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Annual Conference

September 12-13, 2024

Lanyon Building 0G/074, Queen’s University Belfast

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? 

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

PROGRAMME OF EVENTS

  • Thursday 12 September
    Time Event
    9:00-9:30am Registration
    9:30-10:30am Welcome and Keynote Lecture: 'Mapping divides? Connecting public histories through digital cartographies’ by Prof. Keith Lilley (Queen’s University Belfast), Chair: Leonie Hannan
    10:30-12:00pm Storytelling Panel:
    • Chair: Angela Rogan
    • Aleena Din (University of Bristol): Digitising British-South Asian Histories: Visualisation, Access and Storytelling
    • Rūta Kazlauskaitė (University of Helsinki): From Victimhood Stories to Victimhood Storyliving: Embodying Past Suffering in Polish Virtual Reality Storyworld
    • Kirsten Riley and Georgina Sutherland (English Heritage): Reframing Reality: Storytelling with XR
    12:00-1:00pm Lunch / Special Collections Tour
    1:00-2:30pm Mapping Panel:
    • Chair: Nik Ribiansky
    • Shriya Dasgupta (Purdue University): Lost Dreams and Lost Homelands: Documenting Tales of Refugee Revolutionaries in Post-Independence India through Digital Storytelling
    • Alisea Williams McLeod (University of Chicago): The Last Road to Freedom Project: A Fourteen-Year Reflection
    • Cheryl Thompson (Toronto Metropolitan University): Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives and Digital Mapping of Space, Place, and History through Storytelling
    2:30-3:00pm Tea
    3:00-5:00pm

    Collections Panel:

    • Chair: Maurice Casey
    • Elena Almangano and Chiara Carosi (Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici): Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung: A Digital Edition
    • George Gyasi Gyesaw (University of Ghana): Beyond the Paper Trail: African Archiving in the Digital 21st Century (Online)
    • Christopher Lawton (Georgia Tech): Writing the Lives of Enslaved Georgians: Reckoning with the Past through Student-Authored Public History. (10 mins only)
    • Laura Nelson (Princeton University): Centering the Enslaved: Seenunseenbook.com as an Archival Corrective. (10 mins only)
    • Kristen J. Nyitray (Stony Brook University) and Dana Reijerkerk (USA): Prophesying AI in the Archive: Archivists’ Emotional Labor, Public Encounters, and Private Personas (Online)
    5:00-6:00pm Keith Jeffery Wine Reception (Senate Room)
    6:00-7:30pm Keith Jeffery Lecture (Emeleus Lecture Theatre): ‘Digital Chaos’ by Prof. Julia Laite (Birkbeck)

     

  • Friday 13 September
    Time Event
    10:00-11:30am

    Digital History in Public Panel:

    • Chair: Keith Lilley
    • Leanne McCormick (Ulster University) and Elaine Farrell (Queen’s University Belfast): Reimagining Bad Bridget: Historians, Digital Technology and Stories from the Past
    • Petros Apostolopoulos (University of Luxembourg): Crafting Digital and Public History: Experiences of Wikipedia Editors
    • Wacław Kulczykowski (University of Gdańsk, Poland): From Archaeological Video Games to Historical Game Design Classes – How We Do It at the University of Gdańsk
    12:00-1:30pm

    Gaming Panel:

    • Chair: Ester Wright
    • Vinicius Marino Carvalho (Universidade Estadual de Campinas): Past Epidemics and the Problem of Historical Agency: How Videogames Can Help Us Rethink the History of the Black Death
    • Shu Wan (University at Buffalo): Making The Past Gameable: Virtual Realization of Oral History (Online)
    • Victoria McCollum, Andrew Sneddon, Brian Coyle, and Sabrina Minter (Ulster University): Islandmagee Witches 1711 Creative and Digital Project
    1:30-2:30pm Lunch
    2:30-3:30pm Poster Session
    3:30-4:30pm Keynote Lecture: ‘Generative AI as a Social Collaboration Tool: An Investigation through Interface Theory’ by Prof. Alexa Alice Joubin (George Washington University)
    5:00-6:30pm Difficult Histories and Video Games
    • Simon Parkin, Esther Wright, Holly Nielsen and Paul Dillon
    • Location: Seamus Heaney Centre
  • Detailed Programme

    You can find a more detailed programme here.

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