Public Heritage and the Promise of the Digital

Abstract

The “promise” of the digital has been a democratization of the notion of heritage, and a disruption of ideas about ownership, authorship, and authenticity that might have seemed more straightforward in the recent past. This chapter overviews the possibilities brought about by these developments before introducing a series of ethical questions that they bring sharply into focus for museum and heritage practitioners. It appraises three practices which exemplify this conflicted terrain and demonstrate the issues at stake: heritage institutions’ uses of social media, crowd-based methods, and immersive mobile encounters. The chapter concludes that reflexivity is fast becoming a core professional competency for those working in digital heritage contexts.

Shared Heritage Revisited

“…Many of the channels for collecting, preserving, presenting, and disseminating cultural heritage around the world are gradually moving to dedicated websites, content-sharing platforms, and a variety of social networks. This process relies on substantial resources that are invested in local, national, and international projects for collecting and digitizing cultural heritage content and making it accessible (Sullivan 2016;Kidd 2018). The process in which increasing parts of cultural heritage are moving into the digital spaces (or gaining further representation in them) multiplies the dissemination channels and makes them more effective than ever.…”

“…Using the digital revolution to make excluded cultural heritages accessible, however, requires extensive resources in order to collect, digitize, and disseminate cultural heritage contents by leading institutions and organizations (Sullivan 2016;Kidd 2018). In this reality, the Arab Palestinian group in the state of Israel, which differs from the Jewish group in its ethnicity, national affinity, and religious faith, has found it hard to raise the necessary resources to preserve its cultural heritage and gain the support of the established cultural institutions and museums (Sela 2007;Berger 2008).…”

Participation in Cultural Heritage Hackathons: ‘Carsharing’ Between ‘Meaningful Nonsense’ and ‘Unromantic’ Networking

“…In the broader field of digital and participatory approaches in GLAMs, researchers have pointed to different gaps in understanding user and participants' perspectives, of which three aspects are most important for this paper: 1) users' general interests in openly licensed digitized cultural heritage collections are understudied [9][10][11]; 2) Web 2.0 promises and buzzwords around co-creation and crowdsourcing fueled unrealistic expectations about creative user communities that have not been validated empirically [12][13]; 3) the motivations of those who actually join GLAM crowdsourcing projects or hackathons have yet to be examined adequately [14][15][16]. Taken together, there is a desideratum in research and practice which is not only impacting the success of projects on the level of usability but rather challenging the basic values and credibility of participation in GLAMs.…”