Value Communication for Cultural Heritage: Operational Workflow for Digital Environments

Cultural Heritage (CH) is a kaleidoscope of our shared human history in all its tangible and intangible forms. Cultural Heritage Communication (CHComm) is the transfer of authentic heritage information and its associated values. Every individual and by extension, communities made up of individuals associate heritage values with heritage properties and assets that they consider as central to their history and identity. All the cultural traditions have associated values with heritage properties, and these values may have changed, evolved, cherished and been forgotten and remembered again over centuries. Digital communication has impacted all fields of human endeavour and cultural heritage is no exception. There is a need for heritage experts, institutions and local communities to maintain a digital presence that supports global sharing of CH knowledge and increases audience participation in heritage conservation and communication. However, digital heritage projects often do not pay enough attention to certain aspects of heritage communication. Often, digital CHComm projects fail to effectively communicate the associated cultural heritage values and there is no systematic method to address such issues. This thesis explores how the information uncovered by heritage professionals can be effectively communicated to groups of willing and interested participants in CHComm. After a thorough analysis of the current state of the art, we formulate an eight-stage operational workflow that undertakes the uncovering, verification and inclusion of cultural heritage values in digital CHComm projects. Then, we go over three case studies to apply and review the operational workflow. The first case deals with the creation of a value-based digital multimedia application for the artefacts under the Menorah collection at the Hecht Museum in Haifa, Israel. The second case is a standalone digital multimedia application that tells the story of the Virupaksha Temple at Pattadakal, Karnataka, India. The third case is a companion application for the existing BeA-ViR system, of the BeArchaeo archaeological project, which deals with the excavation at Tobiotsuka Kofun, a funerary burial mound in Soja city, Okayama prefecture, Japan. The observations from the implementation of the three cases and the results from the public testing of the workflow in each of these separate instances are compared to assess the method and provide a better understanding of how we can reduce the communication gap pertaining to CH values between the heritage experts and the non-expert communities.