Future of Digital Data, Heritage and Curation

Fiona R. Cameron is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia. Her research is directed to the figuration of museum and digital cultural heritage theory and curatorial practice for a more-than-human world.

'In this highly prescient and original account, Fiona Cameron interrogates the vexed future custodianship of digital data. By bringing her incisive cultural heritage studies knowledge to bear on our rapidly increasing entanglement with the born-digital archive of objects, data and media, The Future of Digital Data, Heritage and Curation advances a powerful conceptual framework for the curation and conservation of potentially every utterance of our private and public worlds: "Strikingly, digital data as heritage is not just the new fabric of human life, it is radically embedded in the vast and sprawling ecological circumstances of life itself."' Hannah Lewi, The University of Melbourne, Australia"This book offers an innovative new approach to digital cultural heritage. This is a fast moving but under-examined topic, but Fiona Cameron’s approach is different, focusing right in on central contemporary issues, using an up to the minute conceptual framework, engaging closely with museum theory and practice, and enlivened by lots of illustrations, examples, case studies and useful applications, everything from AI, Trump’s tweets, and sex bots to digitisation, informatics and museum CMS. In contrast to old fashioned humanist, materialist, Eurocentric approaches, Cameron argues that we have to understand digital cultural heritage through a lens which is ecological, post-humanist, and ‘more than human’. The idea of ‘eco-curating’ is a striking environmentalist/relational/networked reformulation of conventional curating as we know it."Conal McCarthy, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

• 1. Introduction: Refiguring digital cultural heritage and curation; 2. The official birth of digital data as universal heritage; 3. Digital data as the heritage of the modern world; 4. Object concepts in digital cultural heritage; 5. From objects to ecological formations; 6. Digital data and artifactual production; 7. Curating inside the archive and out in the world; 8. The rise of more-than-human digital heritage in the Technosphere; 9. Conclusion: Framing a more-than-human digital museology