Citizen Experiences in Cultural Heritage Archives: a Data Journey

Digital archives of memory institutions are typically concerned with the cataloguing of artefacts of artistic, historical, and cultural value. Recently, new forms of citizen participation in cultural heritage have emerged, producing a wealth of material spanning from visitors’ experiential feedback on exhibitions and cultural artefacts to digitally mediated interactions like the ones happening on social media platforms. In this talk, I will touch upon the problems of integrating citizen experiences in cultural heritage archives. I argue for good reasons for institutions to archive people’s responses to cultural objects, and then look at the impact that this has on the data infrastructures. I argue that a knowledge organisation system for “data journeys” can help in disentangling problems that include issues of distribution, authoritativeness, interdependence, privacy, and rights management.