DCDC23 programme

Speakers:

• Dr. Sam Salem, PRiSM lecturer in composition, Royal Northern College of Music (online)
• Prof. Kate Elswitt, head of digital research and professor of performance and technology, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London (online)

Join speakers Prof. Kate Elswitt and Dr. Sam Salem as we discuss ‘creative responses to the archive’. Approaching materiality in exciting and innovative ways, we will explore creative responses to physical collections and imagine a digital future for creative practice. This plenary session will consider the intersections between AI, machine learning, composition, dance, data and digital methods.

Speaker: Gethin Rees, lead curator, digital mapping, British Library (in person)

Maps and geospatial data offer an engaging bridge across the physical/virtual divide. This workshop provides instruction in mapping cultural heritage data and publishing the results on the web using Peripleo software. Peripleo is a browser-based map tool developed by Rainer Simon from the Austrian Institute of Technology as part of the AHRC-funded Locating a National Collection project. This open-source software enables users to explore and discover locations that represent the web pages of humanities and cultural heritage collections. It is relatively simple to create maps of your collections which can be embedded in any web page using an iframe. Peripleo is based on a free hosting method, Github pages, and Stephen Gadd has developed a prototype tool, Locolligo to help prepare data for Peripleo.

This activity will provide instruction on how to use Locolligo to transform participants' own data to linked data standards, create a Peripleo web map and serve this on Github Pages. Participants will have the chance to work through the tutorial on their own laptops, ask questions, provide feedback and receive help. By the end of the workshop they will be able to transform their own csv data and make this publically available on a map. Participants can bring along their own data however this is not essential as data will be provided. The workshop will also reflect on the potential of linked geospatial data to reconstitute material context by connecting collections and the physical environment.

Speakers:

• Erin Liu, assistant archivist, University of the Arts London, Archives and Special Collections Centre (in person)
• Lucy Parker, assistant archivist, University of the Arts London (in person)

This two-part workshop will engage participants in a creative response to archive objects. Archivists Erin Liu and Lucy Parker will draw on their experiences at UAL ASCC. (University of the Arts London, Archives and Special Collections Centre). Since 2022, online workshops developed during the Covid-19 pandemic have been re-adapted for in-person teaching purposes. Today, these workshops pose interesting questions around what constitutes ‘immediate’ engagements with archive objects. Part one of the workshop was developed by former colleague, Ann Chow-Thomas, for online teaching purposes to support UAL courses that have a focus on materiality and material culture. Part two will be an opportunity for reflective discussion among the participants. This will include reflection on using digital surrogates versus original archival objects (both physical and born-digital), in person. We will reflect on our own experience and ask participants how they might design similar workshops in their own settings with their own collections.

Speaker: Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt

Speaker: Prof. Daniela Pettreli, professor of interaction design, Sheffield Hallam University (in person)

Since the late 90s, mobile devices have been a favoured platform for the delivery of digital content in cultural heritage settings and apps are now commonplace. The emerging Internet of Things could change this landscape: by enabling the seamless integration of the material exhibition with the digital content, and by collecting and exploiting use data it is possible to create novel visitors’ experiences and services. The focus then shifts from the delivery of information in place to creating memorable experiences. Design practice for cultural heritage must then open up to include aspects of storytelling and embodied experiences.

Data analysis and network visualisations for hybrid correspondence archives

Speaker: Callum McKean, digital lead curator, contemporary archives and manuscripts, British Library (in person)

This project investigates the hybrid nature of contemporary correspondence collections using the archive of Harold Pinter as a pilot. Whereas thinking around electronic correspondence networks has typically been done within a business, institutional or sociological framework, and literary correspondence studies have taken a more historical or ‘close-reading’ approach, this project combines these two approaches in order to reflect upon and inform future collecting and research practice for literary archives. Using data analytics and network analysis tools, it examines how patterns of communication changed for writers with the arrival of the digital age, and what this means for institutions that want to collect, preserve, display and provide access to this material in perpetuity.

Enhanced curation: Interpreting the digital life of Andrea Levy and Will Self

Speaker: Xiaozhou Li, doctoral researcher, University of Sussex (online)

This presentation is based on the British Library doctoral placement project, ‘Developing an enhanced curation framework for contemporary hybrid archives’, which investigates the digital archives of two contemporary British writers, Andrea Levy and Will Self. It aims to gain a deeper understanding of the writers' material life through close reading of its digital reflection, and to develop a practical method for using digital archives to enhance collection curation. By analysing the metadata of the writers' manuscripts and working documents, the project has unveiled more details about their working lives and professional relationships. The findings of this project may be valuable for researchers interested in contemporary writers working with hybrid or completely digital manuscripts and archives. These findings, apart from writer-specific knowledge, include a range of metadata analytic methods and workflows, further research possibilities, and how material or hybrid collection research may be inspired by digital archive research.

Colonial photography and the digital public realm: a case study from the National Archives

• Liz Haines, team leader, overseas and defence, The National Archives
• Katherine Howells

The Colonial Office Library Photographic Collection (CO 1069) is a valuable and challenging series of photograph albums created and collected by the Colonial Office and its successor government departments. It comprises 942 albums and many thousands of individual photographs depicting people, locations and activities across the British Empire and then the Commonwealth, from 1869 to the 1980s. From around 2011, photographs from the collection have been made available online. Most notably, a large number of images were made accessible on Flickr and many can be found on TNA’s commercial image library. CO 1069 has now had an online presence for over ten years with evidence of diverse uses and engagement by audiences around the world. With this and other related collections in mind, we are beginning to interrogate the position of colonial imagery in the public domain. This paper seeks to contribute to this by investigating the changing uses, audience and reception of CO 1069 albums in the digital realm. Through work-in-progress analysis of user comments, geographical and usage data from Flickr, analysis of views and downloads from TNA’s image library, and by following selected journeys of CO 1069 photographs on social media, we address two questions. What can we learn about the patterns and potential impacts of the public dissemination of these images in different online contexts? How can this analysis contribute to future discussions about new ways of using CO 1069 and other collections of colonial visual material on open digital platforms?

Co-creating digital resources: linking collections with communities at Senate House Library

Speaker: Argula Rublack, academic librarian (history), Senate House Library, University of London (in person)

The British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership: providing virtual access to the British Library’s physical collections

Speaker: Susannah Gillard, content specialist, archivist, British Library (in person)

A case study of the British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership, consisting of a large-scale bilingual project to catalogue and digitise physical collection material held by the British Library: archival material relating to the Gulf and wider Middle East from the India Office Records and Private Papers, visual arts, audio and maps collections, and Arabic scientific manuscripts. The digitised collection material and accompanying catalogue descriptions are made freely available through the Qatar Digital Library (QDL) website, which can be viewed in English and Arabic. Thus collection material previously only physically accessible through the British Library’s reading rooms is now available virtually to user communities worldwide, including in the Gulf. The Partnership also engages with communities in the Gulf and other regions across the virtual space through QDL articles which provide further contextual information about the digitised material and Gulf history and culture, helping connect Gulf communities with their cultural heritage.

Community curating

Speakers:

• Fiona Graham
• Paul Ottey

Speakers:

• Jane Shillaker, The National Archives (in person)
• Kevin Bolton

Archive Service Accreditation is the UK management standard for archive services. Launched in 2013, it sets expectations for focus and delivery across all types of archive services. As the standard reaches ten years old, its content is under structured review to ensure that it remains relevant.

The record needs of charities

Speaker: Paul Beard, AHRC CDP PhD student, UCL and The National Archives (in person)

This paper presents the emerging findings from research that mapped the recordkeeping practices of charities and voluntary sector organisations in England. Drawing from a number of digital and paper sources, it considers how data collection has shaped our understanding of recordkeeping in the voluntary sector. This paper is presented as part of an AHRC-Funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership project between UCL and The National Archives examining risk to records in charities and VSOs in England.

Safe havens for archives at risk initiatives

Speaker: David Sutton, University of Reading Library (in person)

This session will introduce the guiding principles for Safe Havens for Archives at Risk. The guiding principles, based on a wide range of international experience, provide guidance for both sending and hosting archival institutions in situations in which the safeguarding of originals or security copies through relocation can contribute to dealing with the past processes, or to preserving archives requiring immediate action to protect them from the effects of natural disasters. Dealing with the past refers to the processes addressing the rights of victims and societies as a whole to truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence in the aftermath of human rights violations, breaches of international humanitarian law and related forms of corruption that facilitated these crimes. Archives/records serve as irreplaceable materials for ongoing and future processes for dealing with the past and their preservation thus requires special efforts.

Arcadia’s post-custodial model for digitising endangered archives

This presentation will introduce some of the work that Arcadia has funded over twenty years, including the Endangered Archives Programme. Arcadia’s partners digitise cultural heritage globally both to preserve it and to make it more accessible. Since Arcadia began funding such projects, equipment has become cheaper allowing digitisation to become a common cultural heritage preservation intervention even outside of well-funded institutions. However, significant ethical questions remain unresolved in “post-custodial” digital projects (where the physical material remains with its original custodian). These are particularly acute when a Global North funder like Arcadia is supporting work in the Global South: Who should decide how a digitization project is structured and what material is digitized? What are the risks of so-called “digital colonialism” in which knowledge might be extracted from a community? How can the inherent tensions between local control of heritage data and the need for universal standards to make data accessible and preservable be resolved? Although much of the work of digitisation is mechanical (flipping pages, typing metadata into a spreadsheet and so on), designing sustainable projects requires deep intellectual engagement and collaboration.

Speaker: Stephen Brooks, product manager, content and delivery, Jisc

A multiplicity of voices: Digital integration at the museums of the University of St Andrews

Speaker: Eilidh Lawrence, learning and engagement manager, Libraries and Museums, University of St Andrews (in person)

How do the custodians of collections ensure colonial stories aren’t silenced in contexts where this isn’t the only story an object has to tell? When an exhibition focused on empire ends, where are these stories represented? And importantly – how do communities want to engage with these narratives and be represented in heritage spaces? The Digital Integration project builds on work to explore colonial legacies in our collections, uncovering untold narratives and working with communities to reinterpret collections digitally. Focusing on virtual reality, augmented reality, the Smartify app and our digital storytelling tool Exhibit, we have examined the efficacy of technologies in exploring colonial narratives in collections. We’ll be sharing what cultural organisations can learn from this project - trying to unpick what role the merging of the physical and the virtual might have in sharing colonial narratives, with communities and their stories at the forefront.

Digitally mediated encounters at the Unforgotten Lives exhibition

Speakers

• Andrea Kocsis, assistant professor in history and data science, Northeastern University London (in person)
• Dr Olly Ayers, Northeastern University London

The paper aims to evaluate the lessons from the Unforgotten Lives exhibition, a collaboration between the London Metropolitan Archives and Northeastern University London. The exhibition displays the Switching the Lens dataset, a collection of parish records mentioning people of colour in London. We designed digital tools to evoke a sense of ‘deep place’, where visitors are encouraged to consider the long-range presence of Londoners of African, Caribbean, Asian and Indigenous heritage by making connections between past and present. Three digital components, acting as contact zones, tackled this purpose. By juxtaposing the records (material temporal), the maps (digital spatial) and the app (digital-material spatial), the visitor can experience a synthesis between different forms of encounter with their local heritage. Three digital components, acting as contact zones, tackled this purpose. By juxtaposing the records (material temporal), the maps (digital spatial) and the app (digital-material spatial), the visitor can experience a synthesis between different forms of encounter with their local heritage.

Engaging local audiences, without material records?

Speaker: Rob Chipperfield, digital content officer, The National Archives (in person)

How do you make an online-only resource engaging to a physical audience? This was a key question when planning 20sStreets, a local history campaign based around the 1921 Census. The census is undoubtedly a fascinating resource and of obvious value to family historians and researchers; but how do you engage local communities with their local census history – particularly people new to archives and families with young children – when there are no physical census records available to show? Many archival visits involve handling original records or viewing priceless documents in exhibitions, so arranging events around a resource that cannot be engaged with physically was a step into the unknown for the team and a conundrum that required no small amount of creative thinking.

Speaker: Gracen Brilmyer, assistant professor, McGill University

This talk describes some core projects in the Disability Archives Lab and their connection to one another. Through community-centered research, these projects use interviews and ongoing participant involvement to investigate the ways that archives impact disabled people--both as users and as archivists. The talk covers the foundations of such projects, some key findings, as well as future directions of the Lab.

Speaker: Prof. Claire Warwick, professor of digital humanities, Durham University (online)

The emergence of generative AI bots such as ChatCGP and Artiphoria has created both hype and anxiety. Articles now appear almost daily in the press, questioning the status of creativity and perhaps of humanity itself in a world dominated by AI. If AI can write songs and articles and create artworks, they ask, what is the future for the arts and tangible heritage? In a digital world, what is the future for cultural heritage and our ability to preserve and interact physical artefacts? This paper will discuss such questions, arguing that far from making physical engagement with cultural heritage and the arts redundant, the rise of AI may instead imbue them with new value. Interaction with physical objects, especially in social settings, will become even more precious to us because they evoke emotional responses in a way that digital interactions currently do not and perhaps never will.

Speaker: Ojoma Ochai, cofounder / managing partner, Creative Economy Practice at CcHUB (in person)

This keynote will explore the promising potential of technology in driving growth and innovation within the African creative industries. By examining how platforms, AI, Blockchain, and other emerging technologies are transforming the value chains of creative industries in Africa, we can identify the many gains and opportunities that lie ahead. From new ways of connecting creators with audiences to more efficient and transparent management of intellectual property, technology is opening up exciting new possibilities for African creatives. The session will also look at the action that is required to ensure that the benefits of these technologies are distributed equitably across the industry.

Ever onwards – meeting the needs of a hybrid users

Speaker: Jacquelyn Sundberg, outreach librarian, ROAAr, McGill University Library (in person)

Staff have acquired new skillsets for hybrid delivery of outreach activities due to forced creativity resulting from the COVID-19 Pandemic closures. With buildings reopened and in-person activities resumed, this online community means we now have a hybrid user-base; some interact with our collections, events, and exhibitions only in the digital realm, some only in person, and some in both realms. To serve our entire community, we must now offer a digital option for exhibitions as well as events. Given the hybrid nature of our community, we need meaningful digital experiences accompanying physical exhibitions. These elements must work well together for on-site visitors as well as independently for remote users. Jacquelyn will present two case studies with different approaches. The first is a web-based exhibition that fuels a physical exhibition from that digital content. The second is a game-based, engaging digital experience that parallels the physical exhibition and provides a meaningful experience both in person and online.

’What Was Here?’ Beyond the barriers of materiality, with mobile app interfaces

Speaker: Sam Bartle, digital archivist, East Riding Archives (in person)

At East Riding Archives, the ‘What Was Here?’ app was innovated to disrupt preconceptions about archives and materiality, by infiltrating mainstream visitor economies beyond the formal heritage sector and academia, widening participation and changing perceptions about archives and their uses. The app turns mobile devices into a virtual ‘time machine’ experience, comparing past and present, in which everywhere becomes a place for self-guided exploration through time. Through digital placemaking, the service aimed to help people use archival content to re-imagine their immediate space and interrogate it more deeply for mainstream uses, such as recreation, education, tourism, walking for health and wellbeing, and reminiscence. This session explores how the app was developed as part of the service’s digital infrastructure, to create a business-as-usual (BAU) interface that inspired new collaborations and cross-sectoral partnerships. It will also consider potential future interventions within the context of 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies.

Speaker: Sian Collins, head of special collections and archives, University of Wales Trinity St David (online)

UWTSD is a multi-campus university in an area that does not have good public transport links and can require a journey of 1.5 hours to travel between campuses. It is difficult to transport special collections items or students, so virtual access offers huge possibilities. There are only two members of staff in special collections and no access to expensive specialist equipment. However, a pilot project with Digital Services colleagues was started to create a 360 virtual tour of the Reading Room with the ability to inspect selected manuscripts virtually. The tour will be available in the university’s new immersive rooms and via the website. This case study looks at what it is possible to achieve in this area, fuelled mainly by goodwill, enthusiasm and curiosity.

We are living in a digital world and I’m a material girl

Speaker: Hannah Nicholson, education officer, Museum on the Mound, Lloyds Banking Group (in person)

The Museum on the Mound has run in-person workshops about the history of money for local schools for over 17 years. The pandemic presented both challenges and opportunities as we explored how to take this learning experience into the digital space to engage and support communities. How could we bring our collections to life through a computer? When entering a digital world, we couldn’t leave the material behind. Experience has taught us that breakthrough material is essential for making connections and developing an inclusive and impactful learning experience. We’ll explore how we navigated the challenges inherent in a digital experience, how we took the strengths of a physical encounter and applied them to the digital, and the unexpected benefits of a hybrid approach. You’ll gain insight into how to make digital learning tangible by handling some unusual currencies from around the world!

Speaker: Erum Hamid, leading library assistant, British Library (in person)

Physical makerspaces converge the social and collaborative aspects of learning, creating ‘communities of practice’ and expanding to virtual spaces. With the digitisation of traditionally physical activities in academia and libraries among others, how can we navigate the physical-digital while balancing a future-oriented optimism and nostalgia of the past? The panellist revisits virtual makerspaces and explores the interplay between virtual spaces and physical materials. Prepare for the challenges facing the education, cultural, and information industry today that are redefining access to ‘the physical’ in visceral virtual territories.

Speaker: Vicky Price, head of outreach, UCL Special Collections (in person)

This paper will explore ways to support young participants in building personal connections with historic collections, no matter the medium. It will use case studies from secondary school partnerships at UCL Special Collections that have combined delivery off-site, digital collection interaction and in-person collection encounters. The speaker will share what happens when a practitioner continually addresses the question ‘where is the awe?’ in their work. Expect frank reflections on a range of approaches, both successful and less so, including efforts to use augmented reality and film making alongside more traditional methodologies.

Speakers:

• Vanicka Arora, University of Stirling (online)
• Prof. Liam Magee, Western Sydney University (online)

Through this interactive workshop, we invite participants to collaboratively interrogate the visual archives upon which popular text-to-image models are based. Each of these generative AI systems is built upon archives consisting of billions of image-text pairs scraped from the Internet. Each model can be fed a text based ‘prompt’ which generates an image in response. While these models have rapidly come under scrutiny, justifiably so, regarding issues of copyright, algorithmic bias, and larger philosophical questions around the work of art, there is lesser attention paid to the images produced, their aesthetics and their relationship with the archives from which they are reconstructed.

Speaker: Dr. Chiara Zuanni, assistant professor, University of Graz (in person)

This keynote considers the legacies of our digital practices to reflect on the data we create, collect, and preserve and the impact they will have on the future understanding of cultural heritage and contemporary history and culture.

Speakers:

• Jane Collings, Archives Hub service manager, Jisc
• Carly Richardson, technical specialist (Archives Hub), Jisc
• Ben Crabstick
• Adrian Stevenson

Speaker: Ian Cooke, British Library (In person)

In April 2023, the UK legal deposit libraries celebrated ten years since the introduction of digital legal deposit regulations. This presentation will reflect on the experience of implementation and the challenges of collecting and preserving digital publications at large scale. Legal deposit aims to create a distributed collection across the nations of the UK, preserving the very rich diversity of published communication. A significant trend has been towards complexity, whether that is in publishing behaviour, types of publication or user needs. Consideration of users and user needs has been a key element driving our thinking and planning. This becomes especially important in developing new parts of our collection and services, such as with the UK Web Archive and innovative and creative digital publications.

Spotted! Material encounters with textile pattern books

Speaker: Alison Spence, PhD student, University of Glasgow (in person)

Historic textile company pattern books impress their material substance upon custodians and researchers alike. Bulky but fragile, their textual data and colourful fabric samples evidence manufacturers’ skills and fickle fashion trends. They offer rich textual, visual and material research data and inspire new creative responses. But their mass, form and complexity make them challenging for custodians to store, produce, describe and digitise. Digital encounters with pattern books offer viewers detailed insights into their material structures. Weaving methodologies, yarn characteristics and surface textures can be scrutinised; production data and designs compared across collections. This presentation explores how pattern books’ materiality can be engaged digitally. It invites audiences to consider the equal, but different, roles of physical and virtual records in engagement and research. Deeply aware of custodians’ challenges in facilitating physical and digital access, the presentation considers how to effectively create material-rich encounters with these engaging records online and in person.

Hybrid collections: how technology can increase engagement, inclusivity and transform the materiality of library and archives

Speakers:

• Eleonora Gandolfi, associate director (research and innovation), University of Surrey
• Catherine Polley

Library and archives are adopting multimedia technologies to increase accessibility of archival material and collection. This is the journey inside challenges, opportunities and insightful reflections on how tech is changing us! We'll look at the result of the AHRC funded project “Reimagining knitting: a community prospective”, which aimed to use photogrammetry, laser scanning, 3d printing and oral history to make the existing Knitting Reference Library collection more inclusive and accessible. By working with local communities and researchers, we have uncovered reflections on how technology has changed the materiality of individual objects while creating digital and new 3d printed derivates. A new collection is now born! Key takeaway: How the use of 3d modelling and printing impacts the materiality of Library and Archive collections while making collections more inclusive

Accessing weapons collections: Virtual approaches to physical constraints

Speaker: Stuart Bowes, doctoral candidate, University of Leeds and Royal Armouries (in person)

Drawing on the Royal Armouries, the national museum of arms and armour, this paper will examine how virtual approaches can be mobilised to engage audiences with weapons collections. It will explore how its digital offering enables public access to the objects in spite of the considerable physical restrictions imposed by weapons regulation. The paper will then explore the particular difficulties associated with facilitating digital engagement with weapons – such as confidentiality, sensitivity, and security – all of which have consequences for material cultural practice. Focusing on the registrar staff at the Royal Armouries, Stuart will explore their negotiation of the legal and ethical entanglements pervading the provision of digital access to its weapons collections. By reflecting on prevailing professional practice, this piece will thus postulate how the fundamental interplay of material and digital approaches might be harnessed to refine this process.

Speakers:

• Glen Robson, IIIF technical coordinator, IIIF Consortium
• Josh Hadro, managing director, IIIF Consortium

IIIF (the International Image Interoperability Framework) allows for unparalleled high-quality presentation of digitized materials, up to and including interactions that highlight and reframe the stunning details of physical media. This presentation will cover the broad capabilities of IIIF with particular emphasis on materiality, featuring real examples of IIIF in exhibitions, augmented reality, and more.