Presenting archival data for environmental modelling at SCOLMA 2023
Stefania Merlo (MAEASaM Project Manager) presented a paper on the climate emergency and coastal heritage sites in Africa at the annual SCOLMA Conference (the UK Libraries and Archives Group on Africa) in London. This year’s conference set out to explore the library and archive relating to Africa and the environment, and how these records are collected, catalogued, preserved and used in research and teaching. It raises important questions on how records are being used to document and understand the history of climate change, and how to help predict future emergencies and influence current policy.
Stefania’s paper presented on the methodology that the MAEASaM project has been developing to integrate long-term knowledge on heritage sites through the digitisation of archival data such as sites records, including photographs and drawings, topographic maps and published papers, and cutting-edge climate models to predict the present and future consequences of climate change on the preservation of African coastal heritage sites. A case study looking into the coastal heritage of Kenya, Tanzania and Senegal was used to illustrate the methodology and reflect on its potentials and issues.
Reflecting on invisible records and the digitisation of the past at the Obliterate Workshop 2023
In the ‘Obliterate’ workshop, held at the Origins Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), 7-8 September 2023, participants were asked: how we can engage in new methods of making the museum relevant to African realities today?
Faye Lander (MAEASaM Regional Project Manager) and Stefania Merlo (MAEASaM Project Manager) presented a paper on the complexities and challenges of working with some of the legacy records. Often, these records consist of multiple resources and are rarely directly accessed as whole, whether by the general public or by practitioners themselves. They are in many ways invisible. Here we reflected on the potential opportunities for enabling the visibility and accessibility to these rich ‘texts’ through digitisation. Such archives are central for everyday decision-making about heritage, but they also require careful introspection, particularly about past and current ontologies that shape how heritage is practiced today.