Making Culture Tangible

Free and open to all.

Where: Room HH202 HH203, University of the Arts London, 272 High Holborn WC1V 7EY

Accessable guide: Wheelchair accessible entrances and lifts to 2nd floor

Schedule:

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

Speakers: Natalie Nudell, Professor Karina Rodriguez Echavarria, Dr Patrycja Kaszynska, and Dr Giota Alevizou

Chair: Zoetanya Sujon

Contact: z.sujon@lcc.arts.ac.uk

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 Prof 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.

Patrycja Kaszynska will address Cultural Value at the Time of Datafication and Algorithmification asking if we Are Losing the Medium That Holds Us Together? Exploring mediation as a constitutive dimension of cultural value, Kaszynska asks whether datafication and algorithmification are displacing the structures that sustain collective meaning-making. Mediation describes the ways in which experiences and ideas are given forms, enabling us to interpret them, negotiate their significance and connect with others. Cultural and heritage objects, alongside creative practices more broadly, have long provided shared points of reference through which meanings can be explored, contested and reinterpreted. As more aspects of our lives are translated into data and organised through algorithmic systems, what happens to these cultural forms of mediation? Is disintermediation an inevitable outcome, and is the shift from interpretation to processing unavoidable? Rather than treating digital technologies and AI systems as inherently disintermediating, the talk explores the tensions between expanding access to cultural knowledge and preserving the relational conditions that give rise to cultural value.

Finally, Giota Alevizou draws on her research on knowledge systems and public media to develop an important approach on ‘cultural custodianship’ as publicly oriented social infrastructures. Alevizou draws from her book 'The Web of Knowledge’ to examine how public media and knowledge institutions with a public or commons remit navigate the ecological, cultural and governance responsibilities that accompany AI systems. Introducing a new project funded by the British Academy, Alevizou asks what it means to steward creative labour and public trust as AI rapidly reshapes cultural production, and whether institutions can develop governance grounded not only in innovation and efficiency, but also in care, accountability, and public value.

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

Speaker Bios

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.

Patrycja Kaszynska is a Senior Research Fellow at University of the Arts London (UAL), Research Fellow at the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (Newcastle University and RSA), and Research Affiliate at Northeastern University London, where she previously served as Head of the Art History Faculty. Her expertise focuses on cultural value—how the value of arts, culture and creative practices is articulated, conceptualised, and measured within policy and decision-making contexts. Dr Kaszynska has shaped national debates through major initiatives including the AHRC Cultural Value Project, the Cultural Value Scoping Project, and the AHRC- and DCMS-funded Scoping Culture and Heritage Capital Project, alongside advancing place-based research for the OECD and Creative PEC. Her interdisciplinary work sits at the intersection of cultural policy, arts management, cultural economics, critical theory, and cultural studies to address how cultural value is constructed, expressed, and contested.

Giota Alevizou is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities and King’s College London and author of recent book The Web of Knowledge: Encyclopedias and Authority in the Digital Age (Polity 2026). Alevizou’s roots in digital humanities stem from her research on the influence that technologies have in producing paradigms, methods and genres that incentivise artificial and collaborative intelligence as well as collective action. A strand of my research explores how innovation trajectories and materiality of global informational assemblages and social technologies affect the epistemology of media - ranging from alternative & learning media, encyclopaedias and semantic media, to, more recently, LLMs and Creative AI platforms. Alevizou is the Co-Director for the MA in Digital Futures, Board member of the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association, and has been project lead for several projects on knowledge, learning and digital culture.