The digital is transforming culture. This workshop will explore ‘digital public spaces’, with the aim of developing perspectives on how digital culture both challenges and opens up new imaginaries of public space.

Digital public space might change the way we think of physical public spaces such as libraries, museums and archives. In 2015 the former Controller of Archive Development at the BBC, Tony Ageh, used the term to describe a new public access layer of the Internet that would enable the convergence of cultural heritage and broadcasting collections through digital media. Another project, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), functions as an aggregating platform that makes the collections of America’s libraries and research organisations ‘freely available to the world’ (DPLA website, 2017).

While such initiatives are premised on well-established notions of public access to knowledge, and informed by recent ‘digital commons’ debates, there has been a growing recognition that the privatised infrastructure of the Internet profoundly challenges these ideas and assumptions about public space embedded in the institutional identities of many public-facing organisations. Interpreting and debating digital public spaces is therefore an urgent task.

The workshop will invite scholars from the digital humanities and digital sociology, political science, cultural and media studies, and cultural policy and heritage studies, to discuss changing conceptions of public space in the contemporary media and political environment. It aims to contribute to debates about everyday digital culture and reflect on the implications of the Internet as ‘a privately owned public medium’ (Chun 2016).

Thanks to support from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), we are able to offer a limited number of travel bursaries for up to £30, on provision of receipts, for travel to and from the workshop (allocated on a first come, first served basis). To apply for a bursary, please email Elizabeth Stainforth at: v1estain@exseed.ed.ac.uk

Schedule:

09:30-10:15 Registration and Coffee

10:15-10:30 Welcome and Opening Remarks

10:30-11:30 Panel 1 – Culture is Digital? New Imaginaries of Public Culture

Elizabeth Stainforth (IASH) – Shifting Landscapes of UK Digital Heritage Policy

Jen Ross (Edinburgh) – Duty to Care and Duty to Share: Institutional Tensions around Digital Open Access and Public Art Collections

11:30-12:00 Coffee

12:00-13:00 Panel 2 – Mapping Digital Public Spaces

Phil Sheail (Edinburgh) – Data Bodies in the Library

Julian Hartley (V&A Museum) – Public Museums and the Spatial Politics of Digital Cultural Heritage

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:00 Panel 3 – Understanding Digital Environments

Richard Coyne (Edinburgh) – Network Nature: Nature Setting as Public Space

Karen Gregory (Edinburgh) – Is the Public a 'Market'? Public Space, Privatising Platforms

15:00-15:30 Coffee

15:30-16:30 Roundtable

Dave O’Brien (Edinburgh)

Melissa Terras (Edinburgh)

Gill Hamilton (National Library of Scotland)

Harry Weeks (Edinburgh) (chair)

16:30-17:00 Closing Discussion

17:00 Reception