Abstract
Digital archives of memory institutions are typically concerned with the cataloguing of artefacts of artistic, historical, and cultural value. Recently, new forms of citizen participation in cultural heritage have emerged, producing a wealth of material spanning from visitors’ experiential feedback on exhibitions and cultural artefacts to digitally mediated interactions like the ones happening on social media platforms. Citizen curation is proposed in the context of the European project SPICE (Social Participation, Cohesion, and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement) as a methodology for producing, collecting, interpreting, and archiving people’s responses to cultural objects, with the aim of favouring the emergence of multiple, sometimes conflicting, viewpoints and motivating users and memory institutions to reflect upon them. We argue that citizen curation urges to rethink the nature of computational infrastructures supporting data management of memory institutions, bringing novel challenges that include issues of distribution, authoritativeness, interdependence, privacy, and rights management. To approach these issues, we survey relevant literature toward a distributed, Linked Data infrastructure, with a focus on identifying the roles and requirements involved in such an infrastructure. We show how existing research can contribute significantly in facing the challenges raised by citizen curation and discuss challenges and opportunities from the socio-technical standpoint.
Highlights
Digital archives of memory institutions are typically concerned with the cataloguing of artefacts of artistic, historical, and cultural value
From the role-based analysis of requirements, we identified six areas of interest, namely: (a) Data management for cultural heritage; (b) Web technologies for metadata publishing and exchange; (c) Rights data management; (d) Crowd-sourcing and cultural heritage; (e) Social Media uses in cultural heritage; and (f) Distributed online social networks
We focus on analysing how approaches in this area of research may fit some of the requirements of citizen curation, reusing results from a number of surveys in the area: [20] that focuses on approaches based on P2P networks; [104], which analyses aspects of security and privacy; [61] illustrates a number of open challenges for Distributed Online Social Network (DOSN), for example, in relation to scalability and access control; and [48], which covers in addition issues of data availability and information diffusion
Summary
Digital archives of memory institutions are typically concerned with the cataloguing of artefacts of artistic, historical, and cultural value. Citizen curation requires a technical infrastructure that is egalitarian in essence, where memory institutions, citizens, scholars, and businesses share the “power” over the assets they produce and the associated metadata What does this mean from the technological standpoint? In the light of this research program, it is an open question what type of technologies and systems could support management and preservation of data produced by citizen curation To answer this question, in this article (i) we characterise citizen curation from the point of view of user roles and (ii) we devise a general workflow. We survey relevant research in computational ecosystems for cultural heritage focusing on technologies and tools that could contribute to build social applications for citizen curation, and tackle issues of distribution, authoritativeness, interdependence, privacy, and rights management.
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