Community Generated Digital Content

Community Generated Digital Content

Wednesday, November 20, 2024 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM · 1 hr. (Europe/London)
Space 2 (and hybrid)
Panel Discussion
Our Heritage Our Stories

Information

Connecting digital humanists, historians, computer scientists, and information professionals from across academic and Independent Research Organisation backgrounds, this panel will explore key areas of future research identified throughout the Our Heritage, Our Stories (OHOS) project, elaborating on remaining challenges for research and innovation from a range of invested perspectives. Discussions will reflect on research findings about the nature of Community Generated Digital Content (CGDC), its status within the archival sector (historically and contemporarily), where CGDC has been recognised and where it remains underappreciated, how we may collectively push for the improved recognition and representation of CGDC as a unique cultural asset, and how working with large complex datasets of CGDC has implications for data driven research and the development of AI tools and methods. It will also address challenges to carrying out research across the disciplines using CGDC, with examples from the different sectors and subject areas represented by the panellists. The panel will also address the experiences of OHOS in bringing together differing areas of expertise and institutional/organisational stances, and how these experiences can help us better understand some of the challenges of interdisciplinary and cross-sector research.

Our Heritage Our StoriesOur Heritage, Our Stories: Linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people's national collection (October 2021 – January 2025) PI: Professor Lorna Hughes, University of Glasgow Co-Is: Universities of Glasgow and Manchester, The National Archives Partner organisations: Tate, The British Museum, Association for Learning and Technology, Digital Preservation Coalition, Software Sustainability Institute, Archives+, Dictionaries of the Scots Language, National Lottery Heritage Fund, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland & Wikimedia UK Community-generated digital content (CGDC) is one of the UK's prime cultural assets. However, CGDC is currently 'critically endangered' due to technological and organisational barriers and has proven resistant to traditional methods of linking and integration. The challenge of integrating CGDC into larger archives has effectively silenced diverse community voices within our national collection. The project responds to these urgent challenges by bringing together cutting-edge approaches from cultural heritage, humanities, and computer science. Existing solutions to CGDC integration, involving bespoke interventionist activities, are expensive, time-consuming, and unsustainable at scale, while unsophisticated computational integration erases the meaning and purpose of both CGDC and its creators. Our approach is fundamentally different: our project is using innovative multidisciplinary methods, AI tools, and a co-design process to make previously unfindable and unlinkable CGDC discoverable in our virtual national collection. Our project is developing approaches to dissolve barriers to create meaningful new links across CGDC collections. We are also developing new methods of engagement, and making this content accessible to new and diverse audiences through a major new public-facing Observatory at The National Archives where people can access, reuse, and remix this newly integrated content. This will facilitate a wealth of fresh research, while also embedding new strategies for future management of CGDC into heritage practice and training and fostering newly enriching, robust connections between communities and archival institutions. By enabling CGDC to be re-used and reimagined, we will help it survive and be nourished, for the future and for our shared national collection.

Log in