Workshop on the Embodiment of Things (EoT 2021)

The goal of this workshop is to bring researchers and practitioners from national and international cultural heritage (CH) organisations together with those from across HCI and related fields. We aim to establish how an alertness to tertiary embodiment (mind-body-artefact) can provide the ground for bringing artefacts to life, catalyse collective knowledge production, facilitate collaboration, and encourage the creative integration of computational and archival thinking. Key examples of engaging with this theory in practice can be seen in the projects of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Towards a National Collection research programme. In this workshop we will explore how embodiment can be and has been applied to digital objects and practice in CH collections. We will do this via three interwoven critical interventions: digital objects (digital collections, interfaces, tangible computing), situated interaction (how context shapes meaning) and virtual connections (collaboration and communication in digital rather than physical space (Computer-supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), crowd-sourcing and citizen research, knowledge-sharing).