Some of my interests...

Just to remind myself:

Over the past 15 years the digitisation agenda for cultural heritage has been shaped by a number of key policy statements, frameworks and funding calls. As well as enabling major projects such as Europeana, these have informed shifting understandings of the relationship between 'heritage' and 'the digital'. My research is concerned with the influence of discourses of collective memory in debates about digitisation and the preservation of cultural heritage. My thesis explores the politics of this relationship further through analysis of the projects, press and policies that have the digitisation of cultural heritage as their goal, within major organisational and cultural settings.

There are several areas of interest within this broader project that are of interest. These are:

 * The Museum as Memory Institution: how large-scale digitisation projects potentially re-define parameters between museums, libraries and archives.

 * Going beyond a notion of the digital object as a supplement to but not a replacement for the physical object. Thinking about digital objects in their own right, techniques for curation and engagement.

 * Search engine culture as a potential barrier to digital heritage collections (i.e. you need to know what you're looking for in order to find it).

The issue I've been working on recently is about approaches to preserving digital objects, or more prescisely, the question of what to preserve - not in terms of which artefact but which component of the digital object. For example, the Science Museum takes an approach informed by the privileging of material culture; even if you could view a digital object through running software on some of their old models, they wouldn't risk turning it on since there's a threat of fire or damage to the physical object. This issue forces us to think about the format of intellectual content as a sort of performance (the process by which it can be rendered and read or viewed). So potentially we're preserving the performance of an object in digital culture.