"It's all their words, it's just not necessarily all of the words": Balancing Authenticity and Authority in Participatory Heritage Projects

Rowling, H; Bowen, S; Kirk, D

doi:10.1145/3537797.3537823

"It's all their words, it's just not necessarily all of the words": Balancing Authenticity and Authority in Participatory Heritage Projects

Lookup NU author(s): Hattie Rowling ORCiD, Dr Simon Bowen ORCiD, Professor Dave Kirk ORCiD

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract

Participatory heritage approaches have the potential to create more democratic forms of local history and a relational commons around this material. This paper presents an interview-based study with volunteers from a community oral history organisation, to explore their current working practices, particularly around editing and publishing material and to consider volunteers’ feelings and concerns around openness and control of archive material. From the interviews, tensions were found between the desire for openness and concerns around the need for structure, highlighting challenges to address for future work in designing systems for participatory local history projects.