Democratising Digitisation: Tools to Support Small
Community Archives
Invited Talk

Alan Dix1
1
    Computational Foundry, Swansea University, Swansea, Wales, UK




Abstract
Local communities across the world have documents, artefacts and crucially memories that are
precious but precarious. Digital tools to help communities record, curate and present their own
heritage are important both for the life and empowerment of each community, and also to add
to a broader historical body of knowledge. When designing digital interventions, there is an
apparent tension between co-creating tools and processes that are meaningful for a particular
community and creating generic tools that can be reused at scale. Tools created as part of
ongoing engagements with two very different communities has shown that this apparent tension
may be an illusion. Indeed, tools created very specifically for the local circumstances of one are
also well-suited to the other. This is promising and suggests that it is possible to create human
and technical infrastructure to democratise digitisation for cultural heritage in the small that
has broad impact


Bio
Alan Dix is Director of the Computational Foundry, a £31M initiative by Swansea University,
the Welsh Government and the European Union to nurture foundational digital research that
makes a positive difference in the world. He is known for his textbook on human–computer
interaction (HCI) and numerous research publications in HCI and related areas. He lived for
ten years on Tiree, a remote Scottish island. While there he ran Tiree Tech Wave a biannual
maker/meeting event and worked on a variety of community technology projects including
Frasan, a Nesta funded project to bring the contents of An Iodhlann, the island archive, out
to the windswept corners of the island. His interests are eclectic and recent outputs have
included a textbook on statistics, a book on physicality in design and a video course on technical
creativity. His methodologies are equally unconventional and in 2013 he walked a thousand
miles around Wales as part personal journey and part research exploration of the nature of
community technology at the margins. Amongst other things, he is currently he is working

AVI-CH 2022 Workshop on Advanced Visual Interfaces and Interactions in Cultural Heritage. June 06, 2022. Rome, Italy
Envelope-Open alan@hcibook.com (A. Dix)
                                       © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
    CEUR
    Workshop
    Proceedings
                  http://ceur-ws.org
                  ISSN 1613-0073
                                       CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
with musicologists on local musical society archives and with the diaspora of the evacuated
village of Troedrhiwfuwch in the South Wales valleys.