Making Culture Tangible

Free and open to all.

Schedule:

• 3.00pm–3.30pm: Live demonstration of the Fashion Calendar Research Database
• 3.30pm–5.00pm: Panel presentations and discussion

Focusing on fashion, archives, craft and cultural heritage, this session opens up key questions around data cultures through the work of researchers whose projects examine data, fashion, and cultural heritage. While the archive and preservation sectors face challenges in digitization, sustainability, and equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), the (im)materiality of data systems and processes raise multiple, intersecting issues. This session aims to unpick these challenges, implications, and successes, following projects which strive to preserve both the intangible and tangible.

Visiting researcher, Natalie Nudell, will speak on the Fashion Calendar Research Database: Technology in the American Fashion and Creative Communities, and about her open-source fashion archive project and latest book, In American Fashion, (2024). Nudell’s work opens broader questions of data in preserving cultural history and revealing the contributions of underrepresented communities. Nudell will focus the intersections of time and community through the Fashion Calendar, unpacking how the calendar operated as a significant technology that created a shared temporal infrastructure for the diverse fashion and creative communities it served. Nudell will demonstrate the Fashion Calendar Research Database, which digitized the Fashion Calendar archive from 1941 to today, and discuss the project’s use of feminist and queer digital humanities methodologies, critical cataloguing and data analysis in its development.

Joined by Karina Rodriguez Echavarria who will speak on Sustaining the living heritage of making in the cultural and creative industries. Rodriguez Echavarria addresses the challenges threatening the living heritage of making worldwide by co-developing sustainable approaches and digital innovations. Beyond documenting and mobilising communities’ collective knowledge and traditions of making, digital platforms can provide verifiable mechanisms for authenticity and traceability, while bridging documentation and monetisation. The talk explores collaboration with artisan communities in India, Turkey, and Scotland to co-design infrastructure requirements to support them within the Cultural and Creative Industry within policy frameworks.

The discussant, Zoetanya Sujon, will share reflections on the tensions between equitable datafication, cultural value, and cultural preservation.

Speakers:

Natalie Nudell, is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY (USA), and is the Director and Principal Investigator of the Fashion Calendar Research Database. Nudell is a fashion and textile historian with a research focus on the American fashion industry, digital humanities and the Fashion Calendar. Nudell is the author of the scholarly monograph In American Fashion: Ruth Finley's Fashion Calendar, published by Bloomsbury Press (2024), and she wrote and produced the feature documentary Calendar Girl (2020). Nudell is the recipient of the 2026 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Fashion & Culture and a prestigious Canada Graduate Research Scholarship- Doctoral Award from SSHRC.

Karina Rodriguez Echavarria is Professor of Visual Computing at the University of Brighton, Rodriguez Echavarria’s research interests include the development and application of computing technologies for the creation, management, discoverability, (re)use and access of digital representations of object collections and environments. A particular interest is also in the development of digital infrastructures to enable the wider applicability of this research across interdisciplinary groups. Rodriguez Echavarria leads research, funded by the UKRI-AHRC, in digital innovation for tangible and intangible cultural heritage, including crafts, as well as pilot services and training within national infrastructures for arts and humanities researchers and practitioners. The focus is on improving the ability to leverage computing and digital methods in their practice to enable innovation and impact.

Zoetanya Sujon is a Reader in Communications and Social Technologies at the University of the Arts London (UAL); the UK's Key Regional Leader of the TikTok Research Cultures Network; Programme Chair for the International Conference on Social Media and Society; and authored ‘The Social Media Age’ (2021) and with Bea Wohl, ‘Data Frictions: Inclusion and Data Skills in Arts, Humanities, and Culture’ (2026).

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