Digitizing Culture Challenges, Opportunities and Lessons Learned Leslie Chan University of Toronto at Scarborough Multicultural Canada Conference, May.

Digitizing CultureChallenges, Opportunities and Lessons Learned

Leslie Chan

University of Toronto at Scarborough

Multicultural Canada Conference, May 31-June 2, 2006, Vancouver, British Columbia

For historians, one of the great promises of digital technology is its potential to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past (2006).

Roy Rosenzweig, Founder and Director of the Center on History & New Media (CHNM), George Mason Universityhttp://chnm.gmu.edu

•Reconstituting Cultures in Cyberspace•Connecting the diasporas

• Digitization • Modes of Production

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

• Epublishing - what is it?• Access - importance• Teaching and leaning in digital space• Recommendations

Video The Global Gathering Place Inspector Relic

What we didn’t know

• If we build it, they will come• Design for the online environment• Persuasive hypertext• Metadata, standards, long-term

preservation• Institutional buy-in• Academic legitimacy• Sustainability

Digitization

• From analog to binary• Is selective - sampling• Remediation - representation of one

medium in another (Bolter and Grusin, 1999)

• Requires new interpretive frameworks

• Challenges authenticity and authority

Online and invisible

• How to overlay information onto the physical world and into the past?

• Lessons from Google Earth

Modes of production

• Cathedral or the the Bazaar?• Collaborative commons-based

production• Institutional barriers• Disciplinary boundaries• Academic conventions

Access

• Increasing commodification of knowledge• Ensuring access to public Internet materials for educational

uses?

“We want the new Copyright Bill to reflect the reality of Internetusage today and not support outdated and unsustainable business models that limit access to publicly available Internet materials.”

"We believe that Canadian students and educators have a right to use publicly available materials on the Internet without a copyright collective charging a licensing fee for access.”

May 30, 2006 , Education Minister Jamie Muir, Nova ScotiaCopyright Consortium Chair, Council of Ministers of Educationwww.cmec.ca

Learning

• Margaret Mead, Culture and Commitment (1970) Cultural Styles:

Postfigurative Cofigurative PrefigurativeConcepts “bound to the past,

could provide no models for the future”

Recommendations

• Use the Web as a social space• Promote participatory design• Use open source and open standards• Ensure broad and open access • Better understanding of learners’ needs• Work collaboratively and across disciplines • Provide adequate education and training

for knowledge media design