Virtual Archaeology, Museums and Cultural Tourism

International workshop in Delphi

 

Organized by the University of the Aegean, Dept. of Mediterranean Studies, Laboratory of Archaeometry (GR), directed by professor Ioannis Liritzis, in collaboration with:

• The University of the Aegean, Dept. of Product and Systems Design Engineering
• Athena-Research and Innovation Center in Information, Communication and Knowledge Technologies
• Duke University, Dept. of Classical Studies

and under the Auspices of the Hellenic Ministry Culture and Sports

it has just taken place a very interesting and successful workshop in Delphi, on the theme “Virtual Archaeology, Museums and Cultural Tourism“.
This international workshop was aimed at investigating all new trends in the field of digital (e.g., online, virtual) museums, virtual communities, archaeometric studies, digital cultural tourism and related topics.

The workshop was attended by students, museum and cultural heritage professionals, scholars, archaeologists, historians, ethnologists, IT specialists and engineers and others working on digital applications in cultural heritage, public and private museums, etc.
Topics of the debate included Visualizing archaeology and heritage in 3D, Virtual museums, Virtual, Augmented & Mixed Reality applications, Serious Games, Museums, Narrative and Virtual Storytelling, Web 2.0 and Social Networking in cultural heritage, Interactive installations in museums and heritage sites, Data mining and digital archives, Digital Cultural Tourism, Digital preservation of historical & traditional practices, Virtual Educational approaches and much more.
Interest is nowadays focuses on the relationships between museums, artifacts, digital technologies and the Web, and their role in the redefinition of the museum itself as “communication engine”. The interaction between real ontologies, the empirical perception of material culture – objects – and their virtual ontologies – the digital representations – creates new perspectives in the domain of data analysis, data sharing, data contextualization and cultural transmission. In this way, every museum is a meta-museum since artifacts, sites and objects exist in relation and interaction with cultural processes.
In other words, in the digital domain, a museum artifact is the outcome of a very sophisticated informational and communicational process, contextualized in a virtual network of relations. The museum and its collections are themselves a site or a “sitefact”, because they create new contexts and territories of knowledge.
Keynote speakers were: prof. Maurizio Forte, Duke University USA; prof. Luis A. Hernández Ibáñez, Universidade da Coruña, Spain; and dr. Μaria Roussou, researcher at University of Athens.
Papers submitted to the workshop will be published as a special volume in the ICI (Arts & Humatities Citation Index, SCOPUS) International Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology & Archaeometry (www.maajournal.com).
Website of the workshop: http://vamct13.syros.aegean.gr/