The Mingei Handbook on Heritage Craft representation and preservation

Foreword - Who is this handbook for?

This handbook is addressed to persons, social groups, or organisations, interested in the documentation, preservation, and safeguarding of crafts. The targeted audiences of the protocol are:

• CH professionals, scholars, and the public for comprehensive documentation of CH.
• CRAFT practitioner, community, student and master for documentation of own craft, promotion of craft, educational material, interactive and educational experience, and online courses.
• CRAFT friend, enthusiasts for documentation of personal work, collection of works of interest.
• CH industry: revenue stimulation for the safeguarding of crafts, through (a) sustainable thematic tourism services and (b) utilisation of traditional crafts in modern contexts.
• Local authorities, businesses, and public bodies are interested in a comprehensive presentation of a craft, its relation to local tradition and thematic tourism.

Mingei is committed to the provision of service to the CH professionals the outcomes of the Mingei technical tools strive to adhere to international standards of CH documentation and representation.

The Mingei protocol encompasses a wide range of representation methods. These methods fall into the topics of artefact digitisation, semantic representation, and curation of content.

The Mingei approach strives to simplify technical topics, by providing tailored technical tools that specialise in the tasks required for craft documentation in a human-comprehensible fashion. Nevertheless, as the representation of a craft includes representation of socio-historic context the scientific experience of the curator, historian, or anthropologist, is relevant to the quality and accuracy of the authored descriptions. The curation of heritage items and practices is a multi-disciplinary subject, which for in-depth study requires a pertinent scientific background.

The Mingei protocol avails the possibility of exploiting advanced technologies in the domains of artefact digitisation, motion capture, and knowledge representation. Nevertheless, a baseline craft representation can be achieved even with modest technological resources and expertise, namely a camera, a computer, and an Internet connection and the capacity to operate them.