Exploring Digital Heritage Initiatives in Greenland

um I want to welcome everyone that's signing in virtually um if you are online please as always make sure that you are muted so that our speaker isn't distracted if you have any questions for our speaker go ahead and put them in the chat thread and we'll moderate those at the very end um but I'm going to turn it over to our own Dr Jenny Burns who's going to do the official introduction to our final speaker here and thank you everyone for signing in thanks say hi good morning good afternoon I don't know good afternoon Katie uh good morning to everyone else so um I invited Katie because uh we went to graduate school together at the University of Buffalo so I know her pretty well and now she's at SUNY Potsdam so I thought she might have some some interesting things to share with us with what she has going on so I'll do her introduction so you get to know her uh so Dr Catherine Allen is an assistant professor at SUNY pop stand which is in Upstate New York if any of you are familiar with the rest of New York State besides New York City um it's a small level arts college um and there she teaches and mentors undergraduate students in biological archaeological and applied coursework she teaches students from all academic departments focusing on strategies that integrate anthropology into their professional goals Katie is also the owner of modern anthro Consulting LLC her recent Adventure into the world of non-academic Consulting where she uses her anthropological training to develop human-centered solutions for different types of clients while her research and work has touched upon many academic areas of anthropology including historical archeology bioarcheology repatriation and forensic anthropology today she will be sharing her work in Heritage and some of the projects that allow her to contribute to cultural and natural heritage work around the world and without further Ado I will turn over to Katie thanks Jenny thanks for that introduction to decide this year and thank you guys for having me uh it's a privilege to have a chance to share some of my work uh the first thing I will mention is that I've changed the title just slightly from what I originally submitted first I was just going to talk about my work in Greenland but that I decided to expand it a little bit and show you a little uh some of the other stuff that I have been doing so as Jenny mentioned I actually have a lot of different hats that I wear um it might appear as though I have a bit of an academic or professional identity crisis but I've always been interested in a lot of things so I consider myself an archaeologist a biological Anthropologist and an applied Anthropologist I also work in both academic and non-academic settings as an assistant professor and as a consultant so I do a lot of different stuff but the kind of overarching part of my identity is that it is really I love to do work that applies anthropology to different problems different possibilities and I like to do it very widely so I used to try it's very hard to pick one area and stick with it but I've realized it's just not who I am so I do a lot of different stuff and so some of my other work is is different from this but today I'm really looking forward to talking about my Heritage work okay just hide one thing so the first thing I wanted to do is I'm going to give a really really brief background to Heritage um as a as a concept before I jump into the to the projects that I've been doing uh in the Heritage field uh and very generally speaking Heritage is defined as property that is or may be inherited it's an inheritance right so there's actually two parts of this definition that are really important for my work the first is the part that's connected to the Past right and as an archaeologist it's it's pretty clear why I'm interested in the past right so Heritage is something that people today have inherited from the past it came from past generations and we have it today as it is uh the second half of this definition is that is the part where we're connected to the Future right and that is that the actions that we do the things that we are doing today uh will directly affect what is inherited by Future Generations right and so this word heritage is really both about the past and the present and but focused on our actions uh excuse me the past and the future but focused on our actions in the present um as connected to both of those things so UNESCO is really the organization that took the lead in defining these things and and making places uh using the word heritage to describe places right so uh in the past Heritage or inheritance was was usually thought of as something that you know you'd pass down to your children or your grandchildren right a monetary inheritance uh an estate inheritance but UNESCO really took Heritage and made it about human places around the world right and they defined natural versus cultural heritage right important places important things that we have inherited from those who came before us uh in this state that they are and that our actions today have the ability to or will influence what is inherited in future Generations right so they split up natural and cultural heritage both of them are influenced by humans right so as you can see in the list of natural heritage uh there are plenty of places like Botanical Gardens and zoos that are are human created um places but uh focusing on the natural versus the cultural ideas and expressions that people have put forth in the past and that have survived to modern times right and with these definitions they want on to uh create their world heritage list right so uh the UNESCO has a world heritage list with over 1100 properties and what these properties are are the places around the world in which governments uh non-governmental organizations uh different um non-profits they've basically done a lot of work to get a UNESCO world heritage stamp right so they have gone through a lot of Labor to prove that the location they're natural or their cultural site or their mixed site um is of outstanding human value there are criteria that UNESCO has put forth and they have to put forth not only their um justification as world heritage but also their management plans um their acknowledgment of threats to the survival of the hair it's a very lengthy process I work at one of these world heritage sites in Greenland and it is um and so I've I've I haven't been part of the um designation process but I know it's quite extensive right and so around the world uh we see these those green red and yellow dots that represent these UNESCO world heritage sites uh UNESCO also defined the differences between tangible and intangible Heritage right and so archaeologists I think are have mostly focused on tangible Heritage but there is growing appreciation uh and consideration of the intangible Heritage how it's connected to tangible places uh and the intangible Heritage that just kind of uh survives on its own right and like tangible Heritage intangible Heritage which are Traditions or living Expressions right it can be a festival knowledge of a traditional craft an art an oral tradition right they are also inherited from past Generations they're also currently existing um because of the people who keep them alive but our present actions are going to entirely define whether or not future Generations inherit this part of human Heritage as well so they've split up tangible and intangible Heritage intangible Heritage has re recently kind of captured my attention as well again as an archaeologist an anthropologist I've um I think I've spent more time thinking about tangible Heritage and in the way of artifacts and archaeological sites that we've inherited from the past but uh the intangible Heritage is is incredible and some of the stuff that I've been exposed to in Greenland has has my brain working about um the interesting ways to uh protect and and promote actions that will um that will help these kinds of Heritage survive in the future as well uh this right here this image is still on my screen but if you go to the UNESCO world heritage site I it's an incredibly interactive um digital resource where you can find out a lot about the intangible Heritage that they are putting a list together much like their world heritage list to protect different knowledge sets around the world foreign so my argument or my uh kind of driving uh idea is that there's so much off the list Heritage right and so those 1100 places and that list of hundreds of intangible knowledge sets that we have identified as some of the greatest uh world heritage some of the greatest physical uh and intangible things that we have inherited from past uh populations and that we have a chance to pass on to the Future right those are incredible pieces of Heritage but there's so much more right there's so many more places of historical archaeological artistic uh environmental importance that show the human history the show the human story that we've inherited from the past um with all of its complications and that we have a role to play in making sure that it's an inheritance we can leave for the future right so I I think there's so much work for anthropologists all kinds of anthropologists in this area not just in the really big Heritage that makes it uh onto unesco's designation list but all of the off the Heritage work too which is uh some of my more recent work is more often off the list kind of heritage okay so on to my projects the the first kind of piece of Heritage work that I did actually I never really realized it was Heritage work um it started off as a very uh it was a very traditional bioarchaeological academic research project so this was my the subject of my PhD dissertation I'm not gonna spend much time talking about it but it is I realized looking back where my fascination with human Heritage and my desire to work in human Heritage uh first was born right and so my my research was uh was traditional bioarchaeological work and it was connected to a question about uh the identity of Islamic populations living in ottoman controlled Southeast Europe uh and the late medieval uh and early modern period right and so it was debate that had to do with uh conflicting historical records that said that the ottoman populations were either migrants of new people coming in from Anatolia and other parts of the Ottoman Empire or they were local people who had converted to Islam for a number of reasons they became Ottoman and they were the ottoman populations in control during this uh very brief time period when predominantly Christian Europe was being um uh politically run by an Islamic empire right uh the interesting thing or the the thing that kept capturing me right it wasn't just this historical debate right I wasn't just out to uh to prove or disprove the historical ideas um that for the most part the archeology had not really touched ottoman archeology is not a very popular topic and ottoman bioarcheology at the time was almost non-existent right but my my driving force or my the thing that I really wanted to get at right had to do with how this question of the past had actually affected modern populations right and so I kept looking at it from the perspective of wanting to understand this debate because it had been wrapped up actually in Far More modern uh historical events so questions about the religious uh diversity in Europe during the Ottoman period and the Islamic populations that stayed in Europe even after the Ottoman Empire retreated um was at the heart of a lot of conflicts that uh erupted in the 1990s and more recently related to the Balkan Wars uh and forced assimilation of European Muslims and it was this very contentious time period of probably why the archaeologists in the area didn't spend a lot of time studying it because it was wrapped up in a very difficult history that had been part of populist movements and ethnic cleansing movements and all sorts of things that the area is still largely trying to recover from right and so I was really being driven more by this this underlying question of how the past was affecting modern populations and how the understanding or the interpretation of the debate was affecting modern populations and so at the time it never occurred to me but now that I've dived full much more fully into Heritage I see the connection to Heritage right and this it was the idea that historical knowledge ideas and beliefs are passed down from us from from past generations and we inherit these ideas of the past right we don't just inherit the ottoman archaeological sites and their artifacts we inherit uh understandings of them we inherit uh the legacy of them in the modern in the modern day and they absolutely influence our human relationships and modern people uh and in the case of of Southeast Europe in a very real um and very influential way right and so this was my introduction to Heritage even though at the time hey I wouldn't have called it a cultural or a cultural heritage project at all so fast forward a few years and um I've started worked out in Greenland right so I've entered the Arctic a very different part of the world um and in this case I went in fully fully invested in questions of Heritage right and so I didn't really have academic questions I was just far more interested uh in developing cultural heritage projects right and so my underlying questions over in Greenland was uh or continues to be how do we build public understandings of Arctic Heritage that will resonate both with people inside and outside the Arctic right and in Greenland my connection to Heritage my interest in Heritage is a lot more clear to me now right and that is that in this place of the world this very distinct and different uh environment and Country in the face of significant climate population changes the heritage of the Arctic has to consider what it is inherited from the past but also what future Generations are going to inherit as a result today Greenland faces incredible climate and population changes including most likely huge increases in tourism in the coming years which I'll talk about uh in a moment and uh the Heritage work uh there really is gonna have to think about both the past the present and the future to think about um protecting what has survived and what will survive uh in the face of so many changes okay and so the the Greenland project um is actually a collaboration between three of us uh who are all extremely invested in Heritage projects and Heritage ideas um myself from SUNY Potsdam uh Han Dr Hans harmsen he is the National Heritage manager at the Greenland National Museum and archives and Dr Alice Waterson she is an archaeologist and an archaeological animator uh an illustrator so she's equally trained in archeology and art and animation she produces incredible products at incredible pieces of digital Heritage and the three of us kind of all hooked up and for a really long time were trying to figure out how to launch a project in Greenland together pulling together our varied interests and desires to work there and we went back and forth a lot and we pitched a lot of ideas and the pandemic happened and canceled a lot of our ideas and me and Hans had submitted a bunch of before we got hooked up with Alice we had submitted some grants and the grants hadn't gone through and it was it was a frustrating process to figure out exactly what it is we wanted to launch and what we wanted to do but eventually we we did make it and we launched basically a couple of pilot projects which were just as much about trying out some digital Heritage initiatives as it was about learning uh what might work there and what what the communities in Greenwood were even interested in and so the projects I'm going to share with you guys I'll also mention have a number of other partners who made these possible we work with a number of museums in the area and then our funding sources came from me and Alice's travel funding came from our respective universities but the United States Consulate of Nook which is an arm of the U.S embassy of the Kingdom of Denmark because of the relationship between Greenland and Denmark um we're responsible for a lot of the in in Greenland activities that we've done so we've been fortunate to partner with a lot of people who helped make our first projects a success and so I'm hoping uh they will continue to partner with us in the future right so we decided basically that we just needed to try out some stuff we're just gonna go to Greenland we're gonna all get together Hans already was in Greenland as he lives and works there full time and we're gonna try some of our ideas in person uh not knowing whether they were going to be great ideas or complete flops and we decided the venue for our experiment and our information gathering because we also me and Alice had never been to Greenland and had a lot to learn about working uh working in Greenland uh was going to be Greenland science week and so in the fall of 2021 uh we decided to spend two weeks me and Alice decided to travel and spend two weeks at Greenland science week which is um the this up here shows the 2023 one but in 2021 it was the same roughly the same dates end of October early November which is a very interesting time to fly to the Arctic Circle uh the first week is in Nook which is the capital of Greenland the second week is in these smaller places of congresswak sarfangui and sesame those are up in the Arctic Circle uh Nook is is just south of it and it's not just Heritage in our heritage professionals and archaeologists it's all sorts of scientists who all fly in from all around the world uh to talk about Greenland science uh and so we decided to launch a couple of of Pilots or or trial ideas uh to explore digital Heritage and to learn more about where we wanted to work the first was called the virtual field trip and so this was connected to my teaching we were going to Greenland in the middle of uh the semester and so I decided to connect it to one of my classes I connected it to my applying anthropology class uh and I made it into a quote-unquote virtual field trip for my many students who had for all of my students who had not been able to study abroad so many of my students had spent almost their entire college career uh in the in pandemic no international travel mode um and so I thought wouldn't it be fantastic to not only teach them about Heritage but give them a chance to see a bunch of stuff from a country that um they can't travel to them themselves and so I built what I kind of just made up as a virtual field trip and I launched a Blog and a video log a vlog and my intent was to produce as much content and to basically let them follow along on our two weeks in Greenland science week on our other activities that we had planned on our conversations with green lenders and I wanted to connect American students that was actually part of the the Grant from the U.S uh Consulate in the U.S embassy was connecting the American public but I wanted to connect more than just my applying anthropology class who was it who was using the trip to help design impact projects which were part of the bigger class right so there was more there was formal coursework associated with following along on the trip but I wanted more people to be able to learn from it as well so I opened it to the public I hosted it on my website rather than in our learning management system which would have uh really limited it to my to my applying anthropology class and I shared it with as much as of my uh my network as possible and the local newspapers up here shared it and the the campus shared it for for other students to follow along as well um along the way I decided to bring on an undergraduate student who was interested in this kind of work and so he served as my content manager and project uh helped develop some of the project he did editing he did video work he helped me with email blasts that sent out information to people who signed up for updates and so I wanted to give him a chance to to build some applied anthropology experience that he could leverage on the job market as he was graduating not long after the course finished right and so the Virtual Field trip was uh was born basically and it's all still accessible online but I'll just give you a look at some of the content these are just the titles of the uh blog posts which include which in the posts are a lot of uh images pictures a lot of video footage um anything there are surveys and some interactive elements of learning um that was all shared before I before I traveled I uh I took the opportunity to start getting people interested in both my class and those who were following outside my class um talking about things like the benefits of virtual International Learning uh gauging what people already know about greenlands right so we're here I was wanting to teach them about Heritage and climate change and history in Greenland but uh I was fascinated to find out that people actually at least the those who replied to my survey didn't know that much about Greenland at all including where what continent it's located on right and so they would have a trouble picking it out on a map um which was you know a good thing to know going into it about the kinds of things that I should share to help people understand and contextualize what I was doing right I talked about about um applied anthropology and all of the things that um you know anthropologists do that that both related to Heritage and other stuff as well that I might come in contact with at Greenland science week um and you know my own Journey as a as a mom of two very little kids uh it was the first time I had left them internationally so I talked a little bit about that and just kind of set up the trip a bit and then most of it was while I was there for two weeks and I tried to post every single day which was challenging at certain times because of internet connection but I did pretty close to getting stuff every single day is as close to real time as I could so that they could follow along uh on everything that was going on including travel mishaps um all the workshops that we ran which I'll talk about in a second um uh the interviews that I ended up doing quite a few interviews with people there to to let people learn about life in Greenland and uh the perspective of history and Archeology and Heritage from Green lenders themselves um again all of this is still available online um if any of these uh sound kind of interesting and then when I returned back I also did some content to kind of wrap everything up talked about the future role of anthropology in Greenland not just in Heritage but in other avenues that kind of my interest got sparked in while I was there and learning about all the other kinds of of work that's done and was being presented at Greenland science week um and then I have a full recap which can be uh which can be accessed as well so we were really looking at tangible Heritage while we were there and ways that uh that tangible Heritage can be shared and protected um and that included artifacts but also physical places so to the left you can see me at the new uh that is a spot in the new UNESCO world heritage site called asavisa Whitney Houston uh it is a very large natural and cultural uh Heritage area that has the UNESCO world heritage designation but it just got it right before the pandemic so they haven't really they hadn't really received their first influx of tourists yet um but the whole Community the Heritage Community and the government we're thinking through um you know how to share this Heritage Place with people um but how to do it in a way that's gonna that's gonna be protecting um the conversations that were there were about concern about protecting the tangible Heritage of Greenland uh in the face of uh visitors that were both climb climate change and visitors who were anticipated to increase significantly so I was there in October and I think just a few weeks before there had been uh an article published or their news came out that Carnival Cruises had offered their first Greenland Cruise ever uh it was not gonna it was not scheduled to stop at ASA Vista at nipisa it was going to the South but this first ever Greenland Cruise sold out in 24 hours then it crashed the website Carnival had to apologize to its customers and then offer another Carnival Cruise to Greenland this Cruise wasn't scheduled for another two years so it sold out in 24 hours for two years into the future and so everybody was a bit shocked by that um and it led to a lot of questions about no there hadn't been any really huge well that I know of there hadn't been any really big cruise ships um docking in Greenland that all of the cruises had been very small Expedition cruises up until that point right and so it brought up a lot of questions about how do we protect the tangible Heritage of Greenland um in the face of so many uh visitors this picture in the middle right here um this is uh system unit that's a small town in the Arctic uh small City actually in the Arctic uh Circle that you have to go through to get to the UNESCO world heritage site um and the only way to get from system unit into uh asaviso at nipisat the heritage site is by small boat or by helicopter they have a helicopter pad because there is a small community of people who live inside the heritage site which is another consideration that that needs to be addressed and protected and uh when I was there there they didn't have the docs that could physically um with withstand or or dock a huge cruise ship they only had us I believe three hotels or Inns um the one I stayed in had 15 rooms so accommodations aren't they aren't built yet there either um for this kind of Tourism and right so a lot about the tangible Heritage but I also was completely brought in and raptured with the intangible Heritage I was discovering as well um and so I kind of on a a whim decided to start interviewing people so that my students could hear from greenlanders it actually turned out to be one of their favorite parts of the Virtual Field Trip um and I got a chance to discover uh people's perspective on Heritage but also uh came across people who were protecting and finding ways to uh pass forward intangible Heritage as well so this photo here in the middle this is barsi is an artist uh some of the things in the background you see here are his carvings right so he carves um uh pendants uh jewelry um small statues using traditional uh natural materials like polar bear claws narwhal tusks reindeer antlers things that uh Inuit Carvers have permission to it's con it's controlled because they're protected um resources obviously but they do have access because of their um the the their Heritage work and their artwork uh and then over here this is Maria uh Pittsburgh Maria she is a teacher at the um the only school for Inuit traditional clothing making in the Arctic so it's a small school uh there's I think four or five teachers and they are basically doing the work of trying to pass on uh the knowledge of how to create traditional Inuit clothing um and they are the only one currently doing that they have a small group of students that start every year but it is a significant challenge to have the funding and support to pass on this knowledge which is quickly dying off the knowledge on how to process seal skins which is what traditional clothing is made of how to do the original designs and things like that and so we were dealing with both tangible and intangible Heritage certainly uh and then while we were there we were doing a lot of things and in addition to uh you know exploring and interviewing and creating content for the Virtual Field Trip uh we were running digital Heritage workshops uh which is where kind of Alice's work came in uh and it gave us a chance to show off some technology uh to a couple uh different population or different groups of people show them the kinds of things that something like a 3D scan of an artifact or a piece of art um how that can be used how it worked but it also gave us a chance to talk to different um people interested in history Heritage and art and find out what they're interested in right and find out uh what they care about so you see a picture here of a of a school classroom it was a high school level class that that got us a workshop and Hands-On trading and things like 3D photogrammetry and we had an our text fighter which uh created 3D models of it and talked about how a model would be used and how it's different from the actual artifact right and how it can be shared because in communities that are further away Greenland's cities are not connected by roads they're only accessible by boat and plane so they're they're quite separated from each other and in the winter it's even more difficult to get from one town to the next or one city to the next right so uh this kind of digital Heritage would allow you know new discoveries um or new uh exhibits to be shared a lot further than the the city that they were being hosted in we also had drop-in office hours in which the community was welcome to come in and bring a family heirloom a piece of art an artifact and while they did that this gentleman down below brought in a family heirloom uh we got a chance to talk to them to learn to them learn from them what they think about Heritage and history and the importance of passing on uh both tangible and intangible Heritage into their the future Generations in Greenland right so here's just some more pictures I mean we did as much as we could we cut we connected with as many people people as possible um we we also uh did anything we could to help the local Heritage professionals the women to the far right here are both um they both run the system unit Museum and so we had a lot of time to talk to them about what their hopes are for the museum what their challenges are as a very small Museum uh in the Arctic Circle um with a lot of considerations for protecting their Heritage especially in the face of a lot of climatic shifts and increasing tourism uh and just did I did whatever we could to to kind of try out these ideas talk to people see what people were interested in and learn more about um understanding Heritage in this place at the end of the virtual field trip I just wanted to mention um I was really pleased with the the feedback and I found that my anthropology students got as much or my non-anthropology students got as much out of it as my anthropology students I was really pleased to to hear a lot of feedback from my business students I had a couple criminal justice students all of who uh felt they they still got a lot from thinking about Heritage and thinking about passing on things and inheriting things and uh you know global global uh um Global problems and Global considerations like you know climate change and population changes um and so the the feedback of of not only getting to learn about this stuff but just getting a chance to kind of virtually explore Greenland through tons of pictures and um narratives and video footage uh they really uh really enjoyed it so it's um it was definitely a big win with the with my in-class students and I loved reading their posts both on the blog uh and in follow-up Reflections and stuff where they talked about um how they felt about it but I do think this class actually this was my applying anthropology class this was the first year I dropped the prerequisite so that non-anthropology Majors could enroll in it uh because I really wanted to increase my approach to teaching about applying anthropology to far more than just people who have dedicated a whole major to anthropology I wanted business students I wanted Public Health students I wanted education students right I wanted other students who might think about using anthropology in their own career trajectory uh in a way that it would have never occurred to them before and since then my this class is almost if it's either half or more filled with non-anthropology students um who've you know discovered that this uh has something to contribute to their careers so that is the virtual field trip and the trip from 2021 um we are now working on another uh digital Heritage experiment um to see what kind of uh engagement uh this might uh produce uh and this is going to be a micro learning course right so I have taught online um uh far beyond far before the pandemic I actually taught online I taught it at online college um and an in-person College where I taught half online and half in person uh and so I've always been interested in e-learning and virtual learning uh and I've recently become interested in kind of short form e-learning uh and so not everybody is going to you know sign up for a full semester of 15 week or a 10-week class in uh in Virtual learning but there's so much opportunity to teach people in smaller form uh virtual learning and so there are you know short courses which are a week or two weeks but there's also something called micro courses or micro learning and these are really short spurts of opportunity to teach people about something and the idea behind micro learning is that it's a very focused type of learning you have kind of a singular goal or a singular skill you're trying to communicate uh they don't have a set amount of time but they are you know with the word micro they are meant to be done quickly and to communicate quickly but they're built like a course like a learning opportunity with me some interactions with a quiz at the end uh and things like that and so I pitched the idea to my other two partners of a micro learning course that um we could uh advertise in places where tourists are going to be uh and see if we could get incoming visitors to the UNESCO world heritage site to participate in something that would teach them about the heritage of the place where they're going and how their actions could negatively impact it if they're not careful right so research has shown that people who go to Heritage tourist locations right the people who go to UNESCO world heritage sites and archaeological uh sites where they allow visitors right many of them the most of them are very supportive of Endeavors that help protect the site even if it restricts their access right so even if it means they can't take photos or they can't get as close as they want they seem very supportive of it indicating that the people who are spending money to go to these places uh care about their well-being right they care they understand the value of inheriting something uh like an archaeological site from thousands of years ago and the value of protecting it so that others can enjoy it in the future and so with that idea I'd like to explore whether we can encourage these visitors to adopt kind of a Heritage tourist mindset right so can we encourage them to think of themselves as stewards and Protectors of the places where they are visiting not just visitors right and to think about their actions and to think about how their the role they play in protecting the the Heritage and maybe all they do is just are very careful when they visit but maybe they do even more maybe they go on to support or to learn about bigger Heritage initiatives um you know maybe they attend they take more classes or they attend learning opportunities in the country with where they're going you know some people uh you know will go to a country and and and keep to the tourist areas and others will want to you know maybe we can encourage people to explore more to learn more about the culture and the people um of the place where they're they're visiting so I'm building a a micro learning course uh in a an awesome software called articulate 360 which will allow me to launch the course um open access it is going to be uh in the kangar loose walk airport initially uh and so and it's going to be in English at first because we're specifically to piloting to see how we reach in Outsiders right so people who are coming in um to Greenland uh and most likely they'll be coming and if they're flying into from Congress walk to cement um they will if they're going to the world heritage site they're probably going to do kind of more Adventure tourism and so the world heritage site has something called the Arctic Circle Trail uh and so it's kind of an adventure hike um it takes I want to say three days to do and along the way these there is archaeological sites and there's a lot of the the Heritage that is is what made us a world heritage site and so the protection of the uh of the site uh and anything that they come across is important and so we're wondering whether we can get some important information to them through this micro learning course uh while they're sitting in the airport right Greenland weather can often cause flight delays if they're sitting there anyways you know will they participate in some sort of a a learning experience and so this is uh definitely not the poster that we're going to hang up uh this was something I actually just pulled together fast when I was switching the idea to Allison Hans and I said what if we do this and I just put that together to give them a visual right of what it might look like where somebody's sitting in the airport can scan a QR code and access this little micro learning course and the micro learning course would be really interactive and you can see pictures here um these are Stills but in the course it's a slider in which you take an archaeological site and then you uh Alice put superimposed or reconstruction of what it might look like this is an Inuit tent ring um and so she showed what it would look like in uh when it was used thousands of years ago um and so uh excuse me Pally when you ten ring and so uh you know some interaction uh maybe some quizzes uh 3D models of that we already had from the from the visit and they can do it for free and fast and get a chance to learn something about the place that they're going to um while they're sitting there waiting for their flight so that is hopefully going to be launched in the next month or so we're finishing up the content and then we're going to advertise it in the airport and fingers crossed that somebody actually actually takes it and the animal analytics of how many people are logging into it or finishing it will lead us to think is this is this something that could really work could it work and with other kinds of tourists right what if we put it on a cruise ship right would it would would anybody on the cruise ship do it cruise ship tours are a bit different than um the kind of people who fly up to the Arctic Circle trial so uh lots to learn I think there but it is definitely an experiment so and that leaves me just real quick to my final thing project that I'll mention uh this this fascination with Heritage uh has led me to want to do a lot more um and a lot more with kind of the off the list Heritage places that I think deserve uh an anthropological perspective and so I recently started a new partnership with a Park Conservancy in Western New York again not I don't have an academic question here this is entirely applied work it's actually they're my first client under uh the consultancy that I established modern anthro Consulting um and because I would really like to do more non-academic Heritage work I think there's a lot of companies Industries uh non-profits that could benefit from a Heritage perspective of this idea that we inherit things from the from the past and we have if we take that consideration we might shape our actions differently thinking about what is going to be inherited in the future and so in this park uh this is an incredible Park uh it's it received a huge donation um to rebuild this park into a world-class Park um a Hundred Acre Park in which it's going to be absolutely fascinating uh it's going to be a beautiful Green Space in this urban area all along um the Lake Erie Coastline and it is a very important environmental uh location and so it has a lot of tie-ins with uh environmental resiliency in the Great Lakes and along the shoreline of Western New York and so the underlying question of my work here which is which is just starting is how do we tell a story about Heritage and environment in this place in a way that encourages stewardship opportunity and buy-in from the local community City stakeholders and the larger Great Lakes Region right so um again the project that I'm doing is really trying to uh trying to get people again to think of themselves as stewards of the local place connecting them with the history of this place um that we that the park had the how the park was used in the past what history existed on it how the past actions have influenced uh its Vitality today and how our actions uh right now and in the next you know 10 five to ten years will determine how much of this beautiful green space that's being completely renovated uh in a way that is extremely thoughtful in terms of environmental resilience and natural habitat building uh and uh habitat restoration and clean water initiatives right how do we make sure that all of this energy is going to last and it's going to be inherited in future Generations right and so I've La uh designed and I'm helping and how um excuse me designed and I'm working on a Heritage engagement project for them right and so it's this again like greenlands I feel is a clear connection to Heritage uh here my work is looking at how Urban green spaces are places of human Heritage too uh and how they're past impact their vitality and their use in the present and how their Futures are independent on our efforts to build resilient places of mixed and cultural mixed cultural and natural heritage right so this is all very new um and so I've just started it very recently but it was also the um it was the impetus for me to to make my consulting which I have done Consulting in the past but it make it more formal uh and now I would really love in addition to working with them uh to expand my Heritage work into other non-academic Partners who I think would benefit from an anthropological perspective uh on Heritage so with that um you can find out more about my work at my professional webpage my academic work and my Consulting work although forewarning my website is under construction because of my very recent decision to launch an LLC and begin more formalized Consulting so some of it is still um kind of up and it's still being developed and connected but I also share on LinkedIn uh and so you can find out some more information there my um my the Virtual Field Trip all the content for that is accessible on my website or you also can email me I put together all the blog posts in a PDF form that you could read the story really fast and easily because going back through old blogs is is terribly painful um and so I'm happy to email that to anybody who wants to learn more but with that I'm happy to take any questions all right thank you very much um if you do have questions go ahead and put them in the chat I certainly have a question I'm just gonna I have a quick comment and then I see Dr bunishek has a question I just wanted to say your your micro course is your micro learning I immediately thought my mother-in-law she's a retired teacher and she has been traveling everywhere and she is that kind of Taurus that she does her research she goes to all the local museums she wants to learn everything about those places before she goes so I know that she would be the one clicking on those courses so I have to go if my fingers crossed I want I know there are those kinds of tourists so I think it's a wonderful idea I'm going to let Dr money check speak for himself with this question thanks Lisa uh Dr Alan thanks so much boy that was really interesting and it got me thinking about a lot of things uh as a anthropologist who does applied work as well so one of the things I'd like to do to address real quickly if you could is economic development I mean I know you were talking about this in terms of Heritage and uh what that means for let's say the planet for for all of us um but can you talk a little bit about maybe the possibilities of this approach particularly the digital Heritage approach for tangible and intangible Heritage for some communities with so many communities around the globe that are undergoing transition socially politically economically and this seems like a way that many of them could engage in potentially sort of sustainable economic development but at the same time uh preserving their cultural traditions and uh um tangible Heritage etc for generations to come for their own communities and those outside is there much work that's been done on this with respect to Economic Development by indigenous communities or can you speculate about it if there hasn't there has been and people have been doing so much interesting work on this that I'm just starting to kind of tap to learn myself um I'm learning some really interesting stuff it's a it's a delicate balance right so you're absolutely right that a lot of these Heritage initiatives have considerable potential for economic development right so let me give you an example from Greenland um the artist that I showed you that he uh came to learn how to he brought his work his carvings from local materials he wanted to come and learn how to do a 3D model so that he could load his artwork up on Facebook and on his website so that he could sell it right he didn't have any kind of digital uh representations of the work and we were able to give him 3D models that were really easy that he could get they could give 360 views of them um and it could help him with some of this the sales of his artwork um there are a lot of really interesting Heritage uh groups that are doing work trying to help build kind of build micro economies or build um benefits for local communities to make sure that they're the ones benefiting from the economic development but there's also some concern about making sure that the economic um that the economic effects or the economic trickle effect of these kinds of digital Heritage places like a UNESCO world heritage stamp that the money actually goes to the local people because that's not always the case right and so um trying to find ways to do it so that it economically supports those whose Heritage it is right and that giving them a lot of say in whether or not they want to sell like original designs or um or artwork is a huge conversation in the Heritage Community and one that's absolutely fascinating I can't even give a Justice because I'm diving into it uh uh kind of uh I'm just starting to kind of really dive into it but in the in the case of Greenland um I do know that economic development is a hopeful outcome of this right so the tourism is is for many going to be a very good thing um to increase their economic stability and to help them with um uh just building out some of their Industries uh over uh there when I was at Greenland science week I was uh I noticed that the business Community was just as involved in Greenland science week so the head of the um uh the uh head of the fisherman and Hunter's Union was a part of Greenland science week the head of the local uh business Chamber of Commerce was there and so there was a lot of connection between industry and economic development and Science and how the two of them can work together uh in a way that's mutually beneficial my work in at the Park Conservancy in Western New York is similar right so the hope of this huge um the donation was not just to build an amazing Green Space that will protect and kind of revitalize an important environmental area they also the um the foundation that donated the money has strong hope that it will uh Revitalize the communities that live around it that struggle from very low socioeconomic um opportunity uh low graduation rates at the schools right a lot of uh uh struggles in those communities they really hope that um building this world-class Park and this amazing Green Space will have really positive um uh influences on that Community but in they also hope that it won't cause you know uh pushing out of the local community right so the uh they hope that the housing around the park won't immediately get so expensive that the those people who've lived there their whole lives uh are having trouble affording it so it's yeah it's it's a question I could probably talk all day about but it's a really good one and a really important one that there are a lot of people trying to to figure out the best path that's that's great and thanks I I appreciate how nuanced uh some of these issues are and uh um I'm going to pass some of this information on to a colleague who I know will be especially interested in we likely will reach out to you so so thanks for a great presentation and uh response thank you thank you Dr Ellen I do see that we have a hand raised by Dr ore Menendez and then I have another question in the chat so uh I'll I'll let Dr Audrey Menendez go first and then I'll turn to the chat thread uh thank you Lisa uh first of all uh Dr Allen it was amazing because you touched on so many different things um that I couldn't keep up with all the questions I had but one of the first of all and and second place uh I love how you have managed to move from Academia to do something that we clearly enjoy and and work in uh like I mean that's that's just amazing and I think it's a great example uh for the discipline there so right uh my question though uh it's it's way more um technological I'm like I love that part of anthropology and Archeology and when it's about training how did the uh English the locals and departments that you work with there respond to that kind of workshop on and what we uh training and the second part of my question is how do you manage this um since this is Heritage and things that are protected uh how do you manage the power of the management like who who is the repository of all that information and and all those kind of things but I know it's very complicated by that again I was more into the technical part of things so for training do you mean um the training of like the Heritage professionals or the Museum and Science staff who from Greenland um I wasn't trying to when you use uh the different Villages and we were teaching at the high schools and you were telling them about all these uh pre-work that we have by kinda in a more productive way how they respond to that um I'm gonna try to answer and let me know if I get off from what you were or what you're asking so um so one of the one of the concerns so there's only one University in Greenland uh the University of Grill uh Greenland Elementary Suffolk in Nook um and a lot of the uh school kids uh they go off to University uh off the off out of Greenland so they go to Copenhagen or Denmark they go elsewhere and they get um training and so one of the things that I know that some of the Heritage Professionals in sesamewa where I was working were really interested in is they wanted to encourage the young kids to come back right that if they did go and train elsewhere to bring their um to bring their skills and to bring their uh training back home uh and then and so the University of Greenland is is starting to expand as much as I got a chance to uh to tour it and they were very uh involved in Greenland science week so they are Bill building their programs to build more in-house training of all of The Sciences of archeology of all of it but there is still a lot of training that happens outside of Greenland um and it's definitely one of their one of their challenges um and so when we brought at least when we brought like the digital technology over um we made sure to bring some things like um T we taught 3D photogrammetry which can be done without extremely expensive equipment but then also showed them like a what a 3D artex fighter which is still really expensive what that looks like um with the idea that like future Partnerships would um you know allow us to continue bringing the technology over and while we were there we scanned anything that we could that they wanted scans of and um you know and so we uh tried to help build capacity but they're also doing a lot internally to to build training programs and to encourage those who go abroad to train to come home with their skills is that did that answer their question oh I can't hear you you're on mute yourself and now you need to unmute so uh how um I haven't what happened with the with this issue with uh not an issue but um how do you manage the all the dative storage and who gets to keep it and how how that was managed because it's uh it's always like really hard to go back and see what what else do you do with all your files and your data so all of the data was all of the scans that we did we uh we gave to them so we gave them um the digital files a lot of them were uploaded for the digital for the 3D models at least a lot of the photos were um loaded into sketchfab so that they were freely accessible and used um yeah we were we we did it together and the uh the excuse me the community members who came by um we immediately gave them their scans so that they could put it on their website or share it on Facebook or the whole idea was actually just to get to to give them um the digital products we were almost more interested in their stories and their perspective and possibilities for the future you know and so um we only scanned things that we had um that people asked us to scan um and sit with both at the museum and at the local community stuff and then we get we gave all the files back over to them and if we did post it like when I posted stuff um I made very sure that they understood that it was being posted I had little cards that said the website for anyone I interviewed and made very clear um where their information where their story was going and that it was open access and that the American public was reading it and then with the um the school teacher from the Inuit school for uh traditional clothing she wanted to review my write-up of her and the images and all of that and so we did a lot of back and forth and she gave the final approval before her content was loaded up okay we do have two minutes left thank you so much I want to make sure we get this final question too from Emil are you hoping to expand this educational website for other cultures and Heritage sites which one the micro learning the the Virtual Field Trip um yeah that's a good question Emil micro learning the micro learning um yeah so I'm actually uh really interested in this idea but as I mentioned it's a complete um it's just a shot I'm just trying to see I would love to so I worked for a long time in Romania and I would love to I've already kind of like left little like hints to my Romanian colleagues that I would love to do something over there as well I think it has potential to be useful anywhere um if I how much I'm going to do I'm not sure yet I'm currently expecting my third child so I'm looking at a maternity leave and I'm trying to just get this initial one launched but going forward I would absolutely love to do this in in more places than just Greenland um my big thing is that I think this Heritage perspective is useful in so many places right not just in the Arctic and not just places with significant change coming I mean everywhere I think um people would value from these kinds of stuff so um I've been seeing more more yes yes absolutely and so um I think it could be used in a lot of places where Heritage is at risk and there is really important very targeted messages uh that can be delivered really quickly um to help it can be used with Customs officials right so actually the idea for this was was actually shared at a workshop with um Greenland at Customs officials on how to identify um uh traffic like some some problems with trafficking and the removal of artifacts and stuff and so it had it could be done also with um much more protective measures and the people who are working to protect like training them on what's the Heritage how do you do it what's the law um things like that so um I hope I hope it grows much bigger than than what it the the small thing I'm going to launch this spring so we're going to launch thank you so much so you have the information here for anybody that wants to follow up and see the next project but I want to thank you again this is our final Pro seminar for this semester so so thank you all for tuning in and what a wonderful last talk it was so thank you so much for sharing your work with us thank you so much thank you have a good rest of your Monday everyone

2023-05-05 15:33

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