Laura Carletti

Participatory Heritage: Scaffolding Citizen Scholarship

Column Editors Notes The “Digital Heritage: Spotlight on Europe” column examines technological advances internal and external to cultural institutions. The digital shift changed radically how cultural heritage is made, disseminated, distributed, accessed, consumed, and monetized. One of the most important revolutions is that the users role changed dramatically, shifting from passive observers to active participants and content producers with many new and exciting opportunities for engagement, creative use, and access. The strength of the column is its broad, international focus, and contributors are encouraged to explore issues and recent advances in digital heritage theories, methodologies, standards relevant to the European region, as well as the larger, global audience. Interested authors are invited to submit proposals and articles to the column editor at annamaria.tammaro@unipr.it. Please include “IILR submission” in the subject line of the e-mail. ABSTRACT Digitizing Europes cultural heritage, making it accessible online, and preserving it for future generations is one of the challenges of the digital single market. It is estimated that 90% of the cultural heritage has not been digitized yet. While endeavours to increase the digitization continue, equal commitment is essential to assure that the digitally available content is not only accessible online, but also accessed. The European framework is evolving toward a culture of participatory heritage, and the digitization itself is perceived as a joint endeavour of institutions and communities. In the past decade, many initiatives have been undertaken by cultural and education institutions to harness the capabilities of information and communication technology and explore novel forms of partnership with the public. Among the emerging models of collaboration, heritage crowdsourcing has become very popular. Nevertheless, crowdsourcing is only part of a wider context exploring innovative, inclusive, and cohesive trajectories of engagement. Numerous projects have been carried out locally—with the community at the heart of the initiatives—but they are dispersed and difficult to map. This article presents a brief overview of those models of participation, and how they contribute to engaged access to digital cultural resources and to scaffold citizen scholarship within the culture of participatory heritage.

ArtMaps: A Technology for Looking at Tate’s Collection

ABSTRACT This article presents ArtMaps, a crowdsourcing web-based app for desktop and mobile use that allows users to locate, move and annotate artworks in the Tate collection in relation to one or more sets of locations. Here the authors show that ArtMaps extends the “space” of the museum and facilitates a new pluriperspectival way of looking at art.

The Morphing Organization: Rethinking Groupwork Systems in the Era of Crowdwork

Web 2.0 has provided organizations remarkable opportunities to improve productivity, gain competitive advantage, and increase participation by engaging a crowd to accomplish tasks at scale. However, establishing and integrating crowd-based systems into organizations is still an open question. The systems and the collaborative processes they enable appear diametrically in dissonance with the norms and culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing in traditional organizations. They require mechanisms for articulation of work, coordination, cooperation, and knowledge co-creation that are fundamentally different from those in current groupwork systems and processes. Building on two workshops hosted at ACM CSCW 2014, we will explore questions such as: How does the shift in organizational work from a closed system with known individuals, to an open and crowd model that requires engagement with an undefined network of people, affect how we conceptualize groupwork? What are the implications for the design of groupwork systems? What can the crowdsourcing research community learn from groupwork systems, or conversely what can groupwork researchers learn from crowdsourcing? How do cultures, motivations, ownership and representation fit into these systems? This workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners in crowdsourcing, social computing, collaborative technologies, organizational science, and workplace research, to discuss the future of groupwork systems in the era of crowdwork with the goal of articulating an agenda for future research.

Art mapping in Paris

In this work, we describe a proposed technology demonstrator for Art Maps, a collaborative research project exploring the relation between artworks and the location that they depict, through the support of a cloud-based crowdsourcing platform with web and mobile interfaces. The Art Maps demonstration entails two types of hands-on experiences for the conference attendees: an in-CHI-experience and an optional bespoke outdoor activity to experience Paris through Art Maps.