Podcasting Culture in Rome

On November 26, at American University of Rome and British School in Rome-hosted conference “Our Future’s Past“, I was pleased to participate and present with my AIRC colleague Alberto Prieto . We spoke on the final day of the 3-day conservation/ cultural heritage conference where topics addressed included various aspects of technology and innovation.

Our presentation “Podcasting culture: the role of video in heritage preservation” offered a different perspective on innovation because it is took a popularizing medium (.e., video for edutainment) into the service of more practical, educational discussions. The focus was simply:  video’s potential for positive impact on heritage preservation efforts. We discussed our experiences in filming our unlisted conference, our new conservation project at Ostia, and filming ongoing excavtions for FastiONLINE.  We gave details of planning involved in filming on site and the low costs that filming entailed. We also emphasized the fact that good storytelling was still key; without and the audience soon would be lost. Our objective was to encourage our colleagues to collaborate and utilize this growing medium in the cultural heritage sector, for documentation, presentation, and fostering interest and participation.

While our presentation (including AIRC-produced videos from projects such as digs at Gabii and Pompeii) was appreciated by Our Future’s Past audience, in the accompanying dialgoue we as a group concluded that sustainable conservation via video is an area presently untouched by many academic colleagues because of their unfamiliarity with the medium and skills involved in shooting and editing video.

Our Future’s Past was a successful and engaging conversation  with a broad range of colleagues representing many disciplines (business, tourism, conservation, archaeology, etc.):  the British School of Rome, most particularly, the Herculaneum Conservation Project, ICCROM (headquarted in Rome), World Monuments Fund, and other individuals, such as Jessica Stewart (Context Rome), Laurie Rush (Dpt. of Defense) who presented at our last year’s Unlisted Conference.

–Darius Arya, AIRC Executive Director.  Please contact him at dar[at]romanculture.org for inquiries regarding videography and cultural heritage.

Upcoming:   we’ll be headed to several heritage conferences in Spring 2012 – including our own Unlisted 2012 conference– and continuing to produce videos of digs in Italy. But keep an eye out for our videos with Kogeto LUCY camera.