The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Documenting Architectural Heritage in the Age of Digital Reproduction

• In Event: Confronting the Literary, Historical, and Architectural Heritage through the Digital Humanities

Abstract

Documenting architectural heritage in the age of digital reproduction is an enormous challenge, particularly if the aim is to not only capture structures at a specific moment in time, but to contextualize them within their larger milieu. In this digital age, everything is available instantaneously; hence, we are confronted with an avalanche of material of variable quality, often presented with dubious metadata if any at all. Popular social media approaches and crowd sourcing can further degrade the value of the metadata despite well-meaning intentions of creators and contributors, leaving a plethora of images, websites, and digital repositories without proper oversight and curation. Too often these artifacts float untethered in the virtual world, fade into obscurity, or are lost in the abyss. This paper looks at how AKDC@MIT is addressing issues such as curation, preservation, and sustainability in digital repositories through an examination the processes and praxes necessary to document architectural heritage.

Authors

• Sharon C. Smith, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Michael Toler, Massachusetts Institute of Technology