0000000000088480
AUTHOR
Ester Alba
Recovering Sicilian Silk Heritage through Digital Technologies: The Case of Piraino’s Collection
Textile conservation has given rise to small and medium-sized museums, usually with scarce resources. In Sicily, the little evidence that remains of silk production and opulent imports by the rich and powerful local aristocracy is kept in museums, parishes, and other cultural institutions. The documentation, dissemination, and enhancement of such a fragile heritage is today possible by means of technological tools that provide novel means to preserve, analyze, and exploit digital information. In this paper, we present some outcomes of the SILKNOW project, a project that applies computing research to the needs of diverse users (museums, educational institutions, the tourism industry, creativ…
Interactive Tools for the Visualization of Tangible and Intangible Silk Heritage Emerging from an Interdisciplinary Work
Silk is a unique example of heritage where memory, identity, creativity and knowledge can be found in just one piece. It is a multifaceted, living heritage, as it consists of more than the fabrics themselves, but also the techniques associated with them, historical buildings, trades, festivities, etc. Therefore, designers, weavers, painters, sellers and users are involved in it. However, it is also a fragile heritage, alive in the few industries that still weave with historical looms. Additionally, the COVID19 pandemic has put the entire artisanal and small industrial sector of European silk in risk of disappearing. In this, paper we show some results of the SILKNOW project, whose main obje…
Interactive Tools for the Preservation, Dissemination and Study of Silk Heritage—An Introduction to the SILKNOW Project
Silk was a major factor for progress in Europe, mostly along the Western Silk Road’s network of production and market centers. The silk trade also allowed for the exchange of ideas and innovations, having impacts at economic, technical, functional, cultural and symbolic levels. However, silk has today become a seriously endangered heritage. Although many European specialized museums are devoted to its preservation, they usually lack the size and resources to take advantage of state-of-the-art digital technologies. The aim of this paper is twofold; firstly, we introduce SILKNOW, an interdisciplinary project that has been recently funded by the H2020 Programme of the European Union in order t…
El hilo de la historia: del patrimonio mueble al intangible. Rescatando el patrimonio textil sedero
[EN] Silk heritage belongs to the so-called integral heritage type, which means that tangible and intangible elements can be found in one piece. Moreover, silk is a living heritage strongly connected with its community. It is paradigmatic case, where its intangible elements go from literature, to mulberry farming, or traditional weaving techniques. Also, activities surrounding silk trade have left an imprint on various cities in monuments and even marking their town planning. Nowadays, silk is a living heritage in various communities and constitutes an element of creativity that can be appreciated in the current fashion trends. This paper addresses the main results of the SILKNOW project, f…
Weaving words for textile museums: the development of the linked SILKNOW thesaurus.
Abstract The cultural heritage domain in general and silk textiles, in particular, are characterized by large, rich and heterogeneous data sets. Silk heritage vocabulary comes from multiple sources that have been mixed up across time and space. This has led to the use of different terminology in specialized organizations in order to describe their artefacts. This makes data interoperability between independent catalogues very difficult. To address these issues, SILKNOW created a multilingual thesaurus related to silk textiles. It was carried out by experts in textile terminology and art historians and computationally implemented by experts in text mining, multi-/cross-linguality and semanti…
Towards the Preservation and Dissemination of Historical Silk Weaving Techniques in the Digital Era
Historical weaving techniques have evolved in time and space giving as result more or less fabrics with different aesthetical characteristics. These techniques were transferred along the main silk production centers, thanks to the European Silk Road and creating a common European Frame on themes and techniques. These had made it complicated to determine whether a fabric corresponds to one century or another. Moreover, in order to understand their creation, it is necessary to determine the number of weaves and interlacements that each textile has, therefore, mathematical models can be extracted from these layers. In this sense, three dimensional (3D) virtual representations of the internal s…
Rereadings: Highlighting the Gender Perspective Through Hypermedia
In this text, we present the contributions of the Spain-based project Rereadings. Museum Itineraries from a Gender Perspective, which aims to present to the public the collections of 11 Valencian museums, of various kinds and under different types of ownership, from a gender and queer perspective. Rereadings uses virtual itineraries and QR codes to contribute to the study of gender. Thus, technology is used as a basis for information dissemination, analysis, and debate. The struggle against androcentrism and heteropatriarchy has generated a greater inclusion of women, other genders, and diverse sexualities in traditional museum discourse. New technologies function as one of the fundamental …
Applying Axial Symmetries to Historical Silk Fabrics: SILKNOW’s Virtual Loom
Symmetry is part of textile art in patterns and motifs that decorate fabrics, which are made by the interlacement of warp and wefts. Moreover, the 3D representation of fabrics have already been studied by some authors
Design Archives: Sustainable Solutions for Young Designers in Valencia, Spain
Design education is practical and theoretical; however, it does not usually include the study of cultural heritage. Nonetheless, relations with academia have been strong since the 18th century, when the need to educate designers spread across the continent to improve design and make it competitive in the market. In this paper, we recover that spirit and act as mediators between heritage and young people to create links and preserve cultural heritage. A case study was conducted at the Public Valencian Design School with 31 product design students. The methodology applied was based on iterative processes that allowed students to discover design and silk heritage when they proposed innovative …
Digital Cultural Heritage
Most contemporary thinkers agree that we are going through a time of historical change, building adifferent concept and model of social interrelation. Our ways of life and work have changed, as havethe ways in which we communicate and relate to each other.