Volume 47, Issue 1

As the new editors of Preservation, Digital Technology and Culture, we welcome you to our first issue of 2018! We would like to thank our previous editor-in-chief Michèle Cloonan heartily for her contributions to the journal, and also give thanks for her mentorship during the editorial transition. In her final column as editor, Michèle wrote that she had witnessed much change in the preservation discourse over the previous five years. Discussion of technological and social issues across a range of topics and disciplines were given space in PDT&C. The journal’s coverage promoted a vision for a holistic and converged future of preservation that embodies multiple and varied ways of thinking and practice.

Recently most of the Gulf countries have had significant urban development, with innovative architecture, as a result of the production of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) in many places in the world. This has generated an unprecedented construction boom in the cities and the surrounding areas. Despite their rather short urban history, the Gulf States have recently launched several signatures mega-projects, where public investments are developing an urban structure of a global dimension. Affecting the direction of the rapid urbanization is a permanent tension between the creation of a new, modern cultural identity and the promotion of traditional architecture. One aim is to establish new connections with local history and cultural traditions. To reveal the challenge of the construction of a new architectural identity in the Arab emerging cities, this paper focuses on the action needed to preserve historical, cultural, traditional, and architectural heritage, with the aim of filling the gaps of knowledge and encouraging new research in the fields of restoration and conservation that will lead to future practical implementation. The paper also calls for a fresh look at the tradition, modernity, and identity, by outlining a number of aspects related to the current status of architectural heritage conservation in some Arab cities. Traditional culture, ancient architectural constructions, and vernacular architecture are the result of historical processes and products of Arab societies. Understanding this is an indispensable tool for the comprehension of the Arab modern cities, a knowledge which can influence their future expansion and revitalization, and the shaping of a new architectural identity in these areas. In the Arab regions, restoration methodologies also need to be defined and implemented with the aim of preserving cultural heritage and raising the conservation and restoration research profile among the international research community.

Archiving is a long-standing vocation, founded on principles such as provenance, original order, truth, evidence, preservation and permanence. A far cry from the visual spectacle and movable feast of film visual effects (VFX)—a transitory and globalized industry of disposable firms, ever-advancing technologies and a roving workforce which craft digital animations and seamless effects for the big screen. In this paper we utilize the concept of “story” as a premise to bring together the seemingly different vocations of archival science and film VFX. Through an exploration of digital film production and archival practice under the context of storytelling, we aim to highlight the need for archivists to work with the VFX industry to ensure evidence of this culturally significant aspect of filmmaking and cinema discourse is preserved into the future. As well present the argument that archives are more than collections of historical evidence. Archives are story—and archivists are storytellers.

During a 10-week, full-time research internship at Curtin University’s HIVE (Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch) Center in Western Australia, Aaron Kent worked on visualising massive datasets documenting the information seeking behaviours of the university’s Robertson Library patrons at the request of Peter Green, Amanda Bellenger, and Matthew Robinson from the Curtin Library. Supervisor of the project, Senior Lecturer in Library, Records, Archives and Information Science, Dr. Pauline Joseph, talks to PDT&C about the research, curation of the datasets, and the emerging and valuable role of data visualisation.