Beyond Text Project
Beyond Text is an Arts and Humanities Research Council programme which funds more than 40 projects which investigate how we communicate across time and place using performance, sounds, images and objects.
'Taking forward a participative 21st Century Inventory' is a project which builds on the research being undertaken by Beyond Text Collaborative Doctoral Award student Michela Clari. Entitled 'In the hands of the user’, Michela’s work looks at changing patterns of participation and learning through RCAHMS digital collections. Through the University of Edinburgh, with co-supervisor Dr Sian Bayne, Michela has been researching how new online media environments are changing the way users engage with, and learn from, the collections of cultural institutions.
The purposes of this project are to:
- test three new social media developments of our existing services to improve how users can access, interact with and reuse our records
- consult with the public, professionals and academics to actively develop and implement two of these proposals
- enable testing and gain feedback on the beta developments to incorporate further improvements
A public consultation was undertaken at the end of 2011 to gauge interest in three proposed online developments:
- Image tagging – to enable users to add their own keywords to Canmore images and to search for these tags, turning Canmore into a browsable image bank
- Thesaurus – to enable users to nominate Canmore images to represent each site type definition
- RCAHMS Data Service – to enable members of the public to search for data and export the results to develop new interactive resources, for example Apps
A summary of responses to this consultation can be downloaded as a PDF, along with documentation that participants received as part of the consultation process.
From this consultation, image tagging and an API were selected for initial development and in January 2012 these two developments were made ‘live’ for four weeks of user testing. The responses to the user testing are being collated and will shortly be published on this page.
