ICS Seminar Series - Dr Fiona Cameron
Date: Thursday, 6 May 2021
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: The seminar will held online via Zoom. Please RSVP to email yan.wang@westernsydney.edu.au by 5:00pm Wednesday, 5 May, to receive the Zoom details.
The Future of Digital Data, Heritage and Curation in a More-than-Human World
Presenter: Dr Fiona Cameron
Discussant: Professor Ned Rossiter
Chair: Associate Professor Liam Magee
ABSTRACT
Waking around 5.30am each morning, former President Donald Trump turned on his television and tuned into CNN, Fox News or MSNBC in the White House master bedroom, often tweeting from his personal account handle @realDonald Trump or his presidential account inspired or infuriated by what he saw and heard on the news report. All Trump’s tweets have been designated as historical data by the US Presidential Records Act (1978) and therefore born-digital heritage that must be saved in perpetuity. With the development of AI and automation, all manner of entities now produce data, from social bots on social media sites to sex bots in intimate relationships, autonomous weapons, embedded medical devices, automated systems in banks, and even bacteria in bio art experiments. All this data, from Trump’s tweets to the scripts of sex bots, represent the emergence of new heritage forms and the data producers of present and future life.
In Cameron’s recently published monograph, The Future of Digital Data, Heritage and Curation in a More-Than-Human World (2021, Abington: Routledge) She first critiques digital cultural heritage concepts and their application to data and develops new theories and curatorial practices for a contemporary and future world. In this seminar Dr Fiona Cameron presents key arguments and concepts from the book drawing on Trump’s tweets as examples.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr Fiona Cameron is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. She is an activist academic and leading thinker in museum and digital heritage studies with a long-standing passion for helping museums realise their full potential in contemporary society.
Dr Cameron has played a pioneering role in the development of digital cultural heritage studies, contributing to its theoretical framing, and in prompting reform in curatorial practice. She has been instrumental in shifting museum thinking from modern humanist concepts to materialist and ecological precepts, and in pioneering research in museums and posthumanities and in respect to museum roles and agencies in controversial topics and climate change governance influencing policy.
Dr Fiona Cameron has held 8 Australian Research Council grants (including 7 Linkages as lead CI and one Discovery as CI 2), 11 international grants, 13 international fellowships and published 83 books and articles with leading publishers.
