With the digital revolution, the way in which we capture our living experiences, the nature of our artifacts, and the ways in which we share them are changing. Our lives are increasingly captured and shared with others who can themselves annotate and augment these digital traces with their own perspectives.
Preserving and communicating these everyday artifacts and practices (often on servers behind closed doors, not well indexed or lost on hard drives) is a matter of heritage: it brings the past to matter in the present, helping us to tell stories about who we are. In this sense, heritage artifacts and practices not only constitute a legacy to future generations, but they also play a crucial role in shaping our cultural memory and sense of identity.
Increasingly, everyday users, professional designers and administrators of social media projects are starting to confront challenges associated with aggregating and shaping large archives containing user-generated content that may be culturally and historically significant. However, despite the strong history in designing for personal information management and institutional knowledge management, the HCI community does not, to this date, have a well-developed vocabulary to address the heritage implications of these challenge.
This workshop will break new ground by critically engaging with heritage discourse and practice to explore the HCI research and design challenges of long-term preservation, management, and sharing of digital artifacts. The long-term objective of the workshop is to establish a network of scholars interested in shaping an agenda for novel research and interdisciplinary collaborations on future heritage topics in HCI.
Workshop Goals
- Discuss topics at the intersection of heritage, digital content and social technology that are relevant to HCI theory and practice;
- Discuss how to incorporate heritage concepts, methods, and approaches into HCI research and design;
- Develop an agenda of research themes and design considerations that expands the sociotechnical vocabulary of HCI.
Workshop Themes
This growing, natural engagement of HCI with heritage matters is opening up several issues and opportunities. We invite submissions that take an interdisciplinary approach to exploring heritage issues to expand HCI research and design. This workshop will specifically address the following three themes:
* Technologies
We are interested in digital and social technologies that allow us to create digital content that is or may be of personal as well as social and cultural value. We are also interested in technologies that allow us to mediate meaningful experiences and interactions with the things we come to value. These include technologies that can help people: (a) make sense of their memories for the benefit of present and future generations; (b) experience meaningful encounters with a shared or contested past; and (c) in general, bring the past to matter in the present in novel ways.
* Social and Cultural Practices
In addition to identifying specific types of technologies, we are interested in understanding how these emerging technologies are appropriated and used for heritage purposes. We will also discuss how individuals and communities digitally preserve, share, and interact with artifacts from the past to make them meaningful to the present. Topics include ethnographic, sociological, socio-cultural, and historical analyses at the intersection of heritage and technology.
* Emerging Topics
Emerging technologies are changing the ways in which people can meaningfully engage with heritage objects and concerns. We are interested in how HCI researchers, designers and practitioners can address the following issues: How can we curate our digital archives to ensure their longevity? How can we enable democratic, discursive spaces to address the possibility of multiple cultural interpretations and narratives? How can technology design enable ‘grassroots heritage’ practices to reveal hidden or marginalized narratives, and promote the formation of new social solidarities and cultural identities?
Foundational HCI topics we see as having a potential bearing on these issues include, but are not limited to: information capture, storage, management and retrieval; multimedia indexing, storage and retrieval; information presentation; mashups and DIY sites for cultural production; social networking and social media for the development of cultural narratives; digital artifacts and the provocation of personal, social and cultural stories; and social and cultural values in HCI.