The final speaker at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library today is Kristina Petzold, whose focus is on the question of whether music-related user-generated content can be seen as cultural heritage – this includes, for instance, some of the creative content generated and shared during the COVID-19 pandemic, and is part of post-digital everyday practice.
This includes content remixes, memes, and mashups, and is therefore highly referential; it is culturally relevant (and the cultural relevance of remix practices is now formally recognised under German law); but it is also highly ephemeral, especially where it exists in commercial, proprietary platforms.
The project DiCHOT – Digital Cultural Heritage of Our Time explores the challenges in this context, with a particular focus on musical content. It engages in field research to explore the nature of such content, develops strategies for its selection and collection, builds digital learning modules, engages high school students as digital experts in this culture, and eventually builds a circular system of knowledge and action.
A working definition for such content is that it is deliberately published content on many-to-many digital platforms which references other materials; the archiving of such content should be optimised for exemplary diversity, especially also including everyday exemplars of such content, but this is further complicated by the long-tail distribution of such participatory practices.
Such practices are of course also channelled by the affordances and constraints of the platforms on which they take place, as well as by the collective practices of use and genre expectations that are co-created by the user community; further, the uneven demographics of the diverse platforms also mean that any archival selection choices that privilege specific platforms will also skew the distribution of creator demographics captured in the archive.
This means that selection approaches need to consider platforms, formal and structural types, genres and communities of practices, exemplary diversification within individual genres, and diversity and interrelations across selections.
On TikTok, for instance, a first application of these principles might distinguish between content challenges, collective imitation, and object-centric clusters of content as centred for instance around specific hashtags. These forms stabilise only temporarily, and this also means that it would be desirable to archive whole content chains rather than individual items.
For much of this content, it would also be valuable to involve the groups which create it as experts in the archival process; this includes especially high school students. The DiCHOT project therefore also aims to generate learning materials and other resources, and to work iteratively with students as co-designers of archival selection criteria.
