Who Owns the Past? Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age

Who Owns the Past? Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age is a portal into the Microhistory/Cultural Heritage projects of a UC Berkeley course  Anthropology 136k: Who Owns the Past: Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age. The course is an  exploration of  Cultural Heritage on a global and local scale through discussion, debate, in-class activities and team-based research projects. It started with our construct of what comprises Heritage (World, Cultural, Local, Virtual, Corporate, Personal, Intellectual, Tangible, and Intangible). The themes of the course included the global and local management of heritage sites; the creation of heritage sites; the ethics of archaeologists as stewards of heritage; listening to multiple voices of interest groups; preservation and conservation of heritage; the destruction and looting of heritage; and the public interpretation and presentation through digital media, museums and education. Throughout the course there was explicit attention paid to the impact, long-term sustainability, and articulation of digital (new media) technologies in cultural heritage practices.

The class is taught by Professor Meg Conkey and Ruth Tringham. The most recent session of the class was taught in the Fall semester 2015 (with the help of Annie Danis) when a mosaic of 10 local SF Bay Area heritage locations was created. In an earlier session of the class in Spring semester 2011, 5 local Bay Area heritage locations were tied together in a web small histories – microhistories. Fall semester 2015 projects Spring semester 2011 projects