Food cultures: co-creation and evaluation of a thesaurus as a cultural infrastructure 

 

Thomas Palfinger, Jose Luis Preza Diaz, Yalemisew Abgaz, Alexander Schatek, Rainer Zoubek,   

Amelie Dorn, Eveline Wandl-Vogt 

Close collaboration with societal actors is a central part of the Digital Humanities project exploreAT! 

(exploring austria's culture through the language glass). Digital tools have increasingly enabled the 

process of interconnecting and opening up various resources across different media. To make use of 

this potential, exploreAT! cooperates with the Topothek, a citizen driven digital infrastructure which 

collects local historical multimedia items from private sources. It is of interest to connect this collection 

to exploreAT! as it contains a variety of cultural and local historical information, which can only be 

accessed with the help of citizens and their knowledge.  

To initiate such collaboration, both scientists and citizens need to learn how to interact with each other 

in order to constitute common goals. In this paper, we focus on the workflow and process established. 

We introduce the community group "Topothek", a citizen driven archival platform to archive, 

annotate, geo-reference and present regional culture. 

We present our first co-created result, a food cultures thesaurus, interlinking food terms with cultural 

practices and tools. The added value for Topothek is increased discoverability, while for exploreAT! it 

is the scientific exploitation for cultural lexicography of the multimedia archive. The processes along 

the mutual learning scenarios are evaluated.  

The co-created thesaurus is co-funded by the DARIAH-theme 2017 "public humanities" in collaboration 

with ADAPT centre Dublin (Ireland).