Communication of Cultural Heritage Values: One approach evolved for many audiences
Creators: name: Goud, Srushti
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: Preservation of Cultural Heritage (CH) assets and communication of cultural heritage are two sides of the same coin. Heritage conservation is in itself an attempt at communicating the values held by individuals or groups of people for the heritage in question. It is understood that heritage communication ends up taking a lower priority than the physical conservation of heritage assets. The scholarly efforts in the field of conservation have been working towards an approach for identifying and preserving authentic heritage value associations. It is high time that heritage interpretation and communication research also engage with the realities of CH value associations in the digital age.
Due to heavy focus on technology and its implementation, digital cultural communication projects frequently fall short in their attempts to properly communicate the values of the underlying cultural heritage, and there is no structured method to deal with the problem. This poster discusses the implementation of an eight-stage operational workflow for the deliberate inclusion of CH values in cultural heritage communication applications. The eight-stage operational workflow was developed after conducting a thorough review of the state of the art to handle the discovery, validation, and incorporation of cultural heritage values in digital heritage communication initiatives. This process of deliberate inclusion of values was applied in two contrasting settings.
The first application was within a museum setting where a communication application was created to communicate values of the menorah collection at the Hecht Museum, Haifa, Israel. The menorah collection was chosen due to the administrative importance associated with the Menorah symbol and the fact that many of these artefacts were daily use objects, provided an opportunity to explore the contemporary perception of the symbol and the artefacts among the museum visitors.
The second application was a standalone web-based digital application that communicates heritage information and the CH values associated with the Virupaksha temple at Pattadakal, Karnataka, India. This Hindu temple is an active place of worship and is a part of the World Heritage site listed as the "Pattadakal Group of Monuments" dating from the 7th century CE. The second application was exclusively designed for digital outreach to interested and willing participants of online communities passionate about heritage. The operational workflow was evolved to better suit this purpose and the communication application was developed accordingly.
The eight-stage operational workflow was applied to create the content shared via a digital application which was disseminated to museum visitors in the first case and select digital communities through social media platforms in the second case. Both these applications were tested using a semi-structured questionnaire. The results show us that users who chose to willingly go through the application in both cases were delighted to learn about the cultural heritage and reported that they were able to learn more and connect better with the artifacts/temple by understanding meaning and value associations. This highlights that heritage communication especially on digital platforms must make an effort to account for the pertinent CH value associations. This poster will provide an overview of the application of the eight-stage operational workflow for value communication across a museum setting and an evolved version for an exclusive digital medium while highlighting similarities as well as outlining contrasting observations.