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By Paul Mulholland, Zdenek Zdrahal and Trevor Collins -November 2002
Paul Mulholland, Zdenek Zdrahal and Trevor Collins report on CIPHER, a new project aimed at developing sustainable cultural heritage forums to celebrate national and regional heritage across Europe.
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The growth of mass communications including the internet has accelerated the trend toward globalisation, which is viewed by some as leading to the loss of regional identity, culture and heritage. Similarly, within the commercial sector, globalisation can be seen to fuel the dominance of international brands insensitive to regional culture. Conversely, new technology can be used to help different cultures to co-exist and learn from each other, and can also be taken as an opportunity for regional cultural commerce to be widely promoted. Within this context, the CIPHER project aims to develop innovative technologies and methodologies that enable the celebration and exploration of national and regional heritage on a global scale.
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CIPHER is a two and a half year project funded by the European Commission under the theme 'Heritage for All' that started in April 2002. Six project partners are involved; The Open University in the UK, the Dublin Institute of Technology and The Discovery Programme, both based in Ireland, the University of Art and Design Helsinki in Finland, the Czech Technical University, and Regionales Information System (RiS) GmbH in Austria. Further information on the progress of the CIPHER project is available on the main CIPHER website [1].
A great deal of work needs to be done before technologies and methodologies can be provided that allow heritage regions and institutions to promote themselves on a global scale. Specific areas in need of attention are: the articulation of sustainable business models, the development of methods for enthusing and involving communities of interest, and the demonstration of clear benefits for the associated regions. We believe these problems can be addressed though the development of Cultural Heritage Forums associated to regions, that empower communities to create, own and sustain online cultural content for themselves, through the provision of workable methodologies and tools for long-term development and sustainability. The objective of the CIPHER project is therefore to develop the methodology and technology required to realise sustainable Cultural Heritage (CH) Forums that empower communities of interest to explore, research and build content.
Within the CIPHER project, a Cultural Heritage (CH) Forum is defined as an online space where people can participate and learn through accessing and contributing to a range of heritage resources around some theme. Users of the CH Forum are therefore engaged as active participants rather than passive viewers. CH Forums have an associated region. Within CIPHER, a region is defined as an area of distinct cultural identity, which may traverse country borders. Cultural Heritage Forums aim to widen access, but also promote rather than replace the experience of exploring regions and their heritage institutions. The approach to sustainability requires the engagement and involvement of interested communities, and associations with heritage of the physical world. The CIPHER model of sustainability comprises three aspects: technical, financial and content-related. Technical sustainability can be achieved by an architectural approach, whereby encoded content will be able to describe its methods of decoding, even where delivery and presentation technologies have since evolved. Development also conforms to an extensible open architecture model. Content sustainability can be achieved by close associations between the forum and communities and organisations that have closely mirrored interests, and reap significant benefit from actively using and promoting the forum. Recent experiences of the e-commerce sector unequivocally demonstrate that advertising revenue alone cannot form the basis of financial sustainability - sustainability requires a core group of public and private organisations and communities that adopt the CH Forum and benefit from its success.
From a technical perspective, this project focuses on the development of the CIPHER toolkit, providing support for CH Forum construction, maintenance, and crucially, the provision of active, engaging experiences for visitors. Support will be provided for constructing "dynamic narratives" - adaptive stories that can be relayed in individualised ways according to selected narrative structures and visitor preferences, to deliver personalised, engaging experiences. Visitors will also be empowered to investigate and research the contents of the CH Forum, producing their own personal spaces, and shared spaces owned by emerging communities of interest. Individual and collaborative construction will be supported by traditional and modern narrative conventions and structures that can help frame their research activities drawing an important link between heritage investigation and causal plot construction. Tools for story construction will be supported by innovative, user friendly, self-organising visualisation tools that provide new methods for navigating the forum, to support not just the location of resources but the construction of new paths and associations, that can then be shared with others. The approach aims to provide universal access to citizens, whereby IT competence, knowledge of languages and chosen computing platform need not prohibit access and use of a CH Forum.
The application goal of the project is to realise the CIPHER methodology and technology in the development of four CH Forums, that act as test cases throughout the life of the project. These test cases will be used by a large number of additional heritage communities and organisations outside the original CIPHER consortium, and will be sustained in the long term as examples of what the CIPHER tools and methodology can deliver. The four CH Forums together constitute the CH Forum Club. The four test cases are:
1) Irish Cultural and Natural Heritage. This CH Forum will primarily use information from a large database of Irish archaeology held digitally by the Discovery Programme.
2) Nordic Heritage through Storytelling and Historical Artefacts. A CH Forum built around the narratives represented in the Carta Marina, 1539.
3) Shared Heritage of Central Europe. This CH Forum will provide online access to a large volume of data concerning historical sites in the Czech Republic and Austria.
4) Tradition of technology innovation in South Central England. This CH Forum will build on the historical record of the cryptanalysis work done at Bletchley Park, home of Collossus, the World's first programmable computer.
A core technical innovation within the CH Forums will be the development of narrative tools to support the exploration of available content, and also allow visitors to create their own personal and shared stories and collections. Narrative concepts are proposed as an approach because heritage collections and presentations can be understood from a narrative perspective, and narrative theory can motivate the development of presentations and collections that are coherent, engaging and educational.
We define narrative as the particular way in which a story is told. A story is a conceptual space representing events, people and objects. A story may be told in a number of ways, to create different effects, such as humour or surprise. Any of these specific ways in which a story is told are narratives. This follows the definition of story and narrative provided by Brooks [2].
Specific narratives conform to different structural patterns, in order to emphasise different aspects of the story or put over a specific message. Schank [3] identifies a range of patterns that he terms 'story skeletons' that can be used to construct a particular narrative from a story. These patterns describe the conceptual associations made by the narrative and the order in which they are made. Schank claims that these story skeletons are categorised in terms of the gist of the story that they can relate such as 'avenging a wrongdoing', rather than purely in terms of the narrative structure. A narrative that relates a series of events generally has a plot. As described in Murray [4], E. M. Forster claims that any plot will emphasise causal relationships between events in the narrative. A narrative of an event should therefore present both what happened and an explanation of why it happened.
Narratives, particularly if relating fiction, employ additional structural elements. Commonly a narrative will introduce and then resolve a series of conflicts, the story ending when all conflicts introduced in the story have been resolved. This type of pattern maintains the readers' interest in the story, and actively involves them as they try to predict how conflicts will be resolved and evaluate the resolutions provided in the narrative. This is an important aspect, as it demonstrates that narrative applies not only to the structures formed by the teller of the story, but also those constructed by the reader. The reader does not just receive the narrative but actively constructs a story for themselves during the reading process.
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| Figure 1: Overall scenario of use and evolution of a CH Forum,
showing the interplay between visitors, communities of interest and developers. |
The overall scenario of use and evolution of a CH Forum is illustrated in figure 1. Developers and associated heritage groups provide a "seed content" for the CH Forum, in the form of interconnected narratives. These narratives draw on forum resources such as media components (movies, pictures, text, etc.), knowledge level descriptions of the heritage domain and formal representations of narrative structure. Visitors are able to view and comment on the seed narratives. Visitors can also develop their own narratives using public forum resources in their own personal visitor spaces. They can choose to share these narratives in communities of interest. According to the editorial model adopted by the forum, visitor constructed narratives may become part of the public narrative structure. Developers and members of the associated heritage groups monitor and maintain the forum as it evolves through visitor contributions. This initial model will be extended and refined through out four ongoing test cases.
This research is being conducted within the EU IST funded CIPHER project, IST-2001-32559.
Paul Mulholland
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
URL: <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/paulm/>
Email: p.mulholland@open.ac.uk
Phone: +44 1908 654506
Fax: +44 1908 653169
Paul Mulholland is a Research Fellow in the Knowledge Media Institute and investigator on the CIPHER project. He has been involved in a number of previous and current research projects; Enrich (Esprit 4 funded project in organizational learning, 1998-2000), Clockwork (Framework 5 funded knowledge management project, 2000-2003), Empowering Learning Communities (Industrially funded project, 2000-2002), and RichODL (EU Socrates programme, 1999-2001) are examples. Dr. Mulholland's professional interests include collaborative learning, knowledge modelling and management and the design and evaluation of educational modelling and visualisation tools.
Zdenek Zdrahal
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
URL: <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/zdenek/>
Email: z.zdrahal@open.ac.uk
Phone: +44 1908 654512
Fax: +44 1908 653169
Zdenek Zdrahal is a Senior Research Fellow in the Knowledge Media Institute and project manager of CIPHER. He has been a project leader in research projects in the UK, the Czech Republic, and Mexico. In VITAL (Esprit 2 project P-5365) he was involved in model-based reasoning, and in ENCODE (Copernicus 940149) he was responsible for knowledge modelling and project management. Recently, he has been the project leader of the following projects: MGT (Copernicus, 1999-2001), Enrich (Esprit 4, 1998-2000), and Clockwork (Framework 5, 2000-2003. Dr. Zdrahal's research interests include knowledge modelling, sharing and reuse, case-based reasoning, intelligent agents and Web technology.
Trevor Collins
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
URL: <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/trevor/>
Email: t.d.collins@open.ac.uk
Phone: +44 1908 655731
Fax: +44 1908 653169
Trevor Collins is a Research Fellow on the CIPHER project. He previously worked on the Empowering Learning Communities project, and the Hank Evaluation Project in the Open University's Institute of Educational Technology. His PhD thesis was concerned with the visualization of evolutionary computation. Dr. Collins' research interests include human computer interaction, software visualization, artificial intelligence and knowledge discovery.
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For citation purposes:
Mulholland, P., Zdrahal, Z. and Collins, T. "CIPHER: Enabling Communities of Interest to Promote Heritage of European Regions", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/cipher/>
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