Embracing the Archive (EA)
Engaging heritage and archive collections in a digital world. In recent decades, the archive has emerged as one of the key concepts and objects of critical heritage study in the 21st century. In tandem with this development has emerged a rapidly growing ecosystem of digital and digitized cultural heritage resources forging new challenges and opportunities in an increasingly globalised world. This cluster examines how engagement with archives and cultural heritage material, especially in digital form, impacts on knowledge production and the formation and articulation of individual and collective identity, memory, cultural values and power relations.
Combining scholarly and creative approaches, our aim is to develop innovative, collaborative, and participatory methodologies that explore complex societal and global challenges in relation to archives and the digital humanities. In particular the cluster investigates whether these flexible, digital and embracing models can enable people to think about themselves, their communities, their environment, their pasts, their aspirations and their futures in a new and transformative fashion.
The work within the cluster within 2018 is organized around the archival and digital humanities platforms drawing on interdisciplinary synergies between UCL and UGOT, recent theoretical developments in particular within archival science and digital humanities, external engagements, and Nordic and international networks. We will prioritize further developing joint UCL and UGOT projects and activities initiated in 2017, to enhance synergies and intensify critical and innovative cross border collaboration.
