This symposium, sponsored by the SAH Historic Interiors Affiliate Group (HIG), will bring together Emerging Scholars and early-career professionals from across the globe to discuss digitality in relation to the study and practice of historic interiors. The shift to virtual work and learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has provoked lively debate among scholars and students about the benefits, and risks, of substituting digital platforms for built space. More sustained attention is required, however, to assess the impact of digital media on interiors as a discipline—particularly where the interiors involved predate digitization as either a resource or a methodology.
Addressing a wide range of issues from globalization to community access, preservation to pedagogy, this symposium will consider digital and new media from the perspective of the historic to elucidate the ways in which they interact with, improve, complicate, or threaten the study of traditionally material culture and analog records. Topics might include, but are not limited to, digital methods of research and conservation, such as 3D modeling or databasing of interiors archives; digital technology within the historic interior, including ‘smart’ displays and app-based guides; or interiors that are themselves digital, such as Zoom classrooms, Open Access libraries, and virtual museum tours. The aim of the symposium is proactively to reflect on how the digital informs not only how we, as historians, go about answering questions but also which questions we ask.
LINK to recording for Parts 1 and 2