Cultural Heritage Communities: Technologies and Challenges

Cultural heritage is an established domain of study for human-centred computing – from the design of technological interventions at heritage sites, to the analysis and evaluation of the role of shared and of personal technologies in heritage settings. The main focus has been for a long time on a view of heritage where an official institution offers visitors certain content and interaction for interpretation and education purposes, whilst cultural heritage is a much more fragmented domain where different communities can play a significant role and where new socially inclusive and participative ideas of heritage have become widespread. Different communities of stakeholders are involved in the preservation, communication and sharing of heritage holdings: from the community of professionals managing them, to the communities of volunteers, of special interest groups and of “friends” and supporters of the institution engaging with them. Technology can feature in a number of activities for all these groups, as well as a tool to support visitors in their experience of heritage. Overall, communities of interest around heritage (with different degrees of formality and training) are increasingly defining and taking ownership of what is of value for them, thus defining and reconfiguring heritage.

Workshop & publication

The workshop will run over 1 day on Sunday, 28th of June 2015 as part of the international conference Communities & Technologies 2015  in Limerick (Ireland). During the workshop, we will facilitate a set of presentations and hands-on group exercises. We invite the participants to contribute to the workshop with either posters illustrating a concept/framework, or samples of data collected during fieldwork, or demos/prototypes, and these materials will be the main subject of the discussion.

As a follow up to the workshop, we will produce an edited publication (journal special issue or edited book, negotiations are currently underway) collecting all the workshop contributions in extended form.

Call for Papers

We welcome submissions on the following themes:

• The emergence of communities of interest and of practice in cultural heritage and how technology
  mediates this;
• Studies of communication and interaction within and among heritage communities;
• Practices of participation and cooperation by heritage communities in technology design;
• Crowdsourcing, participatory science initiatives and community engagement in cultural heritage
• Technology design and evaluation for heritage communities;
• Challenges and opportunities for community involvement in cultural heritage.

Important Dates

May 1st, 2015: deadline for submissions

May 15th, 2015: notifications due

June 1st, 2015: early registration deadline

June 28th, 2015: workshop at C&T 2015 in Limerick

Submission guidelines

Papers should be between 4 and 6 pages long and formatted according to the ACM SIG Proceedings Template

Paper submissions should be emailed to Dr. Areti Damala: areti.damala@strath.ac.uk

All submissions will be reviewed by the organizing team.

Organisers

Luigina Ciolfi (Sheffield Hallam University, UK), Areti Damala (University of Strathclyde, UK), Eva Hornecker (Bauhaus Universität Weimar, Germany), Monika Lechner (DEN Foundation, The Netherlands), Laura Maye (University of Limerick, Ireland), Daniela Petrelli (Sheffield Hallam University, UK).

More information

To find out more please visit the  workshop homepage: culturalheritagecommunities.wordpress.com