Photosharing on Flickr: intangible heritage and emergent publics

This paper argues that Flickr, a popular ‘photosharing’ website, is facilitating new public engagements with world heritage sites like the Sydney Opera House. Australian heritage institutions (namely libraries and museums) have recently begun to employ Flickr as a site through which to engage communities with their photographic archives and collections. Yet Flickr is more than an ‘online photo album’: it is a social and cultural network generated around personal photographic practices. Members can form ‘groups’: self‐organised communities defined by shared interests in places, photographic genres, or the appraisal of photographs. These groups are public spaces for both visual and textual conversations – complex social negotiations involving personal expression and collective identity. For one group, the common interest is the Sydney Opera House, and their shared visual and textual expressions – representations of this building. This paper argues that such socio‐visual practices themselves constitute an intangible heritage. By drawing on the work of scholars Jose Van Dijck and Nancy Van House, Dawson Munjeri and Michael Warner, the paper proposes that this enactment of intangible heritage is implicated in the broader cultural value of the Sydney Opera Hous

Informal networked learning as teamwork in design studio Cmyview: using mobile digital technologies to connect with student\u27s everyday experiences

CmyView is a research project that investigates how mobile technologies have the potential to facilitate new ways to share, experience and understand the connections that people have with places. The aim of the project is to theorise and develop a tool and a methodology that addresses the reception of architecture and the built environment using mobile digital technologies that harness ubiquitous everyday practices, such as photography and walking. While CmyView is primarily focused on evidencing the reception of places, this chapter argues that these activities can also make a contribution to the core pedagogy of architectural education, the design studio. This chapter presents findings of an initial pilot study with four students at an Australian university that demonstrates how CmyView offers a valuable contribution to the educational experience in the design studio

Sydney Opera House on eBay: enabling technologies, community and social value

Digital forms of participation with significant places, such the Sydney Opera House, are increasing. What can they reveal about communities of this World Heritage site? How do contingent forms of participation evidence the interconnectedness of tangible, intangible and digital forms of cultural heritage? Critical heritage scholars assert that social value is a central issue in cultural heritage. In an Australian context, ‘social value’ is used to denote the significance that communities have for places of cultural heritage. Unlike other forms of place-significance such as scientific, historic or aesthetic values, the assessment of social value is complex and difficult to evidence. This theoretical paper explores participation in place through two digital instances, buying a real tile on eBay and a virtual one on Own Our House a crowdfunding venture by the Opera House Trust. The paper seeks to reveal the way in which such online artefacts demonstrate how cultural significance is entangled in the everyday and the individual experience. It argues that these seemingly insignificant moments of participation are implicated in the personal and the emotional by connecting work within critical heritage studies with the work of media scholar Jose van Dijck. Then the paper reflects on the way in which these everyday forms of participation through digital technologies disrupts and complicates established ideas about communities upon which local, state, national and international heritage systems are based

CmyView: Walking together apart

Networked learning practices are impacting the field of cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible, with implications for the way in which places of cultural significance are understood, managed, documented, engaged with and studied. Our research explores the intersection between walking, photography, technology and learning, investigating how mobile devices can be used to foster community participation and assess social value within a networked framework for digital heritage. The paper introduces CmyView, a mobile phone application and social media platform in development, with a design concept grounded on both digital heritage and networked learning perspectives. CmyView encourages people to collect and share their views by making images and audio recordings of personally meaningful sites they see, while walking outdoors. Each person’s walking trajectory (along with their associated images and audio files) then becomes a trace-able artefact, something potentially shareable with a community of fellow walkers. The aim of CmyView is to encourage networked heritage practices and community participation, as people learn to assess their own and experience others social values of the built environment. Drawing on a framework for the analysis and design of productive learning networks, we explore the educational design of CmyView arguing that the platform offers a space for democratic heritage education and interpretation, where participatory urban curatorship practices are nurtured. CmyView reframes social value as dynamic, fluid and located within communities, rather than fixed in a place. The paper presents preliminary findings of the activity of a group of four undergraduate students at an Australian university, who used CmyView to explore the immediate surroundings of their campus. Participants interacted with the platform, mapping, capturing, audio recording their impressions and sites of interest in their walks. In so doing, they created shareable trajectories, which were subsequently experienced by the same group of participants on a second walk. The paper concludes with a discussion about the impact of our research for the design of mobile technologies that embrace participation and sharing, through a networked learning perspective. The paper brings together concepts that sit at the intersection of previously separate fields, namely digital heritage and networked learning, to find their synergies

CmyView: Walking together apart

Networked learning practices are impacting the field of cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible, with implications for the way in which places of cultural significance are understood, managed, documented, engaged with and studied. Our research explores the intersection between walking, photography, technology and learning, investigating how mobile devices can be used to foster community participation and assess social value within a networked framework for digital heritage. The paper introduces CmyView, a mobile phone application and social media platform in development, with a design concept grounded on both digital heritage and networked learning perspectives. CmyView encourages people to collect and share their views by making images and audio recordings of personally meaningful sites they see, while walking outdoors. Each person’s walking trajectory (along with their associated images and audio files) then becomes a trace-able artefact, something potentially shareable with a community of fellow walkers. The aim of CmyView is to encourage networked heritage practices and community participation, as people learn to assess their own and experience others social values of the built environment. Drawing on a framework for the analysis and design of productive learning networks, we explore the educational design of CmyView arguing that the platform offers a space for democratic heritage education and interpretation, where participatory urban curatorship practices are nurtured. CmyView reframes social value as dynamic, fluid and located within communities, rather than fixed in a place. The paper presents preliminary findings of the activity of a group of four undergraduate students at an Australian university, who used CmyView to explore the immediate surroundings of their campus. Participants interacted with the platform, mapping, capturing, audio recording their impressions and sites of interest in their walks. In so doing, they created shareable trajectories, which were subsequently experienced by the same group of participants on a second walk. The paper concludes with a discussion about the impact of our research for the design of mobile technologies that embrace participation and sharing, through a networked learning perspective. The paper brings together concepts that sit at the intersection of previously separate fields, namely digital heritage and networked learning, to find their synergies