The University of Lausanne (UNIL), has awarded dhCenter member Alexandre Camus a faculty prize for his thesis, Faire valoir un patrimoine. Comment une école polytechnique investit la numérisation de la collection audiovisuelle d’un festival musical (Making the most of a heritage. How a polytechnic school invests in the digitization of the audiovisual collection of a music festival).
According to UNIL, Camus was selected for the originality of his thesis, which “cleverly articulat[es] different domains” and “sheds light on a major point of digitization”.
The work was based on ethnographic research carried out on EPFL’s Montreux Jazz Digital Project, which, Camus writes, “analyzes the digitization of heritage, and the increasing weight of technological actors on the destiny of heritage.”
His analysis shows that the digitization of the Montreux Jazz archive of audiovisual records of the famed music festival “renews the relationship between technology and heritage”, leading to “changes of the relationship to the past, reinterpreted through the prism of a continuous technological present, in which the notions of conservation, transmission and memory are looking for a new place.”
About Alexandre Camus
Alexandre Camus is a lecturer in UNIL’s Faculty of Social and Political Sciences and EPFL’s College of Humanities. He is a project manager of EPFL’s Cultural Heritage & Innovation Center, and organizer of the dhCenter’s UNIL-EPFL Cultural Innovations Program (PIC).
Camus is also a contributor to DigitalSTS: A Fieldguide for Science & Technology Studies; a book which recently won the Olga Amsterdamska 2020 Prize from the European Association for Studies of Science and Technology (EASST). Camus wrote, together with dhCenter member Dominique Vinck, the book’s first chapter: “Unfolding digital materiality. How engineers struggle to shape tangible and fluid objects“.
