Resources

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 preparing 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.

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, the authors 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.

This booklet brings together twelve international projects that were selected and invited to present their results at the “Digital Technologies for Social Inclusion and Participation” symposium, organised by CultureLabs, in collaboration with Sheffield Hallam University, University College Cork, and the National Technical University of Athens. These twelve projects describe new models of collaboration and interaction between cultural heritage, digital technologies, and social innovation.

The booklet also features the work of Dr Jenny Kidd of Cardiff University, exploring museums, social media, and participation during the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The lack of granular and rich descriptive metadata highly affects the discoverability and usability of cultural heritage collections aggregated and served through digital platforms, such as Europeana, thus compromising the user experience. In this context, metadata enrichment services through automated analysis and feature extraction along with crowdsourcing annotation services can offer a great opportunity for improving the metadata quality of digital cultural content in a scalable way, while at the same time engaging different user communities and raising awareness about cultural heritage assets. To address this need, we propose the CrowdHeritage open end-to-end enrichment and crowdsourcing ecosystem, which supports an end-to-end workflow for the improvement of cultural heritage metadata by employing crowdsourcing and by combining machine and human intelligence to serve the particular requirements of the cultural heritage domain. The proposed solution repurposes, extends, and combines in an innovative way general-purpose state-of-the-art AI tools, semantic technologies, and aggregation mechanisms with a novel crowdsourcing platform, so as to support seamless enrichment workflows for improving the quality of CH metadata in a scalable, cost-effective, and amusing way.

This publication presents and discusses the results of a qualitative study aimed at identifying what role interactive digital technologies could play in facilitating the participation of communities at risk of exclusion (particularly migrants and refugees) in cultural and heritage-related activities.

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 heritage, 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 different resources and elements of best practices, the “ingredients”, in order to form new “recipes” for social innovation according to their own needs and objectives.

This article reflects on the process, outcomes and value generated by applying co-design to a large scale, long-term (4 years) collaboration involving designers, developers and cultural heritage professionals, with the goal of creating a platform for the realisation of tangible interactive installations. The project was pioneering in establishing and sustaining co-design for the introduction of sector-changing technology into the museum domain. Extensive Data about the co-design process itself were gathered, including interviews investigating the participants’ experiences and the impact on their practices. The paper provides insights from such case study, particularly with respect to value co-creation.