Geopolitics of Digital Heritage

by Natalia Grincheva, Elizabeth Stainforth

Geopolitics of Digital Heritage analyzes and discusses the political implications of the largest digital heritage aggregators across different scales of governance, from the city-state governed Singapore Memory Project, to a national aggregator like Australia's Trove, to supranational digital heritage platforms, such as Europeana, to the global heritage aggregator, Google Arts & Culture. These four dedicated case studies provide focused, exploratory sites for critical investigation of digital heritage aggregators from the perspective of their geopolitical motivations and interests, the economic and cultural agendas of involved stakeholders, as well as their foreign policy strategies and objectives. The Element employs an interdisciplinary approach and combines critical heritage studies with the study of digital politics and communications. Drawing from empirical case study analysis, it investigates how political imperatives manifest in the development of digital heritage platforms to serve different actors in a highly saturated global information space, ranging from national governments to transnational corporations.

102 pages, Paperback

Published February 8, 2024

Reviews

[Satdeep Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read to understand what are some of the motives behind seemingly simple digitization or heritage collection initiatives. From city-state Singapore to international corporate Google; we get to learn about a wide range of geopolitical interests in establishing and evolving their respective digital heritage spaces.