Digital Surrogates

Description

This course asks participants to learn about the process of creating digital surrogates with attention to issues of representation, engagement, and meaning. Beginning with the question “What does it mean to digitize an object?”, participants will be asked to consider the responsibilities of a digitization project as it is related to paid and unpaid labor, the ethics of working with digital material, and how decisions about technical standards and platforms can facilitate or limit future use of digitized materials. Framed via critical readings on feminist labor and digital humanities work, participants will be asked to consider their learning within their own individual and institutional values and support systems. Participants in the course will tour the University of Pennsylvania’s SCETI digitization lab, and will have opportunities for experimentation with various analog materials including manuscripts, printed materials, archival holdings, and material objects. Additionally, the course will include experts from UPenn working on the digitization pipeline including photographers, cataloguers, infrastructure specialists, and front-end developers. Topics covered during the course will also include the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), Linked Open Data (LOD), and how digitization frameworks must respond to material differences in the original artifacts.