2011 Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool

“You study… culture? What are you gonna do with that?”

Throughout my pursuit of higher education, my answer to the question, “So, Rachael, what are you studying?” is always countered with, “And what is that? What do you do?” My studies in the humanities – Cultural Studies as an undergrad, now Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing as a Master’s student – are pretty ambiguous to folks outside the academic bubble. The words themselves don’t pose a challenge, but the “So what?” – that is, the importance of these fields and the work that happens in them – is not quite so self-evidential.

Although there’s much brilliant work happening in fields like rhetoric and cultural heritage informatics and it’s incredibly exciting to me, there’s this metaphorical black box around humanities work. We share our work at conferences and in journals, but those might as well be secret meetings and coded messages – no one from the outside gets in unless they have the password. By nature of the implicit structures of academia, our work is essentially hidden from view; as a result, it’s difficult – literally! – for outsiders to see the value in supporting the humanities.

If people can’t see the value, then there’s no funding, our projects stall… and you know the rest of the story. We need to make it a priority, especially in cultural heritage, to make our work visible.

This week, Ethan (@captain_primate) spoke to us about the powerful role social media can – and should – play in publicizing cultural heritage work. He suggested that the social media push start from the inception of a project and continue throughout the process. The major take-aways were to cultivate an identity for your project from day one, be your own hype man, and leverage your social networks.

I wonder… is publicity a useful way to make cultural heritage work visible? Can we answer the ever-looming question, “So what?” by sharing our projects and our development processes on services like Twitter and Facebook?

The idea of “publicity” is unfortunately polluted by vapid celebrity culture, over-sharing politicos, and toxic gossip rags – nothing that I want associated with my field or my own personal work. But, I am convinced that drumming up enthusiasm and hype for our work is a vital act that can give momentum to individual projects, as well as strengthen the field of cultural heritage informatics itself.

The most important thing we can do for our CHI projects is to let them out into the world so they can be seen, heard, used, and experienced by people who might otherwise not have access to them in the black box of academia. When we share what we are doing, we lift away the black box and – though I acknowledge that there are risks to this – there is loads of good that can come from it. Social tools like Twitter and Facebook have the ability to give our projects legs to move about in society and strengthen the field overall.

Let’s show people what we do. Let’s give them the “So what?” before they even have the opportunity to ask.