Course overview
Digital heritage augments, transforms, preserves and communicates the cultural significance and value of real-world heritage. Despite impressive recent advances and increasingly accessible software and hardware, the digital heritage field faces critical challenges. For example, digital heritage experts have noted even large and expensive projects can suddenly vanish or become inoperable and obsolete; a phenomenon they termed the vanishing virtual. In this course, the advances and challenges of the digital (virtual, interactive, mobile, wearable and immersive technologies) applied to cultural heritage are reviewed, in Australia and internationally. Students will explore recent trends in digital collections, digital media, and digital archives; creative AI; extended reality (AR, MR, VR; cyberculture, virtual worlds, and the metaverse.
Course learning outcomes
- Critically evaluate and respond to challenges facing the Australian heritage sector
- Analyse the place of First Nations communities and the challenges and opportunities of applying digital technology to help support preserve and communicate their storytelling and values systems
- Demonstrate a nuanced understanding of the advances and challenges of digital heritage in Australian and globally
- Identify and critically analyse scholarship relating to digital heritage, its impact, usefulness, and relation to current social and environmental challenges
- Think critically through speculative design about the ways in which digital heritage can encapsulate, augment, or threaten traditional methods to preserve and disseminate the past
- Use their creative strengths and skills to transmit digital solutions to current challenges facing the GLAM sector
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