Cultural data and cultural rights
Citizen cultural data is tomorrow’s heritage. Their recognition and preservation constitute a major democratic challenge for building a constructive collective memory for future democracies.
The technical foundations of an interoperable digital heritage
The Ministry of Culture and the network of French museums have been constructively invested for several years in building technical and methodological models aimed at creating interoperable cultural databases. As Aurélien Conraux and Eudes Peyre emphasize in their contribution to Culture & Recherche (n°148, 2025), this dynamic is part of a broader history of public data opening, where France has held the top European ranking since 2021 according to the Open Data Maturity Report.
This ambition is notably realized through the adoption of the LIDO standard (Lightweight Information Describing Objects) and its French variant LIDO-MC, presented at the Aggregation Crossroads on June 2, 2025. This application profile, specifically adapted to the needs of the Ministry of Culture, aims to “improve the discoverability of French-language cultural content on the Web” while ensuring compatibility with national databases such as POP and Joconde, as well as with the European Europeana ecosystem.
This approach will pave the way for creating innovative online cultural services and guarantee a structured and sustainable presence of French cultural heritage in the digital ecosystem. However, current efforts remain essentially technical and focused on conservation issues. While this foundation is essential, work will need to be done progressively on citizen appropriation of this cultural data, allowing everyone to take ownership of it, create from it, and share it.
In the disintermediated digital universe, citizens are no longer passive receivers but become full-fledged actors in the circulation and editorialization of heritage data. However, and this is precisely the purpose of this article to concretely emphasize, these approaches still suffer from a crucial gap: the absence of structured work on the collection and indexing of cultural data produced by citizens themselves, with full respect for their cultural rights concerning their contribution to the common heritage.
Rethinking the hierarchy of cultural productions
Consider the example of a modern library that, beyond its traditional mission of book conservation, offers language workshops, performances, creative and do-it-yourself workshops, video training, and many other activities. Do we preserve the trace of the creative processes of these workshops and the works that result from them? Do we archive them? Do we showcase them? Yet these productions constitute cultural data just as legitimate as those from official and traditional heritage.
The LIDO-MC standard, with its ability to describe “tangible and intangible cultural goods”³ and its support for FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), precisely offers the technical framework to integrate these citizen productions. But the technical tool is not enough without the political and institutional will to recognize these creations.
Some might object that these citizen creations do not equal in value the great works of humanity. But on what criteria should we base such a hierarchy? Establishing such distinctions amounts to denying the fundamental cultural rights of participants. Why would their creations be intrinsically less precious than official and historical productions?
Today’s museums offer us an enlightening lesson: they certainly exhibit major works of official art representing the cultures they embody, but they also present popular crafts, amateur creations, children’s drawings, and so many other testimonies that, although not legitimized in their time, today reveal major cultural interest for understanding these civilizations. Moreover, more and more film archives collect amateur films, which constitute unique and essential territorial memories, increasingly reused.
Culture, in its anthropological dimension, transcends works of art alone. It encompasses all the elements that allow us to feel, understand, appreciate, project ourselves and identify. It is what weaves the links between official art and popular artisanal productions. The GraphEthno project perfectly illustrates this inclusive approach by developing iterative methods for enriching heritage data.
Museums have understood this for the past: they do not hierarchize these different cultural expressions. This intelligent articulation, without falling into relativism, recognizes that each creation has its own place, born from a specific context and responding to particular intentions. This global understanding authentically connects us to the culture of a given era and context.
The benefits of democratic cultural documentation
Cultural rights teach us an essential lesson: to be fair, complete and respectful of fundamental human rights in cultural matters, we must recognize and value the singularity of cultural productions of all citizens, including those who are not cultural professionals. This recognition of the creative context has a considerable advantage: it allows building the living narrative of what unfolds in our cultural institutions. Let’s return to the example of our library.
This narrative documentation benefits everyone. It helps participants value their memories and legitimize their creative engagement, thus strengthening their personal esteem and anchoring their experiences in collective memory. It reveals to newcomers as well as regulars all the richness of the activities offered, transforming the perception of a simple conservation place into that of a thriving living space. These narratives, available as open data, can feed websites, interactive devices, exhibitions - the possibilities are endless.
This is the power of well-structured, indexed and interoperable data: its ability to be expressed in a thousand different forms. The coordinated action of national aggregators is now at the heart of institutional concerns. Beyond the immediate democratic benefits for participants and their territory, these documented narratives make it possible to evaluate and justify public investment in these cultural activities, thus securing their future funding.
A political and democratic challenge for the future
Elected officials, regardless of their political orientation, need to concretely understand the democratic impact of each public expenditure. Without this understanding, we risk seeing cultural funding undergo drastic cuts in the years to come, a prospect that would be disastrous for our society.
In summary, respecting cultural rights in terms of collection, indexing, conservation, interoperability and valorization of citizen cultural data, and not just professional data, will have major repercussions on the sustainability of cultural funding. This approach will strengthen democracy, of which culture constitutes one of the fundamental pillars. It will also make it possible to inscribe the cultural narratives of our territories and our nations in an authentic, substantial and profoundly democratic way for future generations.
History teaches us: the narratives of the past are mainly those of the powerful. To build the democracies of tomorrow, we need the narratives of all citizens. Digital technology and democratic cultural data represent a cornerstone in building future democracies. As Conraux and Peyre project, “the integration of citizens in the management and exploitation of cultural data opens [...] the way to increased participation and a more inclusive and interactive ecosystem”. The technical tools exist, the standards are defined, the institutions are mobilizing - now it remains to ensure that this infrastructure truly serves to document and value all the cultural expressions of our society.
The “cultural rights”, which derive from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are a concept developed and defended by researchers, sociologists, philosophers, political leaders and actors of the cultural world. Present in a certain number of articles of law since 2001, the cultural rights aim at highlighting and formalizing, in order to be able to make them operative, the principles of a “cultural democracy”. To summarize it quickly, it is a question of each person being able to give value to his or her personal culture, in order to be able to exercise his or her citizenship: to express himself or herself, to defend his or her point of view, to create, to develop his or her practices, to have access to a cultural diversity, etc. Cultural rights operate in a much wider field than that of the strict cultural sector.
The notion of “cultural rights” is present in France in the laws NOTRe (2015) and LCAP (2016). It is carried by a delegation of the Ministry of Culture (General Delegation for transmission, territories, since January 1, 2021).
Paradoxically, cultural rights are difficult to implement in the cultural sector, which is traditionally rather attached to “cultural democratization”: one often defends the idea of the transmission to the public of works of art of the best possible quality, according to a principle of hierarchy of “cultural values”. Thus, the cultural rights can be lived by certain professionals of the culture as a dangerous dynamics for the Art, a tendency towards the amateur practices, which is not the case.
In my point of view, which is that of a practitioner/researcher in the cultural field, cultural rights are above all a practice, an exercise of democracy in the very methods of organization of the work, of the relation to the other and of the place of each one, the choices of programming, the methods of mediation and animation of workshops, the mode of territorial inscription of the cultural policy, etc.
I propose in this section concrete working methods for good practices of implementation of cultural rights, based on my field experiences, as well as a sharing of more theoretical reflections, in the framework of my own research on cultural rights.
I place myself in the filiation of thinkers like John Dewey. But cultural rights cannot be presented without mentioning Patrice Meyer-Bisch, Jean-Michel Lucas, Christelle Blouët, the “Fribourg Declaration”, etc.
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From legitimacy to participate: how cultural rights transform our practices.
Cultural rights are often misunderstood. Their strength lies in their capacity to transform our practices: moving from a top-down programming (…) -
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Creative Freedom and Cultural Rights
A dialectic at the heart of cultural policies.
French cultural policy today finds itself at the crossroads of two fundamental principles, both enshrined in law: creative freedom and cultural (…) -
Cultural Rights in Light of Personal History
At the beginning of my journey as an engaged cultural actor.
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Cooperative Narratives
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The myth of recognition through cultural democratization
Rethinking artistic value beyond systems of domination.
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Cultural Rights and Digital Discoverability
For a cultural policy adapted to digital spaces.
Faced with the failure of many institutional digital cultural strategies, cultural rights and its corollary cultural democracy seem to me to be (…) -
Freedom and Cultural Rights
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Cultural Rights and Digital Technology
Rethinking digital tools in service of cultural democracy.
How can digital technology become a lever for cultural emancipation rather than an instrument of dependence? I propose a digital implementation of (…) -
The specter of the other
From anxious dehumanization to confident recognition.
How can the other, a subject of rights, become a threatening figure? A reflection born from a confrontation with reality, beyond the fantasies and (…) -
Cultural data and cultural rights
For an inclusive heritage democracy in the digital age.
Citizen cultural data is tomorrow’s heritage. Their recognition and preservation constitute a major democratic challenge for building a (…) -
Corporate memory at the service of cultural rights
Rethinking the relationship between cultural venues and people.
Cultural institutions, through their failure to collect and care for data, forget those they welcome, denying their dignity. This amnesia (…) -
Cultural rights and preservation of digital heritage
Bernard Stiegler’s technical philosophy sheds political light.
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How to rebuild democracy in our cultural spaces.
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The impact of location on social roles.
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Organized by UFISC, Opale, Réseau Culture 21, Observatoire des politiques culturelles, Laboratoire des droits culturels and Ligue de l’enseignement (February 6, 2025).
Workshop to find out what stage the partners had reached in their work on the “cultural rights” certification referential project in the context (…) -
Conference: “EAC and cultural rights: convergences to be identified and implemented”
Dans le cadre des Rencontres territoriales “Artistic and cultural education & Territorial cultural projects” (Foix, February 5, 2025).
How can cultural rights be a tool for better implementation of artistic and cultural education projects? And how we can identify convergences (…) -
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Tools for the concrete implementation of cultural rights.
Cultural rights, stemming from the Fribourg Declaration (2007), represent a major advancement for cultural democracy. However, their practical (…) -
“Cultural rights” creative writing seminar
Master Arts du Spectacle, université de Caen Normandie 2021-2022-2023-2024.
A practical seminar on digital writing, with the theme of cultural rights. Students approach writing in the contemporary sense of the term, (…) -
“On the ineffectiveness of our works in real life”.
Commentary on the text by Eva Doumbia & Kader Attia (2023).
In July 2023, visual artist Kader Attia and director Eva Doumba published a text (in Analyse Opinion Critique) in response to the youth “riots” (…) -
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Commentary on the report commissioned by DRAC Bretagne (August 2023).
A study on the subject of digital and artistic creation reveals, through its unquestioned biases, the unconscious desire not to move the lines of (…) -
Digital technology, a tool for mediation and cultural democracy
Webinar on Monday, October 9, 2023 from 10am to 1pm.
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Itinéraire bis, the path of cultural rights
Action research conducted by the MPAA (Paris).
Accompaniment in the animation, production of traces and fabrication of the web platform resources of the research-action “Itinéraire bis, chemin (…) -
Raising awareness of cultural rights - Nantes métropole (September 30, 2022)
Co-design and co-hosting of a one-day event for Nantes’ cultural players.
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Analyze your project using the Fribourg Declaration
Working method
How to set in motion an approach open to cultural rights, that is to say, to put more democracy in the projects and the relationship with the (…) -
John Dewey : an inspirer of cultural rights?
Sharing my interest in an inspiring personality.
The notion of “cultural rights” is increasingly present in the debates within the cultural sector. They are seen by many as being at the heart of (…) -
Professional meeting “Public participation”: presentation by Benoît Labourdette
Interview of Benoît Labourdette by Jean-Yves de Lépinay (11’37s, 2020).
Sharing examples of audiovisual creation workshops conducted in the spirit of cultural rights: moving from “participation” to “interaction.” (…) -
“Cultural participation”: interview with Benoît Labourdette.
Interview with Benoît Labourdette (4’39s, 2020).
Video presentation of Benoît Labourdette’s approach to the democratic dimension of cultural action. -
Research-action “Image Education 2.1”
Collaborative action-research project led by Benoît Labourdette production in 2018 and 2019, to develop the synergy between teenage cinema (…)
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Cultural Rights and Digital Discoverability For a cultural policy adapted to digital spaces.
Faced with the failure of many institutional digital cultural strategies, cultural rights and its corollary cultural democracy seem to me to be (…) -
The Périfééries project’s heritage council of influence Facilitating collective intelligence in a short space of time.
As part of Saint-Denis’s bid to become European Capital of Culture 2028, I led a collective intelligence session to collect proposals on the (…) -
Professional meeting “Public participation”: presentation by Benoît Labourdette Interview of Benoît Labourdette by Jean-Yves de Lépinay (11’37s, 2020).
Sharing examples of audiovisual creation workshops conducted in the spirit of cultural rights: moving from “participation” to “interaction.” (…) -
The marginality of cultural institutions Lucidity of a paradigm shift.
Traditional cultural institutions, once central, have become marginal in the face of digital practices that now dominate citizens’ attention. This (…) -
Cultural Rights and Digital Technology Rethinking digital tools in service of cultural democracy.
How can digital technology become a lever for cultural emancipation rather than an instrument of dependence? I propose a digital implementation of (…)
