Conference Agenda

Maison MONA, a non-profit organization founded in 2020, is dedicated to highlighting art and culture in public spaces in Québec (Canada). Our main initiative is the development of a free mobile app (iOS and Android), MONA: it aims to spark curiosity for, and appreciation of, public art, heritage sites, and cultural spaces in Québec, by transforming their discovery into a life-size treasure hunt. To do so, we align a dozen open datasets about public art and heritage sites to generate a rich, diverse and complex panorama as a sort of "meta" cultural collection. From data collecting to cultural outreach, we follow the workflow, finding solutions and passing them on to the cultural community and to the general public, whilst promoting the exchange of knowledge and equal, nonhierarchical participation in the development of research. Our challenges lie in the often incomplete or ambiguous datasets, which are also scattered and unevenly structured. Their contents, the cultural objects themselves, are also difficult to research or, even, to actually find IRL. To establish their provenance and biographies requires accessing information located within oral history sources, physical archives and otherwise difficult to access materials. As a result, these public cultural objects (such as murals, historical buildings, or even free cultural spaces) and their corresponding data tend to remain elusive to the general public, to cultural workers, and to researchers. Bringing together professionals and young researchers from a variety of disciplines (art history, museum studies, digital humanities, computer science…) in our team, we tailor our methodology through a process of trial and error, following an action research approach. We combine a series of concrete activities (open data creation/crowd sourcing, field research, and cultural mediation), a process of knowledge sharing, and an ongoing critical reflection touching on technical, methodological, and ethical issues.
From the beginning, cultural mediation was a key component of our process to bridge a gap between researchers and the public. The MONA app offers a new dimension to outreach with its participatory approach. Users produce photographs, comments, and ratings, thus documenting artworks and heritage sites whilst also revealing how each individual perceive them. Such user data advances a new approach to studying art appreciation. Partnering with Art+site research group (P.I. Suzanne Paquet, Université de Montréal), we are developing a feedback loop between the general public and sociology of art researchers to better understand how public cultural objects are impacting the lived experiences of urban spaces. We will reflect on the opportunities offered, challenges faced and lessons learned from merging research and cultural outreach while working with heritage and public art open data. It will also introduce our understanding of GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums), which actually includes a variety of cultural workers operating outside, yet often in relation to, these four specific institutions: we are speaking of local councils, schools (including universities), smaller or unconventional non-profit cultural organizations, and so on. We are all engaged in preserving, documenting, mediating public art and heritage sites, as well as in creating and disseminating datasets. This paper will therefore present how this loose network operates to create GLAM+ Data.
In order to do so, we will also focus one a case study, a public art dataset from the Magdalene Islands (Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Qc.). In 2023, we were commissioned by AdMare (Centre d'artistes en art actuel des Îles-de-la-Madeleine; Magdalene Islands' artist-run centre for contemporary art) to co-create a public art tour and its digital mediation. As Quebec has an art and architecture integration policy, we began our field work began by researching these artworks. The only available documentation was a government-issued PDF file (https://www.quebec.ca/culture/integration-oeuvres-art-public/listes-oeuvres-art-public). Beyond the format issue, this file contained rather elusive information, limited to the year of production of the artwork, the name of the artist, the institution for which it was created, and its address (at the time of creation). We had to fill a lot of gaps, starting with the title of the artworks, and updating their locations. While the AdMare team was able to provide us with crucial information, thanks to their own extensive knowledge of their territory, it remained on occasion nebulous to an outsider's viewpoint. We alternated between leg work, crossing the islands searching for public artworks, and talking with local workers from libraries, hospitals, local heritage institutions, and municipal services, all the while documenting what we learned. From this experience, we compiled a rich qualitative documentation, including photographs and testimonies.
With the idea of furthering digital literacy, we wanted to entrust data production to the AdMare team. Adopting tabular data, we kept the structure as simple as possible to favour durability of both the dataset and the knowledge on how to update it. This simplicity might be considered to constrict the quality of the data produced. However, we had to find a balance between respecting standards and good practices, and making the data production possible and accessible for cultural workers. We also introduced the principles of open data, which are very close to the philosophy of several artist-run centres including AdMare, and recommended publishing the dataset as a CSV export on the government open data platform, Données Québec (https://www.donneesquebec.ca/recherche/dataset/art_public_iles-de-la-madeleine). Tabular data also gave us a first opportunity to map these artworks and locations, a welcome visualization after our rather wild-goose chase through the isles. On our side, we added the API provided by Données Québec to our scripts, which import and update all our open data sources. This script requires some fine-tuning, checking that new data aligns with our current data model, but it allows us to automate most updates (Krause and Janssen 2023). Once the data enters the MONA server and our database, we share it to all mobile apps using our own API, creating 31 new cultural troves to be discovered throughout the islands.
The last part of our project with Admare was focused on giving back to the community through cultural outreach. We collaborated with local artist Gabrielle Desrosiers to design a paper map complementing the digital version available on the MONA app. The artist’s rendering focused on the Cap-aux-Meules Harbour. That last sector was also the site for several public activities organized during fall 2023, which allowed direct contact with the public. We met and discussed art and culture in public space, bringing attention to an artwork and sharing local, historical and contemporary knowledge. Participants were encouraged to use the mobile app, in which photography and the prompts to comment and rate the discoveries further a creative and participatory approach. Through these practices, we are dedicated to nurture the opportunity for each participant to develop their own perspective on the artwork, as we hold the belief that each person can and should develop their own taste and appreciation of art (Krause 2020). With the idea of durability in mind, we sought to produce sustainable outreach contents: the mobile app is freely available at all times, and the artist’s map is being distributed by Admare. We also produced teaching content for secondary school teachers.
By sharing this case, we hope to offer insight on the feedback loop between digital good practices and the pragmatic needs of a cultural outreach project, turning a critical and reflexive eye on these practices for a collective learning experience. Our conclusion will, moreover, focus on our current uses for this dataset in the research context, through the analysis of user-generated content, on the one hand, and through the production of Linked Open Data on the other hand (Delattre et al. 2024 (forthcoming)).

Despite its complexity and continuous practical relevance, outdoor electioneering not only loses scholarly attention due to the proliferation of digital political campaigning and communication (Woolley, Howard 2017; Coleman, Sorensen, 2023), but also remains predominantly treated as a discursive phenomenon (Lilleker, Veneti 2023; Allen, Stevens, 2018) thus tending to be undeservingly reduced to the domain of rhetoric, signification, symbolism, and the art of representing truth and falsity. Can digital humanities methods empower to move ‘beyond the box’ of mainstream political science, and help us to re-engage with urban electoral campaigning in a less conventional but more comprehensive manner? How and what kind of DH tools and techniques are conducive to the ideas of more-than-representational and new materialist theoretical approaches (Thrift, 2007; Anderson & Harrison, 2010; Müller, 2015) that invite and allow to re-imagine outdoor electioneering as a complex extra-discursive phenomenon, entwined with its spatial, physical, socio-technical environments as well as sensorial experiences?

The paper aims to offer answers to the posed questions on the potential of DH methods by means of showcasing and sharing lessons from an experimental educational project, designed for and carried out with 3^rd year political science students of Vilnius University in the Lithuanian capital city on the wake of the parliamentary election in 2020. At its core, the project aimed to create relevant and viable links across the distinct study/ research fields via experiential learning and ‘hands-on’ experimentation with an array of mixed techniques and tools. It invited the participants to explore the untapped potential of the humanist digital methods as a ‘gateway to inter and transdisciplinarity’ (Cosgrave, 2019), that enables to question and go beyond traditional studies of urban electoral advertising. What do electoral battles across city spaces entail? How political advertising happens in and via urban environs, and why it’s a different question than ‘what do ads signify’? (How) can such a transient phenomenon be traced, captured and preserved, not only as a political but also a socio-cultural manifestation that is spatially distributed, material and affective?

In order to sensitise the students to the novel view and spur creative ideas leading beyond conventions of their discipline, the study design entailed data collection as an urban fieldwork, based on a tailored set of mixed techniques – in-person city walking (looking for and identifying places and surfaces with electoral ads), taking digital pictures of political posters, billboards, etc. and entire advertising sites (using mobile/smartphones), GIS-enabled mapping of their locations and configurations in urban space (using mobile/smartphones and respective settings), as well as participants’ auto-tracking of own journey trails (using Strava). Such a profile of the learning-based activity met several objectives.

Firstly, the fieldwork required to align the knowledge of the city(scape), skills of navigation, observation, digital recording/ tracking, as well as to learn relevant technicities. But more importantly, the students took an active part in the entire data collection process which allowed them to reflect upon their role as producers of ‘data as capta’ (Drucker, 2011), in relationship with the complexity and local situatedness of the traced phenomenon. This was in a purposeful contrast to the study of political advertising in terms of autonomous, self-contained visual artefacts – ‘image bites’, devoid of their temporal, spatial, social placement or processual nature (Holtz-Bacha, Johansson, 2017).

Secondly, the aforementioned methods of data collection gently but tactically directed the analytical focus towards ‘extra-textual’ aspects of outdoor electioneering, taking the phenomenon beyond its earlier noted traditional focus on signification and linguistic meaning. The data did captured content of ads, nevertheless, it was intentionally generated as multi-dimensional – allowing to experience visual electioneering as discursive but also physical, sensorial, geographically bounded and relational in terms of its urban surroundings, as proposed by more-than-representational theories (Thrift, 2007; Anderson & Harrison, 2010; Müller, 2015). From this point of view, the data allowed to explore not only the strategic instrumentality of political advertising but also material affordances of the city as a ‘giant medium’, composed of an intricate arrangement of sites, surfaces, and flows of local attention economy.

Regarding the data analysis stage of the project, the nature of the overall generated collection – 5000 ad-focused and 2000 contextual digital photos with location data (.exf files) and journey tracklogs (.gpx files) covering Vilnius electoral districts, plus the inventory of the collection (including collectively manually coded standardized metadata) – enabled to further explore the urban electoral campaign at different scales and compare their advantages. In terms of micro-level of analysis, the students were invited to do a qualitative (ethnographic) study of photographed ad sites, urban surfaces, material tactics of power, and present the results in the form of cartographic and visual storytelling (using ESRI Classic Story Maps). In terms of macro-level of analysis, the students looked for and mapped interesting geo-spatial distributions, structures, intensities and rhythms of visual political competition across city space, using open-source software (Excel 3D Maps). Finally, inspired by more-than-representational theories and cultural analytics (Manovich, 2020), the final phase of analysis proposed a new lens to explore outdoor visual electioneering (and the visual aspect in particular), as, first of all, a sensorial and affective phenomenon, given the stimulus-overloaded, hasty, attention-seeking nature of current urban milieus. The idea was explicated putting the collection of captured ads as pictures under a ‘macroscope’ (Graham et al. 2016), adapted for ‘big visual data’ and offering the (non-linguistic) distant reading of urban electioneering art with computational machine vision.

Overall, though the realisation of the complex collective undertaking was not without challenges and limitations that are to be further discussed, it provided the political science students a conceptual and empirical interdisciplinary exercise, facilitated by a gentle introduction to humanist digital methods and tools along the entire research cycle. Quite unexpectedly, next to the empirical experimentation with the more-than-representational approach in the study of politics, the learning-focused activity generated one of the most comprehensive data collections of urban visual electioneering in Lithuania. More importantly, the initiative also demonstrated affinities, intersections and vectors of potential collaboration between humanities-oriented political scientists and digital humanists, trespassing current trends and agendas of computational social science.