Digital meets Culture
https://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/article/weave-labdays/
Export date: Thu Mar 28 12:00:01 2024 / +0000 GMT

WEAVE LabDays


blog by Marie-Louise Crawley and Rosa Cisneros (COVUNI).

In response to one of WEAVE's central research questions, 'What open and reusable digital tools can be developed for working with Cultural Heritage content?', the Coventry team has been tasked with building up the capacity of CHIs to work with digital intangible heritage and with cultural communities. We will produce practices and guidelines for CHIs concerning community engagement and management, materials for training, considering the available tools for social transformation and negotiation strategies.

To accomplish this, we will be developing a WEAVE methodological framework. This will specify hands-on methodologies, building on the LabDay methodology used in the CultureMoves Europeana Generic Service project for communities to engage with project activities and to select the content and collections to be aggregated. Labdays will take place from Autumn 2021 onwards, targeting the following communities: Roma community; Traditional Portuguese dance and culture; Historical dance community (Early Dance Circle [EDC]); Daguerreotype photography community; Slovenian CH community.

credits: CultureMoves 2020



The LabDay framework is underpinned by Communicative Methodology (CM), a sociological method that aims to cross social, cultural and linguistic boundaries. This framework enables an open, egalitarian dialogue between researchers and participants; it is a collaboratively-held space where all voices are acknowledged and valued and stakeholders can reflect together on their needs, desires and various forms of participation.

This bottom-up approach will enable cultural communities to themselves become a driver for the WEAVE Toolkit, developing from their bespoke needs concerning the management of their intangible and tangible heritage.

credits: CultureMoves 2020



As topics addressed will include sensitive topics such as the relation to identity politics and the issues of (virtual) repatriation/restitution, the open and egalitarian nature of the LabDay methodology offers a safe space for these sensitive topics to be addressed and considered and to feed into the development of the WEAVE Toolkit.




To learn more about the LabDays carried out within the CultureMoves Project, you can read the CultureMoves White Paper and deliverable D4.1 Report on CultureMoves services demonstration, both available here: https://www.culturemoves.eu/#resources

Crawley and Cisneros have also published a short article entitled ‘Moving, annotating, learning: MotionNotes LabDays - a case study' in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media Special Issue ‘Digital Annotation and the Understanding of Bodily Practices' (edited by Scott deLaHunta, David Rittershaus and Rebecca Stancliffe):  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14794713.2021.1880141