2010-04-07: Sophia Liu

Title: Grassroots Heritage in the Crisis Context: A Social Media Probes Approach to Studying Heritage in a Participatory Age

Abstract: Social media technologies are rapidly changing the way people create, share, and experience memories especially around crises. When collective memory is generated on a societal scale and shared across generations over time, this practice assumes social and cultural significance and becomes a heritage matter. Emerging uses of social media are generating new kinds of heritage practices from the bottom-up, what I call "grassroots heritage." This interdisciplinary design study works at the intersection of social media and cultural heritage in the crisis context using a variant method called "social media probes." I present a grassroots heritage framework with design ideas for facilitating "socially-distributed curation" to guide future HCI research in the heritage domain.

Short Bio: Sophia B. Liu is a PhD student in ATLAS's Technology, Media and Society PhD program at CU. She works in Professor Leysia Palen's connectivIT lab researching in the area of crisis informatics. She is also working with Professor Elisa Giaccardi in the area of cultural informatics on issues of collective memory. She will be giving a practice talk that she will be presenting at the CHI 2010 Doctoral Colloquium.

Her DC paper