Recall "Internet-Kooperation verändert die Kulturwissenschaften"

As I reviewed some documents and papers on my table this afternoon, I found this article. It could be easy for it to be recalled here (blogized), instead of being kept in a thick magazine.

How does Internet cooperation change research on cultural heritage management? It is reported by my colleagues Matthias Jarke, Ralf Klamma, and Marc Spaniol in RWTH Themen 1/2006 (Page 10-11). Two prototypes called MECCA and ACIS were demonstrated to explore what have movie research taken by film theorists and cultural heritage research taken by cultural scientists in common?

Database and Information Technologies in the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul

Mr. Mohammad Zia Afshar, Deputy Minister of Ministry of Information and Culture of Afghanistan, visited Information Systems and Database Technologies (Informatik 5) at RWTH Aachen University on April 3, 2009. He came to have a training program on database technologies at Informatik 5 in early 2006. He gave interviews and the videos were applied in Virtual Campfire. It is inspiring to hear about the progress happening everyday in the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul, after good three years. The museum building was once a palace and was devastatingly damaged in the Taliban Regime. Now the National Museum of Afghanistan has been opened to the public after the relief work. Although the electricity power supply is sometimes instable and the infrastructure is still limited, there are computer terminals accessed by administrators (curators) and museum visitors. They can use computers to enquire and manage museum artifacts. Over 30 ministries for diverse administration tasks have been established in the whole country. Ministry of Information and Culture have launched its Web site. We are proud to be part of the community by hosting Bamiyan Development Community at our group.

Bamiyan Development Community

Recently Niels and Martin Bachwerk have made much progress to our Bamiyan Development Community on Plone 3.
The highlights include the following new features.

User community
It is much more user-friendly to add and manage your own content to the community website and to browse recent activities (e.g. recent news and content) within the community, because
- The personal member folder has been redesigned to facilitate news, events, etc. management in a more comfortable way;
- The personal profile has been redesigned to let you share more information about your person with other members;
- The contribution policy has been changed so that now everyone can add news, events, photos and so on without having them reviewed or approved by an admin;
- An instant messaging function has been added to let you send messages to other members.

ACIS and the film of Virtual Cave
- A guest login is added to simplify the user management process. Everybody can explore the cultural heritage site at ACIS, while no editing is allowed.
- Dipl. -Ing. Georgios Toubekis starred the Virtual Cave film full of James Bond's flavor.

Nonetheless, filling a community survey is quite welcome to help us improve the community site. You need to login into Bamiyan Development Commiunity and it takes only 5 minutes.

Gandhara – Das buddhistische Erbe Pakistans

The exhibition Gandhara - the buddhist heritage of Pakistan (legends, monastaries and paradises) has been opened in the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn since last Thursday evening. Anna and I with our FIT colleagues enjoyed having attended the opening event and visiting the exponents on Gandhara cultural heritage from worldwide on November 20. Our group worked together with RWTH Aachen Center for Documentation and Conservation (ACDC) led by Prof. Dr. Michael Jansen as well as Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technologies FIT led by Prof. Dr. Matthias Jarke, both of which support this exhibition together with Gerda Henkel Stiftung and Cultural Ministry of Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Gandhara was an important area connecting the west and the east in ancient times. It had a much lager geographic coverage beyond its current borders in Pakistan. Its buddhist culture had been influnced or started in the age of Alexander the Great and boomed from 1st to 5th centruries A.D. The Bamiyan Great Buddhas which were devastatingly exploded by the Taliban Regime are representive artefacts of the Gandhara heritage. A 3D reconstruction film of the Great Buddha in Bamiyan is played in the exhibition hall, technically supported by the Augmented Reality Group at FIT and by the CAVE project at RWTH Aachen University. In addition, we have hosted a community portal for Bamiyan Development since years.



Around 300 fine artefacts are on exhibition from November 21, 2008 to March 15, 2009, before they move on to Berlin and Zurich after then in 2009.