Can’t Touch This: Digital Approaches to Materiality in Cultural Heritage

Can’t Touch This: Digital Approaches to Materiality in Cultural Heritage

Chiara Palladino, Gabriel Bodard (eds.) 

What are the implications of digital representation on intellectual property and ownership of cultural heritage? Are aspirations to preservation and accessibility in the digital space reconcilable with cultural sensitivities, colonized history, and cultural appropriation?

This volume brings together different perspectives from academics and practitioners of Cultural Heritage, to address current debates in the digitization and other computational study of cultural artifacts. From the tension between the materiality of cultural heritage objects and the intangible character of digital models, we explore larger issues in intellectual property, collection management, pedagogical practice, inclusion and accessibility, and the role of digital methods in decolonization and restitution debates.

The contributions include perspectives from a wide range of disciplines, addressing these questions within the study of the material culture of Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas.

License

This is an Open Access book distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (unless stated otherwise), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Copyright is retained by the author(s).

Chapters

• Introduction

  Chiara Palladino & Gabriel Bodard

• Ceci n’est pas un temple. Visual secondary sources between representation and documentation

  Valeria Vitale

• Research resources of Japanese Mokkan: Turning information on ancient wooden tablets into research data

  Hajime Baba

• Description, translation and process: Making the implicit explicit in digital editions of ancient text-bearing objects

  Martina Filosa et al.

• Looking beyond the text: Opportunities and challenges in the digitisation of Sanskrit inscriptions

  Francesco Bianchini

• Materiality and community: Digital approaches to Ethiopic manuscript culture

  Daria Elagina

• Collaborative editing of sixteenth century Indigenous graphic manuscripts from Central Mexico

  Hayley Woodward et al.

• Not the same landscape. Rediscussing digital approaches to premodern spatial knowledge systems

  Chiara Palladino

• From Virtual Reality to virtual restitution: How 3D-Egyptology can contribute to decolonizing the field and the question of digital copies vs the original

  Rita Lucarelli

• Preserving the intangible: The challenges and responsibilities of documenting material knowledge practices and skills through digital media

  Paula Loreto Granados García & Ceri Ashley

• Skulls, skin and names: The ethics of managing heritage collections data online

  Rebecca Kahn & Rainer Simon

• Digital treatment of African cultural heritage: Shifting landmarks and implications for copyright exceptions for archives in Nigeria

  Chijioke Okorie