- PROJECT DOCUMENTATION -

Introduction - Why a museum dedicated to memory?

"It’s like there is a deep gap between the institutional memory, the public narrative of that past, the history taught at school and, indeed, the intimate and private memories - those that emerge with more force when trying to do local history right, including a case study into the broader horizons of global history, dialoguing with it. "

So writes Roberto Bianchi in his blog "Amici di Passato e Presente", in an article dated 31 March 2020 and entitled "The Spanish Flu: Notes on the pandemic of the twentieth century”.

If the Spanish Flu was the disease of the century, the emergency caused by COVID-19, which invested the entire world with incalculable and unpredictable force in 2020, seems to us as the event of the millennium.
We hear repeatedly- and everyone is sure about it - that these last months will 'go down in history'.

Then, as scholars, our critical task becomes to ask ourselves 'How?'.
How will this moment, that we obviously perceive to be significant, be remembered in the future? Will we be able to convey everything we feel now? What will be forgotten?
Bianchi highlights a phenomenon that has always been inherent in human history, and of extraordinary interest for our research: the complex and contradictory relationship existing between history and memory.

History is objective, general, transmitted by influential sources, concerned with big events and major occurrences. Its goal is to transmit the universal tale of the world of the past to future generations. Memory, on the other hand, is individual, sometimes intimate, personal and therefore prone to the risk of deformation, interferences and shortcomings. It is the minimal story of a life, narrated from father to son.

Museums and heritage organisations have always been seen as the main custodians of our past. Their traditional role is commonly perceived to be the preservation of history, the constitution of a formal and “institutional” place to meet, learn and study our past and our historical identity.

But museums are a living thing, and have been knowing an evolution in the last few years. People have become more and more interested not only in the macro-history, but also in the knowledge of the stories of common people, attracted by the possibility to instaurate a personal and emotional bound with them. Furthermore, an higher historical consciousness has made themselves sensible to the possibility to tell their own story. Thus, museums (and in particular, as we will see, virtual museums) can also host the other kind of history: the individual, private, micro-history that is part of the universal one like a mosaic tile.

In the “dispute” between macro-history and individual micro-memories we have chosen to privilege the latter, by telling the collective experience of the COVID-19 emergency, without concealing its intimate dimension nor forgetting its limits: its individualistic nature and its inevitable belonging to a larger whole. It’s often said that history is made by those who live it. Let's also tell it this way.

Ideation and Concepts

The idea of a museum dedicated to the COVID-19 emergency period came to us from the natural exchanging of experiences during the pandemic. We noticed that people have produced memories of their lives during this particularly difficult historical moment and feel now the need to communicate their personal experiences.

The COVID-19 emergency wasn’t only - although the hospital crysis was tragic and devastating - a physical emergency, but also a psychological one. All the people in the world were requested to social distance themselves, to avoid contacts and to remain home. Due to the quarantine, the space where things could be exchange became the web: the online environment has been the only way to meet other people and to make people feel - closed in their own home - part of something. It was the only way in which people could stay together.

Because of this, the idea of a virtual museum able to collect all these witnesses, eager to be shared, came to us naturally. We decided to build a unique virtual place for all the uncommon stories of common people, in the form of a museum whose traditional role is to preserve, interpret and communicate the history of a whole population that has found itself to share an unpredictable moment in history.

Feasibility study

Content

Multimedia score

The user enters the museum and finds themselves inside the "reception" of the museum, the Homepage. The user enters and is encouraged to read the short paragraphs at the top of the page that trace a simple description of the project. Also, a simple thread with steps shows how the museum actually works. The following is a basic example of how an user could navigate inside the rooms:

• After the user has entered, he can choose one of the 6 rooms of the museum. Each room is structured with a grid view of various memories.
• The user can choose one of them, and is redirected to the individual memory.
• The user can choose to visualize the next story or to select another story from similar ones inside the room or in other rommes or go back to the home.
• Shared experiences and thoughts are seen by the user, who experiences a sense of solidarity, empathy, and (hopefully) feels less alone in their personal experience.

Hopefully, after the user has visited the museum, they decide to turn themselves into a contributor. In this case:

• The user gives a textual or multimedial shape to its own memory, this way elaborating it in a structured way.
• The user submits their material (multimedia, text and so on) to the IMOW managers, that evaluate and eventually accept the contribute.
• The user waits and receives an email as soon as the contribute has been uploaded.

Otherwise:

• After their "stay", the user can give feedback about the museum.

Where do we stand as a museum?

Following the proposed taxonomy of S. Caraceni (2015) this museum may be considered a Virtual Museum of "F" category.

IMOW is an open platform in which visitors both explore and contribute to the content. It is an open space, only organized throughvirtual "rooms". All the material is born virtual, in the meaning that it has no physical counterpart. It has no related physical gallery nor exhibition.
IMOW is a virtual gallery that doesn’t necessarily stand in the common perception of museum. It is not an experimental museum, since the gallery, the rooms and the contribution system are familiar enough to both the public and the scholars. IMOW has an hybrid identity between a museum and a public diary. Interaction, at least for the initial phase after basic development, is limited to contribution and approachability of the IMOW team. It has no strictly guided itinerary apart from the "related content" system. IMOW is freely browsable by any user without subscription to the museum.

Design and developement schema

Ethics and Rules

These ethical guidelines are in their entirety respected by this museum management team. These ethical guidelines are based on the ICOM Ethical Guidelines, the UNESCO Ethical Principles for Intangible Cultural Heritage and the EU General Data Protection Regulation.
The parts referred and regarded by the IMOW Deontology are:

1. the IMOW Virtual Museum;
2. IMOW Team: namely Ciambriello Virginia, Silva Elisa, Schimmenti Andrea;
3. IMOW contributors;
4. IMOW contributions;
5. IMOW visitors;

IMOW roles:

1. Preserves the memories of the contributors in a safe, inclusive space (preservation through durable m etadata formats);
2. Interprets the memories through a precise conceptual and virtual framework and by looking at them in a larger web of connections;
3. Promotes itself as a valuable heritage keeper for human memories.

IMOW Duty Ethics:

1. Given that IMOW couldn’t exist without its contributions, it will be enjoyable by visitors absolutely free of charge for the whole duration of its existence.
2. No contribution (any intangible cultural artifact) inside IMOW will ever be marketed or used for profiting reasons, individually or collectively.
3. No contribution will be held inside IMOW for other purposes than the benefit of society.
4. No contribution inside IMOW is intended to cause physical or psychological harm to individuals (including contributors and visitors). Each submitted contribution is previously checked and, if respectful of both the contributor and the visitors, published. Any sensible content will be underlined with a specific trigger warning related to the contribution content.
5. Every contributor has the right to retreat its contribution and have it completely removed (both from IMOW and from the metadata database managed by the IMOW team).
6. IMOW exercises control to avoid disclosing sensitive personal or related information and other confidential matters when contributions are made available to the public.
7. No intangible cultural artifact will be held inside IMOW without a precise and trusted provenance. IMOW will not trust contributions of dubious origin and detains the right of rejecting such contributions. If a visitor, contributor or user suspects or has proof that any of the displayed material should not be displayed because of lack of personal permission, copyright issues, unauthorized share of information or any other reasonable motivation, they must contact the IMOW Team in order to solve the issue. IMOW will also independently check, in case of suspicion, the provenance of already displayed material and ask the original contributor for additional proof.
8. IMOW will have professional and diligent care of displaying the contributions in a respectable way, especially in those cases where the contributions possess sensitive meanings. In the aforementioned cases, IMOW has the right to implement content changes, subject to the contributor’s approval in full compliance with its creative rights. Any change made by the IMOW team does not change the authorship of the contribution in any way.
9. IMOW has professional and diligent care of displaying well-founded, accurate and appropriate information. IMOW avoids displaying or otherwise using informations of questionable origin or lacking provenance, e. g. when providing information, if needed, about the Covid-19 pandemic.
10. IMOW operates in any part of their management in a professional manner, with respect to laws and ethics about the administration of intangible artifacts.

GDPR declaration

Further Development and Maintenance Issues

We feel that IMOW is only at it beginning. As a newly born project, it has only a well-defined structure, which is waiting to be populated by the contents of all those users who decide to share their memories inside the museum.
A first objective that we set ourselves is therefore to enrich the museum with as many contents as possible, to give the visitor a truly complete and varied vision of this historical moment - possible only if we were able to reach people who have lived different experiences. Therefore it will be necessary from now on to publicize the project and make sure that as many users as possible are encouraged to participate.

Further developments for the virtual museum revolve mostly around maintenance, devolopment of higher-level interaction, management of the submitted data.
We look forward implementing a registration systems for users and a tool for automatically insert new memories/items inside the rooms, with just a supervisor verification before making them public.
Further possibilities include, depending on the user interaction, a comment/feedback from the users section (just like in physical museums), counters of how many people visited the site, a research system and social media integration for shareability.

Bibliography