Paper Reading #13: Grassroots heritage in the crisis context: a social media probes approach to studying heritage in a participatory age

Title:
Grassroots heritage in the crisis context: a social media probes approach to studying heritage in a participatory age


Comments:
Angel Narvaez
Alyssa Nabors

Reference:
Liu, Sophia.  Grassroots heritage in the crisis context: a social media probes approach to studying heritage in a participatory age.  UIST '09. http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1753899&type=pdf&CFID=11175862&CFTOKEN=42077103

Summary:

The author sees the current trend in social media to be neglected by HCI in terms of retaining cultural heritage.  Liu states that it is important to pass on the this generation and future generations the crises of our time.  As media is no longer simply in the form of newspaper articles, online archives are needed in order to preserve this data.  Liu seeks to be able to curate this data in meaningful ways using "social media probes" which are directed questions toward certain historical events that a participant can collect online and preserve.

Discussion:
I left the summary fairly vague as was the article itself.  It was difficult to understand just what her probes were.  From what it sounded like, she would focus on one event and tell the participant to grab a certain number of meaningful articles and sources and then maybe some program or network would gather the data for retrieval at a later date.

It seems to me that if people were interested in doing this they would take it upon themselves to do it and not need a mediator.  If this is a program, they so often go out of date and are unmaintainable as new technologies replace them.  Digital media is vary volatile and difficult to keep due to computer failures and carelessness.  This is a problem that I don't see an easy solution to.  I'm not quite sure if that is what Liu was trying to get at with her paper, but that is the main solution I found from her paper.