Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan in the collections of the World
Professor emer. Esther Fihl has been invited into a large-scale initiative where scholars from various countries around the world investigate Uzbek cultural assets in public and private collections outside of the Republic of Uzbekistan. The goal of the initiative is gradually to record, process, and publish the material, and in some cases accompanying films are being produced.
In collaboration with the National Museum of Denmark, the project of Esther Fihl will be to investigate and publish two ethnographic collections from the 1890s and hosted by this museum. The material objects derive from two famous empires on the Old Silk Road, the Khanate of Khiva and the Emirate of Bukhara, respectively.
The books from the initiative will be published in three languages - Uzbek, English, Russian – reaching out to the widest possible readership. For the first time in the publishing practice of Uzbekistan, the augmented reality technique is used in the books, allowing the reader to obtain additional visual information about a collection or a specific item. When scanning special tags with a tablet or smartphone, a 3D model of the object as well as a corresponding video will appear on the screen. The initiative hopes that with such innovations, it will be possible to attract younger generations to science literature.