This article argues that digital heritage initiatives, where cultural heritage institutions offer more interactive possibilities with their digital collections through multimodal platforms and social media applications, provide new territory for memory scholars to explore how heritage communities collectively remember in the digital age. Through in-depth interviews and participant observations of practitioners and participants from three cultural heritage institutions, the findings show that digital heritage initiatives offer new circumstances and venues to observe, interpret, and research collective remembering, as well as illustrate how heritage communities can use these multimodal platforms as means for sharing collective remembrance.

Although the preponderance of collective memory research focuses on particular cultural repository sites, memorials, traumatic events, media channels, texts, or commemorative rituals as objects of study, this article fills a gap in literature by arguing that it is time to refresh established media-memory studies to now also consider how multimodal practices promise insight into the process of shared remembering in the new media ecology. The specific focus here is to propose a conceptual approach for how collective remembering can be observed, experienced, and researched in the digital ecosystem. In addition to a survey of collective memory and media memory studies, this article identifies specific ways to examine this issue by introducing the concepts of multimodal memory practices and platformed communities of memory, and by arguing that metadata analysis of digital practices should be considered a contemporary form of studying collective memory.

Cultural heritage institutions, such as museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies, are increasingly using digital heritage initiatives and social media platforms to connect and interact with their heritage communities. This creates a new memory ecosystem whereby heritage communities are invited to contribute, participate with, and share more of what they are interested in collectively remembering, rather than simply accepting the authoritative narratives of heritage institutions, which raises questions about what this means for cultural heritage writ large and whose versions of the past these heritage communities will hold onto as their digital inheritance. The primary contributions of this article are to provide both an extended view of the issue by building on several qualitative studies involving in-depth interviews and digital observations with eight cultural heritage communities over a five-year period and to better understand how their digital heritage initiatives are creating a new ecosystem for cultural heritage and collective remembering.

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