Special for Digital Humanties Hackathon 2017
Heritage and Participatory Cultures in the Digital Age
Oluwaseun Adewumi, Aleksandra Anikina, Johanna Enqvist, Visa Immonen, Juhana Lahti, Riku Salpakari, Oula Seitsonen, Jouni Tuominen
previous research and our research questions
Heritage and Participatory Cultures in the Digital Age
What is the relationship between official/institutional conceptions of heritage and unofficial conceptions of heritage?
Does official heritage inspire participatory activities?
What is the usability of open access datasets for this kind of research?
Does official heritage inspire participatory activities?
What is the usability of open access datasets for this kind of research?
"Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued" (Jenkins et al. 2006).
"Cultures of participation value the creative process and how engaging socially in creative activities changes how we think about the others and ourselves" (Giccardi 2012).
"Cultures of participation value the creative process and how engaging socially in creative activities changes how we think about the others and ourselves" (Giccardi 2012).
Previous research
Big data & cultural heritage
Cultural heritage studies
For administrative purposes: collection management in museums, site management, crowdsourcing.
Theoretical and conceptual work on the impact of social media and big data on heritage conceptions.
No studies on cultural heritage conceptions and uses on the basis of big data.
Geocache & Pokemon GO
Statistics of users (age, education, gender, motivation) on the basis of small samples.
Theoretical and conceptual work.
Flickr, Instagram
Images of certain urban regions (for examaple, "social media inequality" project: )
Work done on nature parks & nature conservation
For administrative purposes: collection management in museums, site management, crowdsourcing.
Theoretical and conceptual work on the impact of social media and big data on heritage conceptions.
No studies on cultural heritage conceptions and uses on the basis of big data.
Geocache & Pokemon GO
Statistics of users (age, education, gender, motivation) on the basis of small samples.
Theoretical and conceptual work.
Flickr, Instagram
Images of certain urban regions (for examaple, "social media inequality" project: )
Work done on nature parks & nature conservation
Data sources
Locative games and official archives
RKY is an inventory drawn up by the National Board of Antiquities, which has been taken on 22 December 2009. The items selected for the national inventory give an overview of the history and development of Finnish built environment in a regional, temporal and target type. In designing the areas of cultural environments, not only the built environments but also the nationally valuable landscapes and the ancient remains are taken into account. The primary source material for the ancient remains is the ancient register maintained by the National Board of Antiquities.
Finna is part of the National Digital Library (NDL) project of the Ministry of Education and Culture.
The National Library of Finland bears the main responsibility for developing and maintaining Finna, but the actual development work is carried out together with Finna partners. The archives, libraries and museums involved in Finna are responsible for its content.
Finna's catalogue data are freely available, but statutory or contractual restrictions may apply to the digital images and back cover texts displayed in Finna, as well as to the digital content and metadata linked to in Finna.
The open interface of the finna.fi service at api.finna.fi brings the metadata produced by participating libraries, archives and museums to the public.
The National Library of Finland bears the main responsibility for developing and maintaining Finna, but the actual development work is carried out together with Finna partners. The archives, libraries and museums involved in Finna are responsible for its content.
Finna's catalogue data are freely available, but statutory or contractual restrictions may apply to the digital images and back cover texts displayed in Finna, as well as to the digital content and metadata linked to in Finna.
The open interface of the finna.fi service at api.finna.fi brings the metadata produced by participating libraries, archives and museums to the public.
- Collaboratively organised non-commercial scavenger hunt.
- Blending of material and virtual interfaces, notions of visible and invisible, and utilitarian and playful purposes of everyday objects.
- Embodied engagement with mobile devices: bodily presence and absence, and synchronous and asynchronous time.
- Often visiting new and surprising places mentioned as main motivation.
- Statistically most of hobbyists are males of 30 years of age.
- Free-to-play, but highly commercialized.
- Location-based augmented reality games from Niantic: Mundane and extraordinary, physical and digital overlap.
- Potentially enables democratic and evolving cultural heritage work by the users (though overseen by Niantic).
- Players potentially as curators of surrounding landmarks, identify them as culturally relevant.
- Statistically most of hobbyists are females in their teens and 20s.
OUR RESEARCH | Nationwide
GIS analysis
Smth about results in general
Analysis showed the high concentration of RKY sites (Nationally valuable built cultural environments) in Southern Finland and Pirkanmaa area. The concentration can be partly explained by the long tradition for official heritage criteria from the 19th century onwards
Data from Finna archives shows which museums are active in digitalizing collections and uploading to Finna.
Data from Finna archives shows which museums are active in digitalizing collections and uploading to Finna.
- The clear difference in the distribution of RKY sites and Finna photos shows that even the institutional/official cultural heritage is not a simple and monolithic thing, but has variations and differences created by the traditions in building protection, and the present-day activity in digitalization.
- Exploring geocaches legacy has showed that they have an active community which leads to providing rich user-generated data. Geocache points are more evenly distributed than the RKY sites, so we can suggest that geocaching reflects the population density, and the main routes across Finland.
- Geocaches show an affinity with RKY sites. One of the reasons for it can be that geocaches are inspired by official heritage.
All geocaches in Finland (red) and geocaches within 200 m of RKY sites (black).
Other findings: FINNA data allows to make conclusions about the activity of specific museums in digitizing photos and in using certain keywords (subjects).
For example: subject viikset (mustaches). See distribution on the map below.
One should also be cautious about
mistakes in geo-tagging images in FINNA data.
For example, exploring subject "saame" (Sámi) you can end up with finding pictures of Petsamo in Lahti.
For example: subject viikset (mustaches). See distribution on the map below.
One should also be cautious about
mistakes in geo-tagging images in FINNA data.
For example, exploring subject "saame" (Sámi) you can end up with finding pictures of Petsamo in Lahti.
OUR RESEARCH| Nationwide
Topic modelling
The topics were formulated using the description and comments of each geocache as the basis. Most topics depict the challenges and small triumphs of geocaching.
Here are the topics modeled from all geocaches in Finland. In the end I used 20 topics (probably not the best amount, but time ran out). Highest prob means the words with the highest probability to appear in certain topic and FREX means words with high probability AND are also exclusive to that specific topic. Lift and score are used in different topic modeling methods and are not really of any interest to us. The words seen in the poster graphs came from the highest prob category, but I think that we can utilise alse the FREX values for the presentation.
This topic model could be better (much better), but atleast we can get some preliminary analysis out of it.
Most of the topics deal with the basics of geocaching: 10 includes boating, lakes and such; 2 is about climbing and geocaching gear, 5 is about Lapland etc.
Some topics seem to contain errors. Topic 8 seems to contain most if not all of errors stemming from failed conversion from xml to .txt.
Topic 16 seems interesting from a cultural heritage standpoint as does topic 17. (Söderfjärden impact site seems to contain a lot caches). Also Kuuvanvuori hillfort pops out in topic 20.
This topic model could be better (much better), but atleast we can get some preliminary analysis out of it.
Most of the topics deal with the basics of geocaching: 10 includes boating, lakes and such; 2 is about climbing and geocaching gear, 5 is about Lapland etc.
Some topics seem to contain errors. Topic 8 seems to contain most if not all of errors stemming from failed conversion from xml to .txt.
Topic 16 seems interesting from a cultural heritage standpoint as does topic 17. (Söderfjärden impact site seems to contain a lot caches). Also Kuuvanvuori hillfort pops out in topic 20.
our research|Case study
Photoanalysis
Manually categorised photographs on Finna and Flickr. Finna: c. 1,800 relevant images with keyword 'Suomenlinna' , Flickr: c. 2,500, sample from 9/2016–2/2017.
