Democratizing the Digital Collection: New Players and New Pedagogies in Three-Dimensional Cultural Heritage / Jane-Heloise Nancarrow

“Three-dimensional modeling and printing of museum artifacts have a growing role in public engagement and teaching—introducing new cultural heritage stakeholders and potentially allowing more democratic access to museum collections. This destabilizes traditional relationships between museums, collections, researchers, teachers and students, while offering dynamic new ways of experiencing objects of the past. Museum events and partnerships such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art “Hackathon”; the MicroPasts initiative; and Sketchfab for Museums and Cultural Heritage, encourage non-traditional methods of crowd-sourcing and software collaboration outside the heritage sector. The wider distribution properties of digitized museum artifacts also have repercussions for object-based and kinesthetic learning at all levels, as well as for experiential and culturally sensitive aspects of indigenous heritage. This article follows the existing workflow from model creation to classroom: considering the processes, problems, and applications of emerging digital visualization technologies from both a museum and pedagogical perspective.”

Nancarrow, Jane-Heloise. 2016. “Democratizing the Digital Collection: New Players and New Pedagogies in Three-Dimensional Cultural Heritage.” Museum Worlds; Oxford 4 (1): 63–77. https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2016.040106.

Sustainable Heritage Network

The Sustainable Heritage Network (SHN) “is an answer to the pressing need for comprehensive workshops, online tutorials, and web resources dedicated to the lifecycle of digital stewardship. The SHN is a collaborative project that complements the work of indigenous peoples globally to preserve, share, and manage cultural heritage and knowledge.”

Managed by the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation at Washington State University, the SHN is notable not only for sharing a rich set of online resources and an in-depth curriculum. The SHN partners have, since 2016, also run recurring in-depth workshops and provided lasting online workspaces to foster networks of indigenous cultural heritage practitioners through the Tribal Digital Stewardship Cohort program.

“The Sustainable Heritage Network.” n.d. Accessed October 8, 2018. https://sustainableheritagenetwork.org/.

Honoring the Dead: A Digital Archive of the Insane Indian Asylum / Stacey Berry

This case study describes the development of a digital collection focused on a federal detention facility for Native Americans, where the project managers were not from a Native American background. They describe their process of working closely with representatives from the Keepers of the Canton Native Asylum Story, a group of Native Americans stewarding the history and legacy of the asylum in South Dakota, and how they worked to make sure the digital collection and its display are in service to the Native cultural perspective.
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Values in Design

For over twenty years, Values in Design (VID) has been developed as both a theory and a method. VID research has analyzed a diverse set of technologies including human-computer interaction, robotics, mobile technologies, and web technology, and an equally diverse set of values such as privacy, trust, security, safety, community, freedom from bias, autonomy, freedom of expression, identity, dignity, calmness, compassion, and respect. Perhaps more important, VID means taking values into consideration in design practice — making it equally relevant to academics, technologists, and everyday people.

VID is a way of considering human life that explores how the values we think of as societal may be expressed in technological designs, and how these designs in turn shape our social values. In other words, technology is never neutral: certain design decisions enable or restrict the ways in which material objects may be used, and those decisions feed back into the myths and symbols we think are meaningful.

“About Values in Design.” n.d. Values in Design. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/vid/about.html.

See Also:

Bowker, Cory Knobel, Geoffrey C. 2011. “Values in Design.” Communications of the ACM, 2011. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/7/109899-values-in-design/fulltext.
Flanagan, Mary, Daniel C. Howe, and Helen Nussenbaum. 2008. “Embodying Values in Technology: Theory and Practice.” In Information Technology and Moral Philosophy, edited by Jeroen Van den Hoven and John Weckert. Cambridge England ; New York: Cambridge University Press. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.467.8021&rep=rep1&type=pdf#page=335.

 

 

WITNESS: See It, Film It, Change It

WITNESS identifies critical situations and teach those affected by them the basics of video production, safe and ethical filming techniques, and advocacy strategies, making it possible for anyone, anywhere to use video and technology to protect and defend human rights. Includes guides for activists to archive their work and training materials for activists working in the field.