‘Creating Dialogues with the Past’ – Professor Daniela Petrelli invited to speak at The Northwest Digital Research Methods Festival on 12 September 2018

The Northwest Digital Research Methods Festival banner image - taken from University of Liverpool

SHU Professor of Interaction Design Daniela Petrelli has been invited to speak at a session entitled Digital Histories and Heritages – Creating Dialogues with the Past at The Northwest Digital Research Methods Festival, on the first day of the two day festival focused on researching the digital and researching digitally.

The Northwest Digital Research Methods Festival: Researching the Digital/Researching Digitally
South Campus Teaching Hub, University of Liverpool
Wednesday 12 September 2018 – Thursday 13 September 2018
See here for registration and here for full programme of events.

We live in increasingly digital worlds. Social, cultural, political and economic activity today is as likely to be played out online as it is offline and digital infrastructures are ever more central to the ways in which we collectively conduct ourselves and live our lives. This has had major implications for research.

On the one hand, researchers have had to reorient themselves to our new digital worlds and develop new methods and methodologies for coming to terms with them. At the same time, academic research is itself going digital too. Academics, as a result, are both producing innovative research into digital worlds but they are also devising and doing innovative forms of digital research in the process.

Whether that is by harnessing new tools and technologies to study familiar subjects from distinctive angles, engaging with data which was ‘born digital’ or making older information sources digital so they can be studied in new ways, all manner of analytical opportunities are currently being explored across the arts and humanities, social sciences and the rapidly developing field of data science in the advent of the digital turn.

The aim of the Northwest Digital Research Methods Festival is to bring these two strands back together and treat the digital as both a topic of inquiry – something to be studied – and a resource – a diverse set of technologies, tools and forms of data for studying our worlds with. Rather than look at methods in isolation, the aim of the festival is to show how research in the digital age opens up shared worlds, past, present and potentially future, for new explorations and the new set of challenges those developments present us with.

Running over two days, the festival will involve an eclectic mix of talks, workshops, displays, demonstrations, exhibits and hacks that will provide an overview of the issues, an advanced introduction to digital research and the innovative work being done within it as well as examples of the impact of the digital on political economy, understandings of history and heritage, art and culture, archives and the self as well as the practice of research itself.

Wide ranging, intellectually stimulating and drawing together some of the UK’s leading digital researchers for discussion and debate on the state of the art, this festival is for postgraduate and academic researchers working across arts and humanities, social science and data science disciplines as well as those who are interested in or working with digital research methods beyond academic institutions too.

In conjunction with University of Liverpool Digital, Methods Northwest and the
AHRC and ESRC NWDTPs.

Professor Daniela Petrelli is Professor of Interaction Design at Sheffield Hallam University. Daniela’s current research focuses on novel forms of interaction design that combine digital technology with product design, also known as Tangible and Embedded Interaction. Her investigations into these hybrid digital-physical scenarios are within two different domains: personal memories and cultural heritage.