From Bricks to Clicks: How Digital Heritage Initiatives Create a New Ecosystem for Cultural Heritage and Collective Remembering

Abstract

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.

The Potential for Sustainable Local Development through Digital Communication and Digitization of Intangible Cultural Heritage Resources in Făgăraș Land, Romania

“…Cultural heritage institutions are increasingly using digital heritage and social media facilities to engage with heritage custodian communities. Thus, with the help of museums, libraries, archives or historical societies, a new ecosystem of memory in which communities are encouraged to share their collective remembrances [39] is configured. Digitizing cultural collections and local histories increases the chance of preserving them over time [28].…”

“…As Burkey [39] shows, cultural heritage institutions increasingly use social media platforms and initiatives to digitize heritage in order to interact with the communities that preserve heritage and access the content of their collective memory. There are several village museums in Făgăras , Land [56], whose collections include a lot of traditional craftsmanship products revealing information about ICH categories such as social practices, rituals and local festive events, or about knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe.…”

The user is dead, long live the platform? Problematising the user-centric focus of (digital) memory studies

“…While a few recent studies (e.g. Burkey, 2022; Prey and Smit, 2018) note the importance of considering the gate-keeping role of infrastructure designers both in the context of commercial platforms and heritage institutions, the acknowledgement of the important role of this group of memory actors (together with biases attributed to the privilege hazard that these actors are often subjected to; D’ignazio and Klein, 2020: 29) is yet to be achieved. Such acknowledgement, together with an in-depth investigation of the processes of designing memory infrastructures, is essential for understanding how the current functionalities (and malperformances) of memory infrastructures are shaped by the individual and collective choices of their developers (e.g.…”

Digital Twin for Xiegong’s Architectural Archaeological Research: A Case Study of Xuanluo Hall, Sichuan, China

“…Illsley states that a virtual model of Gothenburg in the seventeenth century was made to inform future heritage practices in the city [25]. Burkey used the qualitative studies of eight cultural heritage communities and a digital heritage initiative to build a new ecosystem for cultural heritage and corporate memory [26]. "Smart heritage" is developed using 3D models and augmented reality to study and communicate architectural and urban values [27].…”