The Centre for Global Heritage and Development together with the Huygens Institute, the IISG, the University of Western Sydney and Curtin University (Perth) have been granted a NIAS-Lorentz workshop on the theme of Migrant Heritage: "Migrant (R)e-Collections". A NIAS-Lorentz Workshop has the specific goal to act as a bridge between fields from the Social Sciences and/or Humanities and the Natural and/or Technological Sciences.
All over the world migrants have left multiple traces, deep traces that are indispensable for the fostering of heritage communities and for research in the humanities and social sciences. Yet the growing societal demand for cultural services and the increasingly insufficient resources available to manage migrants’ cultural heritage is creating a gap -- one difficult to bridge even as the importance of cultural heritage to a country’s economy and social capital is widely recognized.
This workshop will respond to this key challenge of how to preserve and enhance transnational public and community memory practices through new digital technologies. Because heritage can be both a focus of research and a source for cultural engagement, especially in the construction of meaning and identity, new digital architectures and new digital preservation techniques and Linked Open Data standards offer new possibilities for scholars and migrant community members alike.
The central research question addressed in this workshop therefore is how to develop standards and strategies for linking the diverse resources through digital methods, community governance and sustainable practices. It explores cultural heritage from a wide range of social science and humanities perspectives and disciplines that include leading representatives from academia, the archives, libraries and museums (both public and private) sector. It provides a distinctive and major intersection into contemporary memory mediation practices as currently researched, understood and practiced around the world within the context of developing an international standard for linking collections.
Bringing together for the first time ever global leaders working in cultural heritage and digital technologies, this workshop will examine memory institution practices at both the public and private level in a time of profound social, political and technological change.
The workshop "Migrant (R)e-Collections" will take place from August 22-26 2016 in Leiden. Please contact Mara de Groot for more information.