Developing and Evaluating Management Services for Collective Memory ‡

Konstantinos Koukoulis,Dimitrios Koukopoulos

doi:10.3390/heritage2030134

Abstract

Collective memory is vital for people as it gives them the sense of belonging to a community. In particular, refugee population groups feel the need to maintain contact with their routes through collective memory, due to the abolishment of the physical connection to their homeland. However, people’s memories fade over time and stories are lost. In such a context a crucial question arises: Is it feasible to design and create a crowdsourcing collective memory management system for the benefit of such social groups preserving memory for next generations? In this work, we present a system that is able to collect and manage refugee stories disseminating them to the public. In order to stress the strength of the proposed system, we have created an evaluation methodology that assesses such a system in terms of system services and system stakeholders’ real impact. We chose to deal with the collective memory of refugee groups coming from Asia Minor to Greece at the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century. Evaluation results reveal that such a system positively affects personal and social impact factors. Furthermore, a preliminary results analysis suggests specific interactions among the examined personal and social impact factors. We believe that the proposed system facilitates the needs of collective memory management and the assessment scheme could be adapted in the creation and evaluation of collective memory management systems.

Highlights

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is “transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity” [1]
The questionnaire consisted of three sections: demographics and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills, detecting the way of life of relatives before the events (Table 1) and memory management (Table 2)
We study the system’s impact to a general population (GeP) that had no special relation to CH trying to trace if the system’s value is recognized from a general audience that maybe has no relation to the specific collective memory

Summary

Introduction

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is “transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity” [1]. Today UNESCO’s attention is given to displaced persons [2]. These people are often leaving their homelands, and their bonds with their cultural heritage roots are damaged. It is necessary to assist those people to preserve their cultural heritage (CH). The carriers of these bonds are memories. Current information technology can gather data from people that have suffered violent events and help them heal any trauma caused. People suffering displacement usually carry with them objects that are valuable, objects that help them remember. In such a context, several questions arise. How can memories be associated with persons’ memorabilia from their homelands and their past lives? Can spontaneous, person memories form collective memory repositories?

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion