Last week we presented lightning pitches on geospatial visualization projects – all very interesting ones I might add – for consideration as the 2013 CHI fieldschool final project. The creativity of the fieldschool collective is impressive, equally amazing is the effort required to advance from brainstorming to production of a vision document.  We have progressed from our individual concepts to selection of a project and  establishment of themes, workflow, time frame, and milestones for the group. The processes involved in generating ideas, focusing direction, and outlining criteria for the project brought to mind a larger question I oftentimes contemplate regarding heritage collection appraisal and accession.

I don’t subscribe to the notion of memory institutions as neutral repositories.  My thinking is more in keeping with former Society of American Archivists president and historian, Randall Jimerson.  Jimerson advises cultural memory practitioners to be cognizant of exerting “archontic power” in relation to the intersection between history, memory, social power, justice, and heritage materials.

The notion of being professionally accountable for influencing the construction and preservation of future generation’s memory, informed my pitch.  Comparing UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites in the U.S. and National Park Service National Heritage Areas; I presented an idea to examine each organization’s heritage listings, noting the absence of over-lap between the agencies and  proposed mapping  heritage resources that have not been included.  As a result of my pitch, I drafted the following concept map:

I intend to use this as a creative problem-solving device to parse the concept of  “showing hospitality to the stranger” (Jimerson, 2009) when addressing archival silences – in this case, heritage silences – to identify narratives for inclusion. This could be a means for locating communities with heritage materials for preservation, digitization, and database management activities.

Jimerson, R.C. (2009). Archives power: Memory, accountability, and social justice. Chicago: Society of American Archivists.

Captain Primate (a.k.a. Ethan Watrall), ringleader of the 2013 CHI Fieldschool emphasized on the first day of the fieldschool that as participants we would be enculturated into the CHI domain through modeling and experimentation with standards and practices of the sector.  Theoretical knowledge and practical application are important components of any discipline.  In transdisciplinary arenas like digital heritage informatics and curation, collaborative processes require soft skills, resources, and networking between institutions and teams of individuals of differing cultures, personalities, styles of communication, and levels of expertise.

Stephen Dale, Collaborative Behavior (2012)¹

What does collaboration entail?  The U.S. Forest Service² identified the following elements as important aspects to working jointly on a project:

• Leverage differences in strength, knowledge, and power on behalf of the collective to build the capacity to achieve objectives.
• Support equal participation, even when there are differences in power, authority, and responsibility.
• Focus on finding common ground and a willingness to live with and learn from decisions.

The Hack Library School website recently featured an interesting post by Paul Lai entitled Praxis and the Perennial Conflict Between Theory and Practice in Library Education.  In this post, Lai touches on the significance of collaboration as a basis of library information science practice.  I believe the same standards apply, by extension, to cultural heritage and memory institutions.

This week we concentrated on applying phases of project management and visualization of time.  Working through the process of launching a project from prototype to implementation of design.  We developed vision documents, wireframes, and work plans; utilized open-source tools such as the HTML/CSS framework, Twitter Bootstrap and the web-hosting site GitHub. We also created timelines using the JavaScript library, Timeline.js.  All of our assignments this week were accomplished through collaborative effort. Stephan Dale, founder of Collabor8now, Ltd summed up the collaborative process best, stating “the most important requirement of collaborative behavior is T-R-U-S-T.”¹

¹Dale, S. (2012). Collaborative Behavior. KIN Summer Workshop: Knowledge and Innovation Network. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/stephendale/collaborative-behaviours

² U.S. Department of Agriculture. (2013). Partnership Resource Center- The Art of Collaboration.  Retrieved from http://www.fs.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsinternet/!ut/p/c4/04_SB8K8xLLM9MSSzPy8xBz9CP0os3gjAwhwtDDw9_AI8zPwhQoY6BdkOyoCAPkATlA!/?ss=119979&navtype=BROWSEBYSUBJECT&cid=null&navid=121100000000000&pnavid=121000000000000&position=BROWSEBYSUBJECT&ttype=main&pname=Partnership%20Resource%20Center-%20The%20Art%20of%20Collaboration