Digital Humanities, Cultural Heritage and Social Justice: the case of a destroyed Armenian cemetery Harold Short haroldshort@mac.com Australian Catholic University, Australia Judith Crispin judith.crispin@acu.edu.au Australian Catholic University, Australia Drew Baker drew.baker@acu.edu.au Australian Catholic University, Australia Overview The trail of destruction of cultural monuments in the Middle East in recent years has instigated or given renewed energy to concerns about threatened or destroyed cultural heritage and the use of technology in restoration and preservation. Beginning with work of Armin Grün and his colleagues on the Bamiyan Buddhas, crowd-sourcing of photographs and the use of photogrammetry to construct 3D representations has become an important method of enhancing existing archaeological data in preservation and reconstruction of cultural monuments that are at risk or have been destroyed. Current work of this kind includes - but is by no means limited to - the Rekrei initiative of Matthew Vincent and Chance Coughenour, and the Center for Cyber-Archaeology and Sustainability directed by Thomas Levy, based at University of California San Diego but established as a consortium also involving UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC Merced. The case of the Armenian cemetery at Julfa, near the ancient city of Jugha, is somewhat unique, because in the century prior to its final destruction access was very restricted, so archaeological research was not possible, and there are rather few – and certainly no 'tourist' - photographs to draw on. At the beginning of last century, there were 10,000 tombstones in the cemetery, including a very large number of ornately carved cross stones ('khachkars') that are unique to Armenian culture. The cemetery was completely destroyed by Azeri troops in 2005-2006, and the site converted into a military shooting range. What we have as the basis for a reconstruction project are an archive of 2,000 photographs taken very systematically in the 1970s and 1980s by a remarkable Armenian scholar Argam Ayvanzyan, about 500 photographs taken on glass negatives in the early years of the 20th Century, and nearly 50 tombstones that were removed from the cemetery over the course of the century, providing us with valuable direct evidence. In this session, the three papers will present the challenges faced in a project of this scale and complexity, the methods adopted to meet them and the lessons learned to date, and will consider wider concerns about the role and potential of digital scholarship in the preservation of endangered cultural heritage and in addressing and confronting social injustice and cultural genocide. In the first paper, Harold Short will give a brief overview of the project and its context, and will then focus on the wider cultural and political issues, relating its concerns to those of the many other current projects engaged in the reconstruction of cultural heritage. In the second, Judith Crispin will discuss the central role of images in the project, including the archive of photographs from the 20th century and the significant number of film and digital photographs shot by the project, and the complex inter-relationship between images of different kinds in the creation of a comprehensive archive on the one hand and an immersive 3D installation on the other. In the third paper, Drew Baker will focus on the issues faced by this and similar projects in creating and documenting the 3D visualisations that are central to its long-term goals. This includes making it possible for individual monuments to be viewed as ‘naturally’ and in as much detail as possible, but also enabling shared group experiences – of the kind that would be possible in a ‘real’ cemetery. The Role of Digital Humanities in Countering Cultural Genocide: the virtual reconstruction of Julfa Cemetery Harold Short The roots of Armenian culture can be traced to the establishment of Nakhichevan during the Fourth Century BC in what is now the Nakhchivan