Page 147 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

Red Temática en Tecnologías Digitales para la difusión del Patrimonio CulturalAn initiative started up in Mexico by the Insti- tuto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) is the network Red Temática en Tecnologías Digitales para la Difusión del Patrimonio Cul- tural,100 which aims to combine the e orts of both national and international cultural institu- tions and sector professionals. One of the main purposes of this network is to devise strategies and develop digital resources for promoting the restoration and conservation of cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible. The website is the project’s nerve centre and gives visibility to the components that are progressively incorporated into the network and the initiatives developed since its creation in 2015. In short, the network is intended as a vehicle for sharing experiences and disseminating projects involving good practice in Mexico.Cantos Seris de la Creación del Mundo projectA case related to what is known as intangible heritage is the Cantos Seris de la Creación del Mundo101 project. Developed in 2014 and 2015 by the Centro de Cultura Digital (Mexico), it set out to recover the chants of the Seri ethnic group. For centuries the state of Sonora has been home to this indigenous people, who have preserved their ancient language, Seri, and the chants which re ect the traditional folklore and mythol- ogy. The initiative involved documenting several of these ancestral chants using digital sound archives that can be listened to on SoundCloud. The chants were performed by elderly Seri and children and the various genres were studied – chants on earthly nature, women, the sea, war and creation – and translated into Spanish. The project showed that it was possible to perpetu- ate this tradition using the digital tools available to us today.Acervo digital de la cultura y la lengua nomatsigengaWe nd another example of the dissemination of intangible heritage in Latin America: the oral tradition and language of the Nomatsigenga people (Peru). Through the project entitled Acervo Digital de la Cultura Nomatsigenga,102an initiative of the Project for the Documen- tation of the Nomatsigenga Language (DLN), Organización Kanuja and the Peruvian Ministry of Culture, several collaborative activities were carried out by a multidisciplinary group and the members of this indigenous people to document and disseminate via the internet the knowledge that has been handed down from generationto generation. The project used digital audio and video recordings to document the chants and language of the Nomatsigenga, which were uploaded to a website, as well as multimedia content, transcriptions in the original language and a Spanish translation.Google Arts & CultureSince 2016 the platform Google Cultural Institute has included Google Arts & Culture103 (formerly called Google Art Project), a website devotedto disseminating art and culture through alarge amount of digitised content using the cutting-edge technological resources of the giant Google.Google Arts & Culture features content from more than a thousand prominent museums and archives, which have collaborated with the Goo- gle Cultural Institute to make the world’s trea- sures available online. This content is grouped into three broad sections: Art, History and World Wonders, which span cultural heritage from antiquity to the present day across more than seventy countries. Roughly speaking, Google Arts & Culture is like a huge online catalogue that brings together works of art, photographs, collections, biographies and histories, providinga large amount of multimedia information, especially virtual tours of the main museumsand monumental ensembles and an archive of high-resolution images (some in gigapixels) to satisfy users’ concerns.AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2017147The use of digital technologies in the conservation, analysis and dissemination of cultural heritage