culture - Österreich forscht

Lovro Koncar-Gamulin, simulation based on Google Studio imagery

Thursday, 12 October 2023

City Layers

Citizen Mapping as a Practice of City-Making

The project “City Layers: Citizen Mapping as a Practice of City-Making”, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) introduces a contemporary framework for city-mapping which centres on citizen experience of urban space as an integrative way to contribute to more egalitarian city design. Within the frame of the Citizen Science Award 2023, the City Layers app has been developed in collaboration with students, citizens and researchers all interested in democratising and diversifying how cities are formed.

Hypotheses

The research hypothesises that current data collection methods have prioritised simulated and measurable data, alienating and excluding diverse data sets. City Layers utilises innovative and contemporary data collection methods which allow for the recording of subjective experiences of the city. The project thus proposes a more inclusive and adaptable form of collecting information for urban design, whether it be material or immaterial, based on terms dictated by citizens.

Objectives

The research aims to deepen the engagement between citizens and urban design using the City Layers app by inviting them to identify, record and reflect upon a range of different material and immaterial ‘layers’ of their cities. These include accessibility, noise, safety, climate resilience, aesthetics, amenities and many more. This city mapping app serves as a means of communication between cities and their citizens, generating a contemporary, critical form of data that is collectively generated, managed and cared for.

Approach and methods

Through City Layers – a digitised participatory tool for urban design – citizens are invited to use tags, textual comments, photographs, suggestions and votes to articulate their views on a particular urban surrounding. By recognising and voicing their subjective experiences in specific spaces, citizens procure meaning and values, but also provide valuable data on how these spaces can be improved. Citizens can add thoughts on how urban places can be improved, or they can immerse themselves in the information about their urban surroundings mapped by others. Citizens' contributions are made available online as a form of commons for active use. This innovative mapping tool thus aims to reorganise individual observations into collective knowledge and brings out the strengths of citizen participation in urban design. The collected data is intended to enable a basis for a better dialogue between citizens and urban planners. Therefore, the research recognises the citizen science approach as a democratic and urgent strategy for identifying the essential components which constitute a city.

Picture Gallery

View the embedded image gallery online at:
https://www.citizen-science.at/en/component/k2/tag/culture#sigProId5975b3fb95

Published in Current projects

CC-BY-NC-ND Karin Reisinger

Tuesday, 19 September 2023

Stories of Post-extractive F*utures

The shrinking town of Eisenerz lies at the foot of the Erzberg mountain, Austria’s largest and best-known site of extraction of iron ore. The post-industrial town is experiencing a rural exodus, which concerns women in particular. The spatial practices of mining areas have been under-researched using inclusive methods. Mining is predominantly narrated in male, heroic narratives, while counter-narratives of repair, care, reproduction and maintenance are mostly overlooked.

Within this complex field, the project focuses on intersectional feminist perspectives on an area of exhaustion; it will collect feminist post-extractive stories to broaden the perception of mining areas and strengthen the focus on feminist narrations for future perspectives. We ask: Which practices contribute to the continuance of the community? The project shows and discusses the spatial practices of repair amid extraction with multiple actors. We work with local associations to reach diverse groups.

Thinking and knowing with the diverse, often surprising, actors and their practices, the citizen scientists shape the project on several levels: they collect and locate stories of practices, they research private archives, and they report and sometimes even organize. Processes of mutual learning take place in meetings and shared activities, and through the process of transformation into drawings by the East Styrian artist Roswitha Weingrill. Based on collaborative science and an affirmative and inclusive approach, citizens are involved in decisions on many levels, especially concerning their contributions and their representation. The collected knowledge will contribute to creating imaginations of future stories of a liveable community. With the help of artistic methods, these will be illustrated and made accessible in public discussions.

Via strategies of making visible, bringing together, and anticipating and activating futures, and also with the help of artistic tools of knowledge production, this project will show practices as constant reparative counter-practices amid extraction. An ethical, intersectional framework of feminist citizen science will revive the margins of how we know about environmental exploitation to deliver a complex, yet profound, image of a polyphonic Anthropocene that allows for imagining dynamic assemblages after exploitation.

Photo gallery

View the embedded image gallery online at:
https://www.citizen-science.at/en/component/k2/tag/culture#sigProId50bd6c7cc8

Published in Current projects

Wednesday, 30 August 2023

Viennese playbills 1930-1939

What is the project about?

The crowdsourcing project "Viennese playbills 1930-1939" is about the metadata capture of the playbills from the holdings of the Vienna City Library from this period. Previously only organized by theater and not indexed individually, during the project these valuable historical sources will become recorded individually and thus discoverable for all. The playbills provide insights into an initially internationally acclaimed and lively Viennese theater world, which was confronted with an increasing restriction of creative scope due to anti-liberal and anti-democratic tendencies.

Since the democratization of knowledge plays a central role in the range of tasks of the Vienna City Library and the previous crowdsourcing projects "Letters 1914-1919" as well as "Letters 1920-1934" have been a great success, we are now again asking the crowd for help in recording our playbills.

The Vienna City Library preserves around 250,000 playbills and program booklets from over 300 Viennese venues, ranging from 1720 to the present. Some of these have been digitized and are freely available in the Digital Library.

How can one contribute?

Participation is open to all interested persons. After registering, you can choose between two tasks: Capture metadata or review information already captured by others. If errors are discovered, they can be changed and a new version created. Two independent confirmations are necessary for a playbill to be classified as correct.

What happens to the results?

The metadata collected is integrated at regular intervals into the Digital Library of the Vienna City Library and will then be individually retrievable and searchable. This means that the playbills can be found by anyone interested and can be filtered by means of various search queries, e.g. by plays that were performed or by individual actors. This is not yet possible.

Crowdsourcing platform crowdsourcing.wien

The project "Viennese playbills 1930-1939" is part of the crowdsourcing platform crowdsourcing.wien – a cooperation of Wien Museum and Vienna City Library. The aim of this joint platform is to make original sources on the history of Vienna from various institutions accessible to all interested persons with the help of the crowd. Because only knowledge that can be read and comprehended can be brought to life and made available for inclusive debate.

More information: crowdsourcing.wien

Gallery

View the embedded image gallery online at:
https://www.citizen-science.at/en/component/k2/tag/culture#sigProIdbbcf8f1c25

ma9 orbit1 pos rgb

Published in Current projects

Wienbibliothek im Rathaus

Thursday, 22 June 2023

Writing history: Letters 1920–1934

What is the project about?

The crowdsourcing project "Letters 1920-1934" is about the transcription of the unique letter collection of the Vienna City Library from this period. In contrast to historical printed works, which are now subjected to automatic full-text recognition as standard, this is still not so easy to do for manuscripts - especially when the documents come from many different writers, as in this case. Since the democratization of knowledge plays a central role in the range of tasks of the Vienna City Library and the pilot project "Letters 1914-1919" has been a great success, we are again asking the crowd for help in indexing the content.

The Vienna City Library will digitize all correspondence - more than 200,000 items - by 2025 and make them freely available in the Digital Library in compliance with copyright law. Due to the alphabetical approach, the crowdsourcing project's holdings will successively expand up to the letter Z.

How can one contribute?

Participation is open to all interested persons. After registering, you can choose between two tasks: Transcribe letters or check letters already transcribed by others. If errors are discovered, they can be changed and a new version created. Three independent confirmations are necessary for a transcription to be classified as correct.

What happens to the results?

The finished transcriptions are integrated into the Digital Library of the Vienna City Library at regular intervals and can then be retrieved and searched at any time. This makes the contents of the letters accessible to all interested persons - something that was previously reserved for a limited circle of experts.

Crowdsourcing platform crowdsourcing.wien

The project "Letters 1920-1934" is part of the crowdsourcing platform crowdsourcing.wien – a cooperation of Wien Museum and Vienna City Library. The aim of this joint platform is to make original sources on the history of Vienna from various institutions accessible to all interested persons with the help of the crowd. Because only knowledge that can be read and comprehended can be brought to life and made available for inclusive debate.

More information: crowdsourcing.wien

Podcast episode

In July 2023, project coordinator Alexandra Egger was guest on the Österreich forscht podcast Wissen macht Leute - you can listen to the episode here (in German).

Picture gallery:

View the embedded image gallery online at:
https://www.citizen-science.at/en/component/k2/tag/culture#sigProIdd57757c8f5

Published in Current projects

Wednesday, 17 May 2023

Salon of Open Secrets

It is an open secret that hardware operating on our smart devices contains not only plastic, but also conflict materials such as tungsten, tin, tantulum and gold. Technology is therefore not neutral. These resources are mined in conflict regions, assembled to electric circuits under harmful labour conditions and mostly ending up in contaminating landfills. This pollution is best understood as an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to Land.

Arts-based research methods seize artistic practice to unpack complexity. Through opening up our artistic research project to citizens we want to make this phenomenon tangible. Intersecting Art and Science needs to be an experience of empowerment, of encouragement to find new ways.

This Citizen Science projecttackles sensitive issues through an online game that introduces the player to alternative technologies. Participants in our workshops (at the Technisches Museum Wien, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna children’s university, Maker Fair Vienna and three Viennese schools) can become players and navigate through different scenes to meet specific characters as avatars. These avatars represent real people from around the world, collaborators in our main research project. Through this form of interactive storytelling young people are invited to become inventors of green and fair hardware themselves, to network among each other and transform their ideas into actual prototypes in the next phase of the project.

Through the term Ethical Hardware we want to describe technology that does not harm the environment, but embraces restorative practices for the benefit of nature and inhabitants alike.

There are strong social movements among teenage, female* and non-binary creatives who share similar values (Extinction Rebellion, Fridays For Future). Our Citizen Science Project addresses the lack of communication between academia and the youth movement. We would like to explore the creativity and transformative work performed by young citizens, specifically from minorities, by offering a playful entry point to our research. We hope that the visions contributed by CSs will transform our theoretical definition of what imagining future technologies entails, and vice versa give participants the chance to discover alternative futures. This way together we hope to gain the necessary strengths to face this crisis.

Our research team composed by artists researchers Stefanie Wuschitz and Patrícia J. Reis at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the citizen scientists will together with the Technisches Museum Wien (TMW), our national research partner, make the research results operative for use in classrooms and after school programs.

Published in Current projects

Tuesday, 11 April 2023

Writing History: Letters 1914-1919

What is the project about?

The crowdsourcing project "Letters 1914-1919" is about the transcription of the unique letter collection of the Vienna City Library from this period. In contrast to historical printed works, which are now subjected to automatic full-text recognition as standard, this is still not so easy to do for manuscripts - especially when the documents come from many different writers, as in this case. Since the democratization of knowledge plays a central role in the range of tasks of the Vienna City Library and only readable and comprehensible knowledge can be brought to life, the idea arose to ask the crowd for help in indexing the content. The historically significant period from 1914 to 1919 was chosen as the starting point.

The Vienna City Library will digitize all correspondence - more than 200,000 items - by 2025 and make them freely available in the Digital Library in compliance with copyright law. Due to the alphabetical approach, the crowdsourcing project's holdings will successively expand up to the letter Z.

How can one contribute?

Participation is open to all interested persons. After registering, you can choose between two tasks: Transcribe letters or check letters already transcribed by others. If errors are discovered, they can be changed and a new version created. Three independent confirmations are necessary for a transcription to be classified as correct.

What happens to the results?

The finished transcriptions are integrated into the Digital Library of the Vienna City Library at regular intervals and can then be retrieved and searched at any time. This makes the contents of the letters accessible to all interested persons - something that was previously reserved for a limited circle of experts.

Crowdsourcing platform crowdsourcing.wien

The project "Letters 1914-1919" is part of the crowdsourcing platform crowdsourcing.wien - a cooperation of Wien Museum and Vienna City Library. The aim of this joint platform is to make original sources on the history of Vienna from various institutions accessible to all interested persons with the help of the crowd. Because only knowledge that can be read and comprehended can be brought to life and made available for inclusive debate.

More information: New platform crowdsourcing.wien and "Letters 1914-1919" www.wienbibliothek.at/ueber-uns/presse/presseaussendungen/neue-plattform-crowdsourcingwien-briefe-1914-1919

Podcast episode

In July 2023, project coordinator Alexandra Egger was guest on the Österreich forscht podcast Wissen macht Leute - you can listen to the episode here (in German).

Picture gallery

View the embedded image gallery online at:
https://www.citizen-science.at/en/component/k2/tag/culture#sigProId1358efc294

Published in Current projects

Foto von SHVETS production: https://www.pexels.com/de-de/foto/frauen-gesichtslos-professionell-arbeit-7176325/

Tuesday, 11 April 2023

The Psychological is Participatory

Counselling centres for women* are important institutions that have been founded since the 1980s by the second women's movement. In the project, researchers are conducting research together with counsellors and clients of Viennese women's* counselling centres. We are interested in the life stories of women* who seek help at counselling centres. How can women lead a good life in this society today and what role can women's counselling play in this? In workshops, questions and methods are developed together with the project partners. The women* and the counsellors are guided to document their knowledge and experiences in the form of narrated stories or/and with visual methods. The use of a critical participatory action approach enables both counsellors and clients to reflect on changes that have occurred through a feminist, psychological counselling process.

The perspective of women clients has very rarely been considered in the history of psychology. Especially structurally disadvantaged women* are often not heard, e.g. migrant women or single parents affected by poverty. Research with clients aims to empower women* and to explore with them how social circumstances have shaped their lives.

coverfoto

"The Psychological is Participatory - Feminist critical participatory action research with women's counselling centres and their clients" (2022-2023), funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF (TCS 112 Top Citizen Science) and co-financed by the Women and Family Department of the Arbeiterkammer.

Project management: Ass.-Prof. Dr. Nora Ruck

Project team: Dr. Barbara Rothmüller, Julia Struppe-Schanda, MSc.

In the project we are conducting research together with Dr. Bettina Zehetner from the counselling centre Frauen* beraten Frauen* and Dr. Sigrid Awart and Dr. Andrea Kaiser-Horvath from the counselling centre Peregrina as well as with 12 clients from both counselling centres. Prof. Michelle Fine & Prof. María Elena Torre (CUNY), Prof. Thomas Stefan (Postdam) and Prof. Alexandra Rutherford (Toronto) advise us on the Advisory Board of the project. The project is scheduled to be completed in December 2023.

Published in Current projects

Friday, 16 December 2022

United by Crisis?

Participate in archaeological field surveys and/or in cleaning, documenting & interpreting archaeological finds.

A transdisciplinary look at the early Neolithic communities in the Schletz settlement cluster

The project aims to explore the surroundings of the famous Neolithic settlement of Asparn/Schletz (Lower Austria). Numerous human remains suggest a violent attack on this site in the Late Linear Pottery Culture, approx. 7.000 years ago.

Due to its size and earthworks, we assume that Schletz was the central site of a cluster of smaller settlements in surrounding region. By researching these settlements, we hope, among other things, to increase our knowledge on the background of the massacre and on the origin of the people who died in Schletz.

We cordially invite you to work with us as a Citizen Scientist!

In the project, we are searching for Neolithic finds (pottery, stone tools, etc.) at known or suspected sites near Asparn/Schletz together with interested people and collectors. During our surveys, we go over the fields at regular intervals and map the findings that we discover. Later on, we clean them together und create a scientific documentation and evaluation. Here you can find further information on how you can participate as a Citizen Scientist. However, as we have planned a format of intensive cooperation, we have reached the maximum number of Citizen Scientists that can participate in the project. Nevertheless, we can still offer you to join the waiting list for the participation in the project (or possible follow-up projects).

In another part of the project, local middle school students extract and process soil samples from the area of the LPC sites to create an isoscape (= isotope landscape). Through a comparison with Sr isotope ratios of the human remains, this will allow a discussion of whether the people that died in the massacre might have grown up locally or not.

Project partners & cooperation partners

Picture gallery:

View the embedded image gallery online at:
https://www.citizen-science.at/en/component/k2/tag/culture#sigProId0cf662b906

The project is funded by:

Published in Current projects

Image by Brian Merrill from Pixabay (https://pixabay.com/de/photos/fußgänger-menschen-beschäftigt-400811/)

Monday, 28 November 2022

Everyday Morality

What is this project about?

How can good people do bad things? How can people act contrary to their moral beliefs without having a bad conscience? White lies, rule bending, finding excuses for our own behaviour, which we would judge others for … To be honest, we have all done stuff like that. Nobody is always 100 % moral - misconduct spans from little untruths to refined fraud, from omission of some facts to crimes. All these things have one thing in common: When performing these actions, the same mechanisms are at work that allow us to ignore our moral compass. At least that is what theories assume. In this project, we examine when, how often, in which contexts and by whom these different mechanisms are applied.

Why is this important?

Our goal is to check to what extend theory corresponds with reality. How is unmoral behaviour in everyday life justified? What influence do situational differences and relationships between actors have? Which actions are seen as immoral?

How can Citizen Scientists participate?

Your task is to observe your surroundings after a short online information. Who acts immoral? When? What justifications are provided for this behaviour? Not just encounters in everyday life matter, but also media, newspaper reports, narratives, movies, social media etc. can be analysed. For this, short questionnaires will be sent to you during the course of one week.

At a later point in time, Citizen Scientists are invited to analyse the submitted scenarios, to build categories and thereby check to what extent theory and reality correspond. Another aim is to discover new categories and strategies.

Podcast episode

If you would like to learn more, you can listen to the Wissen macht Leute podcast episode about the project (in German).

Published in Current projects

Thursday, 24 March 2022

Memories and Imaginaries

Democratic Citizenship

"Memories and Imaginaries" critically explores with students in Austria what it means to be a citizen. Who can or is allowed to actively participate in the political community? Who can or is not allowed to? We address these questions with the aim of finding collective strategies to confront the state of exclusion and marginalization.

The aim of the research is for researchers to explore the importance of remembering, retelling and re-imagining the past and the future plays in living and participating in a political community.

In every community there are different stories of belonging and exclusion. The particular focus will be on migrant, queer and Jewish memories and imaginaries. In their own ways, they all represent stories of exclusion from Austrian society.

We explore how democratic citizenship works by practicing it on a small scale: Students, artists and researchers come together to learn, share and listen about migrant, queer and Jewish memories and ideas. The Citizen Scientists themselves may also bring and share their own experiences of exclusion.

The project sets new impulses in the field of Citizen Science, as it combines Citizen Science with art-based research. Memories and imaginaries are collective and relational forms of knowledge that are experiential, multi-layered in space and time. Citizen science and art-based research are innovative ways to gain insights into such imaginaries and their potential for democratic citizenship.

erinnerungimaginaeres logo2text

How to participate?

During the co-research period from May to June 2022, a total of three "Remembrance Labs" (May) and one General Assembly (June) took place. The citizen scientists each took part in one of the three labs, which had the same content.

The interim results of all three labs, in the form of graphic recordings and stenographic minutes, were reflected on together in a joint general assembly at the end of June and the collected output was jointly verified.

The Labs artistically took us through the past and present of the three selected communities and enabled collective reflection on how we share situations of exclusion and how we can imagine them if we have not experienced them ourselves or if we do not remember them ourselves (for example because we are too young).

Eating together was as much a part of the collective experience as the mental and physical-affective participation in three group-dynamic, artistically guided exercises.

Artistic inputs were given in each memory lab, in which the Citizen Scientists were also invited to actively participate:

Rap-poetry with Esra Özmen aka EsRap on the topic of migration,
Building community by performative story-telling with artist Ndidi Iroh,
Researching biographies: multi-marginalisations from a jewish perspective.

An expert was invited to each Remembrance Lab to present a short input for the discussion. They came from important civil society organisations:

Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (DÖW),
Wiener Wiesenthal-Institut für Holocaust-Studien,
PH Upper Austria.

The results of the research phase are currently being evaluated and will be published in the form of an artistic book in 2023.

What happens to the contributions of the Citizen Scientists?

The activities during the labs will be documented visually and textually by means of graphic recording (artist Felix Deiters) and a stenographic protocol.

The graphic and stenographic protocols will be included in the book publication "Memories and Imaginaries: Democratic Citizenship". The book will be produced in the last phase of the project (autumn 2022) and presented at a closing event in January 2023.

Contact and research team of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Marina Gržinić: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Dr. Sophie Uitz: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Dr. Jovita Pristovšek: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Published in Project archive