Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DISCULTHER (Digitalization of Cultural Heritage as Discursive Practice: Mapping the Museums and Citizens-led Initiatives in Graz and Novi Sad)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-10-02 bis 2025-10-01
The DISCULTHER project addresses the critical challenges of digitalizing cultural heritage (DCH). It aims to advance knowledge and interdisciplinary approaches in the study of museums, heritage, and digitalization. To this end, the project has opened a dialogue between the fields of sociology, cultural heritage, museology, and digital humanities. The project examined how DCH practices, identified on a discursive level, manifest in institutional settings (museums) and activist settings (citizen-led initiatives and cultural organizations). The project compared experiences in two cities: Graz, Austria, and Novi Sad, Serbia. The project's results are expected to contribute to the fields of the social sciences and humanities. In addition to establishing an interdisciplinary research framework and promoting the topic as a relevant contemporary issue in academic settings, the project's findings are expected to inform cultural institution practices and policies, particularly those of museums. Additionally, DISCULTHER will develop an approach to support further scientific research in the field by facilitating high-level, interdisciplinary collaboration and outcomes.
During the project period, extensive research, training, and dissemination activities were conducted, including: 1) training of the researcher to further develop professional competencies and the research profile as an interdisciplinary researcher by enhancing knowledge in digital methods (participation in courses, workshops, and summer schools at the Universities of Graz, Edinburgh, Cambridge, and Utrecht); 2) fieldwork research, including conducting interviews with experts in cultural heritage and digitalization (in Graz and Novi Sad) and online data collection; 3) dissemination of results through scientific conference presentations (at the universities in Graz, Rabat, Philadelphia, Augsburg, Magdeburg, and Ljubljana), article publication (two journal articles published, one book chapter in print, and one co-authored journal article under review) and book draft (to be published one year after the project finishes, with Transcript Verlag), public lectures and public presentations (including one master’s and one PhD course workshop at the University of Graz, a roundtable discussion organized by Museumsbund Austria – #digiRoundtable at the MAK Museum in Vienna, project fair poster presentation and lunchtime lecture at the DDH University of Graz, presentation in the lecture series “Critical Heritage Studies” of the Arqus Network, University of Leipzig, European Young Researchers’ Night – online, and European Researchers’ Night in Graz); 4) transfer of knowledge activities, including the organization of the “International Conference European Cultural Memory in Its Digitalization – Inventing Cultural Memory in the 21st Century?”, followed by the co-edited issue of the journal Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture (De Gruyter Brill, to be published after the project finishes); organization of a series of lectures (“Lunchtime Lectures”) at the Department of Digital Humanities, University of Graz, and the organization of the international workshop “Digital Archives as Spaces for Collaborative Research Practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences” at the University of Graz; 5) outreach in the digital sphere through a LinkedIn account and the websites of the DDH University of Graz and the Field of Excellence – Dimensions of Europe, publication of two essays (one on the “Museumsbund Austria” web portal in English and one on the “Korzo” web portal in Serbian).
The project has produced new insights into the study of cultural heritage, generating results that advance interdisciplinarity in the field. Notably, a novel multi-method approach and theoretical framework for studying cultural heritage and digitalization have been developed, and the project has contributed an open-access dataset and publications for future research. These outcomes have also been disseminated beyond academic settings, reaching other interested public, researchers, and practitioners in the field. This is evidenced by the main published outputs, including journal articles, a book chapter, online essays, social media activities, and public lectures. The key innovations of the project are twofold: first, the development of a theoretical framework of critical genealogical cosmopolitanism for the study of cultural heritage and digitalization, particularly in the context of European history and heritage (already published in an article and planned for further development in a book); second, the creation of a multi-method framework for heritage research, combining qualitative methodologies, such as situational analysis and the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse, with digital methods and tools, including the applied Machine Learning technique of Topic Modelling. As the project results have been presented in public and online, the impact is expected to extend beyond academic and university settings.