Evaluating the Usability and the Personal and Social Acceptance of a Participatory Digital Platform for Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Nowadays, through the Internet, cultural heritage reaches broader audiences via digital platforms that manage and disseminate cultural content formulating a common sense in societies and supporting society's cohesion. Various cultural heritage digital platforms embraced the idea of user participation in contributing cultural content. In this work, we evaluate the usability and the personal and social acceptance of a specific participatory platform (Culture Gate) that manages, disseminates and exploits cultural content and services. We associate platform usability with the level of engagement platform's content and services bring on users. Personal acceptance is related to specific factors like the users' disposal to disseminate and exploit platform content and services or to actively participate in a digital community. We relate social acceptance to specific factors like the promotion of users' responsibility towards the online community and the society, the support of intergenerational dialogue and the amplification of a user's sense of belonging to a society. Evaluation methodology applies a research model based on hypotheses, deriving from the ideas of widely accepted sociological and economic theories, which reflect each of the aforementioned factors. Evaluation results suggest that the test-bed platform is considered usable and acceptable, in a personal and social level, by the users.

Building Semantic Metadata for Historical Archives through an Ontology-driven User Interface

“…One of the most interesting exploitation of crowdsourcing in the Cultural Heritage domain is represented by user-generated meta-data, usually consisting in social tagging, which typically leads to folksonomies (Hooland et al, 2011;Ridge, 2013;Gupta et al, 2010). Social tagging involves important issues such as the quality of the produced meta-data, the personal and social acceptance of participatory platforms, and the already mentioned motivations of participants (Koukopoulos and Koukopoulos, 2019), but the discussion of these aspects falls outside the scope of this paper. Another close perspective that is worth mentioning is that of groups of experts collaborating in the annotations of heritage collections, as, for example, in the CULTURA project (Agosti el al., 2013) or in the SAGE environment proposed by Foley and colleagues (Foley et al, 2017), where user-generated annotations are supported by automatic techniques.…”

New challenges for urban ethnic community research: Digitalization and collaboration

“…There are two positions concerning how to represent different ethnic groups in a city's history (sub/urban 2014). The more traditional approach focuses on the concept and process of "integration" (Hepp -Düvel, 2010). According to this narrative, migration is a process defined in time, with apparently clear starting and end points, in which the state is the most important actor as its needs and regulations define and identify the room for maneuver of each ethnic group.…”

“…One is the urban medium in which they arrive, move, live, work, and rest which serves as a framework for their daily lives and which is constantly transforming as a result of current trends in urban development (changes in the real estate markets, current urban economy, demographic migration processes) (sub\urban 2014). The other, increasingly important context that is essentially determining the everyday life of ethnic groups is the ever-changing repertoire of communication technologies that allow ethnic groups living in big cities to interact with each other, with locals, and with "those back at home" in various ways (Hepp -Düvel 2010).…”

“…The relationships that exist between the components of this three-element system -city/migration/medium -are studied in themselves by independent and rather diverse research trends. 4 Thus, the relationship between migration and the media has long been studied by sociologists and media researchers, and the focus of their research is the specific media consumption (sometimes media production) of ethnic groups, the role of media in social integration or segregation, the media visibility/invisibility of ethnic groups, and the list goes on (Hepp -Düvel 2010). The relationship between the city and media systems also emerges in several contexts: literary and film historians and media researchers are investigating the historically changing ways of how cities are represented in different media, and analyzing cities' successful and sometimes less successful attempts to create their own visual image and brand (Szijártó 2010).…”

Μεθοδολογίες Σχεδιασμού Και Αξιολόγησης Έξυπνων Ψηφιακών Περιβαλλόντων Για Τον Πολιτισμό Και Την Κοινωνία

“…Κοινό σημείο των τριών περιβαλλόντων είναι η αντιμετώπιση της πρόκλησης της βιωσιμότητας μέσα από την υλοποίηση υπηρεσιών που στοχεύουν να έχουν θετικό αντίκτυπο στους ισολογισμούς των φορέων που πρόκειται να τα χρησιμοποιήσουν. Η επιστημονική κοινότητα αποδέχτηκε τις μεθοδολογίες σχεδιασμού και αξιολόγησης που προτείναμε όπως αυτές αποτυπώθηκαν στα τρία έξυπνα περιβάλλοντα [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]400].…”