[1] Crisis, Accessibility, and Preservation: Digitizing Medieval Heritage in a Changing World.
BLAGO Fund Sponsored Session

From: Ivana Lemcool/ BLAGO Fund
Date:
Deadline: 25.09.2023

The current global crises, such as climate change, political instability, armed conflicts, and social unrest, are not only harmful to our present and future, but they also pose a threat to the preservation of historical monuments and artifacts. For many of them, particularly those from the Middle Ages, digital documenting and archiving have been matters of urgency and utmost necessity and, in some cases, their only means of preservation.
Various digital tools have enabled us to envision, reconstruct, and virtually experience spaces and objects that have been destroyed or that are less accessible to a wider audience. In numerous instances, digitization has provided researchers with invaluable data they could not have been able to obtain otherwise. Also, it offered a risk-free, time-saving, and cost-efficient alternative to travelling and visiting sites and collections in person, benefiting both the scholarly community and the general public.
This session seeks papers that address present practices and past achievements in the field of digital humanities, which demonstrate developments conducive to the accessibility, popularization, and conservation of medieval cultural heritage. We welcome proposals from scholars, museum workers, librarians, and cultural professionals at various career stages whose work involves or has been significantly advanced by the employment of digital methods. Please send 200-250 word abstracts for 15-minute presentations to Ida Sinkevic (sinkeviclafayette.edu) and Ivana Lemcool (ivana.lemcoolblagofund.org) by 25 September 2023.
Blago Fund, which is sponsoring the session, is an organization devoted to the preservation and promotion of Serbian cultural heritage, primarily through the creation of online digital collections that preserve detailed visual records of architectural elements, interior decoration, and the surroundings of churches and monasteries built on the territories of the Serbian medieval state. Owing to the efforts of volunteers and experts from the fields of photography, art history, and internet technologies, all the material created is readily available on the Blago Fund website under a CC license.