Upcoming conference will explore how born-digital culture transforms research

An upcoming conference hosted by the Digital Humanities Research Hub, Born-Digital Collections, Archives and Memory, will further an interdisciplinary discussion on how born-digital material transforms what and how we research in the humanities. The conference will bring together researchers and practitioners involved in accessing or developing born-digital collections and archives, and those interested in exploring the novel and transformative effects of born-digital cultural heritage. 

The conference will run from 2-4 April. A full programme is available to view online.

Addressing the importance of the conference, Dr Naomi Wells, Senior Lecturer in Languages and Digital Humanities and member of the conference organising committee, explained, “In recent decades, our cultural and social practices have increasingly moved to digital spaces, such as the internet and social media. As a result, we have seen the rapid expansion of cultural materials that originate in a digital form.”

Born-digital material includes anything that was originally created in digital form. This can include websites and other internet-based material – the kind of things people might be familiar accessing on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine – but also extends to emails, electronic literature, spreadsheets, software, and the digital and physical environments on which all of this material lives.

“Computers and the internet, software, and hardware – these words and many others have become part of everyday language over the last decades.  And while we might think of these things as inherently tied to the time we live in right now, the production, conceptualisation and use of digital technologies have for many years produced digital fragments which are key to understanding the history of our modern world,” said Dr Helle Strandgaard Jensen, Associate Professor of Contemporary Cultural History at Aarhus University, and member of the conference organising committee.

“Collecting, curating, analysing and making accessible these born-digital fragments will let current and future researchers and heritage professionals interpret our most recent past and pass it on to future generation. This is key if we want to understand what the digital revolutions have done to our societies.”

Examining key challenges

Researchers and institutions across the world are working on the technical, ethical, and methodological challenges presented by born-digital material. The UK Government’s recent consultation on copyright and AI and the proposed creation of a National Data Library make clear the legal and ethical issues surrounding born-digital culture and data will be central areas of policy and research interest in the coming decades.

This environment makes this research even more timely. Michael Donnay, Manager of the Digital Humanities Research Hub and member of the conference organising committee, said “The conference provides an opportunity to bring together practitioners from around the world who are working on these issues to share ideas, best practice, and challenges – ensuring that the perspective of humanities researchers and cultural heritage professionals are part of that larger conversation.”

Researchers at the School of Advanced Study have been at the forefront of this field. They were key contributors to the AHRC-funded project Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities, which aimed both to develop a theoretical and methodological framework within which to study the archive of the UK web from 1996-2013 and to engage scholars in the co-design of new analytical tools. The project produced what was then one of the largest full-text indexes of web archive (WARC) files in the world.

Cultural heritage implications

More recently, the several PhD graduates from the Hub have made born-digital culture the focus of their research. Staff from the Hub work also closely with partners in the cultural heritage sector, including with the UK Web Archive at the British Library and UK Government Web Archive at The National Archives, to help build capacity in the sector for working with born-digital material.

Dr Beatrice Cannelli, a recent graduate from the Digital Humanities Research Hub has worked closely with cultural heritage institutions to highlight how organisations across the world are working to archive social media content, despite the many technical and legal challenges involved. As she points out, "Content generated on social platforms provides unique insights into societal, political, and economic dynamics, making it difficult to imagine future researchers studying contemporary events without access to this invaluable source of information."  

The School maintains close connections with other organisations working in this space. Two key partners in this area are the Digital Preservation Coalition, which works with its members across the world to ensure a sustainable future for our digital assets beyond the limits of technical obsolescence, media degradation and organisational change, and the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme, which supports teams and communities to create born-digital resources that document material practices and knowledge systems that are rapidly disappearing across the globe. Both organisations are generously supporting the conference.

Convening interdisciplinary expertise

Researchers studying born-digital culture come from a wide range of disciplines and so this conference aims to bring them together to share best practice, explore common challenges and discuss the evolving research landscape. 

Professor Jane Winters, Professor of Digital Humanities and Director of the Digital Humanities Research Hub, explained, “As part of the School of Advanced Study, the Digital Humanities Research Hub has an important role to play in convening experts who can bring humanities expertise to bear on questions of contemporary significance. The flagship international conference is an important mechanism for doing this, as will be the launch of a new book series on Digital Cultural Heritage with University of London Press.”

Around 300 people will be attending, with presenters including representatives from a range of disciplines and major national and international cultural heritage institutions and web archiving initiatives, such as The Internet Archive, Digital Preservation Coalition, National Library of Norway, Royal Danish Library, Art Gallery of New South Wales, British Library, Science Museum Group, The V&A, National Theatre and the National Archives.

Join us

The conference will include a public lecture by Dorothy Berry, Digital Curator for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, titled “Looking Back Through Opaque Glasses: What Born-Digital Archives Can Learn from Analog”. This lecture is free to attend and a recording will also be shared after the event. 

For more information and to register, please visit the website.