Traditional/Digital Humanities and cultural criticism
Wednesday 10 December 2:00-5:00
G19 Mansfield Cooper
Prof. Marilyn Deegan (King’s College, London and Simon Visiting Professor) Digital Cultural Heritage and the Healing of a Nation: Digital Sudan
Marilyn Deegan was one of the moving forces behind the creation of the leading Department of Digital Humanities in the UK at King’s College, London. In this paper she will discuss her involvement in a project to digitise selected material of cultural heritage as part of a national initiative led by the Sudanese Association for the Archiving of Knowledge (SUDAAK), a Sudan-based NGO, to guarantee the long-term preservation, integration, authenticity and accessibility of important cultural content in respective concerned national institutions. The project addresses some of the main issues related to digitisation networks and services in the cultural domain and the safeguarding and reinforcing of Sudanese cultural heritage through new technologies.
Martin Bright (CEO, The Creative Society) Digital Doomsday: how we risk failing future and past generations through a lack of ambition.
Back in 2009 Martin Bright set up a charity to help young unemployed people into the creative industry and imagined an army of graduates digitising the nation’s heritage. The model was the Roosevelt-era Works Progress Administration, which put tens of thousands of people back to work in museums, libraries and oral history projects in the 1930s. Martin Bright, political journalist and founder of The Creative Society looks back on five years of work at the sharp end of work creation and at his involvement in the Digital Doomsday project, in which the Creative Society put a number of people back to work using funding from the Future Jobs Fund to digitise dozens of unseen films made by the British Council’s film unit in the 1940s.
Michael Stocking (Managing Director, Armadillo Systems) Humanities Research in a World Without Books
As more collections are digitised and more digital tools developed, how might humanities scholars develop new ways of working? Michael Stocking has been working with research libraries to answer this and other questions, and will present an overview of the tools researchers are using as well as a look at innovative ways to surface digital collections. The talk will feature examples of work he is currently involved in with the Bodleian Library, the British Library and Stanford University amongst others.
PLUS
Digital ‘bytes’ including brief interventions by:
Frances Pinter (CEO, Manchester University Press) Publishers and digitisation
Guyda Armstrong (Dept. of Italian) Digital Humanities@Manchester
Caroline Checkley-Scott, (Head of Collection Care, JRL), Conservation, digitization and humanities research
