Supporting Shared Sense of History Within a Rural Village Community

Abstract

In this chapter we present our longitudinal study of a community photo display system known as the Wray Photo Display (Taylor and Cheverst, 2009, 2012) and how members of the community used this display to interact with their past (and each other). Our development of the Wray Photo Display commenced in 2006 as part of a research project which set out to investigate how situated displays could support rural communities, and in particular how such displays could support notions of community. Our analysis of the user generated content (in the form of images and associated comments) submitted to the system reveals a significant proportion related to cultural heritage. The current focus of our work with the Wray community is to provide residents with more sophisticated tools (including mobile tools) to support the shared collection and curation of narratives relating to local history.