Using Recommendations to Affect Social Change in Cultural Heritage: Should We and How?

This paper suggests a different look at recommender systems - instead of the classical approach - recommending what the user may be interested in (including also diversity and serendipity aspects), taking a societal point of view. We suggest examining the use of recommender systems for social recommendations (defined here) to enact social change. We suggest the use of this technology for encouraging visitors to cultural heritage sites to explore diversity of opinions and perspectives related to artifacts and events and to reflect - implementing an interpretation-reflection loop. Visitors are encouraged not only to explore diversity of content but to contribute their own perspective, so others can explore it in the future. We look at this from three perspectives: goals, methods and evaluation.