Strokes of serendipity: Community co-curation and engagement with digital heritage

Abstract

This article explores the potential that community-led digital engagement with heritage holds for stimulating active citizenship through taking responsibility for shared cultural heritage and for fostering long-lasting relationships between local community heritage groups and national museums. Through the lens of a pilot project titled Science Museum: Community-in-Residence, we discovered that – despite working with community groups that were already loyal to and enjoyed existing working ties with the Science Museum in London, United Kingdom – this undertaking proved challenging owing to a range of structural and logistical issues even before the application of digital devices and tools had been considered. These challenges notwithstanding, the pilot found that the creation of time and space for face-to-face dialogue and interactions between the Science Museum and the participating community heritage groups helped to establish the parameters within which digital co-curation can effectively occur. This, in turn, informed the development of a digital prototype with huge potential to enable remote, virtual connectivity to, and interactivity with, conversations about shared heritage. The ultimate goal was twofold: (a) to help facilitate collaborative sense-making of our shared past and (b) to aid the building of sustainable institutional and community/public working ties around emerging affinities, agendas and research questions in relation to public history and heritage.

Too Low Motivation, Too High Authority? Digital Media Support for Co-Curation in Local Cultural Heritage Communities

“…Media-supported co-curation processes involve a socio-technological system of heterogeneous participants (with more or less expertise on different aspects) and a set of digital media, that mediate the processes in different ways by creating awareness on existing imbalances, providing material, offering a communication platform or a group thinking tool. Though digital media can solve some problems, we agree with Mutibwa et al [4] (p. 166) that they are not the solution to all existing challenges, they even pose novel ones, as some target audiences reject digital media. But bottom-up initiatives such as the web-based Austrian cultural collaboration platform Topothek [43], in which independent local units collect, digitize and contextualize historical images and artifacts, prove that digital environments are also well received at a local level and can make local cultural heritage more visible.…”

“…More recent participatory approaches also include collaborative exhibition design practices (in virtual and real spaces, cp. [3] and (p. 160, [4])), where collaboration and communication on archival objects aim to safeguard cultural heritage; In her highly influential work, Simon [5] describes four models of public participation in museums that characterize different forms of participation: contributory projects, where the audience has a small contribution in an institutionally controlled process, collaborative projects, where the audience becomes a partner in an institutionally controlled process, co-creative projects, where audience and institution jointly control a process, and hosted projects, where the audience is in full control within the context of the institution.…”

Mobilising the Energy in Store: stored collections, enthusiast experts and the ecology of heritage

“…Third, and slightly more obliquely, stored collections feature as part of an interest in co-curation, and community involvement in collection interpretation and in contemporary collecting (McSweeney and Kavanagh, 2016). Although writing on museum co-production has usually focused on how 'community' participants experience the social and physical infrastructure of 'the' museum in general those processes have often brought publics into the stored collections (see, for example, Mutibwa et al, 2018).…”

Perspectives on Amplifying Participation in Digital Culture through Global Digital Citizenship

“…Notwithstanding such differences in capacity, museums and cultural organizations share common capabilities in enabling participation at different audience levels. The Participatory Museum [76] outlines approaches designed to aid museums in becoming more open to participation, involving users to inform, co-design programs and exhibitions, and innovate projects, as well as providing platforms for users to construct their own meanings [84,85]. In the concept of the social museum, Visser recognizes new models of digital socialization between the museum and the public [86], with ways to learn with respect to broadening digital citizen engagement.…”