Urbino belonging: Exploring place-based community heritage with digital & participatory methods

ABSTRACT

What we understand and choose as heritage is a question rooted in our individual and collective notions of identity and feelings of community. Critical heritage studies highlight the links between heritage and recognition, emotions, and the everyday lives of people and communities. We introduce a methodology for a digitally facilitated and participatory study of place-based community heritage. Inspired by Participatory Data Design and Photovoice methodologies, the Urban Belonging App enables participants to communicate phenomenological aspects of urban spaces by sharing, signifying, and evaluating pictures of familiar places in the city. A quali-quantitative analysis of the app’s data best exploits its multi-dimensionality: the characteristic of being both countable and measurable and semantically rich and relational. The case study illustrates how the methodology is used to study community heritage in an exploratory and descriptive way. Most valued and recognised heritage places, as well as less conventional understandings of heritage in Urbino, Italy, are identified. Two participants show how heritage differently embeds with everyday experiences, memories, and feelings of community. Its adaptability and ability to capture the contested and phenomenological nature of heritage and to operationalise complex definitions of community qualify the methodology to enable systematic research on bottom-up, situated heritage values.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage studies
• community heritage
• quali-quantitative methods
• digital methods
• participatory design

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following people, without whom this research would not have been possible. A special thanks to professors Anders Blok and Kristoffer Albris, for their valuable supervision to the MSc project from which this article originates. The IIS Raffaello Institute, the S. Girolamo Library administration, the Municipality of Urbino, Casa di Raffaello, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, and Il Ducato for their support in communicating the project, as well as all those helping us spreading the voice. A special thanks to all the people most dear to us, who offered emotional support along the way. More than anyone else, we would like to thank all participants to the project, for their time, contribution, and energy.

Disclosure statement

Both authors are affiliated with Backscatter ApS, a for profit social data science lab and consultancy which is in the process of developing a proprietary app inspired by the Urban Belonging App. On the other hand, the Urban Belonging App’s source code, together with other analytical materials, is open source and publicly available in the interest of scientific development.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. https://whc.unesco.org/en/canopy/urbino/.

2. Due to limitations in modifying the app, the heritage and landscape tags appeared as ‘Culture’ and ‘Urban Nature’ in non-Italian devices. It is possible that the Italian word for heritage (‘Patrimonio’) holds a slightly different connotation than its English counterpart. However, being ‘Patrimonio’ deployed by official and institutional actors in the same way, we consider their discursive constructions to be comparable.

3. Spearman’s correlation measure equals 0.56 between the percentage of picture reactions including the heritage tag and the picture mean sentiment.

4. Pearson correlation measure is −0.35 between the percentage of picture reactions including the heritage tag and the picture standard deviation in sentiment scores.

5. Collier’s (2004) direct analysis of pictures is composed of four stages: a) An open, exploratory viewing of the visual material as a whole. In this stage, first impressions and preliminary questions are jotted down, b) The generation of categories and directives that reflect and assist research goals to guide the more structured analysis, such as filtering the data or choosing which variables to observe. In qualitatively analysing the network, this second stage takes its moves from clusters or network dimensions of interest, c) A structured analysis aimed at measuring, counting, and comparing, often done in a written and annotated format. This stage took the form of a netnographic journal (Kozinets 2010), combining raw data, meta-data on participants and pictures, reflections, and preliminary findings that emerged in the interpretive process. Netnographic journals enrich data with the researcher’s own positionality and interpretations, similarly to ethnographic journals (ibid). Patterns and findings are identified in the process of netnographic annotation and d) A step back to the grand view to achieve distance and realise the significance of findings.

6. The Pearson’s correlation coefficient between the presence of the heritage tag and a higher sentiment score is 0.11, in Luca’s ratings.

7. https://urban-belonging.github.io/UrbanBelongingToolkit/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marco Pernarella

Marco Pernarella holds a MSc in Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen, working with qualitative and quantitative methodologies in digital social research. He has a background in Anthropology, Religions, and Oriental Civilisations at the University of Bologna with a focus on Philosophical Anthropology. He is a practitioner at Backscatter, where he works on direct and indirect digital citizens engagement, applying anthropology, digital methods, and interdisciplinary social sciences at the intersection of public, private and research sectors.

Anders Koed Madsen

Anders Koed Madsen is associate professor at Aalborg University in Copenhagen and co-founder of TANTLab and The Public Data Lab, two institutional homes for researchers crossing STS and computational humanities. During the last five years he has developed ‘Soft City Sensing’ as a distinct framework for mapping and conceptualizing the social infrastructure of urban publics through the digital traces they leave of their urban life. This work draws on his distinct interdisciplinary background in pragmatist philosophy, computational humanities, internet studies and organizational analysis. Anders serves at editorial boards of - and have published extensively in - leading journals within computational humanities and urban cartography. He has authored books on valuation and cultural studies and is currently co-editing an international handbook of computational humanities. Anders directs the executive education in ‘data-driven organizational development’ and frequently gives presentations, also public ones, on topics relating to computational humanities, smart cities and digital citizen engagement.