By Emily C. Arauz , PhD Candidate Dept. of Archaeology and History of Art, Graduate School of Social Sciences & Humanities Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey Upon exiting the San Martiño Pinario Monastery conference hall on the final day of the NEARCHing Factory , a fellow attendee made the cursory remark to myself and a colleague that this will go down in history as one of those conferences where, years hence, everyone will be asking one another: “Were you at the Nearching Factory in Santiago de Compostela, January 30 th – February 1 st , 2017?” Fortunately, I was one of the lucky 96 attendees who took part in this unique experience over the course of two and a half rainy and cold days in the Galicia region of Spain. The meeting, deemed a ‘factory’, was a public and interactive component of the NEARCH ( New ways of Engaging audiences, Activating societal relations and Renewing Practices in Cultural Heritage ) project [1] , organized in coordination with INCIPIT, C...

by Daniel García Raso Would you abandon him now? Until very recently, Nintendo, one of the giants of video games, had refused flatly (quite incomprehensibly from a business point of view) to create games for smartphones and other mobile devices, or even to allow their classic games (Mario, Donkey Kong or sagas like Metroid) to be available on these platforms. But at a meeting of senior executives, someone had to bring Tatsumi Kimishima to reason because Miitomo , the first smartphone app of the Japanese company, was released on March 17 with terrific success: in less than a month it got 4 million downloads. In less than a month since its launch on July 7, Pokémon Go surpassed platforms like Twitter in terms of user numbers. Thanks to the fetishist momentum of casual gamers, some must be gloating in Tokyo... even recovering from the ‘bump’ of Wii U, until they stated a mere 32% of stocks in Niantic , the actual company that released the app.  Pokémon Go is not only t...

Within the framework of a workshop for the “ Heritage Values ” project, the GAPP (Heritage and PublicArchaeology Group) at University of Barcelona organized an intense seminar about public interaction in archaeology. Intense, because we had the opportunity to share and debate projects and ideas with nearly 20 colleagues in one day, which started for me at 5 am to take the train from Madrid to Barcelona. The seminar consisted of three parts: sustainability and participation in heritage policy; cultural tourism and new technologies; and the role of public archaeology as a participation tool. The outcomes of the seminar will be published soon, so I will not make a traditional review of the different papers presented, but rather a general comment on the topics debated and will share some thoughts about them. Image: Seminar poster and programme (source: Universitat de Barcelona ) How do we interact with the public as professionals? How does the public interact with arc...

The forum that could not wait for a year to happen. A very interesting reflection by Yannis Hamilakis , that will be our 'Points of You' for volume 4. What do you think? "Friends asked me to elaborate on my suggestion for an Occupy movement, not only for art museums and galleries but also archaeological museums, archaeological sites/projects and other culture/heritage institutions that rely on cheap, un-insured, non-unionised labour, or on sponsorship from corrupt corporations. We in archaeology, art and heritage domains have been for far too long, oblivious, tolerant, if not complicit to a regime of work and political economy which is not sustainable; they tell us about expansion, new markets, new wings for our museums, new museums elsewhere, mega-projects with hundreds of specialists which are going to last for a quarter of a century, and we think: great! Lots of jobs for us and others, more heritage, more culture, more archaeology, that’s good all round, r...