Grant McNulty attends the Interdisciplinary Conference on Digital Cultural Heritage in Berlin
The Interdisciplinary Conference on Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) was held at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, Germany, from 28th – 30th October 2015. Dr Grant McNulty, Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative (APC), presented on the Five Hundred Year Archive (FHYA), a project of the APC that aims to create a digital archival exemplar pertinent to the southern African past before the advent of European colonialism. The exemplar aims to be a conceptually innovative intervention geared to engaging, in a critical manner, inherited forms of knowledge organisation.
The DCH conference provided the ideal space for McNulty to present findings from his post-doctoral research, the aim of which is to translate the conceptual thinking behind the FHYA into a technical specification for the development of the digital exemplar. The interdisciplinary conference offered McNulty an opportunity to present his work to a broad, mainly European, audience at a conference with a focus on the technical aspects of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional digital heritage initiatives. Conference participants included librarians, technologists, cartographers, academic researchers and professionals working in the digital cultural sector from libraries, universities, museums, private companies and institutes of technology as far afield as Hong Kong, Austria, the Czech Republic, Greece and Columbia. Presentations were wide-ranging and included work on developing open-source tools to integrate and present diverse cultural heritage collections, making accessible the holding of small cultural institutions and the digitisation of maps.
Although the FHYA is unique in its focus on the past before colonialism in what is now KwaZulu-Natal, the northern Eastern Cape and Swaziland, the conference proved very productive in terms of fine-tuning some of McNulty’s findings, as well as providing exposure to new ideas and technologies for the further development of the FHYA exemplar.