[This is a certified Communication-intensive (Ci) Course which meets all of the requirements endorsed by HKU’s Senate, including i) the teaching and assessment of visual and digital communication ‘literacies’; and ii) at least 40% of the course grade assigned to communication-rich assessment tasks.]

Course Description

Every culture has its own irreplaceable heritage and Chinese culture has accumulated a rich heritage during its long history. Digital technologies now provide more effective and sustainable means to promote, conserve and preserve cultural heritage. This course aims to help students better recognize and appreciate the importance and values of cultural heritages in Hong Kong, China and around the world, and to open their eyes to how digital technologies can be used to conserve and preserve cultural heritage worldwide. Three digital preservation projects will serve as running examples throughout this course: one from Hong Kong (e.g., the Hong Kong Memory project), one from Mainland China (e.g., the e-Dunhuang online gallery), and one from Europe (e.g., the Europeana digital collections). Students will also gain a broad understanding on how sociocultural and economic development and heritage preservation impact us as global citizens in this information age. With easy-to-use online and offline tools, students will learn how to create digital artifacts for cultural heritages of their own choice, including virtual reality (VR) stories and a digital gallery. These products will be their unique contribution to preserving and promoting cultural heritage of the world!

[In Week 3 and Week 9, students are required to visit a site with cultural heritage of their interest and to capture VR-compatible spherical panoramas of the site as part of the virtual reality (VR) stories creation.]

Course Learning Outcomes

On completing the course, students will be able to:

1. Demonstrate a good understanding of cultural heritages, their values and significance in history and in today’s society.
2. Explain the importance of preserving cultural heritage and strategies and methods applied worldwide.
3. Apply digital technologies to promoting local and Chinese cultural heritage to a global audience.
4. Apply principles and ethics of information to cultural heritage conservation and preservation.
5. Design and create visual and digital products for organizing and accessing heritage information from a user-centered perspective.

Offer Semester and Day of Teaching

Second semester (Wed)

• Hu, X., Ho, E. M., & Qiao, C. (2017). Digitizing Dunhuang cultural heritage: a user evaluation of Mogao cave panorama digital library. Journal of Data and Information Science, 2(3), 49-67. From https://doi.org/10.1515/jdis-2017-0014

• Gilliland, A. J. (2008). Setting the Stage. In M. Baca (Ed.), Introduction to Metadata (pp. 1-19). Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. From http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic_publications/intrometadata/setting.html

• Howard, J. B. (2017). Opening doors to interoperability and user engagement: IIIf At University College Dublin. Europeana Pro: Letters from the Editors. From https://pro.europeana.eu/page/issue-6-iiif#article-1
• Villa, R., Clough, P. D., Hall, M. M., & Rutter, S. A. (2013, August). Search or Browse? Casual Information Access to a Cultural Heritage Collection. EuroHCIR. [pp. 19-22 (can skip the statistical analysis)]

Course Co-ordinator and Teacher(s)