Interfaces with the Past?

The University of York's Centre for Digital Heritage is having its inaugural conference, Digital Heritage 2013: Interfaces with the Past, on the 6 July 2013, 9.30am-8pm. The Call for Papers is open until midnight on 2 April, 2013, and confirmed speakers include Graeme Earl (sotonDH, University of Southampton), Douglas Pritchard (Director of Operations, Cyark Europe), and Professor Andrew Prescott (King's College, London and theme leader for the AHRC Digital Transformations programme). 200-word abstracts should be emailed to cdh-2013@york.ac.uk with an indication of the preferred format (i.e. presentation, poster, or demo). Successful applicants will be notified if their paper has been accepted by 19 April, 2013. The CFP summary is as follows:

Contributions are invited for papers on all aspects of digital heritage, with a focus on interfaces with the past: audio, visual, spatial, or textual. We welcome proposals for 15-minute presentations, posters, and practical demonstrations.

This strikes me as a very brief and somewhat vague outline, and perhaps, in order to encourage a varied response, it is intentionally so. But what do 'interfaces with the past' refer to in the context of digital heritage? Borrowing from the language of computer science, presumably to emphasise its digital allegiances, the word interface suggests a mode of channelling or interacting with the past, where the interface acts as a mediator. In the OED, interface is defined as v. To come into interaction with but also n. A means or place of interaction between two systems, organizations, etc.; a meeting-point or common ground between two parties, systems, or disciplines; also, interaction, liaison, dialogue.

Being involved in the study of heritage, to me the most obvious example of an interface with the past is the museum, which is understood to be in dialogue with the past to the extent that it constructs representations and interpretations of historical events. But, for the purposes of the conference, it seems that the museum is implied more in the idea of heritage than in the interface. I must conclude, then, that the notion of the interface refers to the opportunities digital technology affords for interacting with the past and, in considering putting in a proposal, this view has informed my thinking.

My preliminary thoughts have been either:

1. To propose a presentation summarising my PhD topic, focusing on the EU's digitisation agenda for cultural heritage through the Europeana project. Relevant to this discussion is the link between the concept of memory and the claims being made for digitisation as means of securing Europe's cultural inheritance. The connotations of collective memory and its potential for communicating or re-creating the past are also important issues.  

An example from the Atlas of Digital Damages



2. To propose a presentation on the The Atlas of Digital Damages, running on Flickr. Initiated by Ben Fino-Radin (Digital Conservator, Rhizome at The New Museum) after a blog post by Barbara Sierman of National Library of the Netherlands, the group highlights concerns about the limited life-span of some digital formats. A colleague of mine at the University of Leeds Library is the Project Manager of Sustainable Preservation Using Community Engagement (SPRUCE) (JISC-funded), and has contributed to the Flickr group. The presentation could publicise the Leeds project and provide a different perspectve on 'interfacing' with the past in the sense that technology presents a threat as well as an opportunity for cultural heritage. Perhaps the title could be 'Digital Damages: The Ugly (Inter)Face of Collections Online'.



So far, taking account of the limited time for presentations (15 mins), I'm leaning more towards the second option. I'll update this post at a later stage with draft abstracts.