Storymaking by design: curating querybased virtual exhibitions on the greek national cultural aggregator

SearchCulture.gr is the greek national cultural aggregator, providing access to over 800k items. Being hesitantly excited about big cultural data and the creative possibilities for humanities research and public engagement this presents, the SearchCulture.gr scientific team developed a brand new tool for curating and showcasing content.   

The Exhibitions Query Form is a smart tool for storymaking and presenting curated content on the aggregator. Storymaking through the Exhibitions Query Form fully exploits recently completed semantic enrichment iterations on the aggregator. The enrichment workflows ensure that each collection added and all retrospectively undergo semantic enrichment in types, persons, chonologies and themes, resulting in homogenization of metadata, which in turn allows for more efficient searches and relevant results.  

Making smart use of the meaning-making dynamic of linked data, the exhibitions produced via the Query Form are deployed to showcase curated content. Through a sophisticated interface, the Query Form allows editors to produce thematic exhibitions by grouping together items which are retrieved via targeted queries. The exhibitions are designed in a billingual interface and also include a key image, title and subtitle, an interpretative text, other resources and bibliography and are all presented through an elegant interface on a dedicated Εxhibitions page.  

Each group of retrieved items is in reality a thematically connected primary source palimpsest, providing teaching and learning contexts based on primary sources, for formal and informal learning. Primary source teaching has been known to cultivate critical thinking, develop reasoning and investigative skills and ultimately, support practice-based pedagogy and active learning. Digital storytelling through linked metadata can be also appealing to those seeking new approaches to cross-disciplinary humanities scholarship.  

The paper will present the Exhibitions Query Form and the developed virtual exhibitions, explain our content selection methodologies and rationale and discuss the overarching strategy for showcasing the richness, width and depth of content aggregated in SearchCulture.gr.  

A key inspiration for developing this new feature on the aggregator was the fact that, while performing the enrichment workflows, we could notice various stories emerging. Having the the chance to deeply engage with the items’ metadata we came across unexpected connections and links to other content and collections. Finding i.e. a series of beautiful late 19th-early 20thc staged photographs of children prompted us to research for more related material which tells the story of the middle and upper class fascination with child portraiture a century ago. 

These exhibitions are an easy-access entry point to the more complex search functions of the aggregator. They can challenge end-users to come up with their own storymaking enquiries and create their own exhibitions, which is a feature we will look at in the next phase of development. Search and retrieval skills are core components of enquiry-based and primary source based research methodologies. End-users would probably greatly benefit from being able to save and share their query results with others, making interactivity one the foci of the aggregator’s future developements, in an efford to foster deeper and wider community engagement with digital cultural heritage. To this end, we have already started piloting user-generated exhibitions by collaborating with individual researchers.