Τhe Digistoryteller project walking around refugee Attica

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Published: Aug 6, 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26265/jiim.v9i1.38586
Keywords:
Digital storytelling cultural heritage apps crowdsourcing city exploration
Angeliki Antoniou
University of West Attica, Department of Archival, Library & Information Studies, Greece
Christos Chrysanthopoulos
National Hellenic Research Foundation, Institute of Historical Research, Greece
Foteini Efthymiou
University of West Attica, Department of Archival, Library & Information Studies, Greece
Konstantinos Papastathis
University of West Attica, Department of Archival, Library & Information Studies, Greece
Stathis Theodosis
University of West Attica, Department of Archival, Library & Information Studies, Greece
Afroditi Kamara
Time Heritage, Greece
Ioannis Triantafyllou
University of West Attica, Department of Archival, Library & Information Studies, Greece
Abstract

Purpose - The present work focuses on an app that supports historical exploration of city neighborhoods. The particular work focuses on the refugee crisis resulting from the Greco-Turkish war in 1922 and the traces it left behind in the formations of different places across Attica. To present the past, we developed digital storytelling features, and to engage users further, we provided them with crowdsourcing functionalities allowing them to create their own content.


Design/methodology/approach - The digital storytelling and the crowdsourcing features were tested with users in multiple events, using a mixed methodology that allowed the collection of qualitative and quantitative data from the public, policy makers and experts.


Findings - Most users provided very positive feedback and imagined further educational uses.


Originality/value - The different features of this mobile approach, allow an in-depth engagement with the past while the user is mobile.

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Author Biographies
Angeliki Antoniou, University of West Attica, Department of Archival, Library & Information Studies, Greece

Angeliki Antoniou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Archival, Library & Information Studies at the University of West Attica specializing in “Adaptive Educational Technologies in Cultural Information”. She has many years of teaching experience (undergraduate and postgraduate level), is a course coordinator in the postgraduate program Cultural Heritage Materials and Technologies of the Department of History, Archeology and Cultural Materials Management at the University of Peloponnese and supervises doctoral dissertations at University College London, University of Peloponnese and University of West Attica. She is a collaborating researcher at the ATHENS Research Center and at the Department of Information Studies at the University College London. She has participated in many national and international research projects and has been the scientific coordinator and member of the steering committee of the European project H2020 CrossCult. She has numerous publications in conferences and international journals, but also organizes scientific conferences and publication of proceedings. She holds a degree in Preschool Education from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, a degree (BSc) in Clinical with Social Psychology (University of Kent at Canterbury, UK), a postgraduate degree (MSc) in Human Interaction with Ergonomics (University College London, UK), a music degree, a Piano Diploma, as well as a PhD in Educational Technologies from the University of Peloponnese, Department of Computer Science and Technology.

Christos Chrysanthopoulos, National Hellenic Research Foundation, Institute of Historical Research, Greece

Christos Chrysanthopoulos works as a Special Scientific-Technical Staff at the Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation. He is an Academic Fellow on Archival Science at the Department of Archival, Library and Information Studies at the University of West Attica. He obtained his BA in History (University of Thessaly Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology), and he continued with a fast-track graduate entry for a second BA in Archival, Library and Information Studies (University of West Attica). He received a Master's Degree (M.Sc.) in Modern and Contemporary History (the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences Department of Political Science and History) and a Master of Education (M.Ed.) in Adult Education (Hellenic Open University-School of Humanities). He is a PhD candidate at the University of Patras (GR), Department of History and Archaeology.

Foteini Efthymiou, University of West Attica, Department of Archival, Library & Information Studies, Greece

Foteini Efthymiou works as a Special Technical Laboratory Staff at the University of West Attica, School of Administrative, Economics and Social Sciences, Department of Archival, Library & Information Studies. She has been a PhD Candidate in the aforementioned Department since 2020. Also, she is a member of the Information Management Laboratory in the above Department. She holds a bachelor's degree in Librarianship from the School of Management and Economics of the Technological Educational Institute of Athens (1994-1998) and a Master of Arts in Librarianship from the Information School of the Faculty of Social Sciences of The University of Sheffield in the UK (2004-2005). She worked as a librarian at the NTUA Central Library from 1999 until 2019. Furthermore, she worked on the implementation of the Hellenic Academic Libraries Union Catalog, its interconnection to the Central Interlibrary Loan Software & Network “Iris” and the implementation of the HEAL-Link “Advanced Services for Open Access Digital Libraries”, from 2005 until 2013. Her research interests concern Media and Information Literacy, Learning Theories, Cataloguing and Scientific Communication.

Konstantinos Papastathis, University of West Attica, Department of Archival, Library & Information Studies, Greece

Costas Papastathis currently works as a software engineer for Red Hat. He obtained his Bachelor's Degree in Informatics and Telecommunications (University of Peloponnese) and continued with a Master's Degree in Computer Science (University of Peloponnese). He is also an active member/maintainer of the paketo buildpacks (open source) community for the Nodejs buildpacks.

Stathis Theodosis, University of West Attica, Department of Archival, Library & Information Studies, Greece

Stathis Theodosis is a software engineer with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Peloponnese. He pursued further studies with a Master's program at the same university. He worked at LIST (Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology) and the University of Luxembourg, contributing to the development of a crowdsourcing mobile application for the CrossCult H2020 project. This app aimed to engage the public in preserving and understanding cultural heritage sites and artifacts.

Afroditi Kamara, Time Heritage, Greece

Afroditi Kamara is a Historian and Cultural Heritage Consultant. She studied History at the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Athens. She accomplished her postgraduate studies at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford in the UK. She has worked as a research historian at the Foundation of the Hellenic World, where she became specialized in Digital Humanities and Digital Cultural Heritage. In 2003 she co-founded Time Heritage, a Greek SME aiming at designing and implementing interdisciplinary projects for the protection and enhancement of cultural heritage. She has accomplished large-scale digitization projects, such as Digital Enhancement of Pylia and Digital Delphoi, she has designed the project DIAPLASIS for establishing masterplans of sites and monuments and since 2015 she works with an international consortium on Erasmus+ and other EU-funded projects for rural sustainable development with cultural heritage as its lever. She has published four books

Ioannis Triantafyllou, University of West Attica, Department of Archival, Library & Information Studies, Greece

Ioannis D. Triantafyllou holds a PhD from the National Technical University of Athens, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Archives, Library and Information Studies at the University of West Attica. He has previously worked as a research associate in many European and Greek research projects at the Institute of Language & Speech Processing (ILSP / Athena RC). Recently, he participated in the CrossCult research program (Horizon2020), as a member of the research team. He specializes in Digital Libraries, Data & Text Mining, Text Classification & Clustering, Ontologies & Metadata, Linked Data, Information Extraction, Text & Information Retrieval, Automated Summary & Text Synthesis, Translation Memories, etc.

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