It sounds paradoxical but one of the world’s leading hubs of digital heritage learning, research and innovation is based in an art school, and it had to be in Glasgow…

A fusion of cultural heritage and technological expertise, history and data, human stories and computational power, it’s the “idea of dueling polarities within one entity” made concrete (and virtual) in an unexpected setting.

Whether its staff and students would agree with or dismiss the idea of the ‘Caledonian antisyzgy‘ is moot, but I can’t resist seeing a correlation between this new formation and that reading of the Scots cultural psyche coined by G. Gregory Smith in 1919…

“That it is defined by duality. Passionate heart versus rational head, Highlands and Lowlands, Scottish and British identity, Scots and English language, realism and fantasy.” [ref]

Debatably then, this brief dérive into Scottish literary history goes some way to…