Teaching students to design digital heritage projects: another way to understand digitization?

Studying digitization in action within a Science&Technologies Studies (STS) perspective provided empirically based studies of heritage digitization (for example, Beltrame, 2012; Camus, 2019a; Tanferri, 2021). These works offered several crucial moves to understand digitization practices, such as the epistemic changes they produce in collections (Beltrame, 2013); the arbitrages they call for to delineate a cultural entity (Camus 2019b); or the local, contingent productions of quality criteria to make copies deemed good enough (Tanferri, s.d.). But studying digitization practices to uncover their mechanisms and consequences is not the same as using these results to design digitization projects.
In this presentation, we will provide an account of an experiment in teaching heritage digitization project design to engineering students from different backgrounds. The course relies on the possibility of collaborating with real-life heritage institutions in their school area to design a digital heritage project. The course aims are two-fold. First, to provide a basic understanding of participatory research methodologies, the students will need to carry out their project. Second, to offer workshop-like content to create awareness of specific dimensions of heritage digitization proposed in several lines of research (Cameron and Kenderdine, 2007; Latour and Lowe, 2011; Vinck et al., 2018; Lewi et al., 2019; Navarro and Renaud, 2019; Appiotti and Sandri, 2020).
These elements are to be addressed by students in their project conception and are organized around these different topics: objects potential transformations (gain and loss of specific dimensions, e.g., touch); work and skills repartitions amongst institutional teams and/or third parties; questions of rights attribution/ownership and legal matters; users, experiences and potential engagements designed by the projects and general issues of heritage access; attention to the problems of conservation (what, by whom, for how long) and their political implications. Describing the student's results, we will discuss the course's intention to create awareness around issues in heritage digitization projects. We will also consider what it means to design participatory projects where participation implies both an effort of co-construction with heritage institutions and a reflection regarding the participation of the institution's publics in digital heritage artifacts and their constitutions.