CALL FOR PAPERS
International Symposium on Evaluating Digital Cultural Resources (EDCR 2016)
Glasgow, Kelvin Hall, 12-13 December 2016
Organized by the Scottish Network on Digital Cultural Resources Evaluation
Submission deadline: Friday, 7 October 2016
SCOPE AND CONTEXT
Digital technologies are affecting all aspects of our lives, reshaping the way we communicate, learn, and approach the world around us. In the case of cultural institutions, digital applications are used in all key areas of operation, from documenting, interpreting and exhibiting the collections to communicating with diverse audience groups. The communication of collections information in digital form, whether an online catalogue, mobile application, museum interactive or social media exchange, increasingly affects our cultural encounters and shapes our perception of cultural organisations. Although cultural and higher education institutions around the world are heavily investing on digitisation and working to make their collections available online, we still know very little about who uses digital collections, how they interact with the associated data, and what the impacts of these digital resources are.
ORGANISERS
The symposium is organized by the Scottish Network on Digital Cultural Resources Evaluation (ScotDigiCH), which is funded by The Royal Society of Edinburgh. ScotDigiCH is co-ordinated by the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), at the University of Glasgow in collaboration with The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow, Glasgow Life Museums, the Moving Image Archive of the National Library of Scotland and the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Strathclyde.
AIMS AND QUESTIONS
The symposium seeks to address this gap by bringing together interested parties from a range of disciplines (e.g. computing science, digital humanities, museology, social sciences), practices and sectors to set an agenda for research and discuss the latest developments on evaluating the use of cultural digital resources. The symposium will address:
- Who uses digital cultural resources, where and how
- Diverse users’ needs and expectations (i.e. from schoolchildren and families to students and researchers)
- Impact and value of digital cultural resources
- Ways of recording and assessing impact and value
- Implications for policy and future strategies
The programme will include a public lecture on the afternoon of the 12th December by Dr Mark O’Neill, Director for Policy and Research at Glasgow Life.
The symposium will also include an open evening dedicated to exploring the digital collections at the new state-of-the-art collections research facilities at Kelvin Hall, one of Glasgow’s iconic landmarks.
IMPORTANT DATES
- Submission deadline: Friday, 7 October 2016
- Notification of acceptance: Monday, 31 October 2016
- Symposium dates: Monday and Tuesday, 12 and 13 December 2016, Kelvin Hall, Glasgow
THEMES
The symposium will appeal to academics and practitioners working in a range of disciplines: cultural heritage workers, arts professionals and scholars interested in issues relating to digital resources and their impact upon preservation, education, engagement and outreach. We invite presentations and discussions of both theoretical and practical approaches, efforts and trends in this emergent field.
Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers that engage with the main themes of the symposium (see also Aims and Questions above):
- Models of access to digital collections
- Crowdsourcing, co-creation, co-curation in digital cultural heritage
- Evaluating impact and use of digital cultural resources (methodologies, approaches and issues)
- Moving from impact to value when assessing digital resources
Proposals might cover the following topics:
- Curation of digital collections
- Working with communities in digital cultural heritage
- Participatory models of work
- Methods of evaluating digital resources
- User studies
- Metrics, webmetrics, infometrics and usage statistics
- Crowdsourcing and citizen science in cultural heritage
- Assessing impact and value
- Social media usage research
Presentations will be 20 minutes in length, followed by time for questions and discussion.
A selection of accepted papers will be published as a special issue of a peer reviewed journal.
HOW TO SUBMIT A PROPOSAL
Proposals should consist of an extended abstract (approximately 500 to 700 words excluding references) that explains how the paper relates to the key themes of the symposium. Furthermore, each abstract should outline the aims, research questions, methods, main findings and underlying work of the proposed paper.
Please use the document template available at the symposium web site https://scotdigich.wordpress.com/events/symposium/call-for-papers/ and follow the instructions for submitting your proposal by Friday, October 7, 2016.
REGISTRATION
Registration to the symposium will be free of charge but participants will need to register through Eventbrite. Please register separately for the public lecture and open evening.
TRAVEL BURSARIES FOR EARLY CAREER RESEARCHERS/PROFESSIONALS AND STUDENTS
A limited number of travel bursaries are available to postgraduate students and early-career researchers to facilitate their participation at the workshop. For more information please contact ScotDigiCH@gmail.com.
CONFERENCE WEBSITE
https://scotdigich.wordpress.com/events/symposium/
Please pass this on to anyone who might be interested in these topics.
We hope to see you in Glasgow soon!
With best regards,
From the EDCR2016 symposium organising committee
Dr Maria Economou
Joint Curator / Lecturer
HATII & The Hunterian, University of Glasgow
maria.economou@glasgow.ac.uk
—
Scottish Network on Digital Cultural Resources Evaluation
Humanities Advanced Technology Information Institute (HATII)
University of Glasgow
https://scotdigich.wordpress.com
http://www.gla/ac/uk/school/humanities/research/hatiiresearch/projects/currentresearchprojects
@ScotDigiCH