Ahlam Bavi, Ph.D. candidate in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies Digital, Art and Humanities at the University of British Columbia.
Patricia Bérubé, Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University
Date: Wednesday, November 16, 2022
Time: 16:30-18:30 EDT (Ottawa), 13:30pm-15:30pm PDT (Vancouver)
Left Image: Bavi, Ahlam, Remediation workflow for cave painting puzzle, Canada, 2021.
Right Image: Figure 32 Image used as an indication for sound placement in Carmichael’s work (credits Patricia Bérubé).
Gamification of digital heritage as an approach to improving museum and art gallery engagement for blind and partially sighted visitors
Digitization of heritage in art gallery and museum contexts raises ethical concerns around ownership, consent, and use. It also highlights fundamental issues of access and engagement for blind and partially sighted (BPS) visitors, mostly elders. Gamification, which refers to the use of game elements and game design techniques, such as user feedback and additive levels of progress in non-game contexts, has been used to improve heritage pedagogy, accessibility for, and engagement with museum and art gallery visitors. In this presentation, we examine collaborative efforts in digital heritage that engage with BPS visitors from historically excluded communities, thereby addressing their traditional exclusion from experiential learning in museum and art gallery settings. Using 3D printed models, we show that gamification can play an essential role in providing BPS visitors in museum and art galleries an incentive to engage with the digital and physical archives, guiding them in experiential learning, and enabling new insights into heritage. Fulsome implementation of 3D models as gamified objects can improve viewership, sharing, learning, and open discussion on redress for historically excluded groups when it comes to their heritage. Gamification of digital heritage can enable a more diverse group of visitors to fully participate in the museum and art gallery experience.
Ahlam Bavi is a specialist in the digitization of cultural heritage, a digital humanities scholar, and a digital designer. Her work applies 3D technologies, design, and humanities application research for the remediation and reproduction of cultural heritage for easy access, preservation, and repatriation to the original communities. She is a Ph.D. candidate in IGS Digital art and Humanities at the University of British Columbia. She has focused on the digitization of cultural heritage using open-source software to make the process of digitization more accessible for marginalized communities.
Experiencing paintings through augmented multi-sensory prototypes
This presentation will focus on my doctoral work in which I relied to multi-sensoriality in the understanding and appreciation of two-dimensional artworks, such as drawings or paintings, by people with visual impairments. Previous research has focused primarily on a first wave of initiatives to translate visual arts into tactile content to make it accessible to people with visual impairments. This doctoral research builds on the second wave of multisensory initiatives for the low-vision and blind community, which draws on research findings of sensory museology and cognitive psychology to deepen our knowledge about multi-sensory translation. The broader findings of this study provide evidence to support the notion that touch and hearing can play a valuable role in conveying the emotional nature of art to visually impaired visitors, giving them greater autonomy in their interpretation.
Patricia Bérubé is 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation scholar and a PhD candidate in cultural mediations at Carleton University. Her research aims to make paintings more accessible to visitors with visual impairment. To do so, her work involved the co-design of multi-sensory prototypes in close collaboration with members of the low-vision and blind community. Moreover, her research interests revolve around accessibility, disability studies, museum studies and anti-occularcentrism as an approach. Patricia works as a policy officer in the Accessible Canada Directorate within the Federal Government of Canada, in addition to also being an accessibility expert (consultant) and part-time professor at the University of Ottawa.
This seminar is part of the ongoing series Accessibility, Inclusion, and Disability: Connecting Scholars and Practitioners, hosted by Carleton University’s Disability Research Group.