A Participatory Approach for Digital Documentation of Egyptian Bedouins' Intangible Cultural Heritage

Abstract

The Bedouins of Egypt hold a unique intangible cultural heritage (ICH), with distinct cultural values and social practices that are rapidly changing as a consequence of having settled after having been nomadic for centuries. We present our attempt to develop a bottom-up approach to document Bedouin ICH. Grounded in participatory design practices, the project purpose was two-fold: engaging Egyptian Engineering undergraduates with culturally-distant technology users and introducing digital self-documentation of ICH to the Bedouin community. We report the design of a didactic model that deployed the students as research partners to co-design four prototypes of ICH documentation mobile applications with the community. The prototypes reflected an advanced understanding for the values to the Bedouins brought by digital documentation practices. Drawing from our experience, three recommendations were elicited for similar ICH projects. Namely, focusing on the community benefits; promoting motivation ownership, and authenticity; and pursuing a shared identity between designers and community members. These guidelines hold a strong value as they have been tested against local challenges that could have been detrimental to the project.

Research on Innovative Design of Digital Culture under the Integration of Culture and Technology: Knowledge Graph Analysis Based on Citespace

“…There are still certain technical challenges in conducting citizen digitization projects in cities, and the technological gap in conducting bottom-up digitization projects in remote areas is even more evident. Giglitto and others carried out the digital recording of intangible cultural heritage [10] for the Bedouin people, a nomad in Egypt. In the participatory design practice, they recruited local students to participate deeply, and narrowed the cultural distance between designers and community members.…”