Community empowerment through the management of intangible cultural heritage in the Isle of Jura, Scotland

The number of digital projects aimed at documenting and preserving communities’ intangible cultural heritage (ICH) has grown considerably in recent years. These projects take advantage of the advancement of digital technologies to enable local communities to manage their ICH, in tune with the deprofessionalisation of heritage practices. This paper follows the progress of a case study that used a wiki to enable participation in the documentation of cultural heritage in the Isle of Jura, Scotland. Using a mix of action research and ethnography, the main argument of the paper is that involvement in digital cultural heritage can enhance community empowerment, but that this depends upon social dimensions of community cohesion and engagement as well as technical knowledge of the software and technologies involved

A participatory approach for digital documentation of Egyptian Bedouins intangible cultural heritage

The Bedouins of Egypt hold a unique intangible cultural heritage (ICH), with distinct cultural values and social practices that are rapidly changing as a consequence of having settled after having been nomadic for centuries. We present our attempt to develop a bottom-up approach to document Bedouin ICH. Grounded in participatory design practices, the project purpose was two-fold: engaging Egyptian Engineering undergraduates with culturally-distant technology users and introducing digital self-documentation of ICH to the Bedouin community. We report the design of a didactic model that deployed the students as research partners to co-design four prototypes of ICH documentation mobile applications with the community. The prototypes reflected an advanced understanding for the values to the Bedouins brought by digital documentation practices. Drawing from our experience, three recommendations were elicited for similar ICH projects. Namely, focusing on the community benefits; promoting motivation ownership, and authenticity; and pursuing a shared identity between designers and community members. These guidelines hold a strong value as they have been tested against local challenges that could have been detrimental to the project

Il giardino Vincenzo Bellini di Catania: Una prospettiva antropologica

This article is linked to the field of urban anthropology. The aim of my work was to investigate the “Giardino comunale Vincenzo Bellini” in Catania as a turning point for the civic and cultural life within urban space. The study moved from the idea that “Giardino Bellini” is not only a central urban space due to its position and history, but also represents a perfect location for reading social dynamics which are crucial in the city life. A “Villa” – so is the Giardino Bellini better known by Cataneses – can therefore assume a great anthropological significance, which was studied through a placed and relationship-wise analysis. However, this was open to a diachronic perspective able to understand how civic memories converge in this space-urban hub.This article is linked to the field of urban anthropology. The aim of my work was to investigate the “Giardino comunale Vincenzo Bellini” in Catania as a turning point for the civic and cultural life within urban space. The study moved from the idea that “Giardino Bellini” is not only a central urban space due to its position and history, but also represents a perfect location for reading social dynamics which are crucial in the city life. A “Villa” – so is the Giardino Bellini better known by Cataneses – can therefore assume a great anthropological significance, which was studied through a placed and relationship-wise analysis. However, this was open to a diachronic perspective able to understand how civic memories converge in this space-urban hub

Management of open access research infrastructures in large EU projects: the “CultureLabs” case

Working Paper Ircres-CNR 09/2021. Research funding organizations, particularly at international level, are increasingly promoting the creation and maintenance of open access research infrastructures (RI). These resources have assumed a pivotal role as support for the new open and networked science in their dimension of technical and operational frameworks that allow scientists and stakeholders to collaborate and share scientific data and results. In Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), the creation and exploitation of open data platforms is still attempting to catch up with longer-standing practices in the “hard sciences” as the resistance to wider data sharing has not yet been completely overcome. This paper aims to describe how a large project, financed by the European Commission, managed the creation of a RI in the field of SSH, showing the steps undertaken to comply with the GDPR regulations and prepare the data for useful sharing and reuse. In this regard, the authors present the case study of the Horizon 2020 “CultureLabs” project, placing emphasis on some specific practical factors that they believe are particularly important for implementing open access principles in the establishment and maintenance of RIs in the new course of science based on sharing and openness. In particular, the authors will focus on creation of “useful” and GDPR-compliant data and the impact on research activities as a result of their (re)utilisation; the control of the data management process; and the compliance with funders’ requirements (e.g. in terms of data security). The reflection on the interplay of these aspects, operated through a case study, appears to be crucial in moving away from a merely theoretical approach to addressing the issue of open access, and it hopes to serve as a guide or a warning for those who create and administer open RIs

Building a bridge: opportunities and challenges for intangible cultural heritage at the intersection of institutions, civic society, and migrant communities

This article explores the needs and expectations of migrant and refugee communities in several European countries in relation to communicating and sharing their intangible cultural heritage (ICH) practices, and of cultural and civic institutions that plan to support this. Based on two empirical studies, we report on the perspectives of cultural institutions, NGOs that are active in cultural work, and representatives of migrant and refugee communities. This work sheds some light on the complex relationship between migrant communities and institutions with regard to ICH, and identifies the gaps and differences between these perspectives so as to produce guidelines and recommendations on how to bridge grassroots’ interests in ICH and cultural institutions, as well as organisations engaged in cultural work with migrant and refugee communities. The overall goal is to address the under-representation and marginalisation of many migrant and refugee communities in cultural heritage participation, production, and safeguarding and to propose ways to activate the potential of ICH

CultureLabs: Cultural heritage and digital technology at the service of social innovation

Studies and practice in the cultural field have long acknowledged the importance of participatory approaches for engaging visitors of cultural institutions, however, it is only recently that we are talking about steps to connecting institutional heritage with civic initiatives that can aid social cohesion and community empowerment. In dialogue with ongoing practices in this context, CultureLabs aims to develop novel methodologies and digital tools that can facilitate the organisation and wider deployment of participatory projects around cultural her - itage, focusing on the social inclusion of disadvantaged groups, and particularly of migrant communities. As a first step in this process, the CultureLabs team has conducted a series of interviews and surveys with the aim to identify and analyse the organisational needs and lessons learnt by different actors from the cultural, social, educational and public administration fields as well as the needs and viewpoints of different migrant communities. These needs have guided the design of an innovative online platform which seeks to offer a number of services for supporting more efficient and participatory governance of cultural heritage on one hand and for enabling inclusive and creative interactions with digital cultural heritage on the other. The CultureLabs platform will allow multiple and diverse stakeholders to discover and combine differ - ent resources and elements of best practices, the "ingredients", in order to form new "recipes" for social innovation according to their own needs and objectives

Challenges and paradoxes in decolonising HCI: A critical discussion

The preponderance of Western methods, practices, standards, and classifications in the manner in which new technology-related knowledge is created and globalised has led to calls for more inclusive approaches to design. A decolonisation project is concerned with how researchers might contribute to dismantling and re-envisioning existing power relations, resisting past biases, and balancing Western heavy influences in technology design by foregrounding the authentic voices of the indigenous people in the entire design process. We examine how the establishment of local Global South HCI communities (AfriCHI and ArabHCI) has led to the enactment of decolonisation practices. Specifically, we seek to uncover how decolonisation is perceived in the AfriCHI and ArabHCI communities as well as the extent to which both communities are engaged with the idea of decolonisation without necessarily using the term. We drew from the relevant literature, our own outsider/insider lived experiences, and the communities’ responses to an online anonymised survey to highlight three problematic but interrelated practical paradoxes: a terminology, an ethical, and a micro-colonisation paradox. We argue that these paradoxes expose the dilemmas faced by local non-Western researchers as they pursue decolonisation thinking. This article offers a blended perspective on the decolonisation debate in HCI, CSCW, and the practice-based CSCW scholarly communities and invites researchers to examine their research work using a decolonisation lens

In the eye of the student : "An intangible cultural heritage experience, with a human-computer interaction twist"

We critically engage with CHI communities emerging outside the global North (ArabHCI and AfriCHI) to explore how participation is configured and enacted within sociocultural and political contexts fundamentally different from Western societies. We contribute to recent discussions about postcolonialism and decolonization of HCI by focusing on non-Western future technology designers. Our lens was a course designed to engage Egyptian students with a local yet culturally-distant community to design applications for documenting intangible heritage. Through an action research, the instructors reflect on selected students' activities. Despite deploying a flexible learning curriculum that encourages greater autonomy, the students perceived themselves with less agency than other institutional stakeholders involved in the project. Further, some of them struggled to empathize with the community as the impact of the cultural differences on configuring participation was profound. We discuss the implications of the findings on HCI education and in international cross-cultural design projects

Using wiki software to enhance community empowerment by building digital archives for intangible cultural heritage

In recent years, the number of digital projects aimed at documenting and preserving communities’ intangible cultural heritage (ICH) has grown considerably. Nevertheless, most of these resources do not provide a userfriendly interface which allows non-professional people to contribute to them. As a result, professional accounts of cultural heritage might miss out the finer-grained knowledge about communities’ customs and traditions. This paper tries to show how the creation of community digital archives allowing an “anyone can edit” approach on wiki software gives a better representation of communities’ ICH, as well as representing an affordable and sustainable interactive digital presence for historical communities. This project has been developed from my doctoral studies and is closely related to the CURIOS Project at the dot.rural Digital Economy Research Hub (University of Aberdeen), which has been taking a different approach to how communities can maintain their digital presence