Bringing the Past to the Present: The use of tagging and storytelling for the enrichment of digital cultural heritage

By Erik Hekman on 18 May 2011

Together with Harry van Vliet I recently submitted an abstract to the International Conference on Knowledge Work and Innovations. In this paper we address the use of social tagging and storytelling in order to enrich digital collections of cultural heritage. The purpose of this conference is to deepen the co-operation between the members of the strategic partner network: HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, Turku University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences and Polytechnic University of Valencia by discussing the new practices of knowledge work and innovation creation. We submitted our paper to the Applied Arts track. Let’s hope it gets accepted.

The relationship between museums and visitors changed due to the influence of technological developments such as the Internet and mobile services this last decade. Museums let visitors play a much more active role, both in the process of making art collections more accessible and in the process of enriching these collections and making them more engaging. One way in which this is realised is by way of social tagging. Social tagging is a solution for engaging the public and making object descriptions more public-friendly. Tagging entails assigning labels and/or keywords to a specific item, such as a painting tagged with the word ‘beautiful’. Consequently it creates associations with the structure: user - tag - item. We refer to this process as social tagging when multiple people are engaged in this activity, and tags are mutually visible.

Together with several Dutch museums the issue was researched whether and how social tagging could benefit these museums in disclosing specific digital collections. This research was conducted in the PACE (Public Annotation of Cultural Heritage) project. The purpose of the PACE project was to examine the ways in which social tagging could be deployed as a tool to enrich collections, improve their acces¬sibility and to increase visitor group involvement. This led to the development of a social tagging tool (www.ikweetwatditis.nl) as a means to research several issues in the behaviour of people tagging cultural objects. The main results of this research will be presented and discussed, such as the different contributions of layman versus experts and the experience of storytelling instead of tags.

The research results of PACE as well as our experience in building a complete social tagging tool are put to use in a new project, currently being conducted: Roots2Share. Roots2Share is an ambitious and innovative programme initiated by two Dutch and two Greenlandic museums. These museums will cooperate in order to take the impressive photo collection of the former Dutch curator Gerti Nooter of more than 4000 images back to the source, back to Greenland. A digital heritage forum where visitors will be invited to enrich specific images with personal input such as context, interesting facts or personal experiences will support this. Besides tagging photos, visitors will be able to ask each other questions, correct details, add translations and debate. The paper will elaborate on design decisions regarding the integrating to tagging and storytelling of this digital heritage forum, and elaborate on the aspect of building an online and offline community to help the Inuit bring their past into the present.

tagged with: roots2share, ikweetwaditis, social storytelling, social tagging, cultural heritage

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