Digital Cultural Heritage

Series editor(s): Dr Eirini Goudarouli (The National Archives), Dr Anna-Maria Sichani (School of Advanced Study) and Professor Jane Winters (School of Advanced Study)

A forum for exploring the past, present and future of digital cultural heritage, both digitised and born-digital. 

Digital cultural heritage exists in many contexts, from large museum, library and archive collections to other forms of digital content generated by individuals, communities, philanthropic organisations and commercial entities. It might be a single digital artwork, a collection of thousands of digitised images, an archive of billions of web pages, a 3D model, a computer game or even an item that is only represented by metadata. 

This transdisciplinary, open access series of short-form books interrogates digital cultural heritage in all its forms, focusing on the key themes of use, access, value(s) and ephemerality. It considers histories of digitisation; the unequal and uneven heritagisation of new forms of cultural data; how individuals and institutions can adapt their practice and processes to exploit digital cultural heritage effectively; how digital cultural heritage is communicated to wider publics; skills for working with digital archives and collections; the politics and economics of digitisation; the values encoded in the digitised and born-digital; and how digital cultural heritage is embedded in teaching and learning practice. 

We are inviting new proposals for short-form books (20,000–30,000 words) including monographs, multiauthored and edited volumes, surveys and syntheses, case studies, think pieces and more experimental forms of writing. Proposals are also encouraged for books with enhanced digital editions that include interactive, multimedia, networked or co-created content, which can be supported by UoL Press’s open access platform. 

Proposals should show a link to one or more of the series’ overarching themes – use, access, value(s) and ephemerality – and example topics include: 

• Social media as digital cultural heritage
• Histories of digital cataloguing and metadata practices
• Linked data and cultural heritage collections
• AI and cultural heritage
• Community archives and/as digital cultural heritage
• Researcher access to digital cultural heritage
• Public engagement with and expectations of digital cultural heritage
• Inclusive metadata for access to digital cultural heritage
• Ethical approaches to digital cultural heritage research
• The value(s) of digital cultural heritage
• Preservation strategies for born-digital heritage
• Skills and training for preserving and accessing born-digital heritage
• Environmentally sustainable approaches to working with digital cultural heritage
• The social, political and economic contexts of cultural heritage digitisation
• The evidentiary value of digitisation and digital preservation for cultural heritage

Series editorial advisory board:

• Georgia Angelaki, Europeana, National Documentation Centre, Greece
• Dorothy Berry, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
• Eric Brasil, University for the International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony, Brazil
• Beatrice Cannelli, Bodleian Libraries, UK
• Patricia Falcao, Tate, UK
• Anna Foka, Uppsala University, Sweden
• Órla Murphy, University College Cork, Ireland
• Sara Namusoga-Kaale, Makerere University, Uganda
• Julianne Nyhan, University College London, UK
• James Smithies, The Australian National University, Australia
• John Stack, The National Gallery, UK
• Lyneise Williams, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Founder, Vera Collaborative, USA
• Chiara Zuanni, University of Graz, Austria

Please see Submit a proposal if you have a book project you’d like to discuss.