Josh Dale

The field of video is not taken very seriously as a medium for historical exploration. When video is considered it is often simply a recording of a lecture or speech, in essence a capture of oral history. This is only the bare minimum of the potential of video for historical discussion.

Lauren Hancock
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​Copyright law in New Zealand is governed by the Copyright Act 1994. The Act has had minimal amendments and fails to incorporate the significant technological growth of the last 25 years. The Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment released an issues paper in November 2018, highlighting issues with the Act and outlining proposed changes. In conjunction to reviewing the Copyright Act, MBIE’s report explores the idea of a unique regime dedicated to the protection of taonga works - expressions of mātauranga Māori. 

 Maggie Blackburn

Since the spatial turn of the 1970s, humanities scholarship has seen an increase in interest in questions of space and place. Harnessing digital tools, recent scholarship following this trend has provided insights into exciting new ways in which historians can engage with the spatial elements of the topics they study. The benefits of the visualisations constructed with these tools are two-fold. First, they provide a user-friendly, simple means of presenting complex spatial arguments to a wider audience. Second, and perhaps more importantly, they allow the researcher to engage with the material in new ways, exploring patterns obscured by textual sources and, in some cases, highlighting the experience and contribution of subaltern groups, thereby enriching the broader narrative of events. 

Lydia Whiting

A discussion of accessibility in Museums and Archives is fundamentally a discussion of democratic processes, making the social, political and cultural history of the people available to everyone whose history it tells. However, it is not nearly democratic enough to just present the items, particularly in the case of disabled patrons. If percentage of society cannot access these institutions, then the whole principal of their creation is inherently flawed. 

Josh Dale

I don’t think that video games are taken seriously as a medium for historical exploration. Historians disregard video games as entertainment, with nothing valuable to contribute, while those outside of the field are often unconscious of the debates surrounding the exploration of history.

Ben Lindsay

​There is a growing trend amongst academics of producing blogs, vlogs, and podcasts. It appears, though, that there is confusion surrounding where these new media fit within academic scholarship as a whole. 

Maggie Blackburn

Overview 
In 2002, a declaration was issued addressing the perceived promise, of the internet and so-called “digital turn”, to revolutionise academic publishing. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) saw, in the widespread adoption of digital technologies, potential to remedy immoral restrictions in knowledge access. “An old tradition and a new technology have converged,” the declaration argued, “to make possible an unprecedented public good.” Free and unrestricted access to knowledge was both imperative and, some felt, inevitable. Viewing knowledge as a public good, the movement sought to rectify inequalities of access and reduce the perceived elitism of academia. Such a commitment, particularly in terms of open access (OA) publishing, to making academic scholarship freely accessible to readers should be applauded and supported wherever possible. There are some issues, however, which have received less attention than is necessary in order to ensure that the movement can be successful.

Lydia Whiting

Lauren Hancock

​The GLAM sector – comprising of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums – is a cornerstone of our society. These institutions play an important role in the preservation, transmission, and diffusion of knowledge. Technology and the internet are fundamental tools in the 21st century, and the adoption of digital techniques is not only imperative to the survival of GLAM institutions but will ensure they can grow to their potential and consequently achieve their purposes within society.