Artfacts - A Platform for Making Sense of and Telling Stories with Cultural Objects

This paper presents the conceptualization, implementation, and evaluation of a Fast-speed IT Platform called Artfacts, which was designed within the context of the Two-speed IT Infrastructure, where a foundational, stable, and slow infrastructure is complemented by a creative, experimental, and agile additional infrastructure capable of promptly responding to the needs of communities. The platform is an attempt to digitally incorporate strategies for making sense and reusing digital collections and mitigate problems concerning specialized knowledge required for profiting from the affordances of data repositories as a creative material. In this sense, through the cartography of information, the platform aims at widening the participation of individuals with no technical background in the development and maintenance process of interpretive applications, no matter whether within cultural institutions or events such as hackathons for cultural heritage. Artfacts intermediates the reinterpretation of cultural datasets and the fabrication of interpretive applications by means of a flexible, general, and interoperable data model that is able to adapt to the demands of storytellers, and an open-ended Object-Oriented UI that enables analysis and experimentation by arranging and rearranging data elements into digital narratives.