Revitalizing the Interior of Ndalem Puspowijoto as a Laweyan Batik Shop and Museum in Surakarta.

Revitalizing the Interior of Ndalem Puspowijoto as a Batik Shop and Museum in Laweyan Surakarta is an effort to preserve cultural heritage buildings. The revitalization aims to maintain the building and as a means of education about batik and local wisdom of Laweyan village for the visitors and general public who care about batik. The design process is carried out using Kurtz programming including the orientation stage, the base program stage, interative programming, and design as feedback. The design approach uses the Art Deco style with the theme of Parang Saudagar. The results of the revitalization are in the form of the museum that can be used for educational purposes, and Laweyan Batik shop which has a place that is comfortable, safe, and able to accommodate the needs of both managers and visitors. The facilities consist of a lobby, café, deposit counter, shop, ticketing room, digital audio education, main display, fabric display, item display, maintenance room, multipurpose room, pantry, toilet, office, and prayer room.

ARTYCUL: A Privacy-Preserving ML-Driven Framework to Determine the Popularity of a Cultural Exhibit on Display

We present ARTYCUL (ARTifact popularitY for CULtural heritage), a machine learning(ML)-based framework that graphically represents the footfall around an artifact on display at a museum or a heritage site. The driving factor of this framework was the fact that the presence of security cameras has become universal, including at sites of cultural heritage. ARTYCUL used the video streams of closed-circuit televisions (CCTV) cameras installed in such premises to detect human figures, and their coordinates with respect to the camera frames were used to visualize the density of visitors around the specific display items. Such a framework that can display the popularity of artifacts would aid the curators towards a more optimal organization. Moreover, it could also help to gauge if a certain display item were neglected due to incorrect placement. While items of similar interest can be placed in vicinity of each other, an online recommendation system may also use the reputation of an artifact to catch the eye of the visitors. Artificial intelligence-based solutions are well suited for analysis of internet of things (IoT) traffic due to the inherent veracity and volatile nature of the transmissions. The work done for the development of ARTYCUL provided a deeper insight into the avenues for applications of IoT technology to the cultural heritage domain, and suitability of ML to process real-time data at a fast pace. While we also observed common issues that hinder the utilization of IoT in the cultural domain, the proposed framework was designed keeping in mind the same obstacles and a preference for backward compatibility.

Shocking Waves at the Museum: The Bini–Cerletti Electro-shock Apparatus

The historian of science, Lorraine Daston, has written about things that talk. But how much can an artefact in a museum communicate its history to the public? Artefacts in museums speak, but it is not necessarily, or even at all, in the language of their original time and place. Cultural baggage, memories, and imagination all come into play, including those held by museum curators, and not least those contained within the operational and historical frameworks of such institutions. At the Museo di Storia della Medicina della Sapienza at the University of Rome we are organising an exhibition around an artefact that more than any other elicits emotive reactions – the Bini–Cerletti apparatus for the administration of electro-shock. This prototype of the first ECT machine, along with various historical documents, manuals, and textbooks relating to it, is a valued part of the Museo's collection. We are proud of it, yet as a display item, it is also something of golden chalice. Leaving aside the ethical question of whether we can (or should) convey to visitors the anxiety and pain of the patients who once submitted to the device, and leaving aside the different loads of historical and contemporary baggage that visitors will bring to it, how can such an object be represented in an historically honest way? This is the problem, for while we might be true to the context of its emergence, within that context (of Fascist Italy) the Bini–Cerletti apparatus was at one and the same time a blessing, a hope, a lie, and a profitable commercial product.