This week marks the start of the third course for the first-year students of Master’s Programme in Digital Humanities. The course is titled ‘Digital Cultural Heritage’ and here is what teacher Nadzeya Charapan has to say about the course:

This introductory course provides you with a conceptual understanding of digital cultural heritage and fosters critical debates about the role of digitalisation in the production, preservation, and commodification of cultural recourses.

During the course, you will learn about digital approaches to cultural heritage; contemporary legal, social and ethical issues of digital transformation in the cultural heritage sector. 

A series of sessions with practitioners as well as a study visit to the digitalization laboratory at Uppsala University Library will promote the intake into contemporary professional practices, as well as existing challenges; and frame a more nuanced perception of digital cultural heritage in making.

The course is thematically connected to the forthcoming course “Digital Implementations in Heritage” and the focus is placed on: 

  • philosophical and epistemological foundations of cultural heritage and applications in the context of digital humanities;
  • ethical, legal, and social issues of production and dissemination of digital cultural heritage;
  • open access and its implications for cultural heritage. 

Following Digital Cultural Heritage is the course ‘Digital Implementations in Heritage’ where methods and tools that can be used to work with and process heritage materials are taught and discussed. Examples of such tools and methods are GIS, AI, text recognition, and OCR techniques.