APAN eCulture Working Group and Its Relevance in the Digital Age - ABSTRACT

The eCulture Working Group (WG) was first ratified in 2006 and it has since been promoting cross-discipline participation and research.

After all, culture is an integral part of everyone’s heritage. In these past six or so years, this WG has accumulated reports of projects and activities on various topics such as digital archive of cultural heritage, cultural portals, emusuems, new media and social computing, online language, food culture, eculture workshops, pop culture, and other related topics.

This would involve capturing images, language and sound of traditional and pop music and dance, old and new media, discussing emerging technics of digitisation, and using grid for the exchange of digitised cultural heritage.

The list of topics is endless and can be left to one’s imagination as culture is ubiquitous.

The latest development for the APAN’s eCulture WG is the live cyber performance since 2011. It is parked under a taskforce headed by the APAN Chairman himself, Professor DY Kim, and is orchestrated by Prof BC Goo of KAIST with partners from the Asia Pacific, European and Latin American countries.

This on-going collaboration is moving towards enhancing the technical aspects of live networked performance across the continents, hence dubbed as “Dancing across the Oceans” (DAO).

The fact that eCulture is still a novice discipline, presenters are encouraged to submit their presentations as APAN proceedings. Hopefully, this acts as an impetus for them to work on full-length publications in the area of eCulture.

All in all, the APAN community has embraced the eCulture Working group as a significant test bed of multidisciplinary talents, expertise and experience that has appeal and relevance in the digital age.