Paper Short Abstract:

Some craftsmen leave a digital print of their artefacts, curating their own work to be displayed on their personal social media, multiplying their role from producer to curator. This presentation will investigate some of the strategies used when choosing the artefacts pictures to represent the craftsmen’s work on social media.

Paper Abstract:

Although seen as lacking the necessary digital skills to create a digital print of their artefacts, some craftsmen create social media pages in which they showcase a part of their creations. Oblivious to any formal curating strategies, these craftsmen manage to create some small-scale personal museum to popularise their work.

This paper investigates the digital traces of mask making and masks belonging to two contemporary Romanian craftsmen from the viewpoint of digital heritage creation. The findings stem from content generation analysis and classical ethnographic interviews with the two craftsmen and draws on the affordance theory in order to map how the objects create agency in the sense of changing the roles from craftsman to curator.

Additionally, since the research focuses on two different types of social media pages the craftsmen have – a personal page, with all types of postings and an ‘official’ page of the artefacts – it will additionally try to single out the specificities of representation, since, to a certain extent, the content generation hold striking differences. Finally, it will also look at the differences between personal postings and those made as a result of suggestions (either by tagged content or by external advice).