Digital GLAM
Technology in the Arts and Heritage Sector
The advent of digital technologies has posed both problems and opportunities, and been the object of different and contrasting commentaries. The impact of technology can be seen in the type and subject of research being conducted, and also in how the academic community and GLAM sector interact with the public. Here we’ve gathered a collection of articles reflecting on these changes, offering new perspectives, insights, and research for you to explore.
Articles are free to read online for a short time.
Engaging the museum space: Mobilizing visitor engagement with digital content creation
Claire Bailey-Ross et al.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
The challenges that digital technology and participatory media bring to museums demonstrate a change from a one-to-many transmission to a many-to-many interaction. Museums now use their own voice and authority to encourage participatory communication and content creation with visitors.
No Future Without a Past: The Dutch National Design Archive (NDA)
Anja Tollenaar, Job Meihuizen
Journal of Design History
The NDA was the first step towards preserving the heritage of Dutch design. It created a sustainable infrastructure for design heritage, and embedded care for different types of design archives within the cultural heritage sector and within art education.
Worth the Wait
Nick Grindle
Oxford Art Journal
Does digitisation bring us closer to the objects we study, or push us further away? A look at the Yale Center for British Art’s searchable database.
Towards an intellectual history of digitization: Myths, dystopias, and discursive shifts in museum computing
Andrea Sartori
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
The historical account of the conceptual relationship between the museum and the computer emerges as a series of clashes between technology-related myths and dystopias. The current rhetorical discourse on digital media seems to proceed one step further than empirical reality, projecting a utopian technological future.
Enabling complex analysis of large-scale digital collections: humanities research, high-performance computing, and transforming access to British Library digital collections
Melissa Terras et al.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
Although there has been a drive in the cultural heritage sector to provide large-scale, open data sets for researchers, we have not seen a commensurate rise in humanities researchers undertaking complex analysis of these data sets for their own research purposes – there are too many technical hurdles.
Precarious Marks: Thomas Ruff's jpegs
Vered Maimon
Oxford Art Journal
The question is whether the concepts of the ‘database’ and the ‘archive’ can be conflated as easily as some scholars and curators have recently suggested. Ruff’s jpegs engages with the current technological conditions to explore the boundary of ‘pictorial’ and ‘conceptual’ in photography, and how this has changed now photographs are part of the ‘data stream’ of the internet.
Digital Curation through Information Cartography: A Commentary on Oral History in the Digital Age from a Content Management Point of View
Douglas Lambert, Michael Frisch
Oral History Review
Our advice to everyone we meet, on every project, is the same: do not fear oral history in the digital age and do not set impossible standards. New digital tools offer new ways of mapping and navigating audio/video oral histories in the digital age, but your data are the center of the universe, so keep your eye on them, as you bring tools in and out of your digital toolbox.
Digitally reconstructing the Great Parchment Book: 3D recovery of fire-damaged historical documents
Kazim Pal, et al.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
We describe here a long-term, interdisciplinary, international partnership involving conservators, archivists, computer scientists, and digital humanists that developed a low-cost pipeline for conserving, digitizing, 3D-reconstructing, and virtually flattening the fire-damaged, buckled parchment, enabling new readings and understanding of the text to be created.
Ceramic Points of View: Video Interviews, the Internet and the Interpretation of Museum Objects
Matthew Partington
Journal of Design History
Video can offer new ways of looking at museum objects, and widen the scope and ambition of museum interpretation. We will show how text, narrative, and image can be brought together to interpret museum objects in a way which is designed to engage, educate and entertain actual and virtual museum visitors.
Values of Art and the Ethical Question
Hallvard Lillehammer
The British Journal of Aesthetics
For the vast majority of interested parties there is a world of difference between the aesthetic value of The Adoration itself and any digitized reproduction thereof downloaded from Google Images, for example.
