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Large parts of museum collections, particularly in the Netherlands, are a legacy of the colonial past, guiding people’s societal perceptions of cultures and histories. There have been increasing efforts to ensure that museums acknowledge and reveal to visitors the multiple (e.g., cultural) meanings and contexts attached to objects in these collections. We address this as an effort to increase polyvocality. The present work contributes to the effort to emphasize, but objectively acknowledge, multiple (perhaps conflicting) perspectives attached to cultural resources. We provide a measurement to assess polyvocality amongst individuals and a case study including an adaptive, polyvocal exhibition design. The developed Virtual Reality (VR) exhibition curates the flag of Suriname (1975 - today), in which participants interactively encountered multiple perspectives on the flag’s colors and, in three different sceneries, learned how those relate to Suriname’s history. Our quantitative findings (obtained among a smaller sample of N = 20) revealed that the experience fostered a polyvocal mindset, which is supported by our qualitative analyses highlighting key polyvocal elements in the virtual environment. In sum, the present approach further explicates the polyvocality construct, proposes ways of assessing a polyvocal mindset, and recommends design principles to tailor polyvocality-enhancing VR applications.

Apulia region in the Southern Italy is frequently characterised by high photochemical pollution levels in the warm period and by high levels of PM10 and NO2 in the winter season. Emissions in the area derive essentially from urban, shipping and industrial activities. The main industrial activities are related to the iron and steel industry (one of the largest in Europe) on the western coast and to two coal power plants on the eastern coastline. A GIS based air quality system has been developed to support local authorities in air quality management for the region. The proposed modeling system is based on RAMS (Pielke et al., 1992) and CALMET (Scire et al., 2000) meteorological models and on CALPUFF (Scire et al., 2000)/ CALGRID (Yamartino et al., 1989) dispersion models. Diffuse emissions for the domain were obtained from the national CORINAIR data base (www.sinanet.apat.gov.it) and were preprocessed by a new-developed tool GEM-PP (Gis EMission Pre-Processor) based on open source GIS. Point sources emissions are obtained by local inventory. Meteorological and dispersion simulations were performed for the year 2005. Predictions have been compared with concentration data from the air quality monitoring network. Results evidence a good correlation between predictions and measurements for O3, NOx, SO2 with most of data in factor of two of the measurements for rural stations and a tendency to underestimate measured data in urban stations. Overall the model tends to underestimate CO measurements. The uncertainty of the predictions are analysed and discussed in terms of the emission calculations, dispersion modelling and monitoring site.