Heritage Computing?

Background

Heritage computing is the technology that helps to preserve our ancient artifacts, literature, the grammar of our traditional languages with the help of a computer-based digitized environment. In a country like India, many people living in different places with cultural differences. Everybody has their own tradition and history. Many of our traditional values are in an endangered situation. So it is necessary to save our culture with the help of digitization. It is difficult to tackle this situation. Heritage computing a modernized digital technology helps to preserve our ancient history alive.

Now a days, we hear the word “Digital India” more often. Digital India technologies help our country to compete with well-developed countries in the digital environment. In many cases, our digitization activities are not focusing on heritage and culture at most. So Digital India technology linked with heritage computing will preserve the roots of our country. Heritage computing is integrated with multiple domains such as Virtual Museums, Digital Library, and Indian Embroidery, etc.

Virtual Museum

Many of our national and state museums reflect our cultural history. The national repository of the museum provides a virtual tour to different museums present across the nation. The virtual museum experience is enhanced through personalization, reality, and the quality of the content. Earlier virtual museums are replaced by CD-ROM and postal mail distribution. In this 3D objects are displayed in animated sequences. Ministry of Culture has standardized Virtual Museum Builder for all the museums under the ministry. It’s been introduced in several national and state museums. Virtual Museum Builder as a public digital collection management system for Indian Museum.

Virtual Museum Builder

JATAN – a Heritage computing software has been deployed in more than 10 National Museums. Ministry of Culture performs data collection using JATAN software. JATAN act as a digital data collection and management system for Indian museums. It’s a client-server interaction application with some features like image cropping, watermarking, unique numbering, and management of digital objects.

Digital Library

Digital Library is to make a portal for contents that are physically present in heritage books and palm leaves. It helps to preserve the contents of the endangered books if it is damaged physically. Our ancestors have written hints of various medicines, traditional art, architecture, and traditional musicology in palm leaves. Usually, these palm leaf manuscripts break easily in the dry environment also gets infected easily by insects. Many of the palm leaf scripts are extinct. Only a few of the scripts are left to preserve. Standardization and representation of varied culture scripts like Grantha, Vedic, Samavedic, and Bhagavat Gita, etc, assumes crucial. With the help of digital image processing techniques, palm-leaf manuscript and other physical book contents are digitized. It is necessary to ensure historical and cultural documents existence in the digital library with free access.

Indian Embroidery

Our Indian embroidery is a base for the fashion designing and textile industry. Now a day’s traditional Indian embroidery information is available on various websites. It helps to safeguard the embroidery from extinction. Before this digitization, most of them were not aware of Indian Embroidery. It’ll make all the contents regarding Indian embroidery available on one web portal. Also, it provides tutorials regarding embroidery techniques, sorts of threads, and texture of garments and colours. Most of the patterns are digitized. We can trace and download the patterns easily.

Conclusion

Heritage computing is widely used in many countries like India. Our country is made of traditional values of various states and various peoples. Today in the race of transformation many of our roots are left behind. Due to the continuing growth of heritage computing, we can preserve many of our traditional things. Therefore the role of Heritage Computing have improved much and provides a lot of  research scope

Suggestions

Student projects are often encouraged and implemented in these ideas.

References

[1] http://indiaculture.nic.in/

[2] https://www.cdac.in/index.aspx

[3] htpp://www.museumsofindia.gov.in