The online presence of organizations is long gone from being just a web page. Social media have enabled easy and inexpensive interaction between millions of individuals and communities. This has not gone unnoticed by cultural heritage institutes. The question is what all these social media activities bring. Even if an institute knows what it tries to achieve online, the metrics often consist of confusing accumulation of statistics, across several systems and reveal little about online user behaviour, engagement and satisfaction. In the research project Museum Compass a prototype of a social media monitor is developed, which will contain data of current and historic online activities on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and Flickr of all registered Dutch museums. The first version of this monitor has been developed, and we believe that this is a good moment to discuss – mostly in a practical sense – our general approach and preliminary results.
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This paper is about Grūtas, a Lithuanian park museum near Druskininkai featuring recovered Soviet-era artifacts. This study fills the gap in literature on people's emotions and reactions dealing with an unwanted past, and an undesirable heritage. Visits to sites associated with occupation, death and suffering are considered emotionally laden. Data were collected from visitor comment books employing a qualitative content analysis as well as quantitative data analysis techniques such as word frequency and semantic network analysis. Few studies empirically investigated visitor emotions to “unwanted” heritage sites. This research provides insights into the interpretive complex by discussing the content of visitor comment books. Three hundred and seventy-nine visitor comments from Lithuanians to the Grūtas park museum were examined. Results reveal that visitors experience both negative and positive emotions after visiting the site, such as unpleasantness, discomfort, surprise, admiration and delight. This is the first study to examine visitor's emotions and reactions to the Grūtas park museum, a site related to difficult heritage.
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In this paper we discuss the general approach and choices we made in developing a prototype of a social media monitor. The main goal of the museum monitor is to offer museum professionals and researchers better insight in the effects of their own social media usage and compare this with other actors in the cultural heritage sector. It gives researchers the opportunity to consider communication within the sector as whole. In the research project “Museum Compass” we have developed a prototype of a social media monitor, which contains data of current and historic online activities on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and Flickr of all registered Dutch museums. We discuss – mostly in a practical sense – our approach for developing the monitor and give a few examples as a result of its usage.
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This publication gives an account of the Public Annotation of Cultural Heritage research project (PACE) conducted at the Crossmedialab. The project was carried out between 1 January 2008 and 31 December 2009, and was funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science. Three members of the Dutch Association of Science Centres (Vereniging Science Centra) actively participated in the execution of the project: the Utrecht University Museum, the National Museum of Natural History (Naturalis), and Museon. In addition, two more knowledge institutes participated: Novay and the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. BMC Consultancy and Manage¬ment also took part in the project. This broad consortium has enabled us to base the project on both knowledge and experience from a practical and scientific perspective. The purpose of the PACE project was to examine the ways in which social tagging could be deployed as a tool to enrich collections, improve their acces¬sibility and to increase visitor group involvement. The museums’ guiding question for the project was: ‘When is it useful to deploy social tagging as a tool for the benefit of museums and what kind of effect can be expected from such deployment?’ For the Crossmedialab the PACE project presented a unique opportunity to conduct concrete research into the highly interesting phenomenon of social tagging with parties and experts in the field.
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This study explored Dutch people's expected intensity of emotional responses of a potential visit to a concentration camp memorial site in the Netherlands. A total of 1050 online panel members participated in a questionnaire that contained a 33-item emotion scale. Results reveal that individuals with a closeness to the Holocaust expect to feel most emotions more intensely, specifically emotions that are traditionally considered ‘positive’, such as pride, love, joy, inspiration, excitement and affection. Overall, respondents expect to feel disgust, shock, compassion and sadness the strongest. Those who look from the viewpoint of the offenders mainly expect to feel emotions that are traditionally considered ‘negative’, whereas those who took the point of view of the victims also expect a more ‘positive’ emotional reaction to the visit. Managerial implications address aspects of education, storytelling and authenticity.
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Environmental values are becoming increasingly important in restoration of historical buildings, while energy interventions can seriously damage historical qualities. Cultural-historical values and environmental values are often considered difficult to commensurate, with energy engineers and heritage experts adhering to widely differing values and relating to different discourses. Valuation instruments are devised to deal with such value conflicts in restoration projects. In this article we study what such instruments perform in the case of assessing historical buildings. We ask how these instruments work, and how they afford, support and guide valuation processes? Furthermore, we enquire what is achieved and what is lost in the reconciliation of values. Theoretically, we start from the notion of commensuration, which allows comparison of values through a shared metric. Empirically, this research note examines the history and use of DuMo, an instrument that aims to reconcile cultural – historical and environmental values and provides a range of sustainable restoration strategies. We find that DuMo indeed performs commensuration of these conflicting values, but also keeps intact the epistemic authority of the two professions. Our claim thus is that valuation instruments can successfully perform commensuration while at the same being contested by involved professionals.
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Can you remember the last time the ground gave way beneath you? When you thought the ground was stable, but for some reason it wasn’t? Perhaps you encountered a pothole on the streets of Amsterdam, or you were renovating your house and broke through the floor. Perhaps there was a molehill in a park or garden. You probably had to hold on to something to steady yourself. Perhaps you even slipped or fell. While I sincerely hope that nobody here was hurt in the process, I would like you to keep that feeling in your mind when reading what follows. It is the central theme of the words that will follow. The ground beneath our feet today is not as stable as the streets of Amsterdam, your park around the corner or even a poorly renovated upstairs bedroom. This is because whatever devices we use and whatever pathways we choose, we all live in hybrid physical and digital social spaces (Kitchin and Dodge 2011). Digital social spaces can be social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook, but also chat apps like WhatsApp or Signal. Crucially, social spaces are increasingly hybrid, in which conversations take place across digital spaces (WhatsApp chat group) and physical spaces (meeting friends in a cafe) simultaneously. The ground beneath our feet is not made of concrete or stone or wood but of bits and bytes.
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The ambition of a transition to a sustainable society brings forth the dual challenge to preserve historical buildings and simultaneously improve the energy performance of our built environment. While engineers claim that a dramatic reduction of energy use in the built environment is feasible, it has proven to be a difficult and twisting road.In this paper we focus on historical buildings, where difficulties of energy reduction are paramount, as such buildings provide local identity and a connection to our past. It is a EU policy objective to conserve and redesign heritage buildings like prisons, military barracks, factories, stations, and schools. Such redesign should also ensure reduction of energy use without compromising historical identity. In this paper we conceptually and empirically investigate how the two conflicting aspirations unfold. In particular we elaborate the obduracy and scripts of buildings, to clarify how they resist change and invite a specific use. We analyse the tensions between identity and energy conservation in a case study of a restoration project in Franeker. This buildinghas recently undergone a restoration, with energy efficiency as one of its goals.Scripts and networks are traced by a combination of methods, such as studyinglayout, materials and building history, and qualitative interviews with restoration architects and users. We identified three types of strategies to conserve identity and energy: design strategies; identity strategies and network strategies. Such strategies are also relevant for other efforts where conservation and innovation have to be reconciled.
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In large organizations, innovation activities often take place in separate departments, centers, or studios. These departments aim to produce prototypes of solutions to the problems of operational business owners. However, too often these concepts remain in the prototype stage: they are never implemented and fall into what is popularly termed the Valley of Death. A design approach to innovation is presented as a solution to the problem. However, practice shows that teams that use design nevertheless encounter implementation challenges due to the larger infrastructure of the organization they are part of. This research aims to explore which organizational factors contribute to the Valley of Death during design innovation. An embedded multiple case study at a large heritage airline is applied. Four projects are analyzed to identify implementation challenges. A thematic data analysis reveals organizational design, departmental silos, and dissimilar innovation strategies contribute to the formation of, and encounters with, the Valley of Death. Arising resource-assignment challenges that result from these factors are also identified. Materialization, user-centeredness, and holistic problem framing are identified as design practices that mitigate encounters with the Valley of Death, thus leading to projects being fully realized. https://doi.org/10.1111/dmj.12052 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-de-lille-8039372/
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