Creating Digital Collections
Full course description
In this course you will create a digital collection with 3D models at its centre. You will do this by considering the ethical, methodological, theoretical, and practical issues regarding collecting and curation, representation, reconstruction, and reproduction. Taking a project-based approach to PBL and working in small teams, you will collaboratively develop a digital collection of 3D objects in collaboration with a cultural heritage institution/project/initiative. You will utilise skills and competencies, such as project management, design thinking, content development, curatorial writing, technical integration, and multimodal narratives and storytelling. The 3D objects will be contextualised thematically for a specific audience, with interactive elements inviting readers to actively participate in knowledge creation. This course will explore, both theoretically and practically, the narrative being created in the design and presentation of artefacts while situating this collection within a conversation of other similar web-based artefacts, collections, and narratives. The collection should be thought of as both a medium and a rhetoric (in addition to a mode of dissemination), a way of communicating multimodally and interactively, creating arguments as powerful and persuasive as those we expect from long form arguments.
Course objectives
By the end of this course students will be able to reflect on issues brought about by the digitisation of material culture, while demonstrating knowledge and understanding of the theory and practice of using digital technologies and methods to digitise, disseminate, and promote material culture in three dimensions. Students will do this, via a team-based approach, through the production of 3D models and associated annotation and apparatus within a bespoke publishing environment for 3D scholarship.
Recommended reading
Conway, B. (2010). New Directions in the Sociology of Collective Memory and Commemoration. Sociology Compass, 4(7), 442–453. http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/8981/1/BC-New-2011.pdf
Di Giuseppantonio Di Franco, P., Galeazzi F., Vassalo, V. Eds (2018). Authenticity and cultural heritage in the age of 3D digital reproductions. McDonald Institute Conversations. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.27029
Doloughan, F. (2011). Contemporary Narrative: Textual Production, Multimodality and Multiliteracies. London and New York: Continuum.
Huvila, I. (2018). The subtle difference between knowledge and 3D knowledge. Hamburger Journal für Kulturanthropologie, 7, 99-111. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:gbv:18-8-11966
Schreibman, S. and Papadopoulos, C. (2019). Textuality in 3D: three-dimensional (re)constructions as digital scholarly editions. International Journal of Digital Humanities 1, 221–233. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-019-00024-6