Rediscovering Refugee Routes: On the Creation of Collective Memory Map Services

Abstract

The route followed by a refugees’ group towards its final destination can be concerned in many cases as the main axe around which the collective memory of such a group of people is intertwined. Such a route enriches people memories with common experiences targeting places and interactions among refugees and locals. The route itself can be a very effective tool that will affect the collective memory of such people positively or negatively. A crucial point in the modern paradigm of smart cities is quality of life. To achieve quality of life for its citizens a smart city should establish ways to reduce alienation among the different groups that constitute city’s palimpsest. A way to achieve this goal is the knowledge of the different identities each citizens’ group have. Collective memory understanding of the different people groups is one of the basic vehicles towards this goal. In this paper, we attempt to give a first answer to such problems proposing and implementing specific services in the context of a crowdsourcing system for collective memory management using interactive maps. We demonstrate a basic usage scenario to show the strength of the implemented services, along with a first evaluation showing positive results.