Start – Programm
#Digitization – Arbeitstagung 2014 in Hamburg
Bilingual Conference in German and English
Within a relatively short time span, digital technologies have intruded into all parts of life. At the same time, technologies themselves keep evolving and are constantly being refined. Terminal points of these refinements do not seem discernible yet, and thus further innovations will continue to enter everyday practice. The international working conference takes up discussions in this context of the digitization and mediatization of modern life worlds. It addresses the widely claimed necessity to reflect these changes in cultural theory.
The bilingual conference (German and English) takes on national and international approaches on digitization. It discusses what digitization means in diverse cultural fields and sharpens the anthropological understanding by contrasting it with ideas from neighboring disciplines, such as media studies, sociology, or museum studies. It aspires to provide space for extensive debate and to discursively develop approaches from the perspective of cultural anthropology. In this spirit a major part of the conference will be conducted in workshop sessions which are going to be based on preliminary readings of different theoretical or methodical aspects, discussed within the workshops themselves. Prior to the conference, these texts are going to be provided via the online platform https://iversty.org to promote well informed discussions.
Complementary to the workshops, three keynotes, held by leading scientists in the field of digitization from India, Germany and Canada, are going to offer a range of cultural-analytical perspectives and approaches. They discuss the foundational relationships between man and media (Manfred Faßler, Frankfurt: Anthropologie des Medialen), the miscellaneous surfaces provided by the internet as an icon for the digitization of everyday live (Nishant Shah, Bangalore: Histories of Internet(s)) and digital curation (Costis Dallas, Toronto: curation theory, digital curation and cultural heritage knowledge). Furthermore, links between academic work and innovative cultural projects, such as smartphone applications connecting locations in the city with local museums, are going to be the focus of the section ‘Digital Hamburg and beyond’.
