Introduction to the Special Section on Digital Objects: digital objects, digital humanities--Questions, Processes, and Outputs

Abstract

The concept of the ‘digital object’ is at once quite straightforward and quite complex. A digital object can be a discrete file in a repository with associated metadata, or a highly sophisticated and multifaceted construct in cyberspace incorporating fuzzy logic, semantically diverse interpretations, and differences of interpretation. The fully complexity of this spectrum is sure only just emerging. This is particularly so where digital objects pertain to cultural heritage, and the relationship between ‘the digital’ and the traditional (or rather non-digital) means in which cultural heritage information is stored, studied, and disseminated. In the world of museums, the notion of an object is, naturally widely and extensively understood: objects in cases, neatly labelled, arranged according to type, provenance, place of origin or date, or some combination of all of these. How we translate these varied wealths of intellectual and cultural knowledge from the world’s museums and archives into the digital domain is surely one of the grand challenges for digital humanities today. With this in mind, I have great pleasure in introducing three papers in this special section of LLC, which examine this concept from three different but complementary angles: digital museum objects, objects within Virtual Research Environments (VREs), and as objects which reconstruct fragments from the real world and document digitally the trails of interpretation that lead to those reconstructions.