Courses / Module

The early 21st century is seeing societal transformations as profound as the shift in the ancient world from a primarily oral culture to a written one, or the early modern revolution from the manuscript to print. The digital affects virtually every aspect of our lives: from the ways we communicate, to modalities of education, to the ways in which we make sense of the past and have glimpses into the future.

This stream will explore the transformation from the analogue to the digital in the study of our past providing innovative means to approach traditional fields of expertise. It will also focus on the diverse ways that new tools, methods, and technologies, and the vast amount of information available to us, from the World Wide Web to social media, augment our understandings of the present.

Students registering for this stream will delve into a number of technologies and methods that transform our engagement with primary data, including 2D and 3D visualisation, crowdsourcing, augmented and virtual reality, text encoding, serious games, and web archiving.

In addition to lectures, there will be hands-on labs and supervised practical exercises in which students will have the opportunity to learn by doing. Classes will encourage active learning through discussion, group work, and critical thinking exercises. The learning outcomes of the module will be assessed via continuous assessment that will provide feedback at various stages of the stream and will help students to identify the areas that require improvement.

The focus of the first part of the stream is on human artefacts, including archaeological objects, buildings, and landscapes from the distant and more recent past, as well as photographs from the time photography was invented in 1839 to date. Technology plays a major role in our everyday lives: analogue objects are substituted by digital, manual tasks are assisted by digital tools, and born-digital artefacts become increasingly common. This module will explore the analogue past, investigate the hybrid present, and problematise the digital future of acquiring, conserving, researching, communicating, interpreting, and exhibiting tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Students will be introduced to the transformations that the digital brings to the world of cultural heritage, will engage in discussions about different modalities of looking at and experiencing the past, and will experiment with different tools, methods, and technologies which are already used in the field of Digital Humanities, such as augmented reality, virtual reality, linked data, serious games etc. to produce alternative engagements with and interpretations of the past.