From Place-Memories to Active Citizenship: The Potential of Geotagged User-Generated Content for Memory Scholarship (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
Flickr’s media content proves to be valuable for researching the importance of cultural heritage and its implications on tourism. Established in 2004, Flickr has encouraged the development of a photo-sharing community, whose members can upload their photos or videos and tag them, curate their personal collections, interact with other members, be linked with various themes and share their love for photography. This chapter argues that the emergence of photo-sharing platforms, such as Flickr, and the close reading of photo-sharing themes and subject-matter, as well as the rise of crowdsourcing practices, and the voluntary representations of the places by the photo-sharing network users could lead us into a better comprehension of people’s perceptions about the function of specific places (of the public space in our case study) in their life.
Visitor, contributor and conversationalist: Multiple digital identities of the heritage citizen
The Historic Environment, 2016
In this paper we analyse modes of connecting to and interacting with heritage through a range of selected digital applications and social media that all relate to the history of places. With their emphasis on connectivity and online participation, these apps and sites seek to create both repositories and digital communities through which images, information, memories and experiences can be shared. Through comparison to the rise of 'citizen science', we propose a new way of categorising these recent mobile and web-based sites that scrutinises, in a more fine-grained way, the mode of citizen engagement that was inscribed into their designs and purpose. The simple typology of curated sites, content-hosting sites, and social network sites, provides a way to examine the possibilities and the limits for a kind of digitally-enabled 'heritage citizen'. We ask questions around how digital and social media open up new forms of consumption and production of heritage related int...
CoHERE explores the ways in which identities in Europe are constructed through heritage representations and performances that connect to ideas of place, history, tradition and belonging. The research identifies existing heritage practices and discourses in Europe. It also identifies means to sustain and transmit European heritages that are likely to contribute to the evolution of inclusive, communitarian identities and counteract disaffection with, and division within, the EU. A number of modes of representation and performance are explored in the project, from cultural policy, museum display, heritage interpretation, school curricula and political discourse to music and dance performances, food and cuisine, rituals and protest. Work Package 4, Digital Heritage Dialogue[s] engages with digital design methodologies to investigate heritage conversations online and on-site, and to craft opportunities for talk/dialogue within exhibition and heritage settings to develop intercultural dialogue. The WP explores the potential of existing and future digital technologies to provide deeper understandings of European heritage alongside reflexive identities and inclusive senses of belonging. This report relates to a key objective of the WP to 'investigate the role and cultural currency of serendipitous online heritage dialogues as manifested in social media platforms'. It presents the analysis of geotagged user-generated content aggregated from photo-sharing platforms to identify emerging approaches to heritage and identity building in reference to three European public squares. It discusses how notions of Europe and heritage are implicitly addressed in photo-sharing practices, and how official heritage discourses are both challenged and complemented by online, participatory accounts of place. The report analyses visual dialogues around the nexus place-heritage-identity, highlighting affective, curatorial and experiential approaches in negotiating past and present, online and offline representations of place and how they are intertwined in processes of identity-building.
2017
CoHERE explores the ways in which identities in Europe are constructed through heritage representations and performances that connect to ideas of place, history, tradition and belonging. The research identifies existing heritage practices and discourses in Europe. It also identifies means to sustain and transmit European heritages that are likely to contribute to the evolution of inclusive, communitarian identities and counteract disaffection with, and division within, the EU. A number of modes of representation and performance are explored in the project, from cultural policy, museum display, heritage interpretation, school curricula and political discourse to music and dance performances, food and cuisine, rituals and protest.
Harmonized Spaces, Dissonant Objects, Inventing Europe? Mobilizing Digital Heritage
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current …, 2011
Technology, particularly digitization and the online availability of cultural heritage collections, provides new possibilities for creating new forms of ‘European cultural heritage’. This essay analyzes the emerging sphere of European digital heritage as a project of technological harmonization. Drawing on Andrew Barry’s concepts of technological zones, it examines the various ways in which agency and European citizenship are being reconfigured around cultural heritage. It explores the “Europeanization” of digital heritage in three areas. In the first section, it analyzes the recent agenda for digital heritage of the European Union as a harmonizing project to create a smooth space of cultural heritage. In the next sections, the development of a harmonized virtual exhibit on the history of technology in Europe forms a case study to explore processes of harmonization at the level of the web platform, and in the aesthetics of digitized objects. It argues that rather than seeking to elide the points of unevenness and ‘dissonance’ that emerge in harmonization processes, we should instead look for ways to embrace them as points of dialogue and discovery.