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Redbot, digital museums and the Web 2.0

Redbot, digital museums and the Web 2.0

In a world where individualisation is the name of the game, how do we still find that nostalgic sense of community? In ‘ye olden days’, ones world was confined to the borders of his village or the lineage of his family, whereas now there are a few Namibian people in Newfoundland, a few Somalians in Slovakia and perhaps even some Friulians in Finland. How do these people stay in touch with their history? The internet offers a great podium for this, with digital renditions of landmarks from your area of origin sometimes thousands of kilometers away, yet ‘reachable’ with a few mouse clicks.

An example of the potential the internet has to offer regarding cultural heritage, is Redbot. This site functions as a hub for all Frisian digital heritage, with the name being a play on the legendary king Redbad, who led the Frisian people in their golden age. This pun is quite relevant, because the aim of the site is to spread Frisian culture, or at least make accessible, to the whole world. At least, those who speak Dutch or Frisian.

In 2014, the province Friesland decided to invest in the digitalising of the Frisian cultural heritage. The project provides a bigger audience for the cultural heritage that Friesland has to offer, and additionally promotes the province. But it was also meant to create employment opportunities. This project had to be finished before 2018, so people can use the site when Leeuwarden is the cultural capital of Europe. If you take a look on Redbot, you can see that it almost is. The lay-out of the site is as good as done, but the projects that the site provides are not entirely completed yet. The multiple services provide the digitalisation of the local heritage. One of the services is called the “Fryske roots”, which reconstructs your Frisian roots or finds your connections to Friesland. Another service, Fryslân op de kaart, provides topographical maps of or maps of projects in Friesland in the old times. Magazines and newspapers (Lân fan Taal) are also provide through the site, as well as films (Yn lûd en byld). Finally, art or other objects that are displayed in museums can also be found through the website at Kolleksjes Tichteby. Even though the services may not be fully finished, there is already a lot of data available which is why it is worth taking a look at it!

Some might argue that a site like Redbot still does not include all the possibilities that the ‘Web 2.0’ offers. A ‘Web 2.0’ website allows users to interact and collaborate actively in a virtual community. Redbot promises to upload the cultural heritage that is ‘important for the identity of Friesland’. But who decides what is and isn’t important? Which things constitute identity and which do not? You could argue they put themselves in a certain ‘gate-keeping’ position of what is and isn’t important cultural heritage. One of the reasons the site was constructed is, as they themselves state, to open up the big pool of information the Frisian archives and museums hold to scientists from all over the world. But their approach can also be characterized as a very educational one. Srinivasan, Ramesh et al. argue that we should drastically rethink the traditional way of (digitally) cataloguing collections and that we should move towards participatory, social technologies that offer a whole range of perspectives on the objects of a collection. This participatory aspect should in their view also keep away the gate-keeping from a select group of ‘experts’ and instead let people collectively decide what is important heritage and whatich is not. A platform like Redbot could possibly lends itself very well for an approach like that. This idea that there should be multiple ‘voices’ brought into the core of documentation and description, is a relatively new one, and it is compatible with a digital and online platform.

What do you think about this idea, should Redbot do away with their own authority in gate-keeping the cultural heritage they offer? Should they take a more open and participatory approach in categorizing and describing their collections? Let us know in the comments!

Authors: MMK, WvdV, EMvG, AE

Reacties

  1. Love your post once again! I really liked how you put forward Redbot as a nice example, but then started criticising it. Personally that really 'worked' for me in keeping me interested and reading. You rightfully questioned Redbot's 2.0-nature by commenting on how it's actually not very interactive. Since I do think interaction between the public and experts is pretty important in heritage mediation, I think the choice to keep it authoritative (as it is right now) is on purpose. Without gate-keeping people will sometimes upload crazy, or hurtful things. However, a more open, just not completely open, approach should work in my opinion! I think it would benefit to the feelings of involvement of the Frisians and to the overall survival of a platform such as this.

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  2. Thank you for the post! I do not think that Redbot shall give up. From your blogpost, I can conclude that it does an important unifying job for Fryslan and its heritage. Considering the fact that not everyone can deside, what heritage is, I would say that its a debatable point, as heritage is too subjective to be shared literally by everyone. I would propose to raise a discussion on the website itself to find out the right and best level of its openness.

    M. D.

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  3. Great job! I never heard of Redbot before, and this article triggered an interest to read more about it.
    I have a different opinion than the rest, I think Redbot should be an open source website where everyone can place 'their Frisian cultural heritage' and to make it interactive, people could maybe "like" the different cultural heritages . This way all the different types of Frisian cultural heritage are documented, but their is a difference between them to see which ones are more known than others.

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  4. Great post! I think redbot is a good initiative as long as it doesn't become exclusive. Well written text :)

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