With New Eyes I See: embodiment, empathy and silence in digital heritage interpretation

Abstract

With New Eyes I See (WNEIS) was an immersive and itinerant digital heritage encounter exploring the exploitation of empathy made possible in such emergent formats. Located 'in the wild' , and timed to coincide with the 2014 Centenary of the First World War, WNEIS transformed Cardiff's civic centre as previously inaccessible stories and archival materials were projected onto, and playfully manipulated by, buildings and the natural environment. The research that underpinned the project unearthed a hitherto untold story about the experiences and fates of those who left their posts at Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales to go and fight in WW1. Focusing on the story of Botanist Cyril Mortimer Green, and moving between past and present, known and unknown, presence and absence, participants encountered a re-scripting and multiple layering of the cityscape, and an uneasy archaeology of the museological endeavour. WNEIS foregrounded opportunities for touching, listening and feeling; as such it was a multimodal form of investigation for participants. This article uses focus group materials to explore the intersecting themes of 'embodiment' , 'empathy' and 'silence' that emerged in reflections. It reveals an audience ready for digital cultural heritage that embraces ambiguity in the examination and negotiation of meaning.

Evaluating Digital Cultural Heritage ‘In the Wild’

“…The detailed findings from the research have been presented elsewhere [13], but to summarise, we found that this project encouraged paricipants to perform their 'visitaion' to this heritage encounter very differently to that of a typical museum visit. The approach necessarily increased the sociality of the encounter and heightened paricipants' senses ofand desire for -agency.…”

“…We wanted to make room for the varied potenials and limitaions of these digital heritage encounters to emerge in peoples' responses in ways that felt authenic, that were unpredictable to us, and that revealed the ways our resources did (or did not) come together to consitute a 'mulimodal whole' [36] with a 'mulimodal grammar' [36] that was ulimately producive for our paricipants. Following other scholars within the field of digital cultural heritage [5,6,9,8,13] we have found mulimodality a useful theoreical framework for exploring these cases, recognising as it does the importance of 'fine-grained detail of form and meaning' [36] and offering methodological prompts. This framework reminds us to pay atenion not only to textual and linguisic resources, but also to spaial, visual, aural and embodied aspects of interacion and environments [37].…”

“…Near or total darkness was important in making the projecions visible and impacful. Up to six paricipants worked together using a map and the 'torch' to cohere an encounter within the park from our curated fragments, at the same ime as they scripted in addiional (unanicipated) simuli from the environment [13]. Other people in the park, a helicopter overhead, or the smell of the flowers for example, were drawn into the narraive in ways that were visceral and unpredictable.…”

“…Ours was an experiment in taking narraive beyond the screen or the interpretaion panel, working with archival materials to interpret a fractured and ambiguous story beyond the walls of the museum [13]. This was a digital cultural heritage project, yet it worked with and between the analogue and the digital.…”

“…The arguments for reflexive museological and exhibiion design pracice are not new: Catherine Styles [2] and Shelley Ruth Butler [3] specifically reviewed a number of self-reflexive museum exhibiion displays to conclude that 'transparent or self-reflexive' exhibiions 'enable visitors to see the quesions and tensions arising from the material, rather than the answers alone' [2] and that the best reflexive intervenions 'are highly site-specific' [3]. Scholars in the field of digital cultural heritage have also begun to creaively explore the dynamic and fluid nature of 'experience' within digital heritage programmes (see for example [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]). As Robert Stein notes, 'the quality of debate and discourse in the field has matured substanially' so that museum technologists and researchers are 'tack [ling] challenging quesions about the idenity of museums, their role in society, their responsibiliies to serve a global public, and the nature of collecing, preservaion, educaion, scholarship, primary research, and ethics in the digital age' [14].…”