News Story

The OU presents the output of the SPICE project at the Extended Intelligence for Cultural Engagement

KMi Reporter, Monday 24 Apr 2023

Researchers from the Knowledge Media Institute participated in the Extended Intelligence for Cultural Engagement (ExICE) conference in Bologna, showcasing the outputs of the EU H2020 project SPICE "Social Cohesion, Participation, and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement". The team, led by PI Paul Mulholland, included Enrico Daga, Jason Carvalho, and Chukwudi Uwasomba.

SPICE is an EU H2020 project dedicated to research on novel methods for “citizen curation” of cultural heritage through an ecosystem of tools co-designed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers, technologists, and museum engagement professionals, and user communities.

In the SPICE project, the OU team collaborated with museum professionals from the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) to design “Deep Viewpoints”, a mobile application supporting citizens in curating their own responses to the museum’s collection and exhibitions. The citizen curation process has been carried out by community groups traditionally under-served by the cultural sector to introduce new citizen voices into the curatorial process. Participating communities include black and black queer advocacy groups, asylum seekers, young people in custody, migrant women, and young people living with long-term illness.

KMi research demonstrates how citizen curation opens critical challenges for data integration and reuse in the cultural heritage sector. The SPICE Linked Data Hub integrates data from museum collections and user-generated content from applications, leveraging a multiplicity of semantic viewpoints, using a novel system for Knowledge Graph Construction (KGC) designed in KMi: SPARQL Anything.

Furthermore, the SPICE Linked Data Hub gives citizen curation partner organisations (e.g. museums or companies in the tourism sector) meaningful control over their data, by expressing fine-grained, user-tailored licenses and terms of use and by developing an approach to dealing with privacy violations and hate speech in user-contributed content.

The SPICE project is successfully ending in April 2023 after three challenging years for museums, affected by the pandemic. Digital methods allowed for alternative communication channels to be explored, transforming the limitations or the lock-down into an opportunity for new developments.