The ‘legacy’ of ‘Het Geheugen van Oost’ makes that Buurtwinkels is strongly represented in Amsterdam-Oost, where I live myself. It is of course extra fun to read about the shops in your own neighbourhood. For example, I found stories about our baker, the health food supermarket, the plumber and all kinds of other shops that I regularly visit.
Just as fascinating are the stories about shops that have disappeared, such as milkman Prins on the Ringdijk or Fotozaak Olsthoorn on the Transvaalkade. And some shops appear to have an eventful shopping past. Take Pretoriusstraat 37 for example. There is now a dentist’s practice there, but the building previously housed the Comestibles shop of Mr. Del Rio, the textile shop of Juffrouw van Dam and Borduur Boutique Bernardina.
Is there also a ‘big story’?
One of the pitfalls of crowdsourcing is that the final result is rather anecdotal. Looking at a crowdsourced project can sometimes be reminiscent of reading a magazine. Entertaining but without a ‘big story’ to give it substance. And that is unsatisfactory, because the often very personal stories make you curious about the bigger picture. After all, the impressions are not isolated, they illustrate developments in the economic, cultural, technologica senegal phone number listl or demographic field. Is it true that local shops seemed to disappear, but are now back? Is it true that there are more and more Turkish shops? These kinds of questions arise.
At first glance, Buurtwinkels does indeed make an anecdotal impression. That impression is partly created by the layout of the website. The interaction concept of the site, created by Mediamatic , is based on associative browsing. That works well when you are in an associative flow. The content is good and its presentation invites you to read and click further. It is a bit more difficult to get an overview, but if you search a bit, you will also find the big picture. For example, the site contains a short history of the Amsterdam neighborhood store. The site also contains a number of research reports. Various sociology students from the UvA have conducted research into specific stores. That research was not desk research:
For Van Eekeren,bringing
A together the small stories and the big story was the biggest challenge in developing this project. A good balance between bottom-up and top-down was not easy to achieve. But in the end it worked out and that makes this project a successful example of museum crowdsourcing.
Buurtwinkels is not an isolated project. Similar projects are being carried out in other countries and several museums american samoa business directory have joined forces in a European network . In the Netherlands, the project also works together with other online collections . Stories from our own which together swisscom blue binge: pay 240.- per year for netflix form a kind of national ‘semantic network of historical and heritage sites’, an initiative of the NHM.