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Art & Art History
University of Mississippi

Public or Perish: Charting a Path for the Future of Digital Heritage

ETHAN WATRALL
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Michigan State University

The domain of heritage is living in an age in which “the digital” impacts all aspects of scholarship and practice. Curation, preservation, documentation, research, teaching, management, public outreach and engagement – all are inextricably intertwined with digital methods and computational approaches. But where does heritage go from here? What does the future of digitally inflected work within the domain look like?

Drawing upon a diverse range of examples from institutions, scholars, practitioners, and projects, this talk argues that the path forward for scholarship and practice in digital heritage is first and foremost publicly engaged. It is a future in which the practice of digital heritage is fundamentally collaborative and community driven, and the outcomes are open and discoverable, useful and usable.