Co-creative events for engagement with digital cultural heritage collections

Mucha, Franziska (2022) Co-creative events for engagement with digital cultural heritage collections. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

More and more cultural heritage institutions digitise their collections aiming to unlock potentials of accessibility, usefulness, and meaning to a new variety of users. However, there is a lack of robust knowledge about what exactly enables successful engagement with digital collections. This thesis aims to narrow this gap by investigating the relationships of three stakeholder groups participating in co-creative use of collections: museum practitioners, active users, and Open GLAM community members. It focuses on three main research questions:
• What are the challenges and benefits of co-creative events for these stakeholders?
• How do these stakeholders collaborate and what are the factors impacting their collaboration?
• What is the role of digital reuse and creative practice in engaging users with cultural heritage collections?
These questions are examined in three co-creative events: a hackathon about discomforting objects on display at The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, Scotland; a Coding da Vinci hackathon with openly licensed digital cultural collections in Dortmund, Germany; and a workshop for remixing museum objects with digital tools at the Museum Europäischer Kulturen, Berlin, Germany. The methodology focuses on participants’ collaborative and creative processes and combines ethnographic methods with practice research, using participant observation, creative workshops, interviews, and surveys. The research provides multi-faceted insights into reusing digital collections and highlights the crucial role of social motivations, media practices, and institutional contexts for engagement. The findings suggest that, in order to unfold the social potential of collections, digitisation needs to be complemented with socio-affective spaces in which diverse participants can develop relationships, negotiate meanings, and explore uses of cultural heritage. The thesis thus outlines practice-oriented approaches for effectively supporting these processes. It forms part of the POEM European Training Network on participatory memory practices funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities > Information Studies
• Funder's Name: European Commission (EC)
• Supervisor's Name: Economou, Professor Maria, Gooding, Dr. Paul and Lloyd, Dr. Katherine
• Date of Award: 2022
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2022-82754
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 24 Mar 2022 14:40
• Last Modified: 08 Apr 2022 16:43
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.82754
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/82754