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Computing and Creativity Cultural Understanding, Access, and EmpowermentThe arts and humanities are critical for situating, contextualizing, and critiquing culture in support of the process of understanding and knowledge discovery. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign strategic plan acknowledges the importance of this research, and an emerging arts and humanities theme is being formulated as a fourth strategic initiative for the campus. An important part of this initiative is a focus on art and technology as an important path to cultural understanding and empowerment. New technology for data mining, representations, digitization, and even archiving can provide crucial new modes for explorative engagement with these materials and their rapidly shifting cultural matrices. Cultural artifacts and more ephemeral and transient cultural products—from aboriginal dances, to documents, to ancient languages, to architectural monuments—are rapidly disappearing. Even when they have been preserved in some manner, they may not be accessible, or are accessible only in a very limited way. Our goal is to use technologies to capture and present cultural heritage and artifacts, and make human culture as widely accessible as possible. Leveraging the tools of cyberinfrastructure, data representation, data storage, and data mining, we also seek to bring that access to communities and individuals who have had limited access. We will develop and adapt cyberinfrastructure, cyberenvironments, and high-performance computing to preserve and provide provenance of cultural artifacts and the complex, diverse contexts of their creation, use, and histories. We will expand our visualization and 3D environment capabilities to create a multidimensional cultural navigation system, the "Cultural Explorer." These tools and technologies will enable preservation and provenance of endangered cultural artifacts and knowledge, and empower individuals excluded from digital culture and humanities. We will work with the Center for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science to choose the initial datasets to explore and develop. We will explore this data with tools such as SEASR and D2K and we will develop new modes of accessing the data using mWorlds and other visualization and representation tools. NCSA's Cyberenvironments and Technologies (CET) Directorate develop technologies for interacting with rich, multimedia datasets, such as the emerging suite of capabilities for a virtual observatory that provide a visual 3D interface for exploring the combined set of observations, models, and literature that represent our understanding of watersheds and their hydrology. These tools could be applied to support rich collaborative interaction with cultural artifacts. CET's efforts to support digital preservation should also be relevant to cultural materials. CET has been exploring mechanisms to capture and display data provenance information and is also working with international collaborators to develop robust long-term preservation capabilities based on logical structures rather than low-level data formats. Given that the term provenance originated in the arts and many of the digital capabilities being developed are modeled on practices from cultural preservation, these technologies should be directly applicable to creating highly scalable and highly accessible systems for cultural preservation. We envision a wide range of outcomes, from web accessible archives, to virtual villages, to first-person historical recreations, to more impactful scholarship. This project will initially develop the Cultural Explorer toolkit that will enable domain experts, historians, artists, anthropologists, etc., to easily integrate digital material into multidimensional interactive experiences. These will be suited to research, education, and public engagement with cultural representations of all kinds (texts, sculptures, dance, video, 3D simulations, etc.). |