Career Perspectives

The Field of Digital Cultural Heritage Studies

Digital Cultural Heritage (or Digital Heritage) is a new academic discipline born at the beginning of the 21st century at the intersection of Cultural Heritage Studies, Conservation Science, Archaeology, Museology, Computer Science, and Information Science. This innovative field crosses disciplinary boundaries to create new theoretical frameworks and methodologies that enhance the exploration, understanding, and protection of the ancient world and alter the traditional processes of production and propagation of knowledge in museums and sites of cultural significance. Digital Cultural Heritage achieves these goals by asking and answering questions vital to studying the human experience and improving the understanding, preservation, and sustainable use of the cultural and material legacies of the past. Additionally, this discipline re-frames how scholars and students think about the past by developing deep relationships across the university-participant-stakeholder spectrum in ways that increase cultural heritage awareness and improve the quality of life for our partner communities and the world.

At the heart of the Master's degree program in Digital Cultural Heritage at LMU is the close connection between the epistemological approach of Cultural Heritage Studies and Critical Heritage Studies with digital technologies and their application in research, practice, teaching and the public sphere. It is this connection and the breadth of methods and applications taught in this program that fundamentally distinguish it from most other programs in Digital Archaeology, or Digital Humanities. A major difference between Digital Cultural Heritage and Digital Humanities is, that the latter is an umbrella term which also includes the analysis of linguistic and textual data, while Digital Cultural Heritage has a more specific, but not exclusive, focus on material, pictorial and spatial data. Therefore, Digital Cultural Heritage focuses on the more specific range of approaches for data capture, data analysis and data management, curation, and preservation, regarding both tangible and intangible forms of heritage.

Acquisition of Skills in the Master’s Program

The Master’s degree program Digital Cultural Heritage enables you to acquire interdisciplinary knowledge, competencies and skills at the intersection of computer and information science, humanities, and heritage studies. Future digital heritage professionals have the advantage over specialists in the respective fields of being able to combine several essential skills in a way that is not taught in existing disciplinary programs. These skills and competencies include:

• understanding of theoretical and methodological backgrounds and approaches, research interests and the types and characteristics of cultural data in (a particular area of) the humanities and cultural studies
• knowledge of the theoretical, practical and ethical concerns and debates in the field of cultural heritage research
• mastery of various digital techniques for capturing cultural data, ability to manage, structure, analyze and curate cultural data in a meaningful way with regard to research interests in the humanities and cultural studies as well as practical concerns of heritage conservation, etc.
• the ability to modify existing digital applications used in cultural studies and to discover, invent or develop new customized digital applications specifically for use in cultural studies.

While the mandatory component of the program will introduce students to a range of various methods and applications in Digital Cultural Heritage, acquire more advanced skills in specific subfields will depend on the choices you make regarding the elective modules.

Potential Fields of Employment

As Digital Cultural Heritage is a new discipline there are rather few job announcements for “Digital Cultural Heritage specialists”. But that does not mean, that there are no jobs for our graduates. To the contrary, the skills you acquire in this program are sought for in many fields. The master's program prepares students to join several professional fields, as is common in many humanities disciplines. In general, the master is designed to train students for professions that are changing and emerging while digitalization transforms most professional fields that deal with the research, protection and management of cultural heritage. Your employability at the end of your study will largely depend on the combination of your academic background (from your undergraduate studies), the specific skills acquired during your master's degree, and your practical experiences (e. g. the internship/s completed during your studies).

One potential career field is academia and research: As a graduate of the master, you may continue your academic career in two directions. The first option would be to return to your Bachelor's field, which you may also deepen as part of the Digital Cultural Heritage curriculum. The second option is to continue your specialization in Digital Cultural Heritage Studies, which will grow in importance in the coming decades.

A second professional field is the public and non-profit sector with governmental and international authorities and institutions involved in the protection and management of cultural heritage (e.g. heritage authorities, UNESCO, ICOM, ICOMOS). This option also includes the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums). These institutions and organizations increasingly rely on digital, geo-spatial and data science technologies to provide access to knowledge and manage, analyse, curate, and preserve their sites, collections, and related cultural data.

The third area is the private sector, in particular the creative and media industry in Germany and Europe (and beyond). For example, skills in programming, artificial intelligence, semantic web technology, cultural data analytics, 3D technologies and virtual/augmented reality, which are taught in the numerous exercise courses of the Master's program, will become valuable and sought-after skills for streaming services, video game studios, web and mobile app developers, as well as the advertising industry. Companies will welcome our graduates whenever there is a need to fill positions where programming skills, humanities thinking and creativity must be paired to meet the demands of today's and tomorrow's world.

As in other humanities disciplines, as a graduate you might also find employment in fields that are beyond cultural heritage, but require some of the digital skills taught in the program.

Conclusion

In conclusion, one of the strengths of the planned program is not to train students for narrow professional profiles, but to offer the graduates dynamic and interdisciplinary profiles that meet the demands of today's and tomorrow's job markets, in which programming, digitalization and automation are playing an increasingly crucial role. More importantly, you will be equipped for future jobs that require skills in dealing with cultural data and digital transformation in ways that we can hardly imagine today, but which will revolutionize the heritage and GLAM sectors and creative and media industries in the coming decades.