New e-Book: Transforming Culture in the Digital Age

Transforming Culture in the Digital Age
Editors: Agnes Aljas, Raivo Kelomees, Marin Laak, Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Tiina
Randviir, Pille Runnel, Maarja Savan, Jaak Tomberg, Piret Viires
Published by Estonian National Museum, Estonian Literary Museum, University of Tartu
ISBN 978-9949-417-59-9

URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10062/14768

Introduction
The increasing digitalisation is posing many different challenges related to a series of
cultural transformations: technical, organisational, practice related and mental. In the
current collection of articles, the focus of the transformations is on the intersections
of individuals and institutions, and users and producers of culture. Many authors
indicate that the roles of the user and the producer are becoming more intertwined and
that it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate one from the other. This has also
affected the cultural and heritage institutions as their role in the society is under
consideration. In this collection of papers, a number of texts look critically at the
hypothetical intermingling of processes and attempt to analyse to what extent hopes are
being realised. The collection also looks at the active role of the heritage institutions
in creating new digital environments, where the different users are often taken into
consideration, in many different ways. In addition, many texts here analyse the changes
that have occurred in cultural practices – the emergence of new forms in art and
literature, the changes in the role of authorship, the broadening concepts of literature
and art. The book is a collection of 56 articles that represent the diversity and
intellectual efforts of a three-day conference which took place in Tartu 14-16 April,
2010. The initial call of the conference invited professionals of different heritage
institutions – museums, libraries and archives, working artists, educators and
academicians researching the subjects of cultural transformation from across the
disciplines. The interdisciplinary nature of the conference and the diversity of the
field is well reflected in the variety of the papers in this volume. We have divided the
book in five large sections – Changing users, Transforming heritage, Digital literature
and Digital art. Each of these sections represents a larger theme from the conference
where practitioners and academics met and discussed the consequences of digitalisation.
The questions posed in the different book chapters look at the identity and practices of
the individual, challenges to the institutions and their responses to these challenges.
There are number of case studies presented both by academics and people who work at the
different heritage institutions, which look at the different initiatives that
institutions are taking to respond to the cultural transformation processes and to the
changes in the heritage practice.