The plight of digitizing culture in one cartoon

“It’s unsettling to realize how quickly digital resources can disappear without ongoing work to maintain them.” Thanks to my friend Daniel Schuldt for sharing this with me.

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Cultural Heritage Preservation of Traditional Indian Art through Virtual New-Media

Traditional art and craft, practiced by various craft-guilds in the country are the evidence of Indian cultural heritage. Though the narratives depicted in the form of painted façade or scroll-paintings are the genesis of traditional Indian visual language, the scarcity of public awareness and seclusion from the mass is becoming […]

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Does Information Really Want to be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness

The “information wants to be free” meme was born some 20 years ago from the free and open source software development community. In the ensuing decades, information freedom has merged with debates over open access, digital rights management, and intellectual property rights. More recently, as digital heritage has become a […]

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Reviving extinct languages the mobile way

Excerpt from source: Sunkanmi Olaleye – a master’s student in computer science – is investigating how novel mobile technology can interface with African digital heritage documents as a way of preserving the extinct |Xam language. “So many languages in Africa are becoming extinct. There’s this craving for English, at the […]

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Creating Digital Heritage content: bridging communities and mediating perspectives

In this paper we focus our attention on an often overlooked aspect of digital heritage content, namely by whom how, and with what purpose such content is created. We evaluate digital materials that are anthropological and archaeological in nature, both digitized archives and newly created materials. In our work and […]

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Patrimony, Power and Politics: Selecting, Constructing and Preserving Digital Heritage Content in South Africa and Africa

Memory institutions in South Africa and Africa, as digital heritage content creators and custodians, are engaging in a political, social, ideological and technological site of struggle. The decisions about what to digitise for long term preservation, why and also how this information is made accessible, speaks to notions of information […]

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Australian Aboriginal Virtual Heritage

Cultural knowledge is a central tenant of identity for Aboriginal people and it is vitally important that the preservation of heritage values happens. Digital Songlines is a project that seeks to achieve this and was initiated as a way to develop the tools for recording cultural heritage knowledge in a […]

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Journal of Interactive Humanities

The humanities have begun to embrace digital technology as a means of expressing scholarship and thought. However, it has become apparent that humanities content cannot simply be transferred into these new media. The humanities may be making the mistake it has observed of other fields: “Part of the problem seems […]

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Measuring the Impact of Digital Resources: The Balanced Value Impact Model

This paper introduces an innovative new model for measuring the impact of digital heritage resources – the Balanced Value Impact Model. The Balanced Value Impact Model (BVI Model) brings together into a holistic framework aspects from disparate Impact Assessment (IA) disciplines into a cohesive and logical process. This model balances […]

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Towards effective management & preservation of digital cultural heritage resources

Abstract In today’s world of digital technologies, cultural heritage institutions, particularly in developed countries, are seeking ways to create national digital memories for the future of the citizenry. However, rapidly developing technologies and their concomitant technological obsolescence put future memories at risk. The challenge is enormous in developing countries that, […]

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Digital Preservation in a Box

Digital Preservation in a Box is a product of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s (NDSA) Outreach Working Group and is designed as a toolkit to support outreach activities that introduce the basic concepts of preserving digital information. The DPB provides the best available resources and tools to help you communicate […]

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Digital heritage in a Melanesian context: authenticity, integrity and ancestrality from the other side of the digital divide

This article examines how digital heritage, in the form of 3D digital objects, fits into particular discourses around identity, ancestrality and cultural transmission in Melanesia. Through an ethnographic analysis of digital heritage use amongst the Nalik community in New Ireland (Papua New Guinea), it demonstrates how digital heritage is understood […]

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