Manifesto

Archival search environments for finding digital cultural heritage artifacts are typically boring, outdated, and confusing. They are still based on the physical archive, and prioritize historical order, provenance, inventories, and record groups – things that everyday people don't care about.

These traditional archives create long lists of unrelated items and tiny thumbnails that force users into repetitive and disconnected "open-view-close-repeat” viewing scenarios that frustrate users. They provide lists of cultural artifacts, often hundreds of pages long, and not much else. The overall traditional search experience lacks aesthetics and joy, and forfeits many opportunities for greater public engagement.

We are on a mission to change this.

  • We want search portals to be beautiful, accessible, useful, creative, purposeful, and absorbing places for exploration and organization. 

  • We want chronology (timeline and grid views) and location (map views) at the forefront of search. Users naturally gravitate to time, place + theme: this is how people intuitively organize family photo albums and scrapbooks. 

  • We want cultural heritage search platforms to be go-to places for creativity and interpretation, with built-in digital storytelling and rephotography tools, play, and engagement zones. 

  • We want CHI search platforms to work as creativity platforms, offering immediate embedding of organized artifacts so they can be shared online on multiple platforms. 

  • We want platforms to provide compelling ways to display a selection of cultural artifacts (full-size autoplay for screens or projections) so CHIs can make engaging public exhibits and art projections in three clicks, without the outdated steps of having to download and paste images into a PowerPoint. 

  • We want to interlink our many digital cultural heritage creativity platforms into a federated network (much like Wikipedia, but for image files) so that cultural artifacts currently siloed within a single archive can automatically find their relevant audiences and appear to users in a single platform. 

  • We want these fun, federated, open source cultural heritage creativity platforms to successfully compete with stock photo agencies so that our publics (including educators, students, researchers, artists, nonprofits, and even businesses) access freely accessible images first. Our shared cultural heritage, photographs and other images, should not be for sale; creativity portals should promote the open access and reuse of digital cultural heritage. 

  • We want to easily attach traditional knowledge notices and labels onto cultural heritage artifacts so that all indigenous communities can have a voice in how their cultural heritage is used and interpreted. 

We are creating such an open source platform. It’s called Kronofoto. We are interested in sharing our code, in collaborating with others, and in perfecting this kind of platform. Let’s work together.