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Hints and tips for running your own heritage digitising event
| One of the posters created for the iHeritage event: who owns your culture?, by Original pic from Wikimedia Commons, by Nananere. Remix by Daniela Faris |
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images
The iCommons team, who worked to organise the iHeritage event. CC BY 2.0
Wendy was on 'scanner duty' all day. Here she demonstrates how its done! CC BY 2.0
The Jaiku channel that we used to display our progress through the day CC BY-SA 2.0
Heather made a homemade sign to attract the attention of passerby CC BY-SA 2.0
Our wonderful volunteers who translated content into Xhosa, Zulu and Sotho CC BY 2.0
Poster made for the event: sharing our past empowers our children for the future CC BY-SA 2.0
On 23 September, the day before South Africa’s national public holiday, Heritage Day, iCommons organised an event to celebrate the diversity of our people’s backgrounds and cultures. The aim was simple – to build an online repository of South African culture and heritage – as lived in the day-to-day lives of ordinary South Africans, to be added to the growing collection of indigenous content on Wikimedia Commons.
We set up a stand at our local mall, and asked the South African public to bring us their photos depicting their culture, heritage and traditions so that we could digitise them and upload them to WikiMedia Commons as a way to illustrate South African-related Wikipedia articles.
We asked people to contribute audio memories of their lives in South Africa, as a way to preserve their precious stories for the future. We had a wonderful team of volunteers who wrote some of the WikiMedia Commons uploads into Xhosa, Zulu and Sotho, and translated some of the audio memories too.
The results: 18 WikiMedia uploads, 15 audio interviews and 380 Flickr photos! We heard some amazing stories that reflected the diversity of our country: about practising Zulu traditions in the city of Jozi, about the history of a Johannesburg street in 1950 that is now a bustling business centre, and about the adjustments of a Dutch immigrant family in South Africa.
We thought that you, as members of the iCommons community might be keen to run a similar event in your part of the world. So, we gathered together an easy to use ‘hints and tips’ article based on our experiences.
Note that the usual procedures of budgeting, fundraising and marketing are not discussed in this article. This is not a step-by-step outline to recreate the event. We preferred to highlight some of the issues, processes and ideas specific to this project that worked well for us and would be most beneficial to you.
Define your goals up front
The adage is considered true for good reason, but interestingly the iHeritage project raised a few surprising issues that were thrashed out at the iCommons office in the run up to the event.
We started with deciding which online uploading service to use. After some back-and-forth discussion we decided that our main priority was to make the contributions usable and relevant – there is no use going through the motions to end up with a stack of scanned photos to be stored away neatly and never used again.
The result was a ‘two-pronged’ approach. Allow people to upload to Flickr, and tag their content as ‘iheritage’. The benefit of this approach is that the many people who already have their photos on Flickr can simply re-tag their pictures to be part of this initiative. The other option was to upload the content to WikiMedia Commons, which is easy to use, compatible with open licences, and most importantly – gave the newly scanned heritage donations a valuable purpose: to illustrate Wikipedia articles about South Africa.
The next issue to tackle was the matter of licensing. A question that was raised was: will the South African public, who have probably never heard of Creative Commons licences, be willing to donate their precious images freely? Should we be prescriptive as to how ‘openly’ they should licence their work by asking that only CC Attribution and Share-Alike licences be accepted? But as one participant said, “I don’t want to see my grandfather’s face on biscuit tins, billboards or fridge magnets.” We debated the pros and cons of these issues – such as how the Share-Alike licence often wards off rampant commercial use. In the end a middle ground was found: all content uploaded to WikiMedia Commons would be CC BY or CC BY-SA, while the uploads to Flickr could choose from any of the Creative Commons licences available.
Online vs. ‘real world’
Thanks to the power of the Internet this initiative can include more than just the people who attend the event. Try to do an online marketing campaign that highlights how people can scan their photos at home, and submit them through online upload services. Writing clear instructions on how to do this is key - take a look at this great ‘how-to’ on uploading to WikiMedia Commons.
Find the right spot
Try to find a public space that is central and has heavy foot traffic – this will ensure that you will tweak people’s interest as they walk by, and you can be easily found by those who are bringing their contributions to you. We chose the Rosebank Mall on a busy Sunday morning, in a spot next to a coffee shop and on the way to the local supermarket – perfect!
When sourcing a space for the event, remember that you’ll need an Internet connection and tons of plug points.
Scanning
Beg, borrow or steal a high quality scanner for this event. Your usual office scanner will work, but will not produce high-resolution copies that are best for reproduction and sharing down the line. We borrowed a scanner from Lawgistix, a company that provides high resolution scans and document conversions to the legal community in South Africa. Ask around for a scanner from similar companies in your country, or ask your library, school, post office or stationery provider to donate one for the event.
Get WikiMedia Commons set up
A wonderful iCommons volunteer and self-proclaimed “wikimedian”, Brianna Laugher took an interest in the project and set up this great upload space on WikiMedia Commons specifically for the iHeritage event. This was immensely useful for uploading content in a central and easy-to-use space. If you are planning on running a similar event be sure to contact your friendly neighbourhood WikiMedia Commons enthusiast to help you out!
Involve the legal eagles
No matter how switched on the public is to Creative Commons and the issues of copyright, it would probably be best to get your legal advisor to draw up a consent form to make sure that people are aware of the implications of releasing their content under a CC licence. To make sure that people were 100% informed we published the human-readable CC code on the consent form, and provided an additional copy of the code for them to take home too.
Attract attention
On the big day, make your scanning and uploading station look attractive. We hung an iCommons banner, covered the table in bright tablecloths, made eye-catching posters and set up a screen to display our efforts to spectators.
We used a content aggregation application called Jaiku to track our online uploading progress through the day (see picture on the right). Jaiku made a flash application available for the event, which we projected onto a screen behind us. This was a funky and animated way to show the photos as they were being uploaded. Even better, people could send messages into the channel, which the iHeritage team used to great effect. We kept passers-by updated on what was being said in the audio message that were being recorded, and the background to the photos that were being uploaded, as they happened.
The posters were also visually stimulating and asked questions like: “Who owns the rights to the images of our heroes?” and “How can we use Wikipedia to write our own history?” We hoped these would spark some thoughts or emotions on why digitally preserving our heritage and sharing our culture is so important. See the posters here, and feel free to reproduce or remix them.
Both the posters and the Jaiku projection were hugely successful – people slowed their pace as they walked past to read the questions and the messages, and some even stopped to find out more and engage in discussions on the topics.
And if all else fails, making a ‘human’ billboard is cheap, easy and effective (see picture of Heather on the right)!
Incentivise or die!
We struck a deal with the owner of the coffee shop right next door to our scanning station: they would offer a free cup of coffee to every person who contributed to the project! Great for them (extra people who were probably going to order a slice of cake with that cuppa!), and great for us (an added incentive for people to contribute!) You may want to negotiate similar deals with the restaurants or businesses near your scanning station.
Get a production line going
We recommend planning a ‘production line’ for dealing with contributions on the day. As there was an informal feel to our event that encouraged movement and interaction with the public, it wasn’t necessary for the volunteers to stick to their stations throughout the day, though at least one person was available to fulfil each step in the process at any time.
However, defining a process for dealing with the material is an important part of making the whole day a success, especially for moments when a host of people arrive at once to have their photos scanned or audio memories recorded.
We had two people available to greet contributors as they arrived, to explain the project and process, and to get them to sign the legal release form. Then we assigned one person each to manning the scanner and audio recordings, and three pairs of uploaders and translators working together on writing and translating captions. The time consuming work of editing audio recordings was only completed and made available online, a few days after the event.
After a day full of chatting to fascinating people, listening to South Africa’s authentic stories of past and present, of WikiMedia highs and projector woes, we learnt a great deal, and set the wheels in motion to expand this collection of freely-licensed cultural content. We hope to do this again, with better knowledge from our first attempt, and we hope you have great success too. If you’re going to be running a Heritage content sprint in your part of the world, be sure to let us know so we can compare notes!
tags:
media-events heritage digitise scanning commons wikimedia wikipedia
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