Digital Engagement, Challenging Histories - Dr James Stark; University Academic Fellow in Medical Humanities/AHRC Leadership Fellow, University of Leeds
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•391 views
Mae datblygiadau diweddar ym maes offer ymgysylltu digidol wedi creu amgylchedd grymus ar gyfer ail-ddehongli treftadaeth. O ymchwil hanesyddol mynediad agored i gasgliadau wedi’u digido amgueddfeydd ac archifdai, erbyn hyn mae gan ymchwilwyr, grwpiau cymunedol a sefydliadau treftadaeth doreth o adnoddau gwreiddiol, a oedd yn anodd eu cyrraedd gynt, y gallant eu cyrchu drwy wefannau, catalogau a safleoedd trydydd parti. Un newydd-ddyfodiad i’r farchnad brysur hon yw Yarn, llwyfan adrodd storïau digidol sy’n dwyn ynghyd gasgliadau amgueddfeydd ac archifdai ac archifau a deunyddiau hanesyddol y defnyddwyr eu hunain. Recent developments in digital engagement tools have created a dynamic environment for the reinterpretation of heritage. From open access historical research to digitised museum and archive collections, researchers, community groups and heritage organisations are now blessed with an abundance of previously hard-to-reach primary resources, accessible through websites, catalogues and third party sites. One relative newcomer in this busy marketplace is Yarn, a digital storytelling platform designed to bring the collections of museums and archives together with users’ own archives and historic materials.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Digital Engagement, Challenging Histories - Dr James Stark; University Academic Fellow in Medical Humanities/AHRC Leadership Fellow, University of Leeds
Similar to Digital Engagement, Challenging Histories - Dr James Stark; University Academic Fellow in Medical Humanities/AHRC Leadership Fellow, University of Leeds (20)
More from RCAHMW
More from RCAHMW (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Digital Engagement, Challenging Histories - Dr James Stark; University Academic Fellow in Medical Humanities/AHRC Leadership Fellow, University of Leeds
- 1. Digital Engagement, Challenging Histories Theory and Practice James Stark @KingTekkers j.f.stark@leeds.ac.uk
- 2. The (non-digital) Challenges • Audience engagement • Co-curation/creation • Institutional and personal perspectives • Responsiveness • Create new relationships with the past • … (broadly) generational differences; rapid technological change; expertise and training
- 3. Digital Heritage and Cultural Value • Collaboration with UK and international partner organisations Science Museum, National Holocaust Centre, Boots, National Trust, Thackray Medical Museum, Nordiska Museet (Stockholm), National Centre for Contemporary Art (Moscow), DDR Museum, South African Holocaust and Genocide Foundation • Sector survey • Literature review – Academic and grey
- 4. A key number… <20% of survey respondents said that the use of digital tools in galleries, at sites or online always enhanced visitor experience … but almost 80% said it was true sometimes
- 5. Expensive Furniture • Economic value – ‘It must be done well’ – Does digital engagement offer value for money? – Digital tools need to be supported and implemented
- 6. The Curator’s Toolbox • Relative value – Different role for the curator? – Or an extension/enhancement of existing practices? • What does the digital do? – Provides additional/more in-depth information – Opens up collections to visitors – Encourages input/dialogue – Enables a new relationship with heritage
- 7. The Medium vs. The Message • The precise location of value – ‘Entrancement’ – Does the digital distract/detract from the message? – Value in the digital technology itself, the encounter or digital representations
- 8. Past, Present and Future • Cultural value and time – ‘Fetishing the future’ – Does current technology obscure access to the past? – How far should the digital be integrated with the physical? – Digital as ‘secondary’?
- 9. Participation and Feedback • Value through participation – Potential for new kinds of visitor engagement – But how effective is the ‘feedback’ loop from visitor to curator? – How should institutions use visitor knowledge and experiences? – Shared ownership of the past
- 10. Place: Personal and Public • Spatial cultural value – Freeing ideas and objects from place removes authority – Do digital encounters enable more personal versions of the past? – Audiences as individuals not groups
- 11. Remote engagement – Curating content – Personal and institutional ‘collections’ – Responsive, open, accessible, free, democratic • Mental health • Childbirth • Holocaust Challenging Histories
- 12. But… – Really a closing of the ‘feedback loop’? – Critical mass – Great for narrative, not for material culture? – What kind of ‘heritage’ is being produced and consumed? Challenging Histories
- 13. Digital can enhance the cultural value of engagement with heritage – Immense potential, but not a magic bullet – Context-sympathetic projects work most effectively – Affiliation does not have to mean endorsement
Editor's Notes
- Should we be thinking about a wholesale reimagining of “curation”, or a set of analogous practices which sit alongside digital interpretation? Long-standing role of stewardship of and reverence for objects and material heritage; digital necessitates a different approach. Greater awareness of the scale of collections – expand public understanding of museums and heritage: about care, preservation and use of collections, not just display.
- Difficulty of separating the medium – digital – from the message – historical narrative. We might think, for example, that display cases and the built environment of heritage should serve to focus and amplify the historical message – in fact, might those with a passion for material culture of the past be frustrated if audiences were more impressed by the display cases than the objects themselves? We can think about digital engagement in precisely the same way. For younger audiences in particular – so-called “digital natives” – digital tools are hardly seen as fundamentally different. They are fully integrated into their ways of experiencing the world. However, this is not reflected across generations. In some ways, the pace of technological change in an everyday sense is amplifying the diversity of audiences in ways impossible to previously imagine. How can we integrate digital offerings without obscuring the heritage experience for non-digital-users?
- What kind of “past” does the digital help to create? National Holocaust Centre is working on 3D avatars of holocaust survivors who respond to audience questions. But how is the experience of hearing such testimony in digital form create a very difference sensation in terms of the temporal relationship between audience and historical events? This might have the ability to generate enhanced relevance of such testimony, or it might make the human experience of atrocities of the past seem somehow more distant.
- Digital engagement generates huge amounts of data, creating new challenges in terms of processing, understanding, interpreting and reflecting back these views. For small organisations without significant resources this presents an intimidating opportunity. Ownership is about identification with and contribution to historical narratives – participation is essential, but is still largely a process which is “managed” or configured by heritage organisations. Is that really “shared” ownership?
- Removing objects from their historical context already presents challenges in terms of situating them in patterns of use and human/natural activity. What about when we remove them from space altogether? In some ways this makes them even further devoid of expertise and authority – they become images onto which audiences can project; ideas with which they can engage. The freedom to reimage – or even edit, amend and update artefacts – can create powerful new modes of engagement.
- In some ways, similar to a range of other digital projects, but with a particular emphasis on the construction, curation and presentation of narratives drawn from personal and institutional collections. This is about creating a parallel historic digital archive of personal materials and enabling users to curate for themselves. Projects around the heritage of pottery in Stoke, historical geography in Bute, and the challenging histories of disability (with the Science Museum), childbirth (Thackray Medical Museum) and the holocaust (National Holocaust Centre).