Future Prospects for Digitization

Future Prospects for Digitization With Andrew Prescott

In the 1990s, it became possible to digitize archives and library collections on a large scale. A first! Thirty years later, digitization has become widespread. This is often limited to the production of a lot of digital content in its most basic form. An analogue document is simply converted into a digital variant, where quantity seems to take precedence over quality.

This certainly has its advantages, but it leaves new digital tools such as multi-spectral imaging and the use of Virtual Reality unused.

This approach to digitization will become increasingly unsatisfactory to both conservators and users. Our current approach will be put to the test, Andrew Prescott predicts. How then? That's the question Andrew Prescott, Professor of Digital Humanities highlights during this webinar.

This talk will indicate three areas in which our current approach to digitization will be challenged.

• First, we will want to use tools such as multi-spectral imaging and RTI techniques to explore manuscript material in more detail.
• Second, we have hitherto been primarily concerned with digitizing existing written records. However, the explosion in born-digital records will pose major issues in terms of resources, methods and access. This will require greater data science and computer science skills than have been deployed hitherto.
• Third, we will need completely new forms of the interface to cope with the vast quantities of born-digital records that will become available. It is here that we will need to consider the possibilities offered by VR and AI.

About Andrew Prescott (Professor of Digital Humanities, University of Glasgow)

Andrew Prescott is a Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow. He trained as a medieval historian at Westfield College and Bedford College at the University of London, where he completed a thesis on the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. He was from 1979 to 2000 a Curator of Manuscripts in the British Library, where he was involved in some of the Library’s first digitization projects, including Electronic Beowulf. He was Director of the Centre for Research into Freemasonry at the University of Sheffield from 2000 to 2007. He has also worked at the University of Wales Lampeter and King’s College London. From 2012 to 2018, Andrew was Theme Leader Fellow for the Arts and Humanities Research Council's strategic theme of ‘Digital Transformations’