TY  -  JOUR
TI  -  Surfacing multiple perspectives on keywords for the Congruence Engine; embracing multiplicity, interdisciplinarity, and mutual learning
  AU -Stefania Zardini Lacedelli
AU -Arran  J Rees
AU -Anna-Maria Sichani
PY  -  2023
VL  - Congruence Engine
IS  - Autumn 2022
KW - Community Engagement
KW - conversational writing
KW - digital sustainability
KW - knowledge co-creation
KW - online cultures
KW - participatory heritage practices
KW - remixing

AB - This article explores collaborative conversation as a method to surface multiple perspectives on community engagement and forms of knowledge creation in the Congruence Engine project. Our exchanges naturally converged around four main areas: the multiple meanings of the term ‘community’ and the nature of these relationships; the modes and spaces for engagement; the different nature of knowledge emerging from these interactions; and, finally, a series of practical issues and challenges that can act as potential barriers. The article also reflects on the opportunities of dialogic writing to enable participatory, inclusive and polyvocal approaches in the development of a national collection.

N1 - Sara Ahmed discusses the figure of the feminist killjoy, noting that to go against a social norm with regards to laughter is often seen to be willing to cause unhappiness, even if unhappiness is not your cause. Ahmed prompts us to consider whether a feminist kills other people's joy by pointing out moments of sexism, or whether they are simply exposing bad feelings that get hidden, displaced or negated under public signs of joy (Ahmed, 2010: 2).
N1 - The interaction between people and technology, as well as the social and computational elements, is at the heart of the concept of ‘Social Machine’, which has served as conceptual framework to understand social systems on the Web (Shadbolt, O’Hara, De Roure, Hall, 2019).
N1 - Sounds of my Quarantine (https://padlet.com/platformmuseum/q9unei4soco98xu8) is a collaborative sound map launched by the National Science and Media Museum during the #SonicFriday project, where people could share their own sonic experience during the first Covid-19 lockdown: from music listened to at home, to the sounds of their own quarantine.
N1 - Museums of the Dolomites was a three-year project (2019–2021) funded by the UNESCO Dolomites Foundation and coordinated by the digital-born museum Dolom.it. The project adopted an action-research approach to co-design a series of digital initiatives aimed to connect different museums and collections of the Dolomites. Thanks to a social media campaign and the collaborative development of a shared, digital space dedicated to the Dolomites heritage, the project fostered the creation of a thriving heritage community of museum professionals, researchers, historians, art curators, geologists, inhabitants and Dolomites lovers.
N1 - Laboratory of Stories is an online collaborative space which collects more than 2,000 multimedia contributions in thematic galleries co-created by museum professionals, curators, residents and Dolomites enthusiasts (https://museodolom.it/en/exhibitions/).
N1 - Around the 1960s, the wider availability of sound recording technologies such as tape recorders introduced new forms of remembering also in the family context. Sound memories became an intrinsic part of our individual and collective acts of remembrance, creating a sense of ‘Auditory Nostalgia’ (Bijsterveld and van Dijck, 2009).
N1 - A key publication representing the academic debate in this field is the dedicated journal published by Sage, Memory Studies (http://mss.sagepub.com).
N1 - Susan Crane, recalling the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1951) and the historian Yosef Yerushalmi (1989), underlines how the concept of memory maintains a link with the experiences lived by an individual or by a community, while 'historical memory' begins when ‘social traditions are broken and living contact with the past has been lost; all that remains are fragments as artifacts' (Crane, 1997). In this perspective, it is the sites of collective memory and cultural objects that allow us to reconstruct the connection with the historical past (Nora, 1989), and at the same time build and ‘redefine our relationship with the past, the present and sometimes the future’ (Anton, 2016).
N1 - The first sound archives were born in the 1920s to preserve sounds that can have ethnographic, historical, scientific and archaeological value. The recognition of the cultural value of sound gave birth to new transdisciplinary studies such as Ethnomusicology, Aural History, Bioacoustics, Archeoacoustic, and Acoustic Ecology.
N1 - We reflected on this experiment in this blog post: https://ceblog.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/2022/10/27/giving-voice-to-hidden-connections-insights-from-the-oral-history-investigation/.
N1 - From the opening of the Alexiad: ‘The stream of time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemorations… Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against this stream of time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depth of Oblivion’ (Comnena, 1969, p. 17)
N1 - Both Gaynor Kavanagh and Graham Black have pointed to the practice of associating personal stories and memories with objects as a later development in social history museums and in attempts to create a sense of collective memory within them (Kavanagh, 2000; Black, 2011). Black suggests that The People's Story exhibition, developed in Edinburgh in the 1980s, was a particular turning point in associating personal stories with objects (Black, 2011, p 442).
N1 - All this information is taken from the object’s collection record online. It is not how the museum presents the lamp, but an example of what a more traditionally written curatorial label might look like. 
N1 - This is the personal memory used alongside the lamp’s online object record, and in the interpretation of the object when it is on display at the museum https://collections.cardiffmuseum.com/ais6/Details/collect/1166
N1 - Omeka is a free, open source, content management system designed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media 2008 to create online collections and digital archives. In Congruence Engine, we experimented with this tool in the first pilot study, to explore the relationships among items from different collections (https://ceblog.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/2022/07/01/what-can-omeka-do-for-your-digital-journey-reflections-from-the-first-congruence-engine-pilot-study/)
PB - The Science Museum Group
 
SN -  2054-5770
LA -  eng
DO -  10.15180/221810
UR -  https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/surfacing-multiple-perspectives-on-keywords-for-the-congruence-engine-embracing-multiplicity-interdisciplinarity-and-mutual-learning/
T2 -  Science Museum Group Journal