Between Promise and Practice: Web 2.0, Intercultural Dialogue and Digital Scholarship

The Internet has been a popular method for communication and collaboration across far-flung sites for some time, and its potential for enhancing participatory democracy has been much commented on. With the emergence of so-called Web 2.0 (O'Reilly, 2005), the interactive and collaborative capabilities of the Internet have greatly increased, with still uncertain social, political and intellectual effects. This paper emerges out of an interest in exploring the possible implications of Web 2.0 for the practice of humanities research. Scholars in the humanities have traditionally been dependent on the written word - on the production of intellectually dense discourse - and, in this producerly mode, they tend to be individualist, sole researchers. How can they respond to the challenges posed by Web 2.0 and its seemingly irresistible promotion of a participatory, expressive, and highly visual mode of cultural production? This article provides a critical (self-)analysis of diverCities: A Global Collaboration Space for Intercultural Dialogue, a digital humanities experiment. Sponsored by UNESCO, the project involved the conceptualisation and development of a customised Web 2.0 site to promote intercultural dialogue within and across major cities around the world. The project was a collaborative effort of an interdisciplinary team of cultural researchers from the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney, the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore, together with e-research specialists from the Archaeological Computing Laboratory (ACL) at the University of Sydney, who applied Heurist, an Open Source Collaborative Knowledge Space (CKS) for humanities scholars, to create diverCities, a prototype website that was used as a practical tool for the exploration and trialling of new, web-mediated practices of intercultural dialogue