I’m so pleased to announced that our chapter in the phenomenal Routledge International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage Sites has been published. Many of the folks I admire the most in the digital field have chapters in this volume, so it’s a huge honour to be featured in this volume!
As part of the EMOTIVE project, we’ve been developing a variety of multi-person digital heritage experiences, for onsite, offsite and hybrid use, that seek to provoke critical emotional interactions between users. We do this by:
- embedding human values and morals into the experiences,
- organising the experiences such that they must be done in groups (not individually),
- progressing the experiences by having groups make critically reflective decisions about how to move from one stage of the experience to the next,
- then evaluating how different demographics navigate the charged engagements that come from such group-based exploration of social values.
This chapter delves into our group mobile experience for the site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, where participants have to literally give away one of their own possessions as a means to explore the nature of Neolithic egalitarian life.
Since we prepared the chapter in early 2018, we’ve subsequently refined the experience and conducted far more extensive evaluations. But here we give our preliminary findings and walk you through the existing literature on group experiences, suggesting the potentials of this line of work.
We are now working on another publication that (drawing on our more recent evaluations) reflects on how we might articulate – and evaluate – a social justice model for heritage interpretation. Stay tuned!
As ever, we welcome constructively critical feedback on our work. You can download a copy of the pre-print version of the chapter on ResearchGate or on Academia.edu.
For those of you who use text readers or prefer access to a text file, you can also download a Word version of the pre-print chapter.
Please cite as: Perry, Sara, Roussou, Maria, Mirashrafi, Sophia S., Katifori, A., and McKinney, Sierra (2019) Shared digital experiences supporting collaborative meaning-making at heritage sites. In Hannah Lewi, Wally Smith, Dirk vom Lehn, Steven Cooke (eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage Sites. London: Routledge. Pp. 143-156. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429506765
SARA PERRY 