Predictions on the future of digitalized cultural heritage

Charlotte S.H. Jensen, webeditor at the National Museum, front runner in the Danish museum world when it comes to digitization of cultural heritage and exploring the potential of new media for museum mediation, and generously sharing her insights on her blog, is always a great source of inspiration (and surely deserves a trackback!). Like this post Digital kulturarv – hvad sker der i 2012, in which she points to possible upcoming trends for digital cultural mediation.

Her point about how cultural institutions should or will shift their focus from simply having a visible presence as institutions on social media platforms to engaging in interactions around themes and topics of interest where they occur resonates very well with my own outset. Perhaps my project could even nudge this development along?

Similaly, I agree that it would be great to see a ‘native’ mobile network for sharing and collaborating around cultural heritage. Which again reminded me to start using some of the tools that are already around; I’m now awaiting an invitation to the online pinboard Pinterest, which I’d been checking out before. Charlotte also shares links to Oink (couldn’t get my head around how that works), Miso (but it would seem that only makes sence if you have a telly, which I don’t)and Path (which presents itself maily as a tool forn sharing everyday life with your social network, but perhaps I’m just not seeing the potential for museums?), but I’ll focus on Pinterest at this point.

Charlotte goes on to cover objectification, cultural heritage in public spaces, crowdsourcing and Second Life (not sure about that, I have to say, but maybe it’s just because I had to leave my avatar stranded in a pool years ago when I couldn’t work out how to fly…) amongst other things – well worth a read!

On doing a research blog

Sifting through my old papers this Christmas, I stumbled upon an article on research blogs written by my former lecturer at IT University, internet researcher Lisbeth Klastrup: Forsker og blogger:- webbloggen som forsknings- og fællesskabsværktøj (Eng: Researcher and blogger: the weblog as a tool for research and collaboration)

In the article, Klastrup, herself a dedicated blogger since 2001, urges researchers to take up blogging and explains how using a blog as a notebook for your research serves perfectly as a filter of information and tool for reflection, assisting the thought process when facing a new challenge or idea, as well as making it possible to find that thought and that reference again when needed in a later stage of the process. And yes, I thoroughly enjoyed having my own experience and hopes for this blog confirmed by an experienced and insightful academic, a reassurance that blogging could set me on the right track.

Another point by Klastrup was the potential for building your network in the blogosphere, sharing posts, comments, references and ideas with other people in your field. Although, as Mortensen & Walker (in Klastrup 2005, as above) point out

“The current reward system depends on certain formulas of academic publishing that encourage exclusivity and the fear of being robbed of thoughts and ideas. Since the real currency in the trade of academia is originality of thought and imaginative development of theories, there is more to lose than to gain in exposing your own ideas too early. The danger of having thoughts, ideas or questions copied before they have been published is not just a matter of some petty game between jealous professors with too little time on their hands, it’s a very real matter of being robbed of the currency which measures academic success.” (Mortensen & Walker:262)

I still like to think that knowledge creation should be a generous and collective effort, and even if I hope that I will eventually come up with ideas worth nicking, I prefer to trust that people who share my interests will also share my desire to discuss and collaborate rather than compete. But maybe they have a point.

Now, I’ve written before that the point of this blog was not necessarily to reach a larger audience, that perhaps keeping it a bit quiet might make it more useful as a notebook, as it takes away some of the pressure of coming up with brilliant posts when I have more silly questions than clever answers. But maybe it’s time to try to attract some followers after all. Maybe I should do a post on Formidlingsnettet to catch the attention of the Danish museum crowd. And maybe I should make a tweet about each posting, adding some #muse hashtag in the hope that it might get picked up by some international players (if nothing else, that would give me something to tweet about, being a bit rusty in that department, and never really much of a songbird @rikkebaggesen).

Which leads to the question: Is blogging becoming a thing of the past, whilst Twitter is where it’s at? Going back to Klastrup, it would seem that even her dedication as a blogger has waned, her latest post dating back to the autumn of 2010, whereas @klast is very active. And closer to home, the blogs by RSLIS reseachers Jack Andersen and Henrik Jochumsen mentioned in Klatrups overview of Danish research blogs (a project which itself seemed to have faded out in 2008) can no longer be found. As for my fellow Ph.D. fellows here and in other institutions, none of them seem to care much for blogging either.

So is this blog an altmodish side track after all? Is there anybody out there who cares? Perhaps the potential for building a network of reseachers through blogging is limited these days, or maybe I just haven’t found my posse yet. Indeed, Mortensens latest post is still fresh off the wordpress (even if she uses Blogger), and Christian Dalsgaards article on research blogs in Mediekultur is only from last year. Either way, as long as the format works for me, I’ll stick with it. Might even earn me a few ECTS credits, or at least a brownie point or two.