(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is inherently a living entity, of which the transmission is embodied, enacted, and socially communicated. Digital applications nowadays have produced various resources for cultural heritage, many of them emerging as apparatuses for material-based collections or merely performative documentation. Nonetheless, few endeavours have adequately supported the representation of the living nature of ICH. In the meantime, digital curatorial conventions of cultural heritage are becoming increasingly data-driven. However, models that encapsulate intangible practices, especially those representing embodied knowledge, are far from maturity. Motion encoding in tandem with machine learning algorithms has emerged as a potential solution for processing the performed cultures into choreographic objects. In parallel, formal ontologies have gained popularity among studies on cultural heritage for enabling related interoperability among the archival entities. By integrating both, this research investigates a novel usage of computational methods to curate the ICH archival contents in a pragmatic, semantic, and relational manner. Specifically, it presents a ‘whole-of-environment’ framework for encoding the performative elements in the ICH archives combining aspects of embodied experiences, motions, physical objects, persons, descriptions, and digital assets with the meaning of tradition. By showing a use case for a martial arts living archive, it further explains how to instantiate a knowledge graph based on this framework to empower the users to search, browse, and explore embodied knowledge in such cultural archives.