[This post is based on Bella Abelardo‘s Master Information Science thesis, “Designing a User Interface for Provenance Reporting of Objects with Colonial Heritage”]

Bella’s thesis addresses a critical challenge in cultural institutions: representing multiple perspectives for colonial heritage items. Current systems often create a “singular truth” in provenance reports, and unstructured data hinders discoverability.

Bella’s goal was to create a user interface to help provenance researchers holistically document the “polyvocal knowledge” often present in colonial heritage objects. Her research intended to explore improvements to the popular TMS content management system. To this end, she conducted interviews with various domain experts to gather design requirements and built a prototype, CultureSource.

The evaluation showed CultureSource’s potential to help researchers document multiple perspectives. Bella’s research provides key requirements—standardization, multiple perspectives, usability, and data management—for future user interfaces aimed at documenting complex, multi-layered histories.