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https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2412/preface.pdf
Cultural informatics research and applications
State of the art and open challenges
Following two successful events in May 2018 and November 2018, the Cultural
Informatics workshop was held again in June 2019. Aiming at bringing together pro-
jects working on the field as well as researchers and research groups, the workshop
provides an opportunity to discuss issues beyond a strict, academic fashion. There are
numerous issues that affect all of us working in Cultural Informatics that often remain
unsaid or discussed within a controlled environment of collaborators. However, silos
need to brake since the field seems mature enough to proceed with admitting chal-
lenges, common problems and even failures. The academic opportunities we often
have to come together and discuss, usually allow us to present our breakthroughs and
our (significant) research results. However, we all know that our work is a lot more
than that. What happens to our work after the end of projects? How do we deal with
unwilling organizations and organizational resistance to change? How can we find
participants for our necessary studies? How do we build new collaborations and in-
volve a wider public? Issues like these are a big part of our work, nevertheless, are
rarely discussed in the open. In addition, there is often a feeling that many of us work
on very similar topics and we time and gain “re-invent the wheel”. Not only do we
need to exchange know-how and tools to save us all effort, but we also need to evalu-
ate and re-set the main goals of our domain. In this manner, we allow the field to
evolve in an effective manner and we save valuable resources for meaningful re-
search. This is the gap we wished to fill with the regular organization of Cultural In-
fomatics workshops.
Ours is not the only effort in this direction. For example, the COST framework held
the “COST Connect: Cultural Heritage in the Digital Era” in 2017 and this year the
European Commission is organizing the “Fair of European Innovators in Cultural
Heritage”, with both events aiming to facilitate the meeting and cooperation between
researchers and practitioners. What is different in our effort is that, in addition to
providing a medium for exchange, we also strive to achieve a more structured analy-
sis of the opportunities available and challenges faced by most of those who are active
in our domain, so that overarching solutions can be sought.
Based on the outcomes of the 2 previous workshops, and also having considered
feedback from the European Commission, we met again this June aiming to further
and deepen the discussion in four directions that have been identified as fundamental
and critical, namely a) user experience evaluation, b) personalization, c) business
plans and d) open challenges.
In particular, during the workshop discussions there were a number of recommenda-
tions that emerged and there are summarized here:
1. Important results achieved by research projects often fail to find their way to actual
large-scale implementation after the end of the project, due to lack of awareness,
scale, complexity and costs. It might be useful to have a new type of fairs, designed
for small to medium stakeholders, showcasing practical, easily implementable and
cost-efficient solutions that stem from EU research.
2. Although impact is now at the centre of proposal evaluation and project monitor-
ing, the used KPIs do not necessarily reflect the actual impact on the society. New
impact metrics, both qualitative and quantitative, are proposed and perhaps should be
adopted in order to drive real impact.
3. Experience from the previous decades shows that digitizing without first consider-
ing the requirements of the intended application can lead to digital records that are
unusable or have little practical value. Culture is mainly about the person's experience
and the connections made between people and their past or amongst people. There-
fore, funded research needs to focus more on user experience and let this drive the
digitization efforts, not the other way around.
4. A true connection between humanities and the digital world can only be achieved
through long term residencies (vocational placements) that allow not only the transfer
of know-how but also the alignment of mentalities.
The present volume includes notes on lessons learnt, open challenges, and available
tools and methodologies by some of the workshop participants. We should note,
though, that this is by no means a full summary of the workshop proceedings. First of
all, while an important number of projects and research groups are represented herein,
a considerably larger number have joined the discussion in Cyprus. More importantly,
this volume describes mainly what was known before the workshop. It is the actual
exchanges and discussion that was held in Cyprus that formed the core product of the
workshop; a product that we will make sure to share both with the European Commis-
sion and the broader community, hoping it will help pave the path forward.
We should clarify that our private effort does not aim to replace the role of the Euro-
pean Commission in outlining the strategies regarding the format and direction of
European research in cultural informatics. Quite the opposite, our hope is to support
the Commission, by gathering, analyzing and providing insight regarding the issues
faced by researchers and practitioners and the interventions they believe could facili-
tate their work and augment its impact and longevity.
Closing, let us not forget to express our gratitude to everyone in the community for
embracing and supporting our efforts. Special thanks are due to Mr. Giorgio Costanti-
no, REA Project Officer, for providing insight and serving as a valuable link to the
Commission, to the SMAP 2019 conference that kindly hosted our meeting, to the
members of the program committee that provided their feedback towards the devel-
opment of this volume, and to Dr. Vassilis Poulopoulos who assisted in turning our
meeting notes into a published volume.
We hope you will enjoy reading this vol-
ume and more importantly we hope to see
you in in our future meetings, so that we
can together examine look for ways to fur-
ther cultural informatics research and ap-
plication in Europe.
Angeliki and Manolis