Conference Agenda (All times are shown in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) unless otherwise noted)

This paper explores the relationship between cultural heritage and collective memory through the lens of information. We explicitly frame the heritage-memory-relationship as constituting a theoretical foundation for the field of Cultural Heritage Informatics. In framing heritage and memory as information phenomena, we leverage two information frameworks that appear most suitable to host, translate, and overlay heritage and memory theory: Context, relevance, and labor (Fremery and Buckland, 2022) and Information as thing (Buckland, 1991). Altogether, this preliminary exploration 1) establishes a terminological understanding of cultural heritage, collective memory, and information/informatics; 2) maps these concepts with recourse to the Context, relevance and labor framework (Fremery and Buckland, 2022); 3) articulates cultural heritage informatics as the intersection of heritage and memory focused on processes of selection, transfer, and integration of historic information in the service of identity maintenance; and 4) offers a cultural heritage information framework that highlights the unique potential of Cultural Heritage Informatics to guide future information research in cultural information studies.

The primary goal of this paper is to explore users' desires for digitized historical image collections, examining their desires based on different use purposes and information interaction activities. In addition, we investigate the image attributes that users wish to search from the collection. To accomplish this, we conducted 21 qualitative interviews with active users of a digitized historical photograph archive. Our findings suggest that users' desires relate to three contexts: tools, collection, and socio-organizational issues. Moreover, our results indicate that users require support for various information interaction activities, not just searching. We found that users' desires vary based on their specific use purposes, and that users prioritize conceptual access points that can already mostly be generated through automated annotation methods. Ultimately, this study contributes to a better understanding of users' real-life image needs and offers implications for improving access to digital image collections.

Digital, community-based knowledge infrastructures confront complex, systemic challenges to their sustainability over time. From digital community archives to computationally amenable corpora, databases, or data models created by and serving research communities, these sites of grassroots knowledge production tend to be maintained without long-term institutional commitments. Yet, they hold unique cultural evidence of enormous value. Prior work on the sustainability of digital humanities scholarship has surfaced numerous factors in project sustainability, including technical, organizational, and financial concerns. The roles of communities themselves in sustaining community-based knowledge infrastructures, however, are under-studied. This qualitative, multi-case study of digital humanities projects and digital community archives addresses community-centered approaches to understanding and implementing sustainability for digital knowledge infrastructures. This study finds that communities of various kinds—from public communities to networks of research practice—conceive of the sustainability of their digital projects as inextricably linked to the sustainability of communities themselves. We offer an exploration of factors in the mutual relationship of sustainability between communities and their knowledge infrastructures, including how they support the wellbeing of individuals and cohesion among communities, and how they promote activism and advocacy efforts within broader publics and disciplinary cultures.

The open data movement is hyped as a sweeping strategy to democratize science, promote diverse data reuse, facilitate reproducibility, accelerate innovation, and much more. However, it is rare that the potential perils of open data are studied and discussed at the same level as these promises. As we invest more into open data, we need to study the full spectrum of what open data facilitates in practice, which can then inform future policy and design decisions. This paper does this by describing the data practices of one contrarian community, anthropogenic climate change (ACC) skeptics, specifically how they process, analyze, preserve, and share data through an investigative digital ethnography. Skeptics often reuse data in ways similar to conventional data reusers, although to unorthodox ends, with differing levels of trust and expertise. ACC skeptics’ data practices call into question the assumption that open data is a universal good. These findings have implications for data repositories and how they might curate data and design their database with this type of reuse in mind.