SPICE - Project

The project

Introduction

Objectives

The overall aim of the project is to foster diverse participation in the heritage domain through a process of citizen curation. Citizens are supported to: develop their own personal interpretations of cultural objects; work together to present their collective view of life through culture and heritage; and gain an appreciation of alternative cultural viewpoints.

Methods

Methods are codesigned so that they can be used by citizen groups to produce personal interpretations of cultural objects and analyse and compare them against the interpretations of others. Tools are developed for modelling users and groups and recommending content in a way that assists citizen groups in building a representation of themselves and appreciating variety within groups and similarity across groups.

Technologies

A Linked Data infrastructure supports citizen curation using social media platforms in a way that gives heritage institutions control over rights protected digital assets and access to citizens responses to their collections. User experience is designed to enable inclusive participation in citizen curation activities across cultures and abilities.

Case studies

A series of citizen curation case studies with a diverse set of museums and citizen groups helps us to demonstrate how our approach can promote inclusive participation and social cohesion in a variety of contexts.

[WP1] Management

[UNIBO] Management and coordination of the project, including monitoring of the production of results and IP regulations.

[WP2] Citizen curation methods

[AAU] Development of methods to support citizens in building representations of themselves in the form of activities such as storytelling, tagging, montage, and curation.

[WP3] Modelling and recommendation

[UH] Analysis of citizen curation activities, development of tools for semi-automated semantic annotation of curatorial products, development of tools to support the exploration of users' interpretations on museum objects. Development of a recommender system to suggest alternative perspectives within and across groups.

[WP4] Distributed Linked Data layer

[OU] Development of a distributed Linked Data social media layer, including an underlying Linked Data infrastructure for data storage, policies for data reuse, privacy, and provenance. Development of methods for linking and discovering contents across datasets.

[WP5] Interface design

[PG] Development of interfaces for participation, collaboration, and exploration of interpretations, tailored on different groups including those with disabilities.

[WP6] Integrating systems

[UNITO] Development of an integrated socio-technical system for integrating and testing social media layer and interface components. Development of Semantic web ontologies, ontology-driven support for exploration and sense-making, scripts for guiding citizens through productive activities.

[WP7] Codesign and evaluation

[Aalto] Co-design and evaluation of inclusive citizen curation tools and methods to support participation, social cohesion and research, by means of case studies.

[WP8] Dissemination and exploitation

[GVAM] Dissemination of the results of the project to the memory institutions, heritage professional and general public users, and the academic community.

[WP9] Ethics requirements

[UNIBO] Ensure compliance with the ethics requirements.