[Important note: please bear with me for a while. This course was taught for the first time in 2008, and I'm only slowly organising the syllabus and the site content, much of which will--due to constraints on time--remain in rough note form for a long while. So wherever in these pages you see t.b.c. or a place-holding "@@@" you'll charitably understand that life is too short and I am too busy to complete the text just at this moment.]

Welcome to your Culture & Heritage Informatics wiki

Background and context

This course, originating in the Virtual History, Virtual Archaeology, and Virtual Museums components of the final-year Desktop Virtual Reality module, was taught as a standalone module for the first time in the second semester (February to May) of 2008. While the focus is on digital heritage and museum informatics, the course also provides context through a broad overview of museum activities and heritage studies. Beyond core topics such as digital curation, the course explores not only the collection, management and display technologies but also the intellectual, theoretical and ethical issues relating to a wide range of heritage topics that includes inter alia the understanding and representation of indigenous knowledge systems, the collection and use of oral histories, and the discovery and digitisation of intangible heritage; students who successfully complete this course will consequently have both the technical skills and also the intellectual confidence to work alongside not only museum professionals but also historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and others.

The 'Heritage Industry'

The 'heritage industry', as Robert Hewison called it in his 1987 book of that name, is big business. Jane Glaser in the preface to her Museums: a Place to Work (1996) quotes Patrick Boylan, Emeritus Professor of Heritage Policy and Management at City University (London), who estimates that "at least 90 per cent, possibly 95 per cent, of the world's museums have been created since the end of the Second World War"; and that percentage has surely grown far larger in the decade since the publication of their book. Employing around 10 million people throughout Europe, in the UK the sector is most visibly represented by the nation's museums, galleries and archives, by such public bodies as the National Trust, English Heritage, the Historic Houses Association, Heritage Link, and the Heritage Lottery Fund, by festivals and events such as the Notting Hill Carnival, Trooping The Colour, and Black History Month, and most recently by new trends in cultural tourism, by the growing popular interest in family history and the burgeoning success of genealogy web sites such as MyHeritage.com, Genes Reunited and Genealogy.co.uk, by the popularity of television channels such as the History Channel and UKTV History and by programmes such as the BBC's A History of Britain, What the Victorians Did For Us, Who Do You Think You Are? and Meet the Ancestors.

Patrick Boylan, cited above, goes on to note that "This explosive growth in the number, range, variety, and richness of museums has been paralleled by similar developments in museum employment. From just two types of employees--the scholar-curators and the non-professional support workers (technical, maintenance, and security personnel)--the museum workforce now includes an almost bewildering range of positions and job titles". In response to the employment needs of the industry, UK universities are now offering a wide range of targeted undergraduate and post-graduate courses. A search on 'heritage' on the UCAS website, for example lists 68 undergraduate courses in 29 institutions, while a search on 'museums' yields 33 undergraduate courses in 14 institutions and the rather broader 'culture' reveals 992 courses in 81 institutions. Indicative course titles include 'Museum and Heritage Studies' (University of Brighton, University of Huddersfield), 'Heritage Management' (Bath Spa University, University of Northampton), 'Heritage Industry Management' (Southampton Solent University). Underrepresented, if not wholly absent, are courses in 'heritage informatics'; and yet it is information and communication technologies (ICTs) that arguably are bringing about the most radical and revolutionary innovations the sector has seen in more than a century. See, however, my listing on this page.

Heritage Informatics

ICTs have in the past decade or so changed not only the ways in which culture and heritage institutions (museums, galleries, national monuments, etc) present themselves and their collections to the public (trivially, for example, there can hardly be a museum or gallery in the world that does not now have a web presence) but also--and increasingly--the relationship between the public and the institutions. ICTs enable cultural and heritage institutions and their publics to engage with collections in new ways, in principle--and, in many cases, in practice--empowering audiences by democratising (digital) access and inviting participation, and yet frequently, with the increasing privatisation of memory institutions and the commodification of culture, defining and constraining the boundaries of cultural (re)production, access, and ownership.

This course will investigate recent trends and innovations in heritage informatics, focusing as much on the changing role of the cultural institution as on the technologies that have both driven and enabled such change. This will entail that, in addition to our core concern with technological innovation, we shall also by necessity be critically scrutinizing in some depth the cultural, social, political, economic, and legal frameworks within which digital 'memory institutions' are designed and presented to public view.

Students who successfully complete this course will have acquired the core knowledge and skills that will enable them to work as IT professionals in the cultural sector. Specifically, they will be able to:

• identify application areas for information and communication technologies within organisations (e.g. museums, cultural tourism agencies, digital archives) in the culture and heritage sectors
• identify the state-of-the-art technologies and technology trends that define the cutting edge of digital conservation, asset management, and public communication of heritage
• advise on the development of systems using appropriate technologies, techniques, and software
• and discuss the intellectual, technical, pedagogic, social, legal, and ethical issues (including diversity issues) involved in the acquisition, management, and presentation of (digital) collections

Employability of graduating students is a high priority for this course. To give you some sense of the kinds of jobs you might apply for in the sector, I've created an Employment section on this site, listing 'Good sources of job postings' and 'Indicative job advertisements'. Please refer to these from time to time.

The course will be largely structured around readings, case studies and examples, software testing, and consequent discussions. It is essential that you do the assigned reading each week: you will be expected to build a portfolio of your learning during the course.

You can access the main areas and sub-pages of this wiki from the sidebar on the left. You are encouraged to create an account for yourself on this wiki and to contribute to its content.

A brief note on your projects You will each be assessed on an individual project that you will have undertaken during the latter part of the course. As information technologists you are obviously expected to be able to demonstrate competence in the technical aspects of your project, including selection of technologies appropriate to the project subject matter and intended use; you are obviously not expected to be content specialists, i.e. to have any expert knowledge of the subject matter. For your work to have the look of a bona fide culture or heritage project, however, there will necessarily have to be some content, and you should therefore consider how you will obtain this content. This will be made easier for you if you choose a project topic in which you personally have a firm interest, something you can get passionate about, excited about. How do you benefit from thus engaging at least partially with the subject matter? In the first place, as technologists you will have acquired a clear sense of how you might work with museum, archive, and heritage professionals and subject experts. In the second place, you will have had the opportunity to broaden your personal horizons beyond the confines of technology alone, For a detailed explanation of how you will be assessed, please go the the Assessment page.