The VAST methodology and workflows for experience digitisation

The interaction of aesthetic and moral values [1], as well as the role of art in moral education [2] are topics of debate. Nevertheless, artifacts often cannot escape but embody the values of their times, their creators or of the stories/people they talk about, at least in the perception of the audiences. Reactions with respect to transmitted values can get as strong as toppling statues, like that of Edward Colston in Bristol, UK in 2020. At the same time, observing and understanding the values of citizens and stakeholders becomes increasingly important in many fields, from sociology and policy-making to technology and Artificial Intelligence. Taken together, the systematic collection of the values born in cultural artifacts, as perceived by audiences, can offer a ‘valuable’ source of research data in various fields.

Unlike measurable or objective properties of artifacts and historical metadata, people’s experience during their exposure to an artifact is highly subjective. From spontaneous emotional reactions to personal biases, capturing the audience's perception of values is a challenging task. VAST is a European H2020 research and innovation action that has been developing methodologies, tools and data infrastructure to capture and digitise the values of intangible cultural heritage (CH) artifacts, including narratives of ancient Greek theatre, 17th century scientific texts and European fairy tales. From text and visual content annotation, to applications and educational activities, VAST has structured a methodology so that any data collected are scientifically sound, can populate VAST’s ontology, and stimulate research in humanities. VAST methodology, instilled in the ontological specifications, deals with three major aspects of a person’s interaction with an artifact or experience: a) the participant’s individual characteristics (e.g. demographic information, philosophical beliefs), b) the description of the artifact/ experience and c) the collection of the perceived values based on the artifact/ experience.

The ‘born-digital’ datasets, collected through the above workflow, populate VAST’s ontology and will be available through the VAST platform for various uses. Besides supporting research, from Humanities to AI (e.g. providing ‘unbiased’ datasets for values mining and Natural Language Processing), VAST datasets can be used for citizen-informed curation, as well as for promoting new ways of engagement with CH, including digital apps and post-activity interactions. Again, these interactions with the VAST platform can further be used for augmenting existing datasets or producing new ones.

Example of the VAST workflow based on an educational activity. An excerpt of Sophocles’ Antigone is used to trigger a discussion about the concept of ‘values’ and the values perceived in the play. Pre-activity, participants provide demographic information and fill-in the Personal Values Questionnaire. After exposure to the play (central experience), the value perception is collected through text annotation and mind maps. The collected data are organised into the VAST ontology and then become available for post-activity use. Importantly, the methodology of each activity becomes available, allowing the reproducibility of the experience and the relevant dataset augmentation.

[1] Ravasio, M., 2021. What is the Connection Between Art and Morality?

[2] Hospers, J., 2022. Art as means to moral improvement.