1st Edition
Difficult Heritage and Immersive Experiences
Difficult Heritage and Immersive Experiences examines the benefits involved in designing and employing immersive technologies to reconstruct difficult pasts at heritage sites around the world.
Presenting interdisciplinary case studies of heritage sites and museums from across a range of different contexts, the volume analyzes the ways in which various types of immersive technologies can help visitors to contextualize and negotiate difficult or sensitive heritage and traumatic pasts. Demonstrating that some of the most creative applications of immersive experiences appear in and at museums and heritage sites, the book showcases how immersive technologies offer the possibility of confronting and disputing presumptions and prejudices, triggering responses, delivering new knowledge, initiating dialogue and challenging preexistingnotions of collective identity. The book provides a conceptual, as well as a hands-on, approach to understanding the use of immersive technologies at sensitive sites around the globe.
Difficult Heritage and Immersive Experiences is essential reading for researchers and students who are interested in, or engaged in the study of, cultural heritage, memory, history, politics, dark tourism, design and digital media or immersive technologies. The book will also be of interest to museum and heritage practitioners.
List of Figures vii
List of Contributors xi
Acknowledgements xv
Difficult heritage and immersive experiences 1
Agiatis Benardou and Anna Maria Droumpouki
1 Difficult heritage and immersive experiences: Immersion,
impersonation and engagement in dangerous pasts – Limits,
effects and ethics of immersive heritage experiences 10
Sharon Macdonald
2 Reflective experiences with immersive heritage 23
Erik Champion
3 Remaking Confucian Rites: Reenactment, immersive
visualization and the revitalization of the marginalized
cosmological body 41
Sarah Kenderdine, Lily Hibberd, Jeffrey Shaw and
Tsong-Zung Chang
4 The role of digital technologies in unearthing the Rosewood
Massacre 60
Edward González-Tennant
5 VR as critical historiography: The case of Wadi Salib in Haifa 80
Eytan Mann and Aaron Sprecher
6 Virtual history: VR, immersion and learning Holocaust history 104
Sara Pitcairn, Silvina Fernandez-Duque and Michael Haley Goldman
7 Practices of digital immersion for the study of built
heritage as a promoter of equity in urban sites challenged
by difficult pasts 123
Georgios Artopoulos
8 First-person interactive experience of a concentration camp:
The case of Block 15 145
Agiatis Benardou, Anna Maria Droumpouki and Georgios
Papaioannou
Index 161
Biography
Agiatis Benardou is Senior Research Associate at ATHENA Research Center in Athens, Greece, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business.
Anna Maria Droumpouki is Research Associate at Ludwig-Maximilians- University München, Institute of Eastern and Southeastern European History.