Digital Public Histories in a Divided World: Stories, Collaborations, Complexities, Futures

Description

Digital Public History in a Divided World: Stories, Collaborations, Complexities, Futures

This two-day conference in Belfast in September 2024 welcomes proposals from researchers, students, practitioners and creatives about digital public history.

How is digital technology shaping history in public contexts? How do innovations in fields such as AI and immersive technologies shape how the public and researchers interact with history? What are the opportunities, challenges and risks in digital public history – and for historians using these technologies? Which stories – whose stories – are we telling in a digital history world, and which are being pushed out? What is the (digital) future for public history? Does an AI want to take your job? Will human historians one day be replaced by machines?

Islandmagee Witches 1711 Creative and Digital Project

The ‘Islandmagee Witches 1711 Creative and Digital Project’, led by Dr Victoria McCollumand Dr Andrew Sneddon is an interdisciplinary, collaborative public history initiative designed to take an important (often overlooked) part of Northern Ireland’s intangible ‘dark’heritage and ‘difficult’ history to the wider public. Its outputs, in different ways and for different target audiences, use digital storytelling to tackle key issues/themes, including gender inequality, gender-based violence, social exclusion, and diversity. Blending cinematic aesthetic, historical understanding, and in-depth knowledge of digital and creative media the project has created the following outputs: an award-winning Virtual Reality application; an animated film; a graphic novel; a student performed play at the Riverside theatre in Coleraine; digitised original trial documents; a museum exhibition; a bespoke musical score,and a ‘serious’ video game.

For this talk, McCollum and Sneddon will focus on the ‘Islandmagee Witches’ video game and consider it in its public/contested history context, while discussing the problems of producing ‘difficult’ histories in places where the past is heavily contested. The game’s co-developers, Brian Coyle and Sabrina Minter will then conduct a walkthrough of the game,while discussing the creative process of working with Sneddon and McCollum to create a visually impressive, immersive and historically accurate ‘serious’ game: ‘serious’ as opposed to games created specifically for commercial and/or entertainment purposes without anticipated educational or learning outcomes.

Period	12 Sept 2024 → 13 Sept 2024
Event type	Conference
Location	Belfast, United KingdomShow on map