly used approaches in heritage institutions, such as participation, engagement and intercultural exchange. The authors map out the complex landscape of digitally mediated heritage practices in Europe, both official and unofficial, by capturing three distinct areas of practice: perceptions and applications of digitally mediated dialogues around heritage within European museums and cultural policy, facilitation of dialogue between European museums and communities through participatory design approaches and non-official mobilisation of heritage on social media. European Heritage, Dialogue and Digital Practices will be of interest to both scholars and students in the fields of heritage and museum studies, digital heritage, media studies and communication, the digital humanities, sociology and memory studies. The book will also appeal to policy makers and professionals working in a variety of different fields.

A guide for families of all backgrounds to celebrate cultural heritage and embrace inclusivity in the home and beyond. Gone are the days when socially conscious parents felt comfortable teaching their children to merely tolerate others. Instead, they are looking for a way to authentically embrace the fullness of their diverse communities. A Place to Belong offers a path forward for families to honor their cultural heritage and champion diversity in the context of daily family life by: • Fostering open dialogue around discrimination, race, gender, disability, and class • Teaching “hard history” in an age-appropriate way • Curating a diverse selection of books and media choices in which children see themselves and people who are different • Celebrating cultural heritage through art, music, and poetry • Modeling activism and engaging in community service projects as a family Amber O’Neal Johnston, a homeschooling mother of four, shows parents of all backgrounds how to create a home environment where children feel secure in their own personhood and culture, enabling them to better understand and appreciate people who are racially and culturally different. A Place to Belong gives parents the tools to empower children to embrace their unique identities while feeling beautifully tethered to their global community.

Transmedia Narratives for Cultural Heritage focuses on theoretical approaches to the analysis and creative practice of developing non-fiction digital transmedia narratives in the rapidly growing cultural heritage sector. This book applies a media-focused transdisciplinary approach to understand the conventions of emerging digital narrative genres. Considering digital media’s impact on narrative creation and reception, the approach, namely remixed transmedia, can aid practitioners in creating strategic non-fiction narratives for cultural heritage. These creations also need to be evaluated and a digital-media focused ‘ludonarrative toolkit’ allows for the critical analysis of the composition and public participation in interactive digital narratives. This toolkit is applied and exemplified in genres including virtual museums, serious games, and interactive documentaries. The book also includes a seven-phase theoretical framework that can assist future creators (and project managers) of non-fiction transmedia ‘mothership’ narratives; and a methodology (based on ‘big data analysis’) for how to invent new cultural heritage narratives through bottom-up remixing that allows for public inclusion. Two transnational case studies on the 11 UNESCO World Heritage Australian Convict Sites and the Irish National Famine Way demonstrate the seven-phase framework’s applicability. As many scholars across disciplines are increasingly creating digital narratives on historical topics for public consumption in various forms, the theoretical foundations and practical project management framework will be useful for scholars and project teams in the domains of transmedia studies, interactive narratives, cultural heritage, media studies, comparative literature, and journalism.