The E-culture publication by Virtueel Platform is available in PDF format. This post contains the Navigating E-culture book.
The articles are presented in the same order as they were published in the E-culture book (2009). They have been converted to PDF and each article has a separate page containing the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 license. When reposting, this license has to be added to blogposts or other online publication.
All three publications (Mapping E-culture, Navigating E-culture en Walled Garden) are available for download via the URL virtueelplatform.nl/eculturebook. The introduction to Navigating E-culture is published in this post.
Introduction 'Navigating E-culture'
Cathy Brickwood
One of the key aims of Virtueel Platform in the coming years is to analyse and evaluate the ways in which e-culture manifests itself in the broader arts and cultural sector in the Netherlands, and to create more chances for such crossovers to take place. In the current publication we selected two fields in which e-culture is challenging the traditional ways we experience culture, public space and technology we carry around with us every day. This selection came about in part due to the events Virtueel Platform itself organised over the past year. A series of workshops and expert meetings were held that examined ways in which e-culture is developing within the broader cultural sector in this country. In order to do so we looked further afield, to Europe but also to the US and Australia, in search of good practice.
One of the key cultural sectors to work with new media in recent years has been the heritage sector. Both at national and European level huge investments have been made in digitising our cultural heritage. But what is being done with it? In the midst of discussions about the future of the Internet, the semantic web, as well as myriad new technologies, we found it interesting to look at the situation of museums as key nodes of cultural content, and how they are dealing with their new role in relation to new technology. Dutch museums have begun to realise the potential of the web and are looking to international good practice. We invited a number of key international experts on the social web and museums to comment on their view of the state of play and offer some insights in to how to implement the web in heritage institutions. Many of the lessons learned can be applied to other arts disciplines or parts of the cultural sector.
This book begins, however, with an examination of how electronic culture pervades the space around us. How will we experience culture in the years to come – via huge screens in public spaces, or on very much smaller screens on new generations of handheld devices? What will this mean for the way we experience it and how will it affect the kind of content that is to be found there and the format in which it is presented? In its new role as sector institute, Virtueel Platform is primarily focused on the meta-level of investigation: what can be learned from projects or new methodologies that are taking place and how can they be translated to the Dutch context? We take a long-term view, in the sense that we are particularly interested in sustainability and professional development of the e-culture sector, and we hope with these examples to broaden the perspective of work that is being carried out across the cultural sector now.