Negotiating “Publicness” in Digital Heritage
Negotiating “Publicness” in Digital Heritage
Interdisciplinary Seminar - College of Arts
Date: Thursday 30 May 2019
Time: 13:00 - 15:00
Venue: Davidson 208, University of Glasgow
Category: Public lectures, Academic events
Speaker: Ethan Watrall (Professor, Department of Anthropology; Associate Director, MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences; Director, Cultu
Building digital heritage platforms, applications, and experiences which have a strong public component is incredibly challenging. You not only have to contend with basic issues of access, but also have to wrestle with ethical issues of ownership, copyright, licensing, use, and patrimony. Increasingly projects are also being challenged to engage with a complex constellation of issues relating to community generated and contributed content, citizen science & scholarship, authority, and multivocality.
This talk will explore the ways in which three digital heritage projects developed at Michigan State University have each addressed and negotiated the notion of “publicness.” The talk doesn’t intend to suggest a “one size fits all” approach to addressing the challenges of designing, building, collaborating on, and sustaining publicly engaged digital heritage projects. Instead, is seeks to provide perspective on what drove the choices that were made in the context of these particular projects.
About Ethan Watrall
An anthropological archaeologist who has worked in North America and North Africa, Ethan Watrall is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Associate Director of MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University. Ethan also serves as Adjunct Curator of Archaeology at the Michigan State University Museum. In addition, Ethan is Director of the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative and the Digital Heritage Fieldschool in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University. Currently, Ethan is Co-PI of Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project. Previously, he was Co-Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funded ARCS: Archaeological Resource Cataloguing System project, Co-Director of the NEH funded Digital Archive of Malian Photography project, and Director of the NEH funded Institute for Digital Archaeological Method and Practice. Ethan’s primarily scholarly interests lie in how digital methods and computational approaches can be leveraged to preserve and provide access to archaeological and heritage materials, collections, knowledge, and data in order to facilitate research, advance knowledge, fuel interpretation, and democratize our collective understanding and appreciation of the past.