Categorising Digital Artifacts
I accept that ‘cultural artifacts’ are objects that have been created to help classify and define human phenomena, including individual and group identity (?). In my previous post I discussed art in relation to the Church (to some extent), so classified Cultural artifacts with relation to religion. How then do I begin to classify / categorise ‘Cultural Artifacts’ that are associated with the digital domain to reveal digital cultures? Asking the question, (I’m not religious but it’s a nice big epic theme to use) what is the ‘difference’ between existent Religious artifacts and representations of those artifacts in the digital domain? And what are the artifacts that are unique to the digital domain that are not existent; or is that an oxymoron?
Interesting question Phil. It’s a discussion you see in museum education discussions quite a lot too. How does the different materiality of digital museum objects affect our ideas about authenticity? You just might find a paper Jen and I wrote with a colleague on this question useful:
Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2009) Objects, subjects, bits and bytes: learning from the digital collections of the National Museums, Museum and Society. Vol. 7(2). pp. 110-124.
http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/museumsociety/documents/volumes/bayne.pdf