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

Abstract

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