Indicative syllabus for this module

There will be ten teaching weeks. Since this course is being taught for the first time in 2008, the syllabus in the sub-menu (and outlined below) is subject to revision over the coming months; and the order in which topics are taught may vary from year to year. The module guide (including the assessment specification) and front sheet are attached as MS word documents to the bottom of this page.

There are no pre-requisites for taking this module. However, a familiarity with and ideally a sound understanding of Web 2.0 ('read-write web') principles and technologies would help you get to grips more quickly with many of the software packages we'll be using. Your skill set should ideally include at least basic competence in some significant subset of, inter alia, (X)HTML, XML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, AJAX, though no great expertise would be expected in any. I shall also be using SWI-Prolog, with its support for SGML, XML and RDF, in the section titled 'Intelligent Heritage'; so, although I expect you to acquire no great expertise in Prolog programming, you may find it useful to browse a Prolog textbook before I teach that section.

The topics we'll be covering in the module can be loosely clustered into groups:

Histories and theories

• Introduction & overview
• from 'cabinet of curiosities' to 'memory institution'
• the 'cultural economy'
  
• the main players
  
• Ways of seeing, ways of knowing
• The Topography of Knowledge: mapping the real and the conceptual museum. Classification, indexing, and organisation of knowledge from Aristotle to the present (see the 'Timeline for Knowledge Organization' and 'Historiography of knowledge organization')
  
• Aristotle
• Raymond Llull
• Francis Bacon
• John Wilkins
  
• Carl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus)
  
• Henry Evelyn Bliss & John Dewey
• S. R. Ranganathan
• knowledge organisation and technology
• from incunabula to indices: the long birth of the printed book
• Paul Otlet
• Vannevar Bush
  
• early uses of computers for knowledge encoding and storage
• Ted Nelson
  
• information retrieval
• knowledge representation in artificial intelligence and the cognitive sciences
  
• hypertext and historiography
  
• metadata
• tagging
• as mnemonic
• as label
• as identifier
  

Representation, interpretation, & diversity

• 'Bridging the 'hermeneutic gap'
• Diversity

'Digital curation' (mostly with regard to the WWW)

• Issues of digitization
• what is digitized, how it is digitized, why it is digitized, ...,
• some case studies
  
• Curating (and selling) contemporary culture (galleries, arts portals, fine art and music repositories, ...)
• Heritage and the web

'Museum 2.0'

• Virtual communities and the participatory museum
• Popular culture and community memory

Beyond bricks-and-mortar: digital assets & the 'born-digital museum'

• Virtual and augmented reality
• Museums in multi-user virtual environments
• 'Museums without walls'
• 'Intelligent heritage'
• Digital asset management

Legal, social, political, ethical, and business issues

• Intellectual property and copyright
• Memory, privatisation, and power
• Representation, interpretation, and diversity
  

An IT career in the culture and heritage sector

• 'The Future Digital Heritage Space': Digicult's reviews of emerging technologies
  
• The role of the IT professional: an open forum with guest panelists from museums and heritage organisations in London (Museum of London, Museum in Dockland, Historic Royal Palaces, ...)
  

With respect to the order of presentation of topics, the following points should be noted:

Some examples of digital culture / digital heritage that I shall be asking you to look in during this course may fall naturally under two or more headings--HiddenHistories.org.uk for example, which is both 'oral history' and 'locative media'--and in such cases they'll typically be referenced as case studies in both units.

In view of the inherently multi-faceted nature of culture and heritage informatics as subject and practice, some topics which may have their own named units (for example, digital asset management, diversity and representations, intellectual property and copyright) will also be recurrent issues, concerns, and themes throughout the entire course.

Now go to the Introduction & Overview.

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