From Digitisation to Co-Production: Embedding Community Engagement into Digital Humanities Projects

Watch a video recording of this lecture.

Cultural Heritage organisations, including libraries, museums and archives, have been collaborating with academics for many years in the construction of digital humanities projects, tools, and digital archives. These partnerships have produced valuable outputs for scholarship, but they have rarely been able to create impact beyond the academy. The presentation will discuss the concept of co-production, and how lessons learned from cultural heritage organisations, and the communities they engage with, can inform the future development of digital humanities projects in ways that are beneficial to communities outside the academy. The presentation will discuss specifically the development of cymru1914.org, a digital archive relating to the history of the First World War as it affected Wales, as an example of this approach, and discuss how embedding community engagement in the development of a digital humanities project can increase its impact.