About the project
Mindful that the collaboration between museums institutions and communities involves complex processes of boundary crossing and partial connections (Meyer 2010), we will here draw attention towards the cultural heritage communities outside, and interdependent of museums institutional frameworks – such as local history organizations and movements.
These communities do represent groups of people that are linked by a shared interest, and that collaboratively are building knowledges and negotiating facts about historical artefacts, sites and event outside but still deeply related to the institutional frameworks that museums and heritage institutions might give.
Local history organizations has taken interesting directions enhanced by social media technologies, and we draw attention to a Norwegian Wikipedia-based (Media WIKI) site for production and sharing of encyclopedic knowledge of local history from numerous municipalities and small towns around Norway.
Launched in 2008 the project www.lokalhistoriewiki.no has collected over 10.000 articles, and photos written in collaboration between 700 lay and professional local historians that have registered into the wiki. The project shows that introduction of social networking technologies, such as wiki-platforms, into the cultural heritage field might in some ways give communities a new public space and role and pave the way to new relationships between cultural heritage institutions, policy politics and communities (Stuedahl 2009).
This strand also studies the organisational transformations, work processes and development of new curatorial forms that are involved in museums and archives publishing digital stories on the national portal digitaltfortalt.no.
Conference presentations
Stuedahl, Dagny & Mørch, Anders Irving (2010). Community involvement and social networking in a cultural heritage organisation in Norway. NODEM 2010, Copenhagen Nov 24-26.
Stuedahl, D. Mørtberg, C. & Murad,H.(2012). Enactments of social spaces in online archiving. Inscriptions as enrollments of digital stories from a Norwegian portal'. Heritage Matters - Designing for current and future values through digital and social technologies, CHI 2012, Austin, Texas, May 4-6, 2012
Publications
Stuedahl, Dagny 2011. Social Media and Community Involvements in Museums. A case study of a local history wiki community. Nordisk Museologi 2011 (1), pp. 3-14.