Designing a Collaborative Storytelling Platform to Enrich Digital Cultural Heritage Archives and Collective Memory

Polariscope is an R&D project resulting from a consortium between the academia and a municipal historical archive. The project is focused on developing a participatory digital experience of cultural archives and events from multiple perspectives using collaborative storytelling to share, visualize and co-create collective memories. Designed as an online community that gathers contributions from citizens and institutions, the platform intends to promote rich digital experiences through interactive and narrative visualizations around meaningful cultural events and heritage data, presenting multimedia visualizations built from archives and testimonies shared by people. The methodological approach of the project adopts a User-Centered Design (UCD) iterative process comprising four phases: 1) Literature review and related work; 2) User research and functional requirements specification; 3) Laboratory evaluation of a medium-fidelity prototype with users; 4) Pilot case studies in field trials related to cultural events. This paper is focused on presenting phases 1 and 2, which are dedicated to the definition and ideation of the digital experience proposed by the platform, validated by an empirical study using focus groups with experts. In overall, the results allowed the validation of the functional requirements, and the identification of the expected features and interaction patterns related to the processes of content contribution, validation, discovery, and curation to include in the next iteration of the prototype to be tested with users.