Susan Legêne

Digital hermeneutics: Agora and the online understanding of cultural heritage

Cultural heritage institutions are currently rethinking access to their collections to allow the public to interpret and contribute to their collections. In this work, we present the Agora project, an interdisciplinary project in which Web technology and theory of interpretation meet. This we call digital hermeneutics. The Agora project facilitates the understanding of historical events and improves the access to integrated online history collections. In this contribution, we focus on defining and modeling prototypical object-event and event-event relationships that support the interpretation of objects in cultural heritage collections. We present a use case in which we model historical events as well as relations between objects and events for a set of paintings from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam collection. Our use case shows how Web technology and theory of interpretation meet in the present, and what technological hurdles still need to be taken to fully support digital hermeneutics.

From information delivery to interpretation support: evaluating cultural heritage access on the web

In this paper, we present an evaluation framework for online access to cultural heritage. The framework enables the assessment of online cultural heritage applications in terms of their provision and support of information and interpretation. It is anchored in digital hermeneutics: the study and theory of the Web as a vehicle of (self)-interpretation. Digital hermeneutics considers the limits of automation and modelling on the one hand, and the interaction of people and technology on the other. In this paper, this philosophical issue will linger in the background, while we focus on the more practical issues of (1) explaining the evaluation framework and (2) describing our work in Agora in the context of that framework. We analyze twelve Web applications, representing the range of current state of the art in this field. This provides valuable insights into what cultural heritage applications on the Web do, can do, and how distinctive goals are to be achieved. Then we report on three user studies with the Agora demonstrator which made us reconsider a number of assumptions we made about the users needs for information and interpretation.

Mission Interrupted: Gender, History and the Colonial Canon

Current debates on the canonization of historical knowledge often focus on national canons. These are criticized for their exclusively national focus and their exclusion of ‘deviant’ or dissenting memories and experiences. The histories of women and migrants, for example, have often been absent from national canons. Women’s lives were regarded as private and domestic experiences, and therefore irrelevant to a national canon defined by state formation and nation-building. In a similar perspective, the transnational experiences of migrants were depicted as a problem for the nation rather than an integral part of its history. Since canonized historical knowledge is taught in schools and, in a popularized form, is often seen as a requirement for active citizenship in contemporary post-colonial societies, the call for alternative forms of canonized knowledge is timely.

Writing History!: A Companion for Historians

Historians not only have knowledge of history, but by writing about it and engaging with other historians from the past and present, they make history themselves. This companion offers young historians clear guidelines for the different phases of historical research; how do you get a good historical question? How do you engage with the literature? How do you work with sources from the past, from archives to imagery and objects, art, or landscapes? What is the influence of digitalisation of the historical craft? Broad in scope, Writing History! also addresses historians’ traditional support of policy makers and their activity in fields of public history, such as museums, the media, and the leisure sector, and offers support for developing the necessary skills for this wide range of professions.

Editorial. Photographic Legacies: Addressing the Colonial Past in Europe

The three photoCLEC PIs are the guest editors of this Theme issue, november 2012, of Photography and Culture, with nine articles from PhotoCLEC research.

Bringing History Home. Postcolonial Immigrants and the Dutch Cultural Arena

Bringing History Home: Postcolonial Immigrants and the Dutch Cultural Arena Three Dutch-language monographs published in 2008-2009 by Ulbe Bosma, Lizzy van Leeuwen and Gert Oostindie in the context of the interdisciplinary research programme Bringing History Home, present a history of identity politics in relation to ‘postcolonial immigrants’. This term refers to some 500,000 people who since 1945 arrived in the Netherlands from Indonesia and the former Dutch New Guinea, Suriname or the Antillean islands in the Caribbean. Bosma traces the development of postcolonial immigrant organizations. In interaction with government policies, these organizations moved from mere socioeconomic emancipation struggles to mere cultural identity politics. Van Leeuwen takes such cultural identity politics as the starting point for her analysis of Indo-Dutch and Dutch Indies cultural initiatives and the competing interests at stake in the Indies heritage discourse. Oostindie discusses these developments in terms of community development and change within Dutch society at large. He introduces the notion of a ‘postcolonial bonus’. In postcolonial Netherlands, this bonus was available to immigrants on the grounds of a shared colonial past. Today, this bonus is (almost) spent. The review discusses the three monographs, as well as the coherence of Bringing History Home as a research programme. Legene argues, that notwithstanding valuable research outcomes, the very category of postcolonial immigrants does not constitute a convincing category of analysis.