Verena Widorn’s short-term project "Von der individuellen Feldforschung zur nachhaltigen Lehre durch Interaktion und Communityerfahrung" is kindly funded through the Fellow Program Freies Wissen by Wikiversity, which is part of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The project will take place during academic year 2019/20 and aims not only to make the research and image data shown in a dedicated lecture on art and culture at the University of Vienna accessible to a wide audience, but also to enrich and inter-link it in such a way that students of different disciplines are stimulated to follow their own research interests while studying the course material. A qualitative selection of images, prepared with appropriate metadata, will be provided via a publicly available digital platform under an open creative commons license (CC BY 4.0) and enriched with information on the images and links to available materials from similarly openly licensed e-resources.

Moreover, a discussion forum and a commentary section should enable the students to participate directly in the scientific discourse, as well as to connect images and objects with one another in order to record complex topics voluntarily, playfully and, above all, more sustainably via interactive processes. Critical observations should be made, thoughts shared in the discussion forum and further links or material added. The voluntary basis should create an open environment in which individual interests of the participating students can be easily followed.

It is hoped that this type of community experience will inspire fellow students to study selected materials and generate curiosity for community driven information and study.

Project Leader

Verena Widorn