Accessibility in the Cyberspace: Teaching 3-D Digitisation Methods for Cultural Preservation Workshop

Description

Convenors: Adil Mian and Jendayi Omowale

Cambridge Digital Humanities is funding this digitisation workshop, held in collaboration with the Sandbach Tinne Archive and the Anti-Colonial Archives Working Group. It aims to democratise access to digital and archiving methods as well as knowledge.

Workshop Overview:

Global majority and indigenous people often face cultural erasure through material colonialism. This workshop aims to equip participants with skills that facilitate dignity and respect for one’s relation to heritage materials by using free/low-cost software and technology that is readily available for minimal standard reconstruction of 3-D objects and digitisation of documents and other 2-D archival material.

This in-person, entirely interactive, workshop will teach participants a thorough workflow;

• Starting from capturing footage of material to be digitised,
• Creating a 3-D reconstructions of objects,
• Uploading the scanned object into an archive with metadata.

Audience:

The workshop is open to all. We encourage participants from global majority and low-income backgrounds in an effort towards community restorative action, particularly in the practice of material cultural preservation. We highly encourage any potential participants, particularly from the aforementioned backgrounds, to contact us if there are any concerns in relation to accessibility or other needs that may hinder signing up!

Funding for participants:

In order to broaden access to the workshop we are offering travel funding for participants. As funding is limited please use the application form to indicate if you would like to be considered for a bursary. Please note we will only fund ground travel from within the UK. If you need a travel bursary, you must indicate that on the application form by June 1st. If you’ve been selected for a travel bursary but can no longer make the workshop, we ask that you tell us as soon as possible or before the day of travel

Sandbach Tinne Material has been kindly donated by Malik Al-Nasir from his personal collection to be used for the workshop as sample material, which agrees with our ethos on working towards decolonisation within digital humanities and highlighting unjust archival narratives. Participants will have the opportunity to contribute to Malik’s archive by scanning and digitising, for the first time, the donated material.  More can be found out about the collection here.

Convernor information:

Adil Ghafoor Mian are a first-generation Pakistani-British muslim, their current practice focuses on environmental disaster mitigation in Pakistan, particularly developing ethical tools for flood mitigation, through collaboration with Cambridge University. They are also currently a facilitator within the ھ و (Ho) collective, which is working towards building regenerative communal practices between STEM and other fields.

 

 

 

Jendayi Omowale is a Caribbean-American filmmaker and writer focused on telling the narratives of those marginalised in the historical archive. They have worked for over four years as a journalist, including writing for the likes of Apartment Therapy, Condé Nast, and being an editor at The Interlude Magazine. Currently, they run an award-winning documentary series about Black artists and art history called BlackArrogance! which was awarded an NYU Diversity Reporting Grant, IMDb-qualifying Onyko Films Award, Best Documentary at 2021 NYC Webfest, Best Story at Genre TV Film Festival and officially selected for both the Berlin Lift-off Film Festival and Miami WebFest. They have an MPhil in World History from Cambridge University, with their dissertation looking at the role of Kittitian and Nevisian plantation societies in the political and legislative policies of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. For her undergraduate degree, they studied Journalism and Dramatic Literature with a minor in history and graduated with honours from New York University.