RETOLD News

Once you have digital data, anybody can do anything with those! Therefore, RETOLD had formulated very early the wish to find communities, we could cooperate with. But we needed to zoom out first. Our open-air museums are part of something larger, Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums (in short called GLAM). Although there is a big diversity between these categories, we all strive for free and open access to digital cultural heritage.

The RETOLD platform is by far the largest project of this year. Some bits and pieces are still coming together, and we will only officially launch the RETOLD platform at our conference in September (see here for conference details). It has been a voyage of four long years, with many partners along the way, to design a system for open-air museums to tell their stories and bring them into new universes and dimensions...

Four years. That is how long the RETOLD project takes. With many goals and a hectic schedule, we may get tunnel vision and forget what we promised, or at least bits of it. We knew this would be happening, so already before RETOLD started, we had planned an external evaluation during, not after the project. While the financial mid-way audit was done by an accountant, we invited Mr Städing from DigiCULT to evaluate how well RETOLD was on its way to reach its goals.

Like many things in the modern world, digitalisation has transformed the way we interact with the past and opened opportunities for visualisation, curation and sharing. But how do we actually use these digital tools? If you'd like to hear more from our speakers after the episode, they will both be presenting their research at our Digitalisation in Open-Air Museums and Reconstructions conference in September.

As we steer towards the completion of RETOLD, the development and evaluation of the RETOLD app have provided significant strategic wisdom. The application has enhanced our understanding of the current technological landscape and readiness levels as well as the specific needs of the open-air museum sector. It will drive future post-RETOLD digital initiatives that contribute to innovation and creativity in the field of...

We are running high speed now, as we only have four months to go until the big conference. Sometimes you wish there were more hours in the day... We just returned from another visit to Museum Village Dueppel in Berlin (14-16 May, 2024). Our goal was to test the Retold app "in the wild", or as this exercise is called, do a User Acceptance Test. Several scenarios were staged, for example: "you want to open the app and document a craft activity".

Retold is in its final year, and yes, things go fast! While our colleagues in Spain are crunching code for the app, some of us went to Northern Germany to the Stone Age Park in Albersdorf, just before their tourist season started (March 2024). It was great to spend a few days with the museum's webmaster, the Social Media coordinator, the young volunteers as well as the Neolithic Farmer. Unfortunately, the Mesolithic Gatherer was still travelling, as they usually do...

In 2022 we developed banners which explained the project goals and the partners. In 2023 it was time to start working on (one of the) the topics, which is Documenting Houses. The last step - in 2024 - was showing the crafts of RETOLD museums members. We are developing methods to document crafts in museums. We like to share online what is happening out there as there are some pretty amazing craftspeople showing very cool stuff...

In September, the six RETOLD partners met in Germany. With a little over 12 months to go, we realised there were some issues. Our biggest challenge is to make an app which works for open-air museums. The technique on the one side must fit with the museum reality on the other. Actually, we have to dive from the museums into the technique, and back again! So, where the museums know what they want out of this product, our struggle...

In the museum village Düppel (Berlin, Germany), we are currently carrying out a structural damage assessment to evaluate the condition of our reconstructed houses. The 13 houses were built using methods from experimental archaeology, in the years between 1976 and 2008 according to the model of medieval farmhouses. Care was taken to retain the floor plans of the houses found during excavations and to rebuilt the reconstructed houses in their ...