In the order they appear in the programme. Please note that apart from invited speakers who were asked to sent short abstracts, the remaining papers and poster abstracts are the extended ones (up to 1500 words) they submitted after the call for papers.
Monday 12 December 2016 / Tuesday 13 December 2016
Monday Sessions: M1 / M2 / M3 / M4 / Tuesday sessions: Europeana Workshop / T1 / T2: Posters / T3 / T4
MONDAY 12 DECEMBER 2016
SESSION 1
Marco de Niet, Digitaal Erfgoed Nederland/Digital Heritage Netherlands
“Measuring the progress of digitisation in Europe: the ENUMERATE Framework and Observatory”
The past decade has shown a increasing need for intelligence about the progress achieved by cultural heritage institutions in digitising and publishing their collections. The EU-funded project ENUMERATE created a framework that is used for biennial surveys across Europe. Since 2013, Europeana has incorporated ENUMERATE in its service infrastructure. So far, three surveys have taken place, a 4th one is in the making for 2017. ENUMERATE has become an authoritative source of statistical information about the progress of digitisation of cultural heritage. In this presentation Marco de Niet will give an update on the activities that will lead to an online observatory about statistical data on digital heritage, as well as on the changing needs with professionals and policy makers for intelligence on digital cultural heritage.
Agiatis Benardou, Athena Research Centre, Greece
“Within and Beyond: Case Studies on the Use of Digital Tools and Content in the context of Europeana”
Over the past couple of decades the use of digital content has become almost the norm in the work of many researchers within the Humanities and Social Sciences. Curation of both digitised legacy data and born-digital content, however, makes it imperative that items are managed at an individual level in order for larger collections of data to be trusted and useful. Europeana, the European digital library for cultural heritage, is shifting focus from being a discovery portal of over 30million digitised items to a platform that allows third parties to develop tools based on its content. In order to collect information about the potential use of existing collections in Europeana, research is being conducted into developing an empirically-based, comprehensive list of User Requirements. Investigations included current data reuse within the sector, the quality of the content itself and identification of topics with which Europeana can be of most use; as well as how researchers within these fields make best use of tools when analysing content.
In our investigations through the Europeana Cloud project, which are being continued in the context of the Europeana Research initiative, we took the approach from both users and providers. Within this presentation, Ι have selected two of these topics as case studies: the study of the Antiquity and Conflict-related Population Displacement. Both topics were selected for trial using Europeana’s current content, as well as other potential resources.
Both topics have showcased the need for improved metadata, and also highlighted the importance of more generic tools that match scholarly primitives and methods in order to encourage use and meaningful reuse of content within the platform. In this paper I will expand on each case study, highlighting similarities and differences between research communities, methods, tools and use of digital content, both within the Europeana ecosystem and beyond.
Alistair Bell, National Library of Scotland, (P); Naomi Harvey, Heriot-Watt University and National Library of Scotland, UK (P); Katherine Lloyd, Heriot-Watt University, UK
“Reimagining the relationship between collecting institutions and communities in the digital environment: Insights from Scotland’s Sounds”
Introduction
The digital environment presents significant opportunities, as well as challenges for ‘memory institutions’ such as libraries, archives and museums. The use of digital technology in the formation of distributed collection models offers the potential to decentralise the role of the institution in the preservation of digital cultural heritage. Digital technology utilised in this way ‘activates and actualises’ (Kidd, 2011) the debates surrounding co-production, co-curation and community empowerment often found in current cultural heritage rhetoric, by providing tools that enable the formation of new relationships between institutions and communities and facilitating participatory models of working. Such approaches encourage us to rethink the binary categories of ‘institutions’ and ‘users’ and instead focus our attention on the diversity of motivations and expectations of different stakeholders engaged in the preservation, access and use of digital cultural heritage, when attempting to understand the value of these resources.
In this paper, we will explore these issues through the case study of Scotland’s Sounds. Drawing on our respective roles as a curator and academics, we aim to examine both the practical and theoretical issues surrounding the network. In doing so, we critically engage with current debates on crowdsourcing, co-production, communities and the changing role of memory institutions within Critical Heritage Studies and archival and museum theory and practice. The paper will reflect on the experiences of practitioners, communities and individuals who have been involved in Scotland’s Sounds to date in order to critically reflect upon the following questions: What role can memory institutions play in the digital environment? What is the function of a collecting institution in an age where individuals and communities can share their collections online? Are institutional and non-institutional digital platforms for preserving and accessing cultural heritage sustainable? Does digital technology change the relationships between communities and memory institutions? And does digital technology afford an expansion of the remit of memory institutions, or indeed require institutions to change their remit entirely?
Scotland’s Sounds
The Scotland’s Sounds network is a network of individuals and organisations holding sound recordings, including many organisations in the museums, libraries and archives sector in national, local authorities, university, and community settings. Collectively the network has the overarching aim to improve the care of and access to Scotland’s recorded heritage sounds. As well as focusing on engaging with the public, the development is a collaborative activity strengthening ties between organisations hosting sound collections and sharing responsibility for their sustainable access.
This network is brought together by the specific challenges of sound as a format for both analogue and digital collections, and is open to include any sounds recorded in Scotland, about Scotland or stored in Scotland. This may be Gaelic song in Canna. Life stories of Scotland’s LGBT community. Recordings of bird song across Scotland. Interviews with Glasgow shipbuilders. Contemporary wildlife and natural sounds in Aberdeen. Instructional material from the National Piping Centre. Recordings of Scottish entertainers held in America. The scope of Scotland’s heritage recordings is extensive and fascinating.
Collectively the network has the overarching aim to improve the care of and the access to Scotland’s recorded heritage sounds. As well as focusing on engaging with the public, the development is a collaborative activity strengthening ties between organisations hosting sound collections and sharing responsibility for their sustainable access. This approach builds on what Keaney (2006) has referred to as ‘networks of reciprocity’, when describing a move towards closer working relationships between those in the public sector, a definition that we extend to include all those engaged in the collection and preservation of heritage for and on behalf of the public.
As sound recordings have been collected and preserved by different institutions, individuals and organisations, this has resulted in significant variations between collection format, accessibility and longevity. Many sound recordings are created outwith the domain of public institutions, instead held within community organisations which may lack the funding or expertise to both preserve and provide access to their sound material. Short-term preservation of sound collections is often possible through uploading content to online platforms (e.g. Soundcloud), but the long-term longevity of these digital collections is reliant on the commercial sustainability of such services. In contrast, sound collections held within cultural institutions may be inaccessible to their originating communities, due to difficulties in providing on-site access as a result of the absence of dedicated equipment and skills or a low priority for audio-visual material within the collections.
One of the major concerns Scotland’s Sounds therefore wanted to address was how to preserve access to 21st century sound recordings, by seizing the opportunities that digital environment offers, while overcoming the challenges that it presents. The network also seeks to understand what role each of the individuals and organisations can play in this digital environment, as collectors, donors, keepers and access points.
One service that Scotland’s Sounds considered to tackle these issues was the creation of an online public upload system allowing communities and individuals to donate their recordings to the collecting institutions. By openly encouraging the public to donate newly created digital material in the digital environment they already inhabit, Scotland’s Sounds could better ensure preservation of access to digital cultural heritage. While the technical mechanics of a public upload platform require testing, it is the organisational, ethical and legal concerns around a service like this that have postponed its introduction to date. These concerns include issues relating to the politics of selection, encompassing rights, ownership and the relationship between the institutions and the donor in the digital environment. How do collecting organisations involved in Scotland’s Sounds persuade people that donating their recordings is a good thing? Is it in their best interests to donate to institutions? Can communities and individuals retain a sense of ownership to the collections once they have been handed over?
Methodology
As a crucial part of the Scotland’s Sounds evolution, on-going evaluation through self-reflective practice has led to the recent recruitment of a PhD researcher as a ‘critical friend’, who will operate both inside and outside the network in order to analyse the issues identified above. The research, which is still in its preliminary stages, will draw upon a number of case studies of communities or organisations that are already involved with the Scotland’s Sound network in order to critically analyse the issues of ownership, access and attitudes towards collecting institutions that are emerging from ‘outside’ the institution, or individual and community perspectives. The research will also look for comparative examples in other national, international and local contexts to assess how lessons can be integrated in a Scottish specific context. This, in turn, will help to inform our approach to identifying the best solutions to using digital technology to foster sustainable relationships between collecting institutions and communities through a greater understanding of issues from a non-institutional perspective.
The value of this approach research lies in its privileging of the experiences and needs of communities and individuals engaged in collecting over institutional agendas when assessing the impact or value of digital cultural resources. Historically, it has been difficult to study the motivations of users of digital resources in depth; much research on digital engagement in the cultural heritage sector relies on user metrics, which offer limited insights into the issues that are fundamental to understanding the impact and value of Scotland’s Sounds or indeed our wider understanding of the nature of participatory practice in the digital environment.
Findings and Implications for Practice
The research contributes to existing debates around the capacity for digital technology to facilitate participatory approaches that challenge the curatorial privilege that Smith (2006) terms the ‘Authorised Heritage Discourse’. Although at an early stage, the experience of the project to date has indicated that the ‘transformative’ narrative surrounding the use of digital tools to engage people in the preservation and curation of their heritage is an unhelpful framework for understanding the motivations, expectations and experiences of collecting communities that are engaged in such activities. There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to understanding the benefits or challenges of distributed models of working. For example, some organisations and community groups have been highly critical of the concept of a distributed digital collection because of its perceived status as secondary to a physical collection. In contrast, others have criticised the value of a central repository and national collection, suggesting that such attempts simply aim to reassert the authority of the institution. These preliminary findings suggest that we need to move beyond assessing the value of participatory approaches on whether they are ‘democratic’ in their approach to the documentation, preservation and access to heritage in the digital environment, and instead attend to the ways in which different models of collecting have value for multiple stakeholders.
References
Keaney, E. (2006). From access to participation, cultural policy and civil renewal. London: Institute for Public Policy Research.
Kidd, J. (2011),”Enacting engagement online: framing social media use for the museum”,
Information Technology & People, Vol. 24 Iss 1 pp. 64 – 77
Smith, L. (2006). The Uses of Heritage, London and New York: Routledge
Peggy Sue Ewanyshyn, University of Alberta Libraries, Canada
“Concerns Around Digitization Projects in an Indigenous Community”
Currently, there is considerable interest in the lives of Indigenous peoples, especially as indigenous communities struggle to maintain their cultures amidst the uniformity of the ever-engulfing mainstream culture. Armed with the latest technological offerings, several indigenous communities in Canada and beyond have experienced breakthroughs that have led to a renaissance of their traditional culture. At the same time, the scrutiny that such technology allows has resulted in some indigenous groups retreating into the background, to hold their spot online for a later date, if at all.
This paper relates the findings of working with an indigenous community to determine the community’s potential digitization needs, prior to an opportunity to digitize. For this small case study set in a First Nation community in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, community members were interviewed about their perceptions of the transfer of indigenous knowledge (IK), through both traditional avenues and current technology. The study aimed to determine whether the digitization of artifacts (images, maps, stories, etc.) would be an appropriate additional mode of communicating traditional values and beliefs and preserving cultural heritage and indigenous knowledge.
The readiness of the community to participate in future digitization projects was evaluated, and valuable feedback from potential users of a future museum was gathered. In addition to the effects of social issues, politics, and economics, interviewees expressed a fear of exploitation and lack of support as major factors inhibiting their engagement with digital initiatives. Until such time when indigenous peoples feel that their IK will be honoured and respected, some will be as reluctant to deposit their cultural memory online as they may be to deposit it in a memory institution.
The indirect costs of digitization projects in an indigenous setting in Canada inadvertently came to light through this study. These costs are not necessarily monetary in nature, though financial considerations can hinder the development of digital initiatives. But there are other factors worth considering before determining whether the potential use of digitized materials will benefit a community enough to warrant the hidden costs.
The findings indicate that digital projects are most successful when the impetus for such initiatives arises directly from community stakeholders. Since the study was completed, the community participated actively in a major digitization project, having gained competencies in assessing the value of collaborative digital projects. The presentation will conclude with examples of current digitization initiatives that are responding to these considerations by empowering communities to take control of their cultural heritage and how it is presented online.
Aims
When conducting user studies, if a group of non-users is discovered, it is pertinent to consider and address, through qualitative research, how their needs could best be met (Showers, 2012, p. 68). This study aimed to demonstrate the value of looking closely at a community before plunging hastily into a digitization project, as “efforts to design, implement, and evaluate digital libraries must be rooted in the information needs, characteristics, and contexts of the people who will or may use those libraries” (Marchionini, Plaisant, & Komlodi, 2003, p. 119). Ideally, technology can be adapted so that the cultures of indigenous communities “would be preserved and public perception of these communities improved” (Worcman, 2002, par. 1).
The results of this study could be used at a later time to inform the design of a future digital collection of indigenous cultural heritage materials for this community, as the findings will provide the “contextual information” concerning the users that will help specialists “to design and provide systems and services that will function effectively and efficiently within those contexts” (Pickard & Dixon, 2004, par. 26). One objective of the research is that a clearer picture of the concerns of indigenous peoples toward digitizing their cultural heritage emerges, so that future digitization projects will address, if not alleviate, those concerns.
Research questions
The following research questions drove the study:
– What are the issues that affect the development of services to meet the needs and wants
of an indigenous community?
– What are the cultural inhibitors to providing digital content?
– Would digitization be accepted as an appropriate (additional) mode of communicating
traditional values and beliefs and preserving cultural heritage and indigenous knowledge?
Methods
The research problem warranted an in-depth study of the perceptions of individuals. Qualitative design was most appropriate for this study because it is concerned with “understanding how people interpret their experiences, how they construct their worlds, and what meaning they attribute to their experiences” (Merriam, 2009, p. 5), and therefore can ideally address the research questions. Yin recommends using the case study method “to understand a real-life phenomenon in depth” if such understanding includes “important contextual conditions” (Yin, 2009, p. 18), as it does in the circumstances under study.
According to Dixon, Pickard, and Robson (2002), rich, meaningful data can be collected through trying “to seek an understanding of the individual user’s value construction, experience and integration into his or her own reality within specific context” (p. 6). As the researcher believes that “knowledge is constructed rather than discovered” (Stake, 1995, p. 99), and that constructivist inquiry “can offer understanding of the meanings behind the actions of individuals” (Pickard & Dixon, 2004, par. 24), a constructivist case study was planned. Constructivist case studies “provide rich pictures of individuals and their interaction with processes, social relationships and organisational frameworks” (Pickard, 2005, p.173). This rich data will illuminate the findings of the study.
The data set consisted of transcribed interviews, field notes, and documents that were accessible. As the material collected was of a reasonable size, no special data analysis software was employed to manage the material. A field journal, for notes from interviews, observations, reflections, etc., as well as word processing of transcriptions was adequate to manage the case study database. An audit trail was recorded in the field journal, with pertinent dates and experiences noted. Printed copies of material were analyzed for emerging themes, as the data was collected. This ongoing data analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 2008, p. 197) allowed for subsequent interviews to cover gaps and also revealed areas that needed clarification (Leedy & Ormrod, 2005, p. 136).
Findings
The research aimed to discover what cultural inhibitors exist to providing digital content and which issues affect the development of services that would best meet the needs and wants of the community studied. The main inhibitors are 1) fear of exploitation and 2) lack of support for cultural initiatives. The issues that affect the development of services tend to be 1) social, 2) political, and 3) economic in nature. The themes that emerged from the data that was collected were highly interrelated.
One of the most significant findings of this study is that there are many issues facing the community that interfere with its ability to actively promote cultural heritage through digital initiatives. This study illuminates that social issues like alcohol abuse, political issues like divisions within the Nation itself, and economic issues like inadequate funding, may continue to impede the uptake of digital initiatives of IK by indigenous communities. In order for this particular community to be truly responsive to the needs of its inhabitants, a digital project has to come from within, with elders engaged from the start.
References
Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. (2008). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (3rd ed). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Dixon, P., Pickard, A., & Robson, H. (2002). Developing a criteria-based quality framework for measuring value. Performance Measurement and Metrics, 3(1), 5-9.
doi:10.1108/14678040210429886
Leedy, P. D., & Ormrod, J. E. (2005). Practical research: Planning and design (8th ed). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.
Marchionini, G., Plaisant, C., & Komlodi, A. (2003). The people in digital libraries: Multifaceted approaches to assessing needs and impact. In A. P. Bishop (Ed.), Digital library use: Social practice in design and evaluation (pp. 119-160). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Merriam, S. B. (2009). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Pickard, A. (2005). The role of effective intervention in promoting the value of electronic
information services in the learning process: Case studies in higher education.
Performance Measurement and Metrics, 6(3), 172-182. doi:10.1108/14678040510636739
Pickard, A., & Dixon, P. (2004). The applicability of constructivist user studies: How can
constructivist inquiry inform service providers and system designers? Information
Research, 9(3), paper 175.
Showers, B. (2012). A strategic approach to the understanding and evaluation of impact. In L. M. Hughes (Ed.), Evaluating and measuring the value, use and impact of digital collections (pp. 63-71). London: Facet Publishing.
Stake, R. E. (1995). The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Worcman, K. (2002). Digital division is cultural exclusion. But is digital inclusion cultural inclusion? D-Lib Magazine, 8(3). doi:10.1045/march2002-worcman
Yin, R. K. (2009). Case study research: Design and methods (4th ed). Thousand Oaks, CA.:
Sage.
12 DECEMBER 2016
SESSION 2
Daisy Abbott, Glasgow School of Art, UK(P); Stuart Jeffrey, Glasgow of Art, UK (P); Kevin Burden, University of Hull, UK; Anastasia Gouseti, University of Hull, UK
“The REVISIT project: legacy heritage visualisations and educational potential”
The REVISIT project explored how immersive 3D models generated in heritage and research contexts can be used to deliver innovative teaching and learning materials for use in schools. Digital technologies play an integral part in educational strategies and methodologies, with a range of tools being used to support students and teachers in their everyday lessons. However, despite the wealth of research on digital technology use within schools, few studies have so far looked at the teaching and learning potential of pre-existing immersive 3D models, in particular the re-use of the large number of digital heritage datasets. The REVISIT project is a one year collaboration between the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Hull. It was funded as part of a special 10 year anniversary ‘follow on’ funding call from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
Through a comparative case study of three primary and secondary schools in the UK, this paper investigates how a legacy 3D model of the 1938 British Empire Exhibition and its associated digital archive was used by teachers and students to support teaching and learning activities across different subject areas. In particular, the project evaluated the potential and impact of this model of access in formal educational settings and highlights a number of salient issues and challenges that emerged. These include, amongst others: the drivers for student engagement; the desire for creative engagement with the 3D and archive data; co-creation of learning materials; modes of learning; and the wider pressures of teacher time, curriculum regimes, and technical issues. In line with the conference themes, this paper considers the range of actors and factors that underpin the outcomes and sustainability of the use of legacy 3D datasets in education and concludes with some suggestions for the future use of these models in this context.
Aims
The 1938 British Empire Exhibition was an architecturally significant event, incorporating over 100 buildings and attracting over 12.5million people to Bellahouston Park, Glasgow over its six month run. Funded by the AHRC, in 2005, Glasgow School of Art’s School of Simulation and Visualisation (formerly Digital Design Studio) constructed a thoroughly researched and highly accurate 3D digital model of the Exhibition as well as a digital, multimedia archive content relating to the Exhibition, its visitors and its international impact. The primary aim of REVISIT was to attempt to transform these research focussed digital assets into innovative learning tools targeted at school learners and covering multiple aspects of the curriculum; to make these learning tools as widely accessible as possible; and to increase our understanding of what value, if any, such assets have for teachers and learners through a pilot study.
Research context
Virtual environments and 3D models have been used across various disciplines and levels of education since the 1990s. Potential learning benefits in both primary and secondary education include opportunities for rich learner engagement; the possibility to explore, manipulate and construct virtual objects; creative interactions where active participation leads to digital forms of cultural production and user-led innovation and co-production. One 2011 review reported that virtual 3D models and environments are predominantly used in the subject areas of science and mathematics, with a smaller number in the social sciences. There are now several examples in the literature that highlight the pedagogical potential of such technologies across a range of subjects including ecology; foreign language learning; maths; science, epidemiology, and creative writing. As learning in virtual 3D models and environments gains momentum there arises an array of challenges and barriers that need to be considered. Despite the plethora of studies that have explored the pedagogical opportunities of specially created tools, very few research studies have looked at the re-use of virtual 3D models originally designed for other purposes (such as research), how well they fit within educational settings. This is particularly relevant for those producing high-quality 3D datasets from original research and who wish to maximise the learning potential and impact from their work – an ongoing challenge across the cultural heritage domain.
Challenges include the availability and cost of robust hardware and internet connectivity; the pedagogical skills needed for creating relevant and meaningful tasks in virtual worlds and the time to plan and design these tasks; usability and fit within existing classroom procedures. Teachers are reported to perceive digital 3D as a means of enriching existing practice rather than transforming it and innovative practices are limited by the current focus on standards and individual performance. Similarly, teaching practice is highly dependent on confidence with both subject-specific and cross-curricular themes as well as a teacher’s willingness to work outside the ‘curricular comfort zone’.
Results
REVISIT collaborated with three different schools to define appropriate, curriculum-driven themes around which to base immersive, interactive ‘virtual tours’ of the 3D model, which incorporate both learning materials and teaching and learning activities. It became quickly evident that, where there was engagement from teachers and students, there was also a desire to be the producers (rather than passive consumers) of content using both the 3D immersive model, its archive of related material, and additional material created by the students. This resulted in a collection of 3D narratives, created by both the project team and the children themselves, exploring different subjects via different aspects of the Exhibition. Approaches varied within and across age groups and subject interests. Examples include investigations of a very specific subject (e.g. coal) using just one building within the Empire Exhibition model; linking up a series of buildings on a particular subject (e.g. pavilions from Commonwealth countries); using numerical data from vintage radio broadcasts in maths exercises; and adding original photographs comparing how Bellahouston Park looked then and how it looks now. As the project encouraged creative responses to the 3D model, research materials, and delivery technology, REVISIT’s results include a reflection on this creative, non-didactic mode of engaging young learners with 3D research data and the effects of the creative responses created by the students themselves. The REVISIT team used ethnographic approaches including interviews and participant observation to explore engagement, enjoyment, and specific curricular learning outcomes and produce a robust evaluation of the use and impact of this mode of learning. In this paper we will also highlight a number of policy, technical and engagement issues that arose during the research process. Through reflecting on both the positive outcomes and the barriers to educational re-use of legacy datasets, expected and unexpected, we will suggest approaches to 3D dataset creation that will go some way to increasing their utility, and therefore re-use, in educational contexts.
Laia Pujol-Tost, Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
“Evaluating VR-mediated experiences: a Cultural Presence Questionnaire”
One of the main goals of Virtual Heritage is currently to build 3D reconstructions of archaeological objects and sites for their general dissemination. However, thanks to the immersive and interactive character of VR, it may also allow a more direct understanding of the culture they belong to. This partially overlaps with the HCI concept of Cultural Presence (Riva et al. 2002; Jones 2005), presented some years ago in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), but never fully investigated.
Aims
The two-year EU-funded project LEAP (Learning of Archaeology through Presence), undertaken at Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona, aimed to develop this crossroad area in three steps. Firstly, by building a theoretical and methodological framework based on a new understanding of Cultural Presence (Pujol and Champion, 2012). Secondly, by designing and implementing a VR-mediated experience (called “ÇH3D”) of the renowned UNESCO World Heritage Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük (Turkey). Through the concept of Cultural Presence, and in contrast to current 3D models seeking photorealism and aiming at simulation, {LEAP] adopted a lightweight approach (Turner et al. 2013) based on a general feeling of verisimilitude and aiming at an “Enhanced virtuality”, that is, different forms of guidance aimed at enhancing learning.
The third and final step was the evaluation of the cognitive, emotional and learning impact of the reconstruction on a selected group of end-users. From this perspective, the goal of ÇH3D was to provide empirically tested design and evaluation guidelines for virtual environments that aim at enhancing understanding, relevance and enjoyment of Cultural Heritage. More specifically, it wanted to test if an increasing feeling of Cultural Presence, that is, of “being then and there” (generated in different versions of the virtual environment by successively introducing objects, text, characters, scenes and narrations), obtained better results regarding the aforementioned aspects, in comparison with a purely architectural reconstruction of the site.
Evaluation methods
The evaluation was based on a between-subjects experimental design. 85 participants (47% male and 53% female; 12-80 years old; diverse backgrounds; different levels of experience with technology and Cultural Heritage) explored ÇH3D while being recorded, and filled in two questionnaires. The pre-experience form contained questions related to demography, and previous knowledge about and attitudes towards Cultural Heritage, VR technologies, and Neolithic societies.
The post-experience form corresponded to a novel Cultural Presence Questionnaire (CPQ), which was built and pilot-tested after an exhaustive review of Presence assessment tools. The questionnaire contained 109 questions, divided in the following sections/subscales: general feeling of Cultural Presence; perception; self-perception; world’s behaviour; interaction; attention; willingness to experience Presence; emotions; characters; culture; and finally, detailed questions about learning.
Also, a standard form was used to gather observations from the video recordings. This form comprised the followings aspects considered by previous authors (Freeman et al. 2000) as indicators of Presence: partial and overall time; comments; help; navigation path; reflex body responses; non-verbal social behaviours; and change in posture.
Results
The subsequent analyses, both qualitative (e.g. multimodal, interpretation) and quantitative (e.g. correlations, Chi square, ANOVA, Principal Component Analysis and Exploratory Factorial Analysis), provided the first comprehensive, empirically tested results about the four main factors underlying Cultural Presence; the positive but not linear correlation between Cultural Presence and learning; and the fact that virtual environments are not universal tools, but need to be designed according to explicit goals and taking into account specific user characteristics.
Conclusions
At the i Symposium on Evaluating Digital Cultural Resources we would like to present the novel CPQ, and to debate with researchers and stakeholders belonging to different fields its scope and potential as standard evaluation tool for VR-mediated experiences in Cultural Heritage.
References
Freeman, J., Avons, S.E., Meddis, R., Pearson, D.E. & IJsselsteijn, W.A. (2000), “Using behavioural realism to estimate presence: A study of the utility of postural responses to motion-stimuli”, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 9: 149-164.
Jones, M. T. (2005). “The impact of Cultural Transmission through Bishoujo Games”, PsychNology Journal 3(3): 292-311.
Pujol, L., Champion, E. (2012), Evaluating Pres-ence in Cultural Heritage Projects. International Journal of Heritage Studies 18(1): 83-102.
Riva, G., Castelnuovo, G., Gaggioli, A., Mantovani, F. (2002), Towards a cultural approach to presence. In Proc. 5th Annual International Work-shop Presence ’02 (2002), pp. 305-309.
Turner, Ph., Turner, S. and Burrows, L. (2013), “Creating a sense of place with a deliberately constrained virtual environment”, International Journal of Cognitive Performance Support, 1(1).
12 DECEMBER 2016
SESSION 3
Areti Damala, University of Strathclyde, UK (P); Ian Ruthven, University of Strathclyde, UK
“Every object tells a story”: Deciphering the impact of digitally enabled tangible and multisensory museum visiting experiences”
Digitally mediated learning and the use of digital interpretive media is becoming more and more commonplace in museums of the 21st century. However, there is still a lot of concern and debate on whether these digital learning interpretive resources assist visitors in getting the best out of their visit or whether they compete with the real museum artefacts and objects on display causing distraction and isolation; screen-based museum applications and interactives more in particular have often been characterized as attention grabbers. This raises the question of whether technology can be used in ways which -rather than digitally complementing or “augmenting” the physical object on display- bring back the attention of the visitor to the physical and tangible properties of heritage artefacts, ideally by engaging the visitor physically, emotionally and cognitively.
Material encounters with digital cultural heritage (meSch, http://mesch-project.eu/) is an EU funded project which seeks to provide answers to the above question by exploring the potential of digitally enabled tangible, embodied and multisensory museum visiting experiences. This is made possible through technologies of the internet of things were different types of sensors, small computational devices and their wireless networks are interweaved with smart tangibles the museum visitor can interact with. In order to showcase the potential of tangible and embodied interaction, an important number of museum interactives and prototypes as well as specific case-studies -which took the form of open to the public, temporary exhibitions- were developed within the life-cycle of the project.
This contribution focuses on the ways the meSch approach was integrated in the temporary exhibition The Hague and the Atlantic Wall: War in the City of Peace which opened to the public from April until November 2015 in Museon museum, the Hague, Netherlands. The exhibition focuses on the Atlantic Wall which was erected during World War II along the European west coast. Within this context, a broad strip throughout the city of The Hague was demolished to make room for the Atlantic Wall. The exhibition plan was explicitly based on the city map, with museum exhibits and artefacts arranged in “visiting stations”, representing different city neighbourhoods and public spaces. The visitors had therefore the chance to recognise street names, buildings, and neighbourhoods of The Hague. At each visiting station (exhibition section), the objects on display served as entry points for different narratives, topics and exhibition themes (e.g. “How was it to be forced to leave your home? To enter or leave the fortress? To experience the launch of a V2 rocket? To live in the almost empty fortress?”).
At each “visiting station”, each story could be narrated from three different perspectives: this of the Dutch civilian, the German soldier, or the Dutch civil servant, involved in the evacuation of the city. In order to “unlock” and activate these narratives, the visitors had to pick up one or more of the six replicas that were available at the beginning of the exhibition (“check-in” station). These were exact copies of original World War II everyday-life objects that were also exhibited at the “check-in” station, alongside the box with the replicas. Thus, a scenting bag with surrogate tea was used for the Dutch version of the civilian perspective and a box of surrogate sugar for the English version of the same perspective. A Delft blue mug, once given as a Christmas gift to German soldiers, was recreated using 3D printing to represent the German perspective in Dutch, while a phrasebook given to German soldiers was used for the English version. The armband worn by a civil servant or the ID issued by the German authorities for access to restricted areas reflected the perspective of an official (Dutch version and English version respectively). RFID tags able to read using NFC (Near Field Communication Technology) were integrated within each object. The replicas could thus activate the audio and multimedia contents available at each visiting station.
A mixed-methods summative evaluation was carried out using qualitative and quantitative research methodologies in which approximately 120 visitors participated. During a period of two weeks, an interdisciplinary team of researchers worked on site using videos, photos, observations, semi-structured interviews and a survey. The evaluation set as a goal to investigate the following questions:
• Use of the smart replicas: How do visitors use and share them and what is their impact on the museum visiting experience?
• Do the visitors appreciate the different narratives and perspectives?
• How does the multimodality factor work out for the visitors and how are the different exhibition components (real museum objects, replicas, audio narratives, slideshows, text labels and signs, multimedia stations, polling stations) used?
• What is the impact of emotions and memories for learning and meaning-making?
Our contribution will highlight the complementarity of the different evaluation methods we used. By means of focusing on the main findings of our survey (in which approximately 90 visitors participated) -all centred on our main research questions- we will illustrate that it is by means of meaningfully combining both quantitative and qualitative data that we were able to understand the “why” as in comparison with the “what” of what the visitors experienced as revealed by the survey. The main findings of the latter will be presented, “triangulated” and informed the qualitative data gathered. Therefore our contribution has three main goals and objectives: 1. provide an honest account of what worked and did not work in the exhibition, 2. investigate the methodological challenges of research design for tangible and embodied museum visiting experiences as well as lessons learned in the field 3. Argue for the value of combining –whenever possible- both qualitative and quantitative approaches for deciphering the complex interaction mechanisms and the underlying meaning making processes of visitors engaging in activities within heritage and free-choice learning environments.
Bibliography
Damala, Areti, Merel van der Vaart, Loraine Clarke, Eva Hornecker, Gabriela Avram, Hub Kockelkorn and Ian Ruthven. “Evaluating tangible and multisensory museum visiting experiences: Lessons learned from the meSch project.” MW2016: Museums and the Web 2016. Published January 29, 2016. Consulted October 14, 2016.
http://mw2016.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/evaluating-tangible-and-multisensory-museum-visiting-experiences-lessons-learned-from-the-mesch-project/
Diamond, J., J.J. Luke, & D.H. Uttal. (1999). Practical evaluation guide: Tools for museums and other informal educational settings. Rowman Altamira.
Dudley, S. (2010). “Museum materialities: Objects, sense and feeling.” In S. Dudley (ed.). Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations. Routledge, 1-18.
Hamilakis, Yannis. Archaeology and the senses: human experience, memory, and affect. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Hooper‐Greenhill, Eilean. “Measuring learning outcomes in museums, archives and libraries: The Learning Impact Research Project (LIRP).” International Journal of Heritage Studies 10, no. 2 (2004): 151-174.
Levent, Nina, and Alvaro Pascual-Leone, eds. The multisensory museum: cross-disciplinary perspectives on touch, sound, smell, memory, and space. Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
Petrelli, Daniela, Elena Not, Areti Damala, Dick van Dijk, and Monika Lechner. “meSch–Material Encounters with Digital Cultural Heritage.” In Euro-Mediterranean Conference, pp. 536-545. Springer International Publishing, 2014.
Laura Gottlieb, Digital Heritage Center, Sweden
“Evaluation Study of Four Installations at the Swedish Museum of Performing Arts”
This paper discusses the implications of using the MIQS method for evaluating digital resources with a wide range of museum audiences. The discussion is based on a study at the Swedish Museum of Performing Arts where four digital installations were evaluated with the museum’s various target audiences. The Swedish Museum of Performing Arts was previously known as the Music Museum and is re-opening in February 2017, with the wider theme of music, dance and theatre. To engage visitors with these themes, several digital installations are being developed.
The following installations were evaluated:
1) An interactive table for visitors to sample their own musical compositions.
2) An installation which produces sound and visuals projected on wall in response to a visitor’s movements.
3) A display of shoes and a touch screen that retrieves videos and text about the shoes.
4) An installation which captures a visitor’s pose and shows a similar pose from the museum’s archive of photographs.
The aim of the study was to gather information about how the installations could be improved before being completed and installed at the museum. The study included the following target audiences: children, teenagers, young adults, people with disabilities (cognitive, physical, visual) and professionals in the field of interaction design, museology and digital heritage. A total of six tailored focus groups were held with each target audience and feedback was collected with a questionnaire and discussions with the focus group facilitators. The MIQS method provided a framework for the collection of feedback about the installations.
The MIQS method was developed at the Vision for Museums research lab in 2006, and combines the study of use qualities of digital artifacts (Stolterman and Löwgren, 2004) together with museum studies (Gottlieb, 2011). Valuable insights can be gained by discussing an installation in terms of its use qualities and can inform a study about how to enhance its visitor engagement and the overall exhibition theme. Incorporating this into museum studies and the field of digital heritage provides a systematic approach to describing important features of an installation and exhibition space as a whole.
The focus group discussions and feedback were framed within these use qualities categories: Motivation, Immediate Experience, Social Implications, Creation of Meaning, and Structural Qualities. By appropriating different means of collecting feedback, all target audiences were able to give comments on the use qualities of the digital installations. These were some of the results:
1) This installation was the favorite from the four evaluated installations for a majority of the participants. Across all focus groups, participants enjoyed the experience (Motivation) and thought it was easy to use (Immediate Experience). However, upon further discussion it became clear that the functions of the installation were not so intuitive (Structural Qualities). Participants were not sure how to manipulate the sounds on the interactive table. Certain accessibility issues also became apparent, for instance, tactile representations on the interactive table would enhance the experience for the visually impaired (Immediate Experience).
2) This installation was a favorite amongst the young adults and people with disabilities. It was easy to use (Immediate Experience) and created a social cohesion amongst the people using the installation and watching (Social Implications). Different age groups displayed different levels of comfort when interacting with the installation. The teenager groups were more uncomfortable and self-conscious when trying the installation. Most of the feedback centred on developing the sounds and visuals (Structural Qualities). Many thought the sounds could incorporate more instruments and musical styles. The focus group with professionals thought that the visuals should be more relevant to the theme of dance and need to be simplified.
3) Only one participant thought this was their favorite installation. Younger participants did not think this installation was very engaging (Motivation) while older participants valued the installation for being more informative (Creation of Meaning). Attention is needed on making the experience more enjoyable. One suggestion was to change the activity of the installation to make it a game or a quiz, instead of a simple interaction of pressing the touchscreen to retrieve information.
4) This installation was most popular with children and teenagers. In both focus groups half of the participants chose this as their favorite installation. For this installation there was a clear divide in what use qualities different target groups prioritize. Whereas the children favored the installation for its playability (Motivation), the older participants from the young adults and disabilities group did not favor it because of its apparent lack of purpose (Creation of Meaning). Contextualizing the installation’s content, for example by adding brief descriptions of the archival photographs, could address the lack of clear purpose. Small changes to the interphase and graphics were also pointed out (Structural Qualities).
This evaluation study provided valuable feedback about the strengths and weaknesses of the installations in terms of their use qualities and design features needed in the exhibition space. It also gave some indication about which use qualities different audiences prioritized.
Bibliography
Gottlieb, H., Insulander, E. and Simonsson, H. (2004) Access in Mind — Enhancing the
Relationship to Contemporary Art, ICHIM, Berlin.
Gottlieb, H., Geijer, L. and Insulander, E. (2006) It Felt As If One Was There — Visitor Response to an Interactive Museum Exhibition as an Example of Learning in Informal Settings, DREAM ’06 Conference Proceedings, Odense.
Gottlieb, H., and Simonsson, H., (2006) Designing Narrative and Interpretative Tools, Engage.
Gottlieb, H. (2006) Visitor Focus in 21st Century Museums. Stockholm: Interactive Institute.
Gottlieb, H. (2006) Interactive Salon 2006/7. Katalog. Stockholm: Interactive Institute.
Gottlieb, H. (2008) “Interactive Adventures”, in Tallon, L. and Walker, K. (ed.), Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience, AltaMira Press.
Gottlieb, H. (2011) Designing Engagement for Art, Exploring Interfaces and Interpretative Content of Digital Heritage Artifacts in Museum Environments. Ph.D. Thesis. University College Dublin.
Löwgren, J. and Stolterman, E. (2004) Thoughtful Interaction Design – A Design Perspective on Information Technology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
George Barker, Royal Anthropological Institute / University of Amsterdam / LIMA media art archive Amsterdam
“Redesigning a Design Museum: Digital Collections and Access at the Cooper Hewitt”
In 2011 the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum closed its doors for a three year, ninety-one billion dollar renovation project. It can be said that the project was twofold in its aims. Firstly, industry specialists were hired to restore and preserve the architecture of the Georgian style Carnegie Mansion located in Manhattan’s Museum Mile. Yet also, and perhaps paradoxically, the project also introduced new so-called “immersive, creative technologies” to create an invigorated experience of the collection and a transformation of the museum . An ostensible tension between restoration and renovation and between ‘old’ museological architecture and ‘new’ digital possibilities of access are palpable in the so called new Cooper Hewitt experience. In a space where monolithic black 4K touchscreen tables are placed alongside traditional artefacts that span thirty centuries of design, we must not only ask the question of how the integration of digital technologies into the museum affects a visitor’s material relationship with the original artefacts of the collection. Instead, as Andrea Witcomb writes on the implementation of multimedia technologies into museum spaces, “there is a need to begin from a different starting point, one that does not presume such a radical and politicized opposition between the material and the virtual” . In this paper I will consider a variety of starting points from which to question the extent to which the creation of a digital collection and its models and variant forms of access can be considered a radical break or epistemic rupture in both the museological curation of and the visitors access to the Cooper Hewitt’s (formerly exclusively material) collection.
The paper will be segmented, dividing equivalent attention to the effect and affect of three digital technologies of interest in the ‘new’ Cooper Hewitt experience, namely the 4K tables, the ‘archive’ pen, and the ‘immersion room’. Whilst digital apparatuses have become ubiquitous in contemporary museum environs, the renovation of the Cooper Hewitt is remarkable because of its scale as well as its steampunk aesthetic where the old ‘material’ and ‘new’ digital collide and intersect. It is significant to examine the introduction of digital-museological structures that claim any form of ‘newness’, as they may well serve as rollout models of pedagogy, preservation and access for future museum curators and designers. This is especially so here because the Cooper Hewitt has since seen an influx of new visitors alongside an increase in average visitation time, a complete rejuvenation in activity incited by the implementation of technological structures of access. In light of the themes of this symposium, my paper will pay specific attention to the models of access that are available for the digital collection of the Cooper Hewitt, evaluating the impact of the environments opened up by digital resources that potentiate the transformation of the visitor into a participatory prod-user of their own archived collection. Moreover, I will draw upon and call into question theories of digital ontology, harnessing phenomenological theory in conjunction with a historical overview of the Cooper Hewitt in order to substantiate the logic and limitations of this hybridised form of access to the design collection.
Looking first at the 4K touch tables, which now spatially dominate the exhibition rooms of the Cooper Hewitt, I establish that a parallelism of old and new is exhibited in the new museum’s access capacities for its collection. The Cooper Hewitt collection houses a wide spectrum of designs including illustrations, ceramics, wallpapers, ornaments and furniture. Irrevocably a textural impetus and appreciation of materiality lays at the heart of many of these artefacts, textures which are maleated through the replicated sheen of the digital representation that is available for the artifacts on these tablet-type glossy screens. As Wanda Strauven states on touch screen technology, when we do reach out and grab the objects on the table, we “don’t touch the image, but the material surface of the screen”, so that we are more concerned with “manipulating data and transferring information” so that technology of the tables becomes the museological object . At the same time, such a model of haptic engagement with the collection was encouraged by the Cooper Hewitt sisters from the advent of the museum in 1897. Reportedly, they appreciated whimsicality and included “peepshows, magic lanterns, kaleidoscopes and zoetropes” alongside static objects which invited visitors to not only observe but also to interact with and touch the collection. When configuring the genealogy of the tablet within early twentieth century technologies of image manipulation that were within the curatorial remit of the Cooper Hewitt a century ago, it becomes possible to counterpoint some haptic apprehensions about the immaterial surrogacy of the digitised collection that is on display here.
The interactions made possible with the digital surrogate collection at the Cooper Hewitt becomes an unavoidable facet of the museological experience by the introduction of the pen which is given to each visitor upon entry. Essentially the Cooper Hewitt pen has two functions; to design, and to archive. It foremost encourages a user engagement with both the artifactual and (digital) referential object by facilitating an oscillation between two artifacts, as visitors store data in the pen from a save point located next to the original object, thereafter uploading this information onto the tables in the museum where they can then use the pen to move and manipulate its digital surrogate. In the very physical movement required between original and digital object, the idea of media convergence wherein “old and new media will interact in ever more complex ways” as written by Henri Jenkins becomes realised. This mode of visitor engagement may sit uncomfortably with conservative models of museum pedagogy wherein haptic play and interaction could be seen to encourage improper attention and negate a deeper understanding of the material, historical and intellectual properties of an object. However, the pen also allows the contemporary museum environ to shift both physically and ideologically, as commented on by Claire Bishop, from its alleged former status as “a storehouse of treasures” to a reimagined structure as “an archive of the commons”. Upon exit of the museum, visitors are given a code to login to their own findings at home, where they can revisit their independently curated exhibition on the Cooper Hewitt website. Therefore, the pen amalgamates three lives of the object, the physical object, the digital table surrogate, and the online photographic representation. The Cooper Hewitt’s pen allows for the creation of off-site online collections in a way that is only possible through the integration of new digital design, providing not only new modes of access, but new epistemologies in which to reconceive what it is a museum and its visitor today does and can do.
The potential for the transformation of the visitor into a ‘prod-user’ of their own online collection is delimited by the actuality of the online activity currently taking place: only twenty five percent of patrons ever log in to access their digital collection off-site. At the same time, the newness of this digital philosophy can be called into question by the ‘practical working laboratory’.
The potential for the transformation of the visitor into a ‘prod-user’ of their own online collection is delimited by the actuality of the online activity currently taking place: only twenty five percent of patrons ever log in to access their digital collection off-site. At the same time, the newness of this digital philosophy can be called into question by the ‘practical working laboratory’ philosophy that was implemented by the Cooper Hewitt sisters, who always encouraged visitors to create designs within the museum, move the objects of the collection, and take their replications home. The Immersion Room in the Cooper Hewitt is the perfect example of how the ubiquitous implementation of digital technologies can be considered not only a step towards the future, but a simultaneous step into the past for the museum, one that has looked back at the traditions of older media practices and adopted them into the philosophy of newer media. Here, wallpaper patterns from the collection are projected on to the walls of what used to be Margaret Carnagie’s bedroom, highlighting an immediate tension between the material museum object which carries “weight, aura, evidence, the passage of time” and multimedia, which is supposed as being “immediate, surface, temporary, popular and democratic” by Witcomb. A particular epistemic rupture emerges because of the digitisation of the wallpaper swatchbook, which replaces feeling with swiping, and in doing so can be said to eschew the material aura of a very material artefact which is often ingrained with bumps, dots and patina. At the same time, when going beyond the obvious schism of multimedia materiality, we can consider how this particular emphasis on design, digital or non-digital, borrows both from the museum’s future and its past. The capacity to upload pictures to Instagram and the Cooper Hewitt website alike rekindles the sense of the museum functioning as a participatory archive, creating a new space for user-generated collections to exist, a philosophy fostered in the late nineteenth century. If anything is to become apparent through the analysis that I have outlined here, it is that there is a renewal, a renovation, a restoration and a rethink all at once, amalgamated by a convergence of old and new media in the Cooper Hewitt, which allows us to think of how digital collections can relate not only to the future of museological access, but also the past.
References
1.http://www.cooperhewitt.org/new-experience/ accessed January 6th 2016.
2. Andrea Witcomb, “The Materiality of Virtual Technologies: A New Approach to Thinking About the Impact of Multimedia in Museums” in Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage, A Critical Discourse (Eds.) Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine (London: The MIT Press, 2007), 36.
3. Wanda Strauven in Touching The Screen Conference, April 28 2015, University of Oslo, http://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/english/research/news-and-events/events/conferences/2015/touching-the-screen-program-folder-new.pdf accessed January 6th 2016.
12 DECEMBER 2016
SESSION 4
Karen Brookfield, The Heritage Lottery Fund, UK
“Making Heritage Digital: A Funder’s Perspective”
The Heritage Lottery Fund is the largest dedicated funder of heritage in the UK; since 1994 more than £7bn raised by National Lottery players has supported over 40,000 projects in all areas of heritage from buildings, monuments, landscapes and museums to cultural traditions and people’s memories and experiences.
Over these 22 years society has experienced a transformation through the development of digital technology. This includes many uses of technology to record, interpret, and make accessible our diverse heritage, and to engage people and communities with it. HLF encourages, and can fund, the use of digital technology in any way appropriate to achieving the objectives of the projects it supports.
In 2016 almost every HLF-funded project is using digital tools. Whilst the picture is encouraging in terms of organisations adopting the technology, there are questions around quality and capacity: discoverability and usability of digital resources; public engagement; collecting data and measuring success; sustainability; and the ability of organisations to survive and thrive in a digital world.
Drawing on the experience of HLF-funded projects and research findings, this paper will offer a funder’s perspective on the challenges of creating and evaluating digital cultural resources.
Kati Price, Victoria & Albert Museum, UK
“Choosing the Right Yardstick: Reflections from London’s Victoria & Albert Museum”
How do you know you’re using the right tools for measuring and evaluating a digital product’s success? Kati Price shares some of the tools, approaches and processes that help the team understand how people are consuming the V&A’s content and resources online. From formal evaluation to guerrilla testing, the right tools and approaches need to be deployed at the right stage. Talking us through the digital product lifecycle Kati will identify what are the best methods and approaches to use at each stage of digital development.
Harry Verwayen, Europeana Foundation, Netherlands
“Impact Eats Sustainability for Lunch (Part 2)!”
We recently released Europeana’s first impact assessment case study that was completely based on our impact assessment framework (development in co-operation with professor Simon Tanner). We are quite happy with the results and would like to present the case study at the symposium (consisting of a film and case study with empirical data) and solicit feedback from the participants on the methodology that we used. We would like to develop this methodology further into a tool that can be used across the cultural heritage sector, for which this input would be vital.
Objectives
The primary objective of this study was to conduct the first application of the Europeana Impact Assessment Framework, exploring the social and cultural impact of a wellestablished service: Europeana 1914-1918. Did we have an impact in this area? And, if so, how can we make that more tangible for our stakeholders? Our secondary objective was to understand the process of impact assessment better, and use our findings to build a better understanding of this process in our network.
What did we do?
At the heart of this Impact Framework are five ‘lenses’; perspectives on impact that we have shaped and refined. We have used these to collect, review and analyse data collected directly from contributors, users and non-users of the service. The film ‘An Impact Assessment Journey’ is the result of experimenting with narrating the results of the impact assessment by using visual storytelling techniques. The film’s content is supported by this case study and the underlying data.
What did we learn about Europeana 1914-1918?
We feel confident that the film we share demonstrates that the service provided by Europeana 1914-1918 has achieved social and cultural impact. Some of the lenses we used to make these points show a very clear positive impact in the areas of community and legacy, while others indicate that there is still much to gain by improving areas of the service, in learning in particular. This process has revealed a lot more about the service, and its impact, than we expected.
What did we learn about the Impact Framework?
We know that we cannot draw just one conclusion from this process. It is clear to us that to be an effective organizational tool, impact assessment needs to be embedded as a continuous cycle of testing, developing, learning and applying. We also learnt that impact assessment is a complex and labour-intensive task. Although we have taken steps to clarify and standardise our methodology, it requires more work before we can expect our sector to adopt it as a widely used standard.
What will the symposium participants learn from this?
We would like to share with the participants why and how we have developed this case study. We will describe the methodology we used for how we gathered, analysed and interpreted the data — first presenting each of the five lenses in detail, followed by describing the practical elements to collecting the data and delivering the film. Finally, we will share a report card analysing what went well (or not), what we learnt and how we will apply this to our next assessment. We hope this study supports others in our network who struggle with the same issues related to impact and impact assessment. We welcome any feedback and invite the participants to join us as we continue to build our understanding of this complex subject.
The Europeana Impact Framework
The Europeana Impact Framework is a developing methodology. It is founded on a paper written to support Europeana’s Strategy 2020, and further refined by recommendations made by Professor Simon Tanner.
Inspired by the approach described by Digital Humanities academic Professor Simon Tanner (King’s College London) in the 2012 paper ’Value Based Scorecard Approach to Impact Assessment‘, the Strategy 2020 paper proposes the basis of a framework to evaluate success and failure in relation to the aims and objectives of our organisation. It establishes the three areas of impact that we intend to explore: Economy, Network & Innovation and Social & Cultural.
Monday Sessions: M1 / M2 / M3 / M4 / Tuesday sessions: Europeana Workshop / T1 / T2: Posters / T3 / T4
TUESDAY 13 DECEMBER 2016
EUROPEANA IMPACT WORKSHOP
Workshop title: “Using the Europeana Impact Framework to conceive Performance Indicators”
This EDCR2016 workshop will focus on impact design, the first step towards the understanding of impact. In the past few years, Europeana has worked steadily on its Impact Framework, that helps to better understand the impact of the Europeana platform on its users, both at the short term and the long term. Although there are already some impact assessment studies using Europeana’s framework, resulting in impact narration (e.g. the recent Workers Underground video), the framework itself still needs further development. At the workshop we want to take a closer look at performance indicators as tools for impact assessment. At the workshop we will present a case that the participants can scrutinise using the Europeana Impact Framework. The workshop will result in a shared understanding of good performance indicators that can be used in surveys to assess impact of digital cultural heritage collections. The moderators of the workshop are Harry Verwayen (Europeana Foundation), Marco de Niet (DEN Foundation), and Lorna Hughes (HATII, University of Glasgow).
13 DECEMBER 2016
SESSION 1
Alison Diamond, Argyll Estates, UK
“Understanding the Archival Audience”
I propose to deliver a paper based on my AHRC/Clore Leadership Programme funded research entitled ‘Understanding the Archival Audience’. This paper contributes to the conference theme of Evaluating the impact and use of cultural resources. Specifically it is a study of users who have a need and desire to engage with archival resources, real and digital.
Prior to this research, no analysis of the current users of Scottish archives or their research interests had been undertaken, particularly in regard to online access to digital catalogues or collections. Archive services collect quantitative data on the number of visits to their website(s) for internal reporting and statistical returns. This data is insufficient to enable archive services to evaluate the impact and use of their service, to understand their users, what they are trying to achieve and whether they have succeeded. Without understanding users’ needs, archivists cannot develop services to meet them. This research is the first in-depth analysis of the use of archives by a particular segment of users in Scotland.
In November 2015 I conducted a survey into the use of Scottish archives by teachers in Scotland to assess whether curriculum requirements to use primary sources were reflected in the use of archives by teachers, and to identify particular issues inhibiting access. Data was collected from 103 respondents. The survey asked about teachers’ broad use of archives, both physical and digital. It was clear from the replies received however that teachers are primarily looking for digital access to information.
Archives provide a collective memory of society, evidence of the past, and promote accountability and transparency of actions. Information is preserved for the benefit of society as a whole, regardless of social class, gender, sexuality, wealth or ethnicity.
With the advent of the internet and the availability of high quality digital images of archives online, the traditional archive user is changing. This change offers archivists the opportunity to re-evaluate their purpose and audience, to ensure that the information preserved is democratically accessible and that it reflects the values and beliefs of all society.
Key Findings
The survey data confirmed that the use of archives in schools by teachers is not widespread.
Most teachers have no personal experience of using archives and are limited by time available to research and identify relevant resources. Their ability to access archives and other cultural heritage resources depends on cataloguing, indexing and arrangement online. Traditional hierarchical cataloguing may not meet the need of these users, and archivists need to reconsider what they are doing, for whom and how.
Responses to the survey showed that users were interested in their cultural heritage and were uninterested in distinguishing between archives, museum artefacts and other primary sources of information. They were seeking a single point of access to cultural heritage collections to enable them to teach the whole story to their pupils.
Primary and secondary teachers demonstrate different approaches to identifying relevant resources. Primary teachers were generally dependent on existing resources. Secondary teachers appeared to be more likely to search for new material. This may reflect recent curriculum changes, with topic based teaching having been standard in primary school even before the introduction of Curriculum for Excellence, whereas secondary teachers have to broaden their search to find appropriate archival material in support of National Qualifications.
The most commonly used sites for finding archives for all teachers are Education Scotland and Scran. The survey showed that teachers focus on websites which they know and trust, with Education Scotland and SCRAN being the most popular. Although other repositories and their websites were mentioned, respondents appeared unaware of the all the sources of archives available online and some openly declared that they were unsure of the trustworthiness of some resources available online.
The majority of survey respondents had never worked with an archivist or education officer, despite the growing number of specialists working across cultural heritage. This emphasises the need for online digital resources to be suitably packaged with context and transcription so that teachers can access and use them without personal expertise or expert support.
Recommendations
This survey investigated teachers’ discovery and use of archives. Although based on a small segment of the potential audience, it has highlighted a number of issues faced by the unskilled and new user in his or her efforts to discover and access information, and has confirmed that the needs of teachers are different from those of traditional archive users. Archivists need to address these issues to ensure that their services deliver the public value expected by stakeholders and funders.
More evidence-based research is needed
There is little evidence-based research into users of archives. If archivists are serious about the survival and development of their services, then there has to be more analysis of users, what they do, how and why. Understanding the current audience is the first step in establishing who does not use archives and ultimately, establishing more effective outreach and services to enable more people to engage with their heritage and learn from it. This requires on-going evidence-based
Archivists need to rethink how they provide access to archive collections
Teachers are primarily looking for digital information that is immediately available, understandable and authoritative. They demonstrate a new type of user, whose needs overlap with those of ‘digital natives’. These users have the motivation but few of the traditional skills associated with archive users. Archivists need to be aware of and take appropriate action to enable these users to discover the information they need. This requires siginificant investment in digital resources and rethinking how archives are presented. Digital also offers innovative ways to enhance ‘real’ experiences, benefitting those who lack traditional research skills.
Justifying the expense of keeping archives in an age of austerity
To justify public spending on the preservation of archives, archivists need to demonstrate their use and impact. This requires outreach and promotion of collections and their potential uses. To demonstrate value, outreach has to be a priority in which time and resource is invested, and not an ad hoc adjunct to the service or a by-product of external funding.
Changing perspectives
The survey responses showed that teachers want to access information about cultural heritage and do not differentiate between archives and other primary sources of evidence. This suggests that the differentiation of archives, museums, galleries and heritage sites exists in the eyes of the professionals rather than the users. Heritage organisations need to work together to tell the complete stories of communities, places and people. From the perspective of the user, all parts of the story are equally valuable and should ideally be accessed together. Heritage professionals, including archivists, therefore need to work together to provide access, online and physically.
Ina-Maria Jansson, Department of ALM, Uppsala University, Sweden
“Value and Use of Crowdsourced Information in Online Image Archives”
As a result of the uprise in digitization of cultural heritage collections, image archives online becomes more common. In many cases, archives and museums do not settle with increased access to the images, but also collect user input on and new knowledge about these images from online visitors. This process has been known as crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing user-created data could help enrich collection metadata, but when taking a closer look of the impact user data makes in the collections, discrepancies of user-added information and information integrated in the collections becomes evident.
This paper will examine professional practices of valuing and structuring information when submitting unstructured user-contributions to image collections. It will identify tensions between the content of users free-text submissions and content supported in the image collection metadata structure. Differences in user-made annotations and the information ending up in the database illustrate the end product of a professional evaluation process of crowdsourced material.
Tagging (structured information) and user comments (unstructured information), are among the most common methods for collecting user-contributions (Smith-Yoshimura m.fl. 2011). Related to other crowdsourcing methods like tagging or transcription, free-text information such as user annotations are more complicated for professionals to handle. This is because it often replaces or changes existing data, implying manual mechanisms of evaluation and editing. First after passing this process of incorporation, unstructured user-generated metadata can add persisting value to the collection.
Research questions
In aspects of cultural heritage image collections, how is crowdsourced information put to use and assimilated with already existing metadata? This problem is addressed through three interrelated questions:
• How do professionals incorporate user-contributed information in the collection database of the institution?
• How is crowdsourced, unstructured information valued by professionals?
• What value can unstructured, crowdsourced information add to digital image collections?
Methods
This is a mixed methods study, which combine interviews with data logs and observations of systems and user comments. A total of 14 semi-structured, qualitative interviews were made with administrative staff on 8 museums and 3 archives. Altogether, there were 5 different collection database systems in use at the participating institutions. Only institutions that expressly were asking for user-created metadata in connection to their digital image collections were selected for the study. Professionals were interviewed about the administrating process of integrating user-created data in the collection database. They were also asked about other factors affecting their incorporative decisions such as policies, staff resources and work organisation. The interviews were inductively analysed with qualitative content analysis. Results of the analysis were compared with observations of metadata structure and field functionality of collection database systems.
Main findings
In all those institutions included in the study, free-text user comments were manually handled. For the crowdsourced information to find its way into the collections, comments had to become moderated, which could mean anything from approved by administrators, to be included manually one by one in the database. All institutions edited or removed metadata based on user contributions, a process that implied checking facts, recording provenance and finding a suitable place for registration in the metadata structure. The way professionals valued and recorded crowdsourced user-comments were in many aspects dependent on the metadata structure of the collections. Comments that helped fill gaps in the image formula descriptions were described as more usable than information that could not be assigned to specific data fields. Some typical examples of such comments were concerning time, place, or names of persons pictured. However, professionals said they also appreciated more subjective information, as memories and opinions connected to the image. They were not found to be of the same use because they were more difficult to adjust and register in metadata fields, however they were reported to ‘add life to the collections’. One interviewee commented that she loved reading the comments as they could tell about things as smells and feelings of places depicted in the images. In all, many of the comments that were reported hard to include could be taken as examples of users’ own meaning-making and understanding of the images. User-comments were a way for users to create accessibility and connectivity to the collections.
A problem with this kind of information is that it is not supported in the metadata structure and therefore is not object for the same actions of preservation as other data. Thus, a considerable amount of crowdsourced contributions of value to both professionals and visitors risks becoming lost for coming generations. Problems in moderating and incorporating user-generated metadata are rooted deep in traditional structures of collections and metadata. Although the studied institutions were using separate database systems with information structure different from each other they had similar problems in moderation of user comments. Deficiencies in the metadata framework made it impossible to satisfyingly note needed and available information. In order to fully use the potential of crowdsourcing, practitioners as well as designers of metadata structures have to gain understanding of unique informational value in user-contributed information. If professional knowledge and structural support are missing, crowdsourced data cannot be recorded correctly.
This study will have implications for how designers of collections database systems and professionals working with crowdsourced and user-generated material think about and value crowdsourcing. Research of longstanding impact of crowdsourced, user-generated data have to be carried out in order to enhance professional understanding of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage and its value.
Underlying work
This paper describes original research focusing on the value of a specific crowdsourcing method, namely free-text user comments. This research builds on earlier findings on user-comments in image collections, although none of the earlier works specifically investigates value or problems with user annotations at the profound level of this paper. The collection of social metadata of archives, libraries and museums worldwide were covered in an OCLC-report where focus was put on questions like motivation for collecting data, moderation policies, staffing and site management and technologies used (Smith-Yoshimura m.fl. 2011). Comments of image collections were included in the study but together with e-mail contributions, user-tags and data from social media platforms, creating mostly general or unspecified data about comments.
The value of user-comments and user-interaction in image archives has earlier been exemplified by Krause and Yakel (2007), and was among other things identified to enhance accessibility for visitors and provide useful information for professionals. A classification framework of user-comments in image archives as correctional, additional, memorial, critical, judgemental and communicative, has had a significant impact on the analysis of user-comments in the study described in this paper (Van Hooland 2006). Value and use of crowdsourcing contributions in the form of user tags has been written about both concerning images (Matusiak 2006) and video (Gligorov et al 2010).
Although there in those cases was a difference in how users and professionals described images, user-contributions were found to reflect users’ language and thereby increasing findability for users when searching the collections. Gorzalski (2013) reported the practice of including user-created data to be on the uprise and also noted the existence of dedicated metadata fields for the registration of user comments in the collection database. The value of crowdsourcing for cultural heritage institutions was discussed by Owens (2014), who says it provides …’meaningful ways for the public to enhance collections while more deeply engaging with and exploring them’. The result of this paper indicates that for crowdsourcing to become meaningful, and of relevance and value, cultural institutions have to adjust their perception of metadata to fully be able to adopt and integrate user-contributions. Only then can new levels of users’ understanding, accessibility and informational depth become possible.
References
Gligorov, R. et al. (2010), ”Towards integration of end-user tags with professional annotations”. Web Science Conference 2010, April 26-27, Raleigh, NC, USA, available at http://journal.webscience.org/363/.
Gorzalski, M. (2013), ”Examining User-Created Description in the Archival Profession”. Journal of Archival Organization, Vol. 11 No. 1–2: 1–22.
Krause, M., and Yakel, E. (2007), ”Interaction in virtual archives: the polar bear expedition digital collections next generation finding aid”. The American Archivist Vol. 70 No. 2: 282–314.
Matusiak, K. (2006), ”Towards User‐centered Indexing in Digital Image Collections”. OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives Vol. 22 No. 4: 283–98.
Owens, T. (2014), ”Making crowdsourcing compatible with the missions and values of cultural heritage organisations”. I Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage, ed. Ridge, M. Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities. Farnham: Ashgate.
Smith-Yoshimura, et al. (2011), Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives, and Museums. Part 2. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research, available at http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2011/2011-03.pdf.
Van Hooland, S. (2006), ”From spectator to annotator: possibilities offered by user-generated metadata for digital cultural heritage collections”. Immaculate Catalogues: Taxonomy, Metadata and Resource Discovery in the 21st Century, Proceedings of CILIP Conference, available at http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~svhoolan/Usergeneratedmetadata.pdf.
Giasemi Vavoula, University of Leicester, UK
“Digitally Mediated Archive-User Interactions”
Introduction
The issue of underutilized archives and records has occupied archivists over the past thirty years. In a 1987 article Bruce Dearstyne urged archivists to confront the problem, and advocated a usercentred, outward-facing archive that actively seeks out new, unconventional users. The Internet and the digitisation blast of recent years have contributed towards more visible and more accessible archival material (Adams 2007). Indeed, although archive usage may still be a predominantly scholarly pursuit, ‘avocational’ users (genealogists, hobby historians, etc.) grow in numbers (Sundqvist 2007). More recently the ‘2.0’ discourse entered archives research to advocate participatory archives, archives that encourage multiple representations and creative reuse of holdings, archives that engage creatively non-traditional audiences, archives that learn from their audiences.
This paper looks at user-centred archive engagement to examine the impacts of digital media and technologies on the nature of the archive-user relationship. Through two projects we will argue that digital can not only increase access and enable user input; but can furthermore transform archival material from historical records of human experience into contemporary everyday experiences.
Full Circle and Memory Reels
The Heritage Lottery Funded project Full Circle enabled MACE (Media Archive for Central England) to work in partnership with communities in the Midlands to discover and ‘salvage’ home videos and other amateur film of local historical interest, hitherto hidden in attics, garages, and forgotten trunks. The nature of the film – primarily home movies made by local residents some decades ago – necessitated the involvement of film donors and local communities in its interpretation, through an engagement model that placed the locus of control with participating groups, enabling and empowering them to appreciate their film heritage and make decisions over its preservation and use. Full Circle curators facilitated film searches within local communities in partnership with over sixty community groups across the midlands. Calls for film donations were advertised in local media, through posters and flyers distributed at community events, and through screenings of existing archive film related to the region. The response was overwhelming, with film donations far exceeding MACE’s targets. Following deposit agreements, MACE would then process the film by digitizing, accessioning and storing the film reels, while giving back to community members copies of the digitized materials and making it available on its website. Once all a community’s materials were processed, MACE assembled a film using these and other film from the archive, adding soundtracks where necessary, and working with community partners to organize public screenings in local venues.
Findings from the evaluation of Full Circle (Vavoula et al. 2013) suggest that, as well as discovering and collecting new archival material, the project (a) effectively demonstrated the historical importance of the (personal) moving image record to partner communities; (b) facilitated learning about the past and interpreting local history; (c) raised the profile of local history, encouraged more interest in it, and celebrated the historical importance and meaning of the everyday; (d) triggered reminiscence and nostalgia, thus engaging participants at both a community and personal level; and (e) offered communal, fun and enjoyable experiences.
The sheer volume of collected material (486 hours of film) and the seeming unattractiveness of a cataloguing workshop to these audiences prevented such community-sourced cataloguing to occur extensively (Vavoula et al. 2013). A follow on project funded through an AHRC KE CATH project, developed Memory Reels, a mobile app that located Full Circle videos on a digital map and enabled users to annotate the videos with their own comments. Trials with members of local history groups resulted in descriptive annotations which verified, corrected or expanded the information previously held in MACE’s catalogue, demonstrating the potential of location-aware applications to mediate the enrichment of place-related local film collections by audiences.
Full Circle brought new material to the local archive, to fill regional gaps in the record. The public screenings of the digitised new material triggered reminiscence in the audiences, who were generously sharing memories during the screenings. While these memories were useful interpretation and cataloguing sources, they were difficult to capture in the context of a public screening. The Memory Reels app enabled the capturing of such annotations, in situ. In both cases, however, digital offered new ways of engaging with archival material beyond the traditional study room experience, in the context of authentic experiences such as film screenings, app-based trailing of local historical events, and independent website browsing.
Affective Digital Histories
Affective Digital Histories was one of a series of research projects that aimed to collect, create and digitise a range of historical records related to Leicester’s St George’s area’s de-industrial past. This period, which spanned three decades (from the 1970s until mid-2000s) saw a range of communities and groups appropriating ex-industrial spaces which had fallen into disuse. These communities included the Leicester United Caribbean Association, gay and gay-friendly groups as well as a range of other subcultures like punks, goths, cross-dressers, and bikers. Regeneration funding over the past decade saw the closure of many of these venues and the rebranding of the area as the city’s Cultural Quarter, featuring an architecturally imposing theatre, creative industries workspaces, arts and multimedia venues, and trendy urban apartment blocks. The Cultural Quarter’s de-industrial history, however, was left largely unrecorded. Previous projects had already generated a record of this history, comprising primarily photographs and oral histories, and had highlighted both the area’s transition period and the gaps in knowledge surrounding the experience of place, particularly the affective dimensions of people’s experience of buildings and venues in the area over the three decades. Affective Digital Histories aimed to use this existing and emerging archive to stimulate new, affective interpretations of the area.
The project included three strands: creative writing, soundscapes, and memory crowdsourcing. Each strand took the existing archive as its starting point and aimed to generate new archive material, while producing digital outputs that brought part of the archive to life as a live-able experience. Writers, audio technologists, digital creatives and academics, engaged with archive to find inspiration for stories, sounds and memory triggers. The creative writing strand commissioned eight pieces of writing in various formats (short story, choreopoem, radio play) The soundscapes strand recreated historical sounds of hosiery machinery, nightclubs and police car sirens, and invited local residents to record their own present-day sounds of the Cultural Quarter. The memory crowdsourcing strand invited people who lived, worked and used the Cultural Quarter during that period to share their memories on postal cards and in a video booth; and current users to sketch and 3D print their personal stories of the Cultural Quarter. All the produced material – stories, sounds and memories – were added to the archive.
A series of digital apps were also developed that enabled users to experience the archival material in different ways. The Hidden Stories location-aware app encourages users to walk around the Cultural Quarter and surrounding areas, guided by a map, to unlock the next part of a story and read it in situ, at the locations where the story unfolds. In situating the stories, the app situates the interpreted archive within the urban landscape and suggests another way in which the area can be read – that of changing soundscapes over time, not just from decades ago but from day to day and place to place in the present. Similarly, the Sounds of the Cultural Quarter app uses GPS to identify when a user enters a sound hotspot, at which point it plays back the related sound while displaying a short caption to identify the sound (‘nightclub’). The projects Explorer web pages map onto Belli’s (1998) model of autobiographical memory to enable users to filter the archive content using themes of activity and landmarks and, thereby, relay the archive in ways that are personally relevant.
The outputs from the three strands – creative writing, soundscapes, and crowdsourced memories –embody affective interpretations of the archival material and as such, upon being added to the archive, constitute its affective dimension. The digital apps further transformed the (now completer) archival record into live-able sensory experiences. The re-interpreted archive has been digitally transformed into lived experience (Figure 2).
Conclusion
Through two case studies, this paper explored the potential of digital technology to reinvent local media archives as catalysts for local residents’ engagement with place, local history and communities. Cook (2001) argued that archives are (or should be) there to offer citizens “a sense of identity, locality, history, culture, and personal and collective memory” (p18). Local media archives are particularly well placed to do so as their place-specific, media-rich holdings can evoke personal memories, reminiscence and nostalgia, and inspire creative, multimedia storytelling about place. These can in turn instil a sense of pride in and curiosity for the past and a desire to narrate it for posterity (Vavoula et al. 2013). The two projects discussed here added a significant layer to the interpretation of archives collections and, importantly, to our understanding of place and its sociocultural contexts. While the digital apps pushed the archive’s use as a source for present day experience – as a soundscape, a story-scape, a memory-scape.
Charlie Turpie, London Metropolitan Archives, UK
“The Great Parchment Book Project”
This talk (accompanied by Powerpoint slides) will present the major and ground-breaking partnership project to conserve, digitally reconstruct, transcribe and publish the iconic 17th century parchment document known as the Great Parchment Book of the Honourable Irish Society, also referred to as the Domesday Book of the Plantation because of its significance to the history of Ulster.
The Great Parchment Book is a 1639 survey of the Londonderry estates managed by the City of London through the Irish Society and the London livery companies. It was damaged in a fire at the City of London Guildhall in 1786 which caused such dramatic shrivelling and fire damage to the manuscript and distortion to the text that it had been completely inaccessible to researchers for over 200 years. Owing to its appearance it had been affectionately referred to at London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) where it is held as the ‘puppodum book’.
The project led by LMA comprised firstly conservation which aimed to gently flatten the parchment sheets as far as possible to facilitate the digital imaging which followed. LMA’s partners at the Department of Computer Science and the Centre for Digital Humanities at University College London captured a set of images for each page, generating 3D models from these developing ground-breaking software which enabled these models to be flattened and browsed virtually. A readable and exploitable version of the text was prepared, comprising a transcription of the manuscript with encoding of appropriate terms using the Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI) to enable comprehensive searching. This culminated in the launch of the dedicated Great Parchment Book website in June 2013 (www.greatparchmentbook.org) where the images (of the folios both in their original state and digitally flattened) and transcript were made available and which featured as the centrepiece of an exhibition in Derry 2013 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the building of city’s walls in 1613.
The Great Parchment Book project has been nominated for a number of awards, evidence both of the importance of the document and the strength of the project: European Succeed Award 2014 (for digitisation focussing on textual content): Commendation of Merit (https://web.archive.org/web/20140717155310/http://succeed-project.eu/succeed-awards/awards-2014); The Pilgrim Trust Award for Conservation 2015: shortlisted (http://conservationawards.org.uk/awards/); Royal Historical Society Public History Prize 2015: nominated; UK Blog of the Year 2016: finalist. This culminated in 2016 with the inscription of the Great Parchment Book to the UK Memory of the World in 2016.
The project has been recorded throughout by a blog, administered by LMA, which continues to record the continuing legacy of the project focussing on ways to revolutionise access to archives and manuscripts through the use of new technology and innovation, but also linking the Great Parchment Book to other sources for Irish history and thereby facilitating both personal and academic research and knowledge.
13 DECEMBER 2016
SESSION 2: POSTER PECHA KUCHA
Fiona Jane Maclellan, Glasgow School of Art, UK
“Transformative Schooling”
Fiona Jane MacLellan is a Ph.D. candidate within Glasgow School of Art’s new campus in the Highlands and Islands. She uses a design led approach to explore, unpack and understand emerging issues and phenomena. These explorations are conducted through a participatory action research framework, and the dissemination of the qualitative research data generated is supported through her creative methods for delivery.
Within the current proposal, Fiona illustrates how this interdisciplinary approach applies to the call for submissions. Methodologically, with a shared interest in participatory and collaborative techniques. And thematically, with digital resources taking the foreground in dissemination of knowledge.
In order to better understand how digital technologies are affecting our lives, this paper explores the relationship between knowledge exchange and digital technology, through a design lens. Key to this exploration is the role of the artefact and teacher in the learning experience, with a focus on the learning experiences of senior phase pupils in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. In this setting population density is at its lowest levels across Britain and spend per pupil is at its highest (Office for National Statistics, 2016). Yet there is success witnessed in this recipe, with attainment levels at there highest this is a key example where impact and innovation come from an edge perspective (McAra-McWilliam, 2015).
The paper begins with a contextual review of emerging theories in Digital Pedagogy from the Open University then moves to literature on the role of the artefact and actor from fields of Design and Anthropology, such as John Thackara, Tim Ingold and Anthony Dunne. In order to ground this inter-disciplinary approach the body of the paper centres around a case study, e-Sgoil, a recently launched educational pilot based in the Outer Hebrides and directed by a small team from Education Scotland and Comhairle nan Eilean Siar.
The pilot aims to trial a new model of digital delivery of learning, with the ambition to improve equity and expand the curriculum choices and access to educational services to school pupils living in rural settings. The priorities and process of the pilot are being documented. Through direct participation in the project team, insights have been gathered over the disparities and commonalities between digitalising education and the intrinsic motivations nurtured through hands on learning and dynamics of teacher pupil relationships. Through referring to this as the ‘flat screen effect’, the new phenomenon allows the wider implications are brought into light, for example, in more informal learning contexts such as museums and other cultural bodies. Secondly, the project team and researcher have collectively explored the potential gains and pitfalls of improved digital means of delivering learning and created a Taxonomy for Digital Learning.
In sharing these outputs and insights from the research project, this paper shall identify emerging parallels between digital learning scenarios found in the traditional classroom setting and beyond. This will help to achieve the wider goal of dissemination. To share these reflections and insights with an international audience through educational reports and conferences for deeper discussions and answer a call from teaching practitioners for research in the area of the classroom of tomorrow.
Michael Newton, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
“Handling Diverse Workflows and Participation Models in Curation and Access: The Development and Impact of DH Platforms in the UNC Digital Innovation Lab”
The Digital Innovation Lab (DIL) was established at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2011 to facilitate the development of Digital Humanities tools and methods. Previous work developing software and digital projects has informed our goals of creating digital projects, products, tools, and applications that are (1) of special social and cultural value, (2) can be produced for free public use (or at a marginal cost), (3) are scalable, (4) are reusable and repurposable, and/or (5) serve multiple audiences/end-users within and outside of the University.
Projects in the DIL have addressed a wide variety of topics, contexts and audiences with diverse mandates and working arrangements: from working exhibits in public spaces to faculty research to community-facing oral history to pedagogical resources and classroom-oriented content—to name just a few of the areas of impact. We have developed a DH platform, Prospect, that supports these data curation, access, and visualisation needs in a generalised manner for Digital Humanities projects. Prospect lowers the cost of the creation and maintenance of digital platforms by building on top of and leveraging the affordances of the WordPress content management system (adopted into the campus-wide IT infrastructure at UNC-CH and elsewhere).
Prospect has also helped to develop models for understanding the needs of digital researchers and engaging with faculty and students. Sometimes the needs of projects and their audiences fit the technology’s existing features or built-in predispositions neatly, yet other times unexpected factors or requirements have necessitated accommodating new configurations or feature sets. Informal feedback from faculty partners as well as periodic focus groups have enabled us to improve our software continuously as its application has broadened in scope. Further, our collaborations with faculty and researchers have helped develop our understanding of the challenges and potential models for helping students and faculty become data literate. This talk will summarise the initial design of our platform and how it has utilized WordPress’s functionality, explore case studies in which the default implementation has suited project scenarios, and consider adaptations and faculty development efforts associated with deploying high impact, generalizable digital platforms.
The data collection and curation process, for instance, speaks to the differing needs of DH platform users. Exploiting WordPress’s mechanisms that manage user accounts and privileges enables the support of a linear workflow in which data collected from contributors goes through the intervention of editors before being made public. This model of hierarchical privileges and actions for a singular data stream is suited to many work models, especially those with a single “data product,” but not necessarily for a multistage peer-to-peer reviewing scenario common in classroom settings.
User feedback about Prospect’s data visualisation and data access mechanisms has also fed into the redesign of existing features – especially the user interface – and the extension of existing, and creation of new, functionality. It was initially envisioned that Prospect would provide access to data items in a digital collection primarily via data visualizations aimed at a user base with a fairly sophisticated understanding of structured data who would not be intimidated by controlling and interacting with parameters (via a graphical user interface). Even after simplifying the visualiser’s user interface as much as possible, however, we have recently recognised the need to provide an alternative “entry point” to the data consisting of very simple view of entries in a “flat catalogue” (that can be easily inserted as content within a standard WordPress post page) that does not require any more interaction than a selection click to be taken to the full record display. The lessons here are that DH projects often have multiple audiences that range from expert researchers to the general public.
One of the shortcomings of most data visualisation platforms that allow a user to explore data freely is the lack of expository narratives to accompany them in order to contextualise or elaborate the significance of particular data items or visual interpretations of information space. Prospect has attempted to address this need with two different mechanisms: (1) the ability to save an annotated “snapshot” of the visualisation display, with all of the settings that produced the particular display, and (2) the dynamic display of visualisations based on references to data records which can be selected within an extended expository text. We believe that these features allow for greater explanatory potential in the use of data visualisations in the humanities.
These are some of the most significant findings in our work in the DIL to create low-entry, low-cost, repurposeable platforms that support the needs of a wide variety of Digital Humanities projects.
Eszter Papp, Xponia AG, Switzerland (P); Sam Moutet, Movement Strategies, UK
“Turning data into knowledge: how digital resources and analysis are affecting cultural heritage”
Movement Strategies and Xponia are presenting a joint paper regarding evaluating impact and use of digital cultural resources in the aspect of data collection and analysis. The first part of the paper will focus on the methodologies museums can use to collect data in an efficient way, whilst the visitors experience a unique visit.
Xponia provides a mobile museum guide with digital wayfinding, based on beacon technology. Visitors can learn more from cultural heritage sites or venues if they have an interactive app in their palm. They can experience a deeper knowledge, engage better with the exhibition and see all the different aspects of the museum.
The museum app has many advantages such as providing a storytelling tool, being multilingual and multi-layered to attract a wider audience and providing a quality visit. As Xponia’s app utilizes beacon technology, it can thus become a reliable tool for data collection. Beacons not only trigger relevant information and actions, and provide precise indoor navigation but also collect usage data. Whilst visitors use a beacon based mobile app, museums can monitor visitor behaviour, encourage them to act and interact. Data is automatically collected as people are walking around, spending time in front of artworks and liking items in the museum, thus resolving the difficult issue of how to collect visitor data.
The type of data generated during the use of the app can be utilised after being monitored and analysed in different ways, this approach to crowdsourcing and citizen science in cultural heritage will be explored in the second section of the paper by Movement Strategies. As the largest and most experienced independent, specialist movement consultancy in the world, Movement Strategies provides its clients with robust analysis, evidence based insights, and recommendations to support their decision-making.
The visitor movement data collected by the Xponia app provides invaluable insights into visitor behaviour and circulation patterns. Through the detailed analysis of this data and its unrivalled experience, Movement Strategies provides a method for evaluating digital resources and is able to add crucial input into the design, planning, and operations of museums, such as ticketing or exhibition design.
Analysed data can give insights into crowd movement and length of stay, the beacon based app can then potentially mitigate crowds and bottlenecks using app features such as treasure hunts or through creating different routing strategies at different times of the day. The museum is able to determine ideal time periods and locations to trigger promotional activity through the app, review the impacts on retail assets and see at which locations people are engaging with content.
Using the app, two types of data can be generated within the museum. The app relevant data can be used for user studies by showing the number of app launches and new users, and the completed or started guided tours providing a brief overview of visitors’ behaviour and usage statistics for museum staff.
The movement data metrics can be analysed by visited/unvisited objects, heat maps, travel paths, or dwell times, giving a museum a deeper insight into their visitors’ behaviour. This enables museum professionals to rearrange exhibitions, manage operations, and make better informed decisions as to where to locate key services. It also creates the opportunity to maximise revenue from facilities such as food, beverage and retail, quantify interventions and see the impact of decisions or projects quickly and accurately. Additionally, museum staff can measure the performance of 3rd party service providers, predict impacts of crowd movement before they happen and manage this accordingly.
Evaluating the impact of the need of digital cultural resources is vital; this paper concludes why museums need data analysis for a better operation and for a deeper visitor engagement. It will also explore why valuable data collected by a mobile app is the easiest solution, and why it not only serves as a tool to gather data but also gives visitors a chance to actively discover cultural heritage sites through a unique and memorable visit.
13 DECEMBER 2016
SESSION 3
Alyson Webb, Frankly, Green + Webb, UK
“Opportunities & Challenges of Research as a Design Tool in the Development of Digital Services?”
Frankly, Green + Webb support cultural organisations to use digital more effectively to meet the needs and interests of both their audiences and their organisations. Recently the team has worked on a large-scale digital interpretation project with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The project used a wide range of research techniques to inform and inspire the team and support effective decision-making at every stage. Alyson will share some of the techniques as well as the opportunities and challenges they encountered along the way, some of the key outcomes and reflect on what she has learned about embedding research into everyday digital interpretation practice.
Maribel Hidalgo Urbaneja, University of Glasgow, UK
“Towards a definition of Digital narratives in Art Museums: Assessing the scholarly value of narrative online resources”
In recent years, digital media are offering new means for art museums to narrate art history and reinvent traditional narrative forms. Exhibitions and printed catalogues have been the most common format to tell museums’ art historical stories, within new media converge old and new narrative typologies that are reconfiguring art museums tell history of art on the web. On the web, well defined and established formats such as online collection catalogues coexist with online exhibitions, exhibition websites, online exhibition catalogues, scholarly catalogues, and a myriad of interactive features.
However, as these practices are more established it is worth examining and determine to which extent digital media reshapes the way in which art history is being told, both for art museums and for art historians. My PhD research focus is to shed some light into the matter and aims to answer the following questions:
Do digital media really offer art museums new means to approach subjects? Do digital media facilitate different inferences, interpretations on art historical subjects? Do art historians foster new connections between textual and visual elements of the narrative? Which are the kind of narratives resulting from new media structures, interfaces and elements such as hyperlinks, high resolution images, parallax, and data visualizations? Do these new digital narratives inherit more of their features from printed publications or exhibitions?
Additional concerns to be addressed by this research, include the expected developments according to art museums needs and art historians expectations, the challenges affecting production processes of narrative digital resources in art museums, as well as the barriers encountered by art historians while using those digital resources, whether those are related or not to usability, access, or digital literacy.
The employed methodology encompasses narrative theory with the perspectives of museum professionals and art historians in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of the questions formulated above. This presentation will offer an overview of the methodological approach, which will reflect on the interdisciplinary framework of the research subject, practical issues, and some preliminary results.
The study of narrativity within visual arts and museology is a well formed area of enquiry associated to discussions about the relationship between image and text in visual studies. Narratology has been applied to history of art, museum studies and new media studies with the purpose of better understand the mechanisms behind the construction and interpretation of stories across media. In this particular case, narratology is complemented with empirical methods commonly aligned with museum and user studies practice, such as unstructured interviewing and thinking aloud protocol. This particular methodology can address all aspects of narrativity in the museum from authorship and production, to interpretation and readership.
Case studies from US, Spain, and UK art museums have been selected after constructing a list of resources worldwide and determine which are the best practices and existing typologies. In this regard, narratology provides a theoretical framework which enables to dissect all the different narrative elements of the case studies selected, such as authorship, rhythm, temporality, spatiality, etc., and identify the most used digital narrative structures used by art museums online.
The following part of the research includes the interviews with museum professionals involved in the development of the case studies selected, depending on the museums’ structure they are generally based in the digital or publishing departments. Data from art historians as users of those online resources is collected through thinking aloud protocol sessions in which participants verbalize their thoughts while browsing the websites of two of the seven case studies. Participants are in every stage of their careers, almost exclusively “digital enthusiasts”, familiar with the use of digital resources and methods for research and teaching, and in some cases, professionally involved in the development of digital resources.
Maria Economou, University of Glasgow, UK
“Evaluating the use of digital trail for connecting The Hunterian collections and engaging visitors in an exhibition”
The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow holds large and diverse collections of over 1.5 million objects ranging from medical and scientific instruments, to natural and life science holdings, ethnography, archaeology, and art. These are currently stored and displayed in multiple sites within and near the campus, posing challenges for their management and interpretation. One of the major ones is connecting intellectually what is physically dispersed and encouraging visitors to follow and re-interpret these links. Another challenge is making connections across the different disciplines which collections of this diversity span.
The exhibition “The Kangaroo and The Moose” at the Hunterian Art Gallery (October 2015 – February 2016) brought these issues to the fore as it investigated the themes of exploration, art and science, combining art, ethnographic and zoological material and necessitating important connections with parts of the collection displayed at the main Hunterian and the Zoology Museum in other locations. The exhibition was inspired by the acquisition of the ‘Kangaroo’ painting by George Stubbs and was part of the Travellers’ Tails project, a partnership between the Royal Museums Greenwich, The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow, the Horniman Museum and Gardens, the Grant Museum of Zoology, UCL, and the Captain Cook Memorial Museum in Whitby, which was supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Art Fund.
To address these, a digital trail was designed to encourage visitors to connect the exhibition themes with other parts of the permanent displays. Student volunteers contributed to the design of the trail by researching objects and exhibition themes and formative evaluation of the design of the user interface. Additionally, the students were actively involved in engaging visitors in a discussion of the exhibition themes and evaluating the use of the digital trail. The evaluation of the use and impact of the trail, which runs from a web server, included the analysis of the web logs, as well as observing and interviewing visitors using it and in depth discussions with the student volunteers.
The paper will discuss the challenges that this case study raises for both the design and use of digital tools for interpreting the cultural heritage collections in a public setting, as well as the involvement of student mediators for connecting and re-interpreting the collections. The paper will also address issues related to the evaluation methodology, as well as the wider implications of using digital tools of this kind to support visitor engagement and interpretation. Additionally, it will analyse how the specific case fits the wider digital strategy of The Hunterian and the way it plans to build in a modular way interpretative digital resources using the underlying infrastructure of the Collections Management System (CMS). This includes co-curation and co-curation models using the primary user basis of a university museum, students and academics, but also including other groups beyond the university campus. In this direction, digital storytelling offers considerable potential for opening up the collections and creating personal connections and can take diverse forms. The paper will discuss the strategy of building up and testing smaller prototypes, while making sure that the underlying infrastructure for the CMS is robust and openly accessible and the wider lessons learned both from the evaluation of the digital trail and its integration in a wider digital strategy of a cultural organisation.
13 DECEMBER 2016
SESSION 4
Christina Kamposiori, University College London, UK (P); Simon Mahony, University College London, UK; Claire Warwick, Durham University, UK
“User requirements for evaluating digital resources: the case of art history”
Over the past decades, the increase in the use of digital resources and the growth of research conducted in digital environments has transformed academic scholarship. Never before has there been such breadth of information and services available for scholars to use; most importantly, though, such developments offer the advantage of not only speeding up the research process, but also more importantly for facilitating innovative research inquiry. Yet, especially in the area of the Arts & Humanities, the capabilities developed by new technologies have had a great impact on the scholarly practices of its disciplines. In fact, these capabilities have affected the way that scholars approach, create and manage information. Therefore, as the employment of digital resources and methods in the Arts & Humanities increases, so does the necessity to accessing and interacting with digital resources? Managing to answer these questions could foster significantly our understanding of art historical practices which, to a great extent, take place ‘behind the scenes’ at scholars’ personal workspace. This knowledge, in turn, could be applied to the creation of better digital resources and tools to support research and teaching in the field.
Our proposed paper reports the results of research conducted for the first author’s PhD Thesis ‘Personal Research Collections: examining research practices and user needs in art historical research’ at the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, London, UK under the supervision of Prof. Claire Warwick and Mr. Simon Mahony. This study employed an ethnographic approach to the study of scholarly practices by conducting semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty art historians at different career stages, as well as observation of their physical and digital personal collections in order to identify the particular needs they have when they build them. We argue that personal collections, being at the core of art historians’ workspace (also see, Long & Schonfeld, 2014), are an important starting point for understanding behaviour and practices that are difficult to study otherwise, due to the private nature and the various personal criteria applied.
To begin with, the analysis of the interview and observation data raised several issues regarding access to information. Firstly, it is necessary to state that previous studies’ findings on the limited access to useful resources, such as good quality visual information, that their participants were experiencing (e.g. Rose, 2002; Greenhalgh, 2004) were again validated in this research. Despite the progress that digitisation projects have made over the years and the increase in the availability of online material (especially secondary literature), it became evident that scholars lack digital access, particularly to primary resources and good quality, open access visual material.
More specifically, interviewees in some areas of study, such as Asian and Japanese art, faced greater difficulty in finding these types of material online; unsurprisingly, the availability of digital resources on the Web tended to be greater in areas dealing with Western art of particular popular eras (e.g. Renaissance art, 18th and 19th century art). Thus, many of the participants in this study still had to travel in order to visit the archives and museums holding the material they were interested in while, even then, some found it challenging to locate or access it physically. The challenges caused by problematic access were, in fact, one of their principal reasons for building personal collections for current and future projects.
Given the issues stressed so far, it was inevitable that easy access to material (including costs of copyright) would be one of the primary criteria for the research participants when choosing resources to access online and use. The institutions where most of them were based or other easily accessible and frequently visited places (e.g. libraries, museums, archives) were some of the key access providers to material relevant to scholars’ projects which had also earned their trust. Previous experience with a resource (or similar resources) and the researcher’s intuition were also influential factors when deciding which resources to visit virtually or physically.
Thinking about other criteria for choosing resources to use, it is worth further highlighting the issue of language which constituted a consideration for scholars who often researched on highly interdisciplinary topics. Actually, whenever the gathering of this type of material was regarded as essential for the purposes of a project, the challenges posed could affect other information and scholarly practices; for example, the information seeking process could be postponed until the attainment of the required language skills. Given that art history is a highly interdisciplinary field in terms of topics studied and methods employed, it became clear in this study that barriers posed by language could influence the research process, an issue which should be taken into account when building digital resources targeted to art historians.
Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that many of the art historians in this study turned to colleagues for advice on where to start looking for information or which resources to trust. As for the various resources which remain underused by scholars in the field (e.g. several European online initiatives) or those currently being created and targeted at art history (e.g. the new Art History Channel by Europeana), taking under consideration the key avenues through which art historians learn about useful resources (e.g. colleagues) is essential for increasing their use and impact on scholarship.
On the other hand, the use of social media and social networks as resources for finding information related to a research project was a discovery not encountered in previous studies looking at the information practices of scholars in the field. Although art historians were generally hesitant towards the use of these types of resources, they were keener to employ them when there were limited resources in their area of study or when they constituted the only way to find specific information.
Considering scholars’ information gathering habits, the art historians in this study collected any material they considered of importance for the purposes of their existing and future projects. The information they collected was characterised by its variety and diversity; the increase in the use of new types of information objects, such as born digital data, is an issue worth highlighting. However, through close examination of the practices of art historians that followed the discovery of information and the employment of relevant information behaviour models (e.g. Kuhlthau, 1991; Ellis, 1993; Meho & Tibbo, 2003), we managed to identify a pattern in their gathering behaviour not previously recorded. More specifically, art historians’ gathering behaviour consisted of, at least, two main phases with different characteristics which we named ‘exploratory gathering’ and ‘focused gathering’; the former usually took place at the initial stages of a research project, while the latter at a more progressed stage. During these phases, scholars were found to have different information needs and, thus, different behaviour when interacting with digital and other resources.
Finally, it is worth closing by arguing that art historians have increasingly become aware of the effects that the design of a user interface, including the searching facilities, of a digital resource or the digitisation process preceding its building can have on their work; for instance, some of the participants referred to the apparent interpretative choices that had been made to the content of specific resources or referred to the searching problems encountered due to the way that the material was classified and catalogued. In fact, such editorial choices could reduce the usefulness of the digitised content for scholars, who would then look for another resource online or, if possible, visit the resource physically. Therefore, incorporating scholars’ (as the potential users) views early on in the digitisation process (e.g. through understanding their needs) and providing essential information about some of the core choices that have been made during the building of a digital resource as well as gaining user feedback about aspects of the interface design, will not only increase its usefulness for scholars and earn their trust but would also prove beneficial for the longevity of this resource.
References
Beaudoin, J.E. & Brady, J.E. (2011). Finding Visual Information: A Study of Image Resources Used by Archaeologists, Architects, Art Historians, and Artists. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, 30(2), 24-36.
Ellis, D. (1993). Modeling the information-seeking patterns of academic researchers: A grounded theory approach. The Library Quarterly, 63(4), 469-486.
Greenhalgh, M. (2004). Art History. In Schreibman, Siemens & Unsworth (Eds.), Α Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell. Available at http://bit.ly/1XdB1Jr (accessed 10 Mar. 2011).
Kuhlthau, C.C. (1991). Inside the search process: information seeking from the user’s perspective. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42(5), 361-371.
Larkin, C. (2010). Looking to the Future While Learning from the Past: Information Seeking in the Visual Arts. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, 29(1), 49-60.
Long, M. & Schonfeld, R.C. (2014). Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Art Historians. ITHAKA S+R, 30 April 2014. Available at http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/supporting-changing-research-practices-art-historians (accessed 01 May 2014).
Meho, L.I. & Tibbo, H.R. (2003). Modeling the Information-Seeking Behavior of Social Scientists: Ellis’s Study Revisited. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(6), 580-587.
Rose, T. (2002). Technology’s Impact on the Information-Seeking Behavior of Art Historians. Art Documentation, 21(2), 35-42.
Milena Dobreva, University of Malta, Malta (P); Edel Jennings, Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland; Dr Georgina Portelli, CBCP, Malta; Pierre Portelli, University of Malta, Malta
“Digital heritage content creation in intergenerational oral history projects: a tale of two projects, and desired and undesired consequences”
Introduction
Participatory approaches in digital cultural heritage enjoy a wider use in the recent years (see Sexton, Flinn 2013) and there is particularly prominent interest to the applications of crowdsourcing and citizen science in this domain. One area where these methods could be particularly beneficial is oral history research; the advantage of appealing to the wisdom of the crowd in this case is to attract greater number of contributors to the collection of histories on a particular topic. Involving a wider network of informants ideally should allow collecting more content and refining information through the memories of different participants.
Oral history projects can follow different design and one recent trend is to involve interviewers as voluntary contributors after providing sufficient context on the research and the interview process. Volunteers can also help in transcribing and curating the interviews. In some cases, people from the same community or even family may be involved since they have the advantage of knowing the interviewee which can be beneficial for topics which do not have any specific areas of sensitivity. In other cases, spreading the word in the community can help to identify potential contributors to the project.
This paper presents two case studies on oral history projects implemented in different countries (Ireland and Malta) and on different topics (rural placenames and tattoos). In Ireland, six teenagers aged between 15 and 16, from two different schools applied to take part in the project within three weeks in November 2014. The stages in involving and training these teenagers and the observations on their contribution will be presented in more detail in the final paper.
Case Study One: Placenames in rural Ireland
An oral history pilot on rural placenames in Ireland had been implemented within the EC-funded Civic Epistemologies project in 2014-2015 (for further details see Jennings 2015). This pilot aimed to explore what is the impact of the contribution of teenagers in the design of a citizen science project on their involvement beyond the mere data collection. The observations are based on the involvement of six teenagers aged between 15 and 16, from two different schools who took part in the pilot within 2014-15. The teenagers first participated in a 3-week long placement in November 2014, met specialists of different profile, provided feedback on the design of the pilot and also took part in interviewing a group of elderly people and in transcribing the interview records.
The intergeneration digital toolkit developed to record heritage in the Civic Epistemologies project pilot consists of a website co-designed and developed by the students and a suite of free applications for smartphones and laptops. Audio recordings were made using the default voice recorder on a Samsung Galaxy android smart phone. Audacity was used to edit the audio files. Soundcloud was used to store and share the published audio files. WordPress was used to develop the website. Adobe Creative Suite was used to design graphics and handouts. Various WordPress audio, map and social media plugins were integrated to enable users interact with the project recordings in different ways. The website showcases some of the audio recordings made during the participatory meeting as reference examples, along with further recordings made by the students with their relatives. It offers distilled simplified methodologies for recording placenames and oral histories, technical tips and a blog documenting their experience in working on the project.
An added value in this citizen-led approach is that the recording and digitization of cultural heritage creates an opportunity for face-to-face intergenerational exchange that might not otherwise occur, and that potentially has a transformative personal value for the participants beyond the gathering of cultural repositories.
Case Study Two: RELINK – Indelible narratives
REL•INK– Indelible narratives is a project implemented in cooperation by The Malta Maritime Museum, Heritage Malta and The Library Information and Archive Sciences (LIAS) Department, University of Malta are project partners. REL•INK is supported by The Malta Arts Fund. It is a community and Citizen Science based project which looks at tattooing in elderly Maltese male informants, aged over 80 years of age, who worked on the waterfront either as stevedores, fisherman, longshoremen, dockers, sailors, stewards, Royal Navy, Merchant Navy or related occupations. Its intention is to document early twentieth century tattoo designs in the Maltese population, with the aim of building a digital archive that will feature as a University of Malta open-source resource. Our research also looks at the Mediterranean port city of Marseille as a one of the possible cultural cross-pollination point for tattoo culture in Malta.
The collection of evidence on this topic includes a combination of research methods. Passport applications from the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century were checked for mentions of tattoos. This establishes that about 15% of the applicants who had maritime professions had tattoos. In some cases, there are short descriptions of the tattoos but there are no relevant image materials of the tattoo images. The investigation of the passport applications also helps to establish that the profession of a tattoo artist had been used at least on one occasion within the collection of passport applications from the National Archives.
A major challenge in this project is the collection of actual images. There are no specialised collections on tattoo photographs which can be consulted and the location of image evidence is very difficult. Working with people who have memories of tattooed members of the family is one of the approaches used to expand this research; advertising on social media platforms and using media publicity are two other methods employed to invite contributions from the community. This work is still ongoing but it allows to make some initial observations on the engagement methods and their suitability.
Discussion and conclusions
We took two examples of oral history projects applying citizen science methods.
Similarities of these projects include:
— Intergenerational involvement;
— Crowdsourcing projects in the memory institutions domain in their popular typology according to (Oomen, Aroyo 2011) is mainly used for Correction and transcription; Contextualization; Complementing collection; Classification; Co-curation; and Crowdfunding. Both our projects cannot be classified as any of those categories but are rather mixed cases with a strong investigative element.
Some of the noticeable differences are:
— nature of data being collected;
— use of citizen science (in RELINK it is mostly aimed at expanding contributors’ base, while in the Rural Archeology pilot it was used also to refine the design of the pilot).
However reflecting on the cases jointly was particularly helpful with regard to the nature of intergenerational involvement. It might be strange to state that such projects help to restore and expand dialogue between generations and in this sense there are unexpected but desired consequences. The most undesired consequence is disengagement of contributors and it will be reflected upon in the longer version of the paper.
References
Jennings, E. (2015). D4.1 Ethnographic Pilot report, Civic Epistemologies EUFP7 project. Retrieved April 2016 from http://www.civic-epistemologies.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/CIVIC-EPISTEMOLOGIES_D4.1_Ethnograhic-Pilot-Report_v1.0.pdf
Oomen, J., and Aroyo, L. (2011) Crowdsourcing in the Cultural Heritage Domain: Opportunities and Challenges. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T ’11). ACM, New York, USA, 138-149.
Sexton, A., Flinn, A. (2013) ‘Research on community heritage: moving from collaborative research to participatory and co-designed research practice’. Prato 2013, Available at http://www.ccnr.infotech.monash.edu.au/assets/docs/prato2013_papers/flinn_secton.pdf
Giannis Tsakonas, University of Patras, Greece
“Did you see that too? On myths and monsters of the evaluation of digital cultural heritage collections”
In a Big Data era, digital cultural heritage collections – their development, curation, preservation and expansion – are standing on a threshold. The need to preserve cultural assets is entering in new phases, with most of these being produced in digital format and with many new agents claiming their curation. The field of cultural heritage collections differs from other fields of digital collections, both in terms of scope and structure. The scope of cultural heritage collections is widely open, covering the needs of academics, researchers and citizens; for the study of past, the understanding of present and the planning of future. It is a field for solitary research, but at the same time a very promising one for participatory documentation and interpretation. Its structure is also complex, as its main components have various forms of content (either in the original format, or the digital surrogates), different platforms of usage (from interactive walls to mobile devices) and different contributing communities (with different backgrounds and mentalities).
After a long period where the deployment of digital cultural heritage collections was governed by quantitative aims and results, we have entered into a stage that everything needs to assessed on the basis of merit to society, if not -sometimes primarily- to economy. The ‘consumption’ stage is now governed equally by quantitative and qualitative measures that attempt to showcase outstanding rates of usage and substantial integration in academic, educational and societal workflows. As stressing as this might be, it is a time of reconciliation with possible design errors of the past and a time for proper remedial actions for existing and future collections. While the resources of developing and curating organizations are disproportionate of the pressure for selection, preservation, documentation and maximum exposure, it is a time to understand the challenges in increased transparency and usability of evaluation outcomes. It is a time that must be a common language to help everyone communicate results in a way that can be understandable, replicable and reusable; all that in a labour-friendly and iterative way. If one sees a Loch monster, everyone has to see it too. If one has considerable results, everyone has to see them too.
This presentation will discuss all issues that need to be addressed by practitioners of digital cultural heritage collections -regardless if they come from museums, archives or libraries- inside a methodological framework. It is engaged with the theme ‘Evaluating impact and use of digital cultural resources (methodologies, approaches and issues)’ and by putting critical issues on a grid of thoughts and ideas it will enable all practitioners sort out key concepts and have some aids for deciding upon future activities. These issues will be discussed on the light of recent developments in the evaluation of cultural heritage collections, while there will be references to state-of-the-art works of the previous years as well. The construction of this grid is based on robust models for digital library evaluation, that try to disentangle all relevant concepts around evaluation, most of which, including usage, attention, impact and value, are often used interchangeably. The primary aim is to have a common understanding of what is essentially needed for the various stages of the evaluation of digital cultural heritage collections.
Anthony Lilley, Magic Lantern Productions, UK
“The Arts and Data: Just Managing?”
This paper offers a pragmatic view of the potential, risks and limits of a more data-driven approach to arts policy, management and practice. Are the arts just managing to hang on to the coat tails of what’s possible with data? Is data only about management anyway?
Scottish Network on Digital Cultural Resources Evaluation 