MCST/ANTH 294: Digital Cultural Heritage
Spring 2025, MWF 12-1pm, Dr. Aisling Quigley
Course Description
Cultural heritage sites, including libraries, archives and museums, have existed in some shape or form for a very long time. Computers, on the other hand, have only been a part of these institutions for about sixty years. Although technologies offer more efficient and cost-effective ways to store and disseminate information and promise greater accessibility to materials, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they successfully facilitate the missions of these cultural heritage sites or the needs of their visitors. Why is this the case? Do digital technologies truly have the potential to decentralize and democratize these spaces? What can they tell us about what we value, as a culture? In this interdisciplinary course, we will reflect on the impact of digital technologies on cultural heritage sites, and museums in particular, starting in the 1960s and continuing through the present, including discussion of how museums responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Among other things, students will learn how to collect, curate, and digitize objects, write and design an object label, and create an online exhibition. No prerequisites.
Last year’s course website (syllabus and course website will be updated with new readings/assignments for Spring 2025).
A sampling of readings/projects we’ll explore…
“The Gallery of Lost Art was an immersive, online exhibition that told the stories of artworks that had disappeared. Destroyed, stolen, discarded, rejected, erased, ephemeral – some of the most significant artworks of the last 100 years have been lost and can no longer be seen.”
“An old friend of mine, someone with impeccable credentials in traditional aesthetics, wandered out of curiosity into the Junior Museum auditorium yesterday morning, got an earful of such things as data banks, input, output, printout, software, hardware, and interface, and rushed to tell me that I was selling out to the barbarians.”
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, The Artist’s Studio / Still Life with Plaster Casts, 1837, daguerreotype, “here was a singularly real and accurate reflection of the world.” James O’Toole
Gettysburg, Pa. Dead Confederate soldier in Devil’s Den, Timothy O’Sullivan, as part of our discussion of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Meg Stuart, “appetite,” Matthew Reason. “Archive or Memory? The Detritus of Live Performance.” New Theatre Quarterly, 2003.
Ant Farm, Richard Jost, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, 1971, as part of our discussion of the unassailable voice of institutional authority, linked to Peter Walsh’s writing
The Art of Google Books, as part of our discussion of digitized and born-digital objects, and the role that these objects play in our global memory
Ritratto del Museo di Ferrante Imperato Wunderkammer, 1599, “the beginning of how museums and collecting [become] tied up with, and in the service of, colonial agendas,” Diva Zumaya
Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology, as part of our discussion of Stephen R. Weil’s “The Proper Business of the Museum: Ideas or Things?”
Decolonizing the Museum, including conversations about NAGPRA and repatriation
Virtual/In-person Visits (confirmed so far!)
Questions we’ll consider (among many others!)
- What is valuable to us as a culture? Or, who decides what is valuable to us as a culture, and why?
- Where does “authority” come from, and how does technology impact notions of authority?
- How important are objects to the mission of the museum?
- Is technology transformative or disruptive (or both?) within the context of memory institutions?
- What ethical questions arise when we talk about technology?
Tools/Techniques we’ll explore…
- WordPress
- Wikipedia
- 3D Scanning
- SketchUp
- VR
You’ll emerge from this class with the ability to:
- Critically engage with the history of technology in the cultural heritage sector
- Collect, curate, and digitize objects
- Engage with new writing formats and styles
- Balance the discoverability component of playing with digital tools with the very real possibility/probability of failure (“productive” failure)
- Explore and articulate ways that digital technologies may be used effectively and ethically.