Digitization of historical heritage

or – how to test the future of making the past accessible

Lecturer: Mgr. Martina Orosová, PhD.

Form of teaching: lecture with seminar (P:0,75 / S:1,25)

ECTS: 4

Objective:

The course is intended mainly for study programmes in archival studies, museology and digitization of historical heritage, history of art, aesthetics, history, archaeology, but also for students interested in the use of modern technologies in the documentation and providing access to historical heritage.

Students will receive information on how the imaging of historical objects has evolved from the earliest times (camera obscura, physical models) through 2D-models to interactive 3D-models. With the help of simple software, they gain knowledge about the origin or further existence of an architectural or, in a narrower sense, artistic work from maps, images or written sources. At the end they will independently collect and analyse this information in the form of a seminar paper.

Brief outline:

Introduction (digital immigrants and digital natives)
Basic terminology
Digital turn, 3D-visualization of (historical) objects
Methodology of the digitization process (from the preparation of the material to making the digitized material available to the public)
Practical exercises (digitization directly at the department – working with glass and celluloid negatives of several sizes, celluloid and photographic paper positives)
Memory portals and adding metadata
Digitization internship at a selected memory institution facilitated by the department (usually an archive or museum) of 20 hours of physical digitization and 15 hours at home adding metadata.

Prerequisites for the course:

Completion of a final colloquium or presentation of the results of your internship (20% of the grade) and a well-crafted digitization in a selected memory institution culminating in the addition of metadata to a publicly accessible memory portal (80%). The lecturer accepts a maximum of 3 absences.

Reccommended literature:

Online tutorials as recommended by the instructor.