ECHOES Collaborative Research Scenarios Defined (MS11)

The aim of the ECHOES Showcases of Collaborative Research Potential (D14.2) is to offer tacit knowledge about exemplar cases in Cultural Heritage (CH) where the ECHOES infrastructure and suite of tools and resources may enhance collaboration potential and consequently shape results of community exchanges and interactions. To illustrate the potential of ECHOES for enhancing existing operations in CH and for providing new opportunities for strong research results, exemplar collaboration scenarios and research workflows were analysed in T3.3 and presented here. The deliverable presents the methods, steps and measures employed in the design, iterative development, implementation and evaluation of a series of Collaborative Research Scenarios.

A new methodology for the field of Cultural Heritage was developed combines social science approaches with design thinking methods. This methodology integrates ethnographic methods of observation, questionnaires, interviews, focus groups and combines them with design thinking tools like personas and empathy maps to enable reflection on two parallel viewpoints: a) user-centric narrative presentation of a workflow of collaborative activities in everyday operations of user communities and b) activity-centric analysis of said operational activities. This dual lens of analysis employed by the methodology ensures correlated opportunities of reflection that helped the identification of meaningful moments of weak collaboration where WP3 could focus in to understand the possible impact ECHOES could deliver through the proposed infrastructure and resources.

Operationally, the scope of T3.3 is twofold: i) to work closely with T4.3.4 towards the identification of relevant communities who will engage in the development of each CRS and, by doing so, to stimulate collaboration that will benefit from the proposed Digital Continuum and ii) to monitor the impact of ECHOES services in enabling deeper collaboration between interdisciplinary teams across the project stakeholders. The CRS evaluation process will be aligned with the Common Evaluation Framework (T9.1).

Key data collection activities were designed in conjunction with major parallel activities in the relevant CH communities and with the collaboration of the other interlinked Work Packages, including WP4, WP5, WP6, WP7, WP8 and WP9. The list of these data collection activities included varied types of community participation and data collection processes spanning from ECHOES-dedicated sessions in major conferences and events in the field of cultural heritage, to focused co-design workshops with practitioners, scholars and museum professionals, the mobilisation of historical archive operations, as well as conducting dedicated interviews.

Dedicated metrics to measure collaboration include value of technology index improvement, knowledge improvement index, partnership synergy, capacity changes and others, as listed in the Methodology section. The CRS evaluation will be developed in close collaboration with T4.3 and T9.3 and will make use of specific pilot projects/pilot tests as appropriate. The results and impact assessment of each CRS will be showcased on a dedicated page on the ECHOES website as good practices.

It is expected that this approach will ensure that the Cultural Heritage Cloud becomes a meaningful, user-friendly infrastructure for its target user communities, optimising the reuse of the outcomes of EU and national cultural heritage projects, to meet their needs. The goal of this analysis of Collaborative Research Scenarios is to demonstrate paths of collaboration across different professional settings, disciplines and topics, informed by the Community needs with the scope of alignment with varied needs and scales of operation.

            This is the document of Milestone 11 that presents the process of defining CRS by means of the proposed methodology, listing some preliminary results of target user feedback collection as the first step towards the development of the D14.2 by M60.