%0 Journal Article
%T Collaborative conversation as a method for exploring multiple perspectives on 'community' and forms of knowledge in the Congruence Engine
%A Simon Popple
%A Stefania Zardini Lacedelli
%A Arran  J Rees
%A Stuart Prior
%A Maggie Smith
%D 2023
%V Congruence Engine
%N Autumn 2022
%K Community Engagement
%K conversational writing
%K digital sustainability
%K knowledge co-creation
%K online cultures
%K participatory heritage practices
%K remixing
%X 
%Z For a helpful introduction to autoethnography, see Ngunjiri, F W, Hernandez, K-A C and Chang, H, 2010, ‘Living Autoethnography: Connecting Life and Research’, Journal of Research Practice 6(1), pp 1–17.
%Z The AHRC Connected Communities theme considered the nature of ‘community’ as part of the research. See the project’s final report for consideration of relationships, partnerships and notions of community: https://connected-communities.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Creating-Living-Knowledge.Final_.pdf.
%Z Keri Facer and Bryony Enright characterise this as ‘the fantasy of the “university” and the “community”’. 
%Z Museums of the Dolomites was a three-year project aimed to connect different museums and collections of the Dolomites through the co-design of digital initiatives. Thanks to a social media campaign and the collaborative development of a shared, digital space dedicated to the Dolomites heritage (https://museodolom.it/en/exhibitions), the project fostered the creation of a thriving heritage community of museum professionals, researchers, historians, art curators, geologists, inhabitants and Dolomites lovers. The project was funded by the UNESCO Dolomites Foundation and coordinated by the digital-born museum Dolom.it.
%Z ‘Heritage community’ is a concept introduced by the Convention for the Value of Cultural Heritage for the Society (Council of Europe, 2005) described as ‘people who value specific aspects of cultural heritage which they wish, within the framework of public action, to sustain and transmit to future generations’. This concept signals a shift from the object-based conception of heritage to a more fluid, process-based, subjective concept of heritage.
%Z A Wikipedia editor’s edit count (the amount of edits made to a wiki) is often used as a simple metric for determining one’s overall contribution.
%Z Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner refer to the ‘unique contours of collective online spaces’ (2017, p 6) in their work on online cultures. Internet forums, and now social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok, provide a space for people with very specific interests to coalesce. Sometimes these are just places to share interests, but they also often act as places to document and share those interests. A prime example can be found in the mass archiving of the early personal website platform GeoCities. Yahoo! bought GeoCities and in 2009 decided to shut it down with very little notice. Luckily (I’d argue) there was a niche group of self-identified ‘rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths’ (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page) who quickly rallied to protect as many GeoCities webpages as possible. Web historian Ian Milligan argues that it is largely down to these rogue archivists that we have any access to the huge GeoCities archive today (2017, p 137). Of particular interest to me is the online collective of people behind KnowYourMeme.com, who do the same for memes and memetic culture today (Rees, 2021). 
%Z This was certainly the case in relation to the ESRC-funded Island Stories (2014) project which examined the research and storytelling traditions of a specific community on the Scottish Isle of Bute. It focused on their use and adoption of digital approaches within the context of the imminent arrival of high-speed broadband. Our research revealed the value of online communities and their co-option of Facebook as a primary mode of working and sharing information. It also revealed that many people preferred more traditional, analogue practices.
%Z The Saltaire Collection website (https://www.saltairecollection.org) includes online exhibitions, timelines and digital narratives co-created in collaboration with the volunteers.
%Z The writers group members all work as individuals (meeting in the pub from time to time to share progress and issues faced). One writer is currently researching the history of Roberts Park, Saltaire; one is researching the history of Salts Hospital and the Almshouses; another has transcribed audio tapes of interviews with a man named Clive Woods who led the campaign to have UNESCO designate Saltaire as a World Heritage Site (Clive died in 2001). One writer completed the story of Pace Microtechnology – an oral history undertaken with the three founding directors. This company was Jonathan Silvers' first large tenant and played a significant part in his success in regenerating Salts Mill as well as being significant in their own right as leaders in the late 1980s digital revolution. Another writer has been researching histories of the small traders in Saltaire, while Colin Coates and I have completed a second book, A Century of Hidden Histories: Saltaire (Smith, M and Coates, C, 2021, Ings Poetry).
%Z The Royal Historical Society have produced blogs to substantiate and collate information they have on women in classical studies to better support creating content on this subject. An example here: https://blog.royalhistsoc.org/2019/12/16/how-can-historians-achieve-inclusivity-in-digital-archives/.
%Z A platform called COMMANET was established with HLF funding to support local history archives. The company behind the platform was wound up in 2010.
%Z This example raises the important question of sustainability and permanence of access to important resources that are in danger of loss or invisibility. This is central to the TaNC scheme and the establishment of centralised and fully resourced and maintained repositories that are open to both formally constituted institutions and independent, community collections.
%Z The #DolomitesMuseum campaign was carried out a first time in March 2020 and a second time in May 2021 with the aim of creating a collective narrative of the Dolomites heritage on social media. The themes of the campaign, identified by 12 ‘hashtags’, were chosen by the participants of the Museums of the Dolomites during a series of design workshops. Alongside museums and heritage organisations, also visitor centres, tourist organisations, local community groups, Dolomites aficionados and local residents shared their own stories, reflections and memories of the Dolomites through their social media profiles. The campaign produced about 500 stories and 2,000 digital resources dedicated to the history, nature and culture of the Dolomites, which were subsequently collected and curated by the project participants, giving birth to 12 online galleries called the Laboratory of Stories (https://museodolom.it/en/exhibitions/).
%Z Documenting the Now is a great example of a project that realised this and has created ethical frameworks and tools to support archiving and documenting social media content. The project began around the time of the Ferguson protests in the US as a way to capture the conversations happening online. The project quickly developed to enable nuanced thinking around the benefits and harms of documenting social media content, and the methods of doing it in a balanced way. (See Jules, Summers and Mitchell, 2018, for more details.) Selective social media content is also archived more routinely through branches of the UK Web Archive and The National Archive, UK.
%Z Wikipedia uses secondary sources that are independent of the subject. A list of criteria can be found here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources.

%Z We simply do not know how to gain access to Wikipedia to place some of our work. If the routes to access were available we would want to use them.
%Z The interaction with different types of memories and shared by inhabitants and Dolomites aficionados on social media had a different impact on the museum curators. The focus groups held at the end of the project revealed a high level of interest on the possibilities of expanding languages and experimenting with new formats. The name chosen for the space (‘Laboratory’) signals the willingness to depart from the traditional top-down narrative developed by curators for the public. However, these new forms of knowledge also introduced new challenges. Some of the curators expressed their concern in relation to the different language adopted on social media and the specific features of the online stories, which required a shift in tone from the traditional exhibition narrative.
%Z It is crucial to think about notions of historical orthodoxy and ‘who’ gets to define or validate historical facts and interpretations. The different traditions such as oral histories or storytelling rub up against formally constituted academic fields and methods. This is an ongoing and unresolved question for the Congruence Engine project and one whose complexities will be incrementally revealed.
%Z Museums are institutions with powerful perceived cultural authority (Macdonald, 1998; Mason et al, 2018). Historically, the formalised knowledge that comes from museums has focused on white, cis gendered (seemingly) heterosexual men who have money. Whilst, over time, the variety of people and stories that feature in museums has increased, the knowledge museums tend to generate is still predicated on a representational model where, for example, an object or a story collected from me might be used to represent the whole LGBTQ community. (For an overview of how the representational model developed from the late 1990s, see Dewdney et al, 2013.) My experience is very different from others who identify as LGBTQ – I am a white cis gendered man from a relatively privileged background. My experience, although a valid one, is not that of all my LGBTQ siblings. The museological practice of including ‘community’ perspectives here should be welcomed as a pluralising of voices, but it is still the curator who decides whose voice is present. A ‘community story’ is a story that has been invited by the curator as something other than the institutional knowledge created by them – it may be stored alongside a particular object the curator thinks is relevant, or in its own ‘community stories’ section – ready to be used when the heritage professionals think it is relevant.
%Z During my PhD fieldwork at the Science Museum Group (2019–2020), I interviewed different members of the digital, curatorial and communication team in London, Manchester and Bradford. I wanted to explore the potential of online spaces and platforms to expand the voices of the museum. From these interviews, the blog uniformly emerged as a genuine polyvocal space to experiment with the inclusion of different voices: in each museum’s blog all the members of the teams can write, but also volunteers, curators from other museums, researchers, wanting to offer their own unique perspective on collections, exhibitions and museum events. A clear distinction was made between this participatory space and the ‘Object and Stories’ section, which is used by curators to tell stories about objects. The different nature of these online spaces made me think of what Nina Simon defines as ‘the power in platform management’ (Simon, 2008), and in particular the power to set the rules of behaviour. Considering that a certain level of management is always required in a platform environment, would it ever be possible to imagine a platform without a power relationship?
%Z See: https://www.thackrayhealthheroes.co.uk/thackray-stories/windrush-nurses 
%Z See: https://www.digitalheritage.leeds.ac.uk/ 
%Z This potentially denies polyvocal approaches and vests power/authority in the academy by implication and privileges academic sources.
%Z The democratisation of knowledge is, according to Wikipedia, ‘the acquisition and spread of knowledge amongst a wider part of the population. The internet is often cited as one of the major technologies that has aided easier access to knowledge (alongside the printing press!), and a tool within the wider context of the internet is wiki-based knowledge tools. These wiki-technologies are often claimed to enable the changing of existing power dynamics and hierarchical systems in generating and sharing knowledge (Pfaff and Hasan, 2011). In this exchange I was referring more specifically to the democratisation of knowledge generation – who is able to contribute to public knowledge. So here, I wanted us to reflect on the fact that Wikipedia, although a tool with affordances that support the democratisation of knowledge, still relies on secondary sources – often ones whose affordances do not support the democratisation of knowledge – to validate a contribution.
%Z Wikispore has entries collating information on subjects not well documented by sources of Wikipedia’s required standard, such as art scenes and movements.
%Z Sound files can illustrate information not available elsewhere, such as accents and vocabulary. Recordings such as this: https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2021/05/recording-of-the-week-we-showed-them-that-we-could-do-it-as-good-as-them.html.
%Z Thanks to the introduction of sound recording and the opportunity to record, store and preserve sounds (Sterne, 2003), sound heritage has become a thriving field of practice, with the emergence of sound archives and the development of oral history projects. The latest developments of sound technologies have contributed to expand the awareness of the cultural, social, economic and environmental value of sound, and the UNESCO General Conference has recently adopted a resolution on the importance of sound in today’s world (2017). In Congruence Engine, we started to explore how audio heritage can open new perspectives in connecting collections and understanding our industrial past. In the first pilot study dedicated to Saltaire and Lister Mill, a mini investigation was developed around the oral history interviews of mill workers from the Saltaire Collection and the Bradford Heritage Recording Unit.
%Z This particular file is not yet digitised and is precisely why we need to create secondary material from the original. There are other personal stories in digital formats which are available on the Saltaire Collection website: https://www.saltairecollection.org/saltaire-snapshots/workers/.
%Z See articles such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Pakistan#Notable_women where many of the women listed or discussed are not notable enough to have their own articles but can be mentioned in this context.
%Z #SonicFriday was a project co-designed within my PhD research to experiment with new ways to make audiences interact with the objects of the Sound Technologies collection and connect them with people’s lives. The project, launched by the National Science and Media Museum (Bradford, UK) during Summer 2020, invited social media users to share memories and stories around their personal relationship with sound culture: from cassettes, CDs and mp3s to digital sampling and lockdown sounds (an example of the Sounds of my Quarantine prompt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MediaMuseum/status/1284053430437384193). As a result, more than 250 digital memories were shared by online users and museum volunteers across different platforms, giving birth to YouTube playlists, multimedia galleries and sound maps. 
%Z During two dedicated focus groups at the end of the project, the museum team reflected on the value of these memories, recognising their potential to understand how objects are perceived and experienced, to collect stories of use, and to create emotional connections with the collection. See also Stefania Zardini Lacedelli, Annie Jamieson and John Stack talking to Ciprian Melian about the project in this video interview realised for the 2022 Best in Heritage edition: https://youtu.be/t922PxXMGTA.
%Z Experimental collecting has long been practised in museums; from art galleries (Altshuler, 2004) to social history museums (Rhys, 2011; Rhys and Baveystock, 2014). Of particular interest here are the attempts at collecting social media. We should acknowledge the early attempt of the Library of Congress to, perhaps over-ambitiously, collect all of Twitter in 2010 (Zimmer, 2015); the work of the V&A in collecting a version of Chinese social media platform WeChat, and in their Towards a National Collection foundation project Preserving and Sharing Born Digital and Hybrid Objects (Arrigoni et al, 2022); Museum of London’s early and ongoing Twitter collecting (Ride, 2013); and the experiments of the Collecting Social Photo project in archiving social media photography (Boogh et al, 2020). For fuller descriptions and analysis of these projects, see Rees, 2021. See also Altshuler, B (ed), 2005, Collecting the new: museums and contemporary art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press); Arrigoni, G, Kane, N, McConnachie, S and McKim, J, 2022, ‘Preserving and sharing born-digital and hybrid objects from and across the National Collection: Project report January 2022’, Victoria and Albert Museum; Boogh, E, Hartig, K, Jensen, B, Uimonen, P and Wallenius, A (eds), 2020, Connect to Collect: Approaches to Collecting Social Digital Photography in Museums and Archives (Stockholm: Nordiska museets förlag); Rhys, O, 2011, Contemporary collecting: theory and practice (Edinburgh: Museums Etc.); Rhys, O and Baveystock, Z (eds), 2014, Collecting the Contemporary: A Handbook for Social History Museums (Edinburgh: MuseumsEtc.); Ride, P, 2013, ‘Creating #citizencurators: putting twitter into museum showcases’, in ISEA International: Australia Network for Art & Technology; Zimmer, M, 2015, ‘The Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress: Challenges for information practice and information policy’, First Monday. 20(6); Rees, A J, 2021, Remixing Museology: An approach to collecting social media in museums, PhD thesis, University of Leeds. https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/29542/.
%Z In my research I frame social media as a new and emerging form of object that collecting institutions need to learn how to handle. The significance of contemporary online culture is often recognised by museum professionals, but the processes and procedures used to guide how collecting and collections management takes place are designed around collecting tangible, material artefacts. I argue that this leads to a conceptual barrier to collecting from online space and suggest that in order to remove this barrier to collecting new and emerging types of objects, museums and archives need to remix their collecting processes to change incrementally, alongside the development of new technologies (see Rees, A J, 2021, Remixing Museology: An approach to collecting social media in museums. PhD thesis, University of Leeds https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/29542/)
%Z Reflecting on the value of digital memories raised a series of key questions. The #SonicFriday project fostered the museum team to reflect on new practices of collective remembering and how the meaning of heritage is evolving. On a practical level, key challenges were identified: how to digitally preserve these memories in the long term, what elements should be collected (the content of the digital memory or also the social media context in which they were published?), what resources and ethical procedures need to be activated, which processes, competences, spaces and tools do museums need to collect this material and integrate them within the museum narratives. In considering these questions, the #SonicFriday project fits within a growing number of participatory projects which involve the collection and curation of people’s memories on social media to enrich the museums’ digital collections. 
%Z ‘The Mills Are Alive in Manningham’ was an epic projection show, which illuminated Lister Mills’ chimney on 3, 4 and 5 March 2022. The projections took audiences on a journey of wonder and learning, telling stories of those who have called Bradford home through generations, from the industrial revolution through to present day. The show touched on iconic political and social movements, the birth of Bradford Festival and Bradford Mela Festival, reflections of contemporary Manningham, and local school children’s imaginings for the future of the mill. Showcasing archive footage, music and original photographs, ‘The Mills Are Alive…’ was an immersive experience which inspired and ignited passion for heritage, mills and the Bradford District. The project was produced by The Brick Box with projections created by The Projection Studio. Alongside the projection events, The Brick Box worked with a number of community organisations and local residents to record oral histories and stories connected to Manningham Mills and Bradford. For 'The Mills are Alive…’ project see https://thebrickbox.co.uk/projects/the-mills-are-alive.
%Z Ruxandra Lupu: THE HOME MOVIE 4.0: (co)creative strategies for a tacit, embodied and affective reading of the Sicilian Home Movie Archive. See http://homemoviesicily.com/.
%Z My use of remix culture here refers to Lawrence Lessig’s description of remix as a shift from ‘read only’ culture, where society is encouraged to read ready-made units of culture, to a ‘read/write’ culture, where people are actively encouraged to interact, edit and re-share what they encounter (Lessig, 2008). Remix has its traditions in music, specifically hip hop, but continues to grow as a way of framing change, creativity and digital culture. Lev Manovich‘s description of remix as ‘a composition that consists of previously existing parts assembled, which is edited to create particular aesthetic, semantic and/or bodily effects’ (Manovich, 2015, p 128) feels particularly illustrative of the remix processes related to the discussions we had. 
%Z The YARN storytelling and research platform was co-developed as part of the AHRC Pararchive project to provide a space for research development and publication. 
%Z On the YARN platform all the projects remain under the editorial control of the author, and can be edited, updated and removed. They can also be quoted by other users to add to their stories or projects as a reference point or as a means of developing a new or alternative version of the original. Each are co-linked so that the original source is always visible and autonomous.
%Z The stories collected from social media in the #DolomitesMuseum campaign were re-published, with the consent of the contributors, in the Museo Dolom.it platform, a participatory museum co-created by Dolomites community and inspired by the platform model (Zardini Lacedelli, 2018). The platform adopts the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 International (CC BY-SA) [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/] (SZL).
%Z When a user signs up to use Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., they sign the platforms’ Terms and Conditions which state that they do not claim ownership over the content and that it remains with the user. However, the agreements do give the platforms a worldwide non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, licence to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of the content uploaded (Twitter, 2022. Terms of Service – accessed 23 August 2022): https//twitter.com/en/tos ). I will note that YARN allows users to remove material and re-edit, never producing a ‘fixed’ and ceded entry (SP).
%Z This fear totally shaped the co-design of YARN.
%Z See Paul Duffy re Bute Island Stories, local collections and relationships with institutions.
%Z See: https://creativecommons.org.
%Z Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia, accessible and editable by anyone. It is the largest encyclopaedia in the world with over 6.5 million articles in English and more across another 328 languages. Wikimedia is the broader movement of volunteers and organisations behind Wikipedia and its sister projects. Wikidata is one of Wikimedia's largest projects, an open source graph database of over one hundred million objects, people, places and more.
%Z As an example, the Wikidata item for Haiti has many labels, written phonetically or in Haitian Creole, for easier search and discovery (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q790).
%Z This relates to the work Nunaliit are doing with indigenous histories (https://nunaliit.org/).
%Z As an example, Wikimedia emits 1.2 kilotonnes of carbon emission compared to YouTube’s 702 kilotonnes  See: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sustainability_Initiative#:~:text=The%20data%20centres%20hosting%20Wikipedia,carbon%20footprint%20of%201.2%20kilotonnes; and https://www.energylivenews.com/2021/06/11/youtube-alleged-to-be-worlds-highest-emitting-website/
%Z A first experiment was developed on the National Science and Media Museum blog, in the article ‘Sounds of my Quarantine’ (https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/sounds-of-quarantine/).
%Z There are a few pieces of work on digital preservation and collections management for museums, but museums are still decades behind archives and libraries. There is a section of digital preservation with contributions from Bill Lowry and myself in the Contemporary Collecting toolkit (Miles et al, 2020), and I am also involved in new digital collections focused guidance coming out to support the Spectrum Collections Management standard (the UK’s standard for museum collections management, produced by Collections Trust). The Digital Preservation Coalition is also a great resource. 
%Z In the Museums of the Dolomites project, the level of involvement was not uniform but changed according to the individual participants, their willingness to contribute and the time at their disposal. From the qualitative study conducted at the end of the project, small and community museums were among the most numerous and active participants. This was partly due to the fact that smaller museums had less opportunities and resources to experiment on digital spaces, so they perceived the project as a way to extend their access in the digital space and collaborate with other heritage institutions. Furthermore, the small museums in the Dolomites are extremely close to their communities; they were often born and managed with the contribution of local inhabitants and have been less shaped by the ‘visitor’ model of the bigger institutions. 
%Z This new museum category, proposed by George Rivière and Hugues de Varine in the 1970s, places community participation at the centre of the mission. According to Rivière, in the ecomuseum, each member ‘could be moving from the role of consumer to that of actor, and even author of the museum’ (Rivière, 1989). The ecomuseum has further contributed to deconstruct the idea of the museum as an exhibition centre, by delineating a museum which is dispersed in the territory – a ‘musée éclatée’, exploded into space (Rivière, 1980). 
%Z In my PhD research, I reflected on the extension of the ecomuseum concept suggesting a new, post- digital, museum conceptualisation: the Platform-Museum. (Zardini Lacedelli, 2019). Thinking of the museum as a platform means to conceive it as a system of relationships that are built and constantly developed around cultural heritage. These relationships contribute to create different communities around the museum as well as new forms of heritage: not only objects, but also digital resources that are created and shared using different platforms. In this concept, the museum is a diffused, polyvocal, participatory institution, extended both in the physical and online spaces. Its physical dimension embraces the building(s) where material heritage is conserved or displayed, but also the landscape and geographical context to which heritage is related. Its virtual dimension includes all the digital platforms and online spaces where the digital resources are shared, experienced and co-created.
%Z Dialogic and conversational writing can be a powerful inclusive means not only to describe collaborative approaches in research but to embody them, building relationships amongst project participants, breaking down barriers and bringing together different voices.
%I The Science Museum Group
%@ 2054-5770
%B eng
%U https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/collaborative-conversation-as-a-method-for-exploring-multiple-perspectives-on-community-and-forms-of-knowledge-in-the-congruence-engine/
%J Science Museum Group Journal