Memex: memories and experiences for inclusive digital storytelling
MEMEX promotes social cohesion through collaborative, heritage-related storytelling tools that provide access to tangible and intangible Cultural Heritage (CH) for communities at risk of exclusion. The project implements new actions for social science to: understand the NEEDS of such communities and co-design interfaces to suit their needs; DEVELOP the audience through participation strategies; while increasing the INCLUSION of communities. The fruition of this will be achieved through ground breaking ICT tools that provide a new paradigm for interaction with CH for all end user. MEMEX will create new assisted Augmented Reality (AR) experiences in the form of stories that intertwine the memories (expressed as videos, images or text) of the participating communities with the physical places / objects that surround them. To reach these objectives, MEMEX develop techniques to (semi-)automatically link images to their LOCATION and connect to a new opensource Knowledge Graph (KG). The KG will facilitate assisted storytelling by means of clustering that links consistently user data and CH assets in the KG. Finally, stories will be visualised onto smartphones by AR on top of the real world allowing to TELL an engaging narrative. MEMEX will be deployed and demonstrated on three pilots with unique communities. First, Barcelona’s Migrant Women, which raises the gender question around their inclusion in CH, giving them a voice to valorise their memories. Secondly, MEMEX will give access to the inhabitants of Paris’s XIX district, one of the largest immigrant settlements of Paris, to digital heritage repositories of over 1 million items to develop co-authored new history and memories connected to the artistic history of the district. Finally, first, second and third generation Portuguese migrants living in Lisbon will provide insights on how technology tools can enrich the lives of the participants.