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Location:Roland Wilson Building | 3.04 Seminar Room 3 (30)
Presentations
Digital Spatial Memories
Fiannuala Morgan1, Francesca Sidoti2, Heather Ford2, Claire Loughnan1, Michael Falk1
1University of Melbourne, Australia; 2University of Technology Sydney, Australia
What is a ‘memory place’, and what does it mean for places to be remembered digitally? Digital memory work has become a key theme in the spatial humanities, as scholars seek new ways to ‘perform’ spatial memories digitally (Mandolessi 2021), and seek new critical terms to understand the role of digital ‘memory places’ in society (Pentzold 2009). Digital reconstructions of place can be highly evocative, vividly recalling experiences and meanings that lie buried just beneath the soil; but they can also be alienating, burying past experiences and meanings beneath grainy geospatial data. In this panel, four practitioners in the spatial Humanities discuss digital methods for reconstructing memory places. Fiannuala Morgan describes her curation of the ‘Australian Bushfire Dataset’, and its publication as the ‘Historical Fires Near Me’ app. Claire Loughnan describes her work on ‘Against Erasure’, a pioneering forensic architecture project that reconstructs the destroyed Manus Island Prison in 3D. Francesca Sidoti and Heather Ford describe their qualitative study of the way Australian places are constructed digitally in Wikipedia. Michael Falk will moderate the session, and offer a short talk on the intersection between Digital Humanities and Memory Studies. Together the speakers will reflect on the ethics of memorialisation, and the way that memory places can be made and unmade using digital technology.