11 September 2024, Crawford Art Gallery Cork.
10.30am – 3.00pm
Prioritising Preservation and Access: Navigating Bias, Constraints, and the Future of Cultural Heritage Digitisation
Join us for an enlightening seminar where we delve into the ethical dimensions of digitisation within cultural heritage and the critical decisions and challenges that shape the preservation and digitisation of cultural heritage.
As institutions face increasing pressure to make collections accessible, questions arise about how we decide what gets catalogued, digitised, and preserved—and the underlying biases and constraints that influence these decisions.
This event will bring together leading experts to explore these themes from various angles, offering fresh perspectives on the impact of these choices on future access and use. Topics covered include the current state of digital scholarship, the unique challenges of born-digital and of AI, the intricacies of cataloguing and metadata, practical insights into large-scale digitisation projects, the evolving role of archives and the principles of ethical digitisation practices.
The seminar aims to foster a comprehensive dialogue on the ethical considerations and practical challenges of digitising cultural heritage, ensuring that digital access supports both scholarship and public engagement in meaningful ways.
Speakers:
- Professor James Baker is Director of Digital Humanities at the University of Southampton. His research sits at the intersection of history, cultural heritage, and digital technologies. He has worked on a range of collaborative projects the focuses of which have included women's work in history, heritage, and archaeology circa 1870 – 1950, legacy descriptions of art objects, the preservation of intangible cultural heritage, the born digital archival record, and decolonial futures for museum collections. His current research looks at histories of knowledge organisation and cataloguing cultures, and an article on museum computing and documentary labour in late twentieth century Britain will be published in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society later this year.
- Dr. Orla Murphy is head of the Department of Digital Humanities, School of English and Digital Humanities, University College Cork, Ireland. Nationally, she is a member of the board at the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI), Co-Chair of the Arts and Culture in Education Research Repository (ACERR), an initiative of Creative Ireland, the Department of Education & Skills, and the Government of Ireland, and National Coordinator of DARIAH-IE, which is driving the development of a digital research infrastructure for the arts and humanities in Ireland. Dr Murphy also represents Irish scholarship and education internationally as an Irish representative on the Social and Cultural Innovation Special Working Group at the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), tasked with developing the scientific integration of Europe and to strengthen its international outreach, as well as the Scientific Committee of COST-EU, a funding organisation for research and innovation networks.
- Professor Claire Warwick is Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English at Durham University. Her research is concerned with the way that digital resources, including artificial intelligence techniques, are used in the humanities and cultural heritage and in reading behaviour in physical and digital spaces. She has recently completed a monograph: Digital Humanities and the Cyberspace Decade: A World Elsewhere. She has led and co-investigated several digital humanities research projects, including the AEOLIAN network, which considered the potential for the application of AI to archives and cultural heritage.
- Jessica Baldwin is Senior Conservator at the National Archives Ireland. Jessica has over 30 years’ experience of caring for collections in Ireland. She trained as a paper conservator in London before moving to Ireland to work at Trinity College Library. In 2003 she moved to the Chester Beatty to establish the museum’s conservation department before taking on the role of Head of Collections and Conservation. She joined the National Archives as Senior Conservator in 2022.
- Dr. Richard A Carter is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture at the University of York. Carter’s academic work addresses a broad variety of questions concerning how digital systems shape how we sense and make sense of the world, defining different possibilities of action and expression. Carter focuses especially on the relationships between digital systems and the environment, examining the role of digital art in telling different stories about these relationships. Critically informed speculation, experimentation, indeterminacy, and possibility are a cornerstone of Carter’s research practice, which engages a wide range of technologies, formats, and modes - including AI, drones and satellites, generative algorithms, experimental writing, and data visualisation.
Panel Discussion
The seminar will culminate in a dynamic panel discussion featuring all the speakers, offering an opportunity for in-depth dialogue and audience engagement on the day’s themes.
Who Should Attend?
- Archivists, librarians, and curators
- Digital humanities and cultural heritage professionals
- Scholars and researchers in the humanities and social sciences
- Anyone interested in the future of digitisation, preservation, and access to cultural heritage
Date and Location:
11 September 2024, Crawford Art Gallery Cork.
10.30am – 3.00pm
Capacity – 70 people.
Registration:
Secure your spot today by registering on Eventbrite here. Don’t miss this chance to engage with thought leaders and explore the future of cultural heritage digitisation!
