Building Stories
Citizen Science
Talking Buildings
> Visit our new web site at talkingbuildings.net
Building Stories
We aim to give a voice to the cultural heritage buildings themselves, in order to shift the perspective in a playful and constructive way. The original plan for the implementation of this process and the collection all buildings' voices in a single platform was the development of indepenednt web blogs of buildings “talking” and sharing their stories with the public in a way that is engaging and informative. The idea, from a technical perspective, is that building stories could act as a novel federated web platform, which builds on the RSF (Really Simple Syndication) approach, that allows the design of collaborative digital platforms, collected and filtered centrally through the RSS protocol and the use of appropriate tags.
However, during the participatory process we realized that the effort needed to create dedicated web blogs could delay the process, and for this we have created a single web site acting as a curated platform, the talkingbuildings.net, which will become the main source of building-stories.net.
Citizen Science
The engagement of citizens in the restoration lifecycle of cultural heritage buildings and corresponding research activities can be beneficial both for the quality of the scientific outputs, but also for the emancipation and empowerment of citizens themselves. SINCERE will follow a bottom-up participatory process, starting at each of the three open pilot sites, and developing customized citizen science workshops that make sense in the specific context, in collaboration with local actors.
Talking Buildings
The big success of the online heritage in dialogue, motivated the SINCERE researchers to reconsider the original strategy to build a "simple" platform collecting such stories as originally planned. More specifically, it was decided to upgrade the idea of buildings impersonation to a thorough citizen science methodology, and dedicate a separate web page to guidelines and examples of engaging citizens in this inspiring and playful activity, branded as "Talking Buildings". This will allow the building stories platform to capture more than just the impersonation attempts but a wider spectrum of posts on the renovation of cultural heritage buildings. So, let's first make the #TalkingBuildings a well-known concept!