Sound and Vision Scapes (SViS)

Sound and Vision Scapes (SViS) integrates the social Internet of Things software platform Tales of Things with the BBC media archive in order to link video and audio content to places and objects via mobile devices. Project SViS will augment a combination of 100 objects and places objects throughout the UK to enable the public to engage with the BBC archive in novel ways that increase access and provide new opportunities to participate in the replay and social recording of objects, places and spaces. For this purpose we will utilize 'broadcast beacons' to allow read/write access to the archive directly linked to the object or place. These beacons, based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technologies, will broadcast the availability of provenance information to BLE enabled devices (phones, smart watches) in the proximity (up to 25m distances). The project builds on the next generation of the Internet of Things and utilises the provenance/read write platform of Tales of Things to allow a seamless interaction with media and objects/places of cultural heritage significance as a means of gathering and displaying information.

Talesofthings.com is part of the EPSRC funded Tales of Things and electronic Memory (TOTeM) project. It represents the worlds largest archive of Internet of Things connected second hand objects with over 10,000 'things' connected to stories, tales and information about their provenance. The project has received over 40 articles in the international press, was named as part of Wired's Top Technology 2011, been utilised by Oxfam as part of their ongoing Shelf Life project and won the cross research council impact award 2011. The linking of the project with the BBC archive, along with the inclusion of geographic location and use of broadcast beacons, will provide a unique roadmap to opening up a wealth of media and audio data to location. An example of this would be a broadcast beacon located on a bench in Lyme Regis on the Dorset Coast, broadcasting a 10 minute short from the BBC Series 'Coast' with information on the Jurassic Coast. The viewer would be able to contribute comments, photos or videos of their time at the location, viewable to the next person who viewed the archive from the beacon and thus adding a social network aspect to not only the archive but also the object, place and location. Another example would be the tagging of a tree in a public park, linking to media resources applicable to wide range of age groups from 'Trees and Tall Things' from the Show Me Show Me CBBC series to Gardeners World. This aim is to link information about objects, places and spaces directly to the BBC archive while also combining the crowd sourced/social network nature of Tales of Things using known systems and techniques.

It is to be expected that the proposed project will generate new types of data about interactions with cultural heritage. This data can be used for the creation of insightful visualisations, it can inform the development of new data analysis tools and methods that support research in the social sciences, arts and humanities. The project proposes the creation of a social cultural heritage platform that allows researchers to explore how people perceive cultural heritage. We aim to investigate new social practises of creating and managing social memories linked to places. Consequently our research also explores novel forms of digital citizenship that can help to democratise how cultural heritage is recorded. In order to study these new phenomena the project will create new tools and methods to study and analyse the generated heritage data.

The use of established and proven technologies enables the project partners to carefully manage risks that are inherent to projects that involve software development. By applying existing technologies the associated risks are low and software development will be restricted to customization and integration of the different backend systems.

There are a number of impact beneficiaries of the proposed intervention. First of all SViS will increase opportunities for engagement with cultural heritage resources to the general public. This will encourage people to learn about the identity of places by broadcasting information about the provenance of a place and past events linked to it. Hence the expected impacts of the project amongst others are:

- Improved access to affordable and widely available tools and services for releasing the economic potential of cultural heritage in digital form and for adding value to cultural content in educational, scientific and leisure contexts;

- Engagement of a wide range of users with cultural resources in diverse real and virtual contexts and considerably altered ways to experience culture heritage as a personalized and adaptive user experience

The proposed social software system that emerges as a result of integrating Tales of Things and the BBC broadcasting archive will enable people to participate in the discussion about cultural heritage and its preservation. Hence the intervention provides learning opportunities for members of the public and it also enables novel forms of participation and citizenship that inform decision-making and initiatives from local authorities. Consequently an outcome of this project will be a new type of social software system for the digital cultural heritage sector. The resulting software artifact will provide insights into possible avenues for commercialization, the design of socio-technical systems for cultural heritage and add-on services with economical viability.

Enabling people to add their own voice also encourages the democratization of recording cultural heritage and social memory. This is important as it will help marginalised groups having their voices heard in a sector that is otherwise dominated by the cultural industry. There is then a risk that hyperlocal heritage and provenance gets forgotten due to a potential bias for settling for a mainstream perspective. Citizens are rarely involved in curating cultural heritage experiences. While the recent uptake of digital technologies has led to improved opportunities for audience feedback in general, and to a certain extent for social interpretation, these approaches tend to only reach an already interested audience. Unfortunately too often cultural minority groups and less affluent or culturally less important regions are under-represented in heritage applications. The Internet of Things-approach that we are putting forward enables new opportunities for people to connect with the culture of place in everyday activities.

The proposed project also provides a stimulus for the economy and in particular the creative industries and tourism sectors. The project will provide pointers for new tourism applications that integrate tailored media access when interacting in-situ with places in the real world through the use of Internet of Things technologies. The use of low-cost ubiquitous mobile technologies will allow greater accessibility to informal learning in groups that may not normally visit museums or cultural sites/institutions. We also envision that our intervention will support novel forms of inquiry learning where students can probe and question their perceptions through interactions with places that have been augmented.

The intervention also unlocks new user-generated data resources that researchers can tap into, visualise and analyse. Hence it enables researchers to work with new data sets and explore novel research questions relating to cultural heritage. Peoples' perceptions and attitudes towards cultural heritage artefacts that are currently largely hidden will be made visible and thus can be used for discussion and mediation of meaning.