CAFe Speaker Series: Linking, sharing and using community generated digital content: using and sustaining citizen histories
Community Events Research Talks/Events
Date/Time: Wednesday, December 1, 2021 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location: Virtual
Speaker: Lorna M. Hughes, PhD, MAE
Professor of Digital Humanities
Dean for Global Engagement (Europe)
University of Glasgow
Lorna M Hughes MAE is Professor of Digital Humanities and Dean for Europe at the University of Glasgow. Her research addresses the creation of digital cultural heritage, and the use and re-use of digital collections for research, teaching, and public engagement. She has a specific interest in the conceptualisation, development, implementation and categorisation of digital methods in the humanities. She has had leading roles on over twenty funded research projects, is Chair of the Europeana Research Advisory Board, and is Vice Chair and a member of the Governing Board of EuroScience. Lorna is Principal Investigator of the AHRC Towards a National Collection Discovery Project ‘Our Heritage, Our Stories’.
In the past two decades communities have adopted digital technologies to gather and record their collections in a form of ‘citizen history’, based on Community-Generated Digital Content (CGDC), that has created a truly democratic and vast reservoir of new knowledge about the past. This reservoir could immeasurably enrich our national and global understanding, but remains largely untapped, hard to find, and at risk of disappearing altogether: the Digital Preservation Coalition has declared it ‘critically endangered’, in a crisis of sustainability and usability due to technological and organisational barriers.
This talk will discuss the urgent challenges of discovery and sustainability in CGDC, and the need for new approaches in information management and technology innovation to address these challenges. This talk will discuss post-custodial and Artificial Intelligence solutions to dissolve barriers and link community collections to UK’s The National Archives (TNA) and to local and national heritage organisations, and approaches to make CGDC more discoverable and accessible whilst respecting and embracing its complexity and diversity.