Critical digital heritage: creation, use and re-use of surrogates from memory institutions

This framing essay accompanies, abstracts, and provides a justification of the intellectual significance of the published works submitted for review for the degree of PhD by publication. This essay explains how and why this research developed, and the broader context and background that shaped this work. It also provides an overview of the specialisation within digital humanities (DH) and digital heritage that has been the sustained focus of my research and the area in which my original contribution to knowledge has been made: the development of a critical framework for digital heritage that incorporates the digital lifecycle of creation, management and use of digital surrogates from memory institutions. Two major aspects of my work are emphasised. The first is that my research has been rooted in, and driven by, practical hands-on digital project development in the area of critical digital heritage across a wide range of institutions. My publications and research were developed in a career that has encompassed working in digital humanities, e-Research, and digital collections roles at a number of institutions in the UK and USA. The second is that I have actively sought to develop and formalise critical and theoretical frameworks to enhance implementation of digital methods and to facilitate the appraisal and analysis of these methods, and their enabling infrastructures. The development of a digital lifecycle for the management of digital heritage assets has been fundamental to this work, and the following discussion explains my role in developing and elaborating models of this life cycle in the early stages of digitization of collections in a wide range of galleries, libraries, archives and museums. The digital life cycle also provides a framework for analysing my work and drawing together its different aspects, illustrating the highly collaborative nature of digital humanities and digital heritage, and the ecosystem that fuses digital methods, content and tools. This essay draws together and explains the relationship between the theoretical and practice-led research that has underpinned my research and publications. Working at the intersection between digital humanities and digital heritage has allowed significant reflection on approaches to the collaborative building and making of digital heritage that bridge the interdisciplinarity and experimentation of digital humanities and the creation, management and use of information in cultural heritage, enabling a theoretical and practice-led critical framework for the production and consumption of knowledge in a digital age