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Journal of Communication Inquiry

2022, Vol. 46(2) 185–205
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Ecosystem for Cultural

Heritage and Collective
Remembering

Brant Burkey

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.

Department of Communications, California State University, Dominguez Hills, Carson, California, United
States
Corresponding Author:
Brant Burkey, Department of Communications, California State University, Dominguez Hills, 1000 E.
Victoria Street, Carson, CA 90747, United States.
Email: bburkey@csudh.edu
186 Journal of Communication Inquiry 46(2)

Keywords
cultural heritage, collective remembering, digital heritage initiatives, new memory
ecosystem, curatorial authority

While the digital age is having profound effects on how we imagine the future, it
is proving equally significant in shaping how we recollect and confront the traces
of our past, which has considerable repercussions for the institutions designated
as the curators of our collective inheritance – the cultural heritage industry.
Cultural heritage institutions have long played a principal role in how society
collectively remembers because they select, preserve, exhibit, and interpret what
they deem to be culturally and historically important sites, artifacts, relics, and
antiquities within their collections. As repositories of such cultural heritage,
these museums, libraries, archives, galleries, historical societies, and heritage
sites allow society to hold on to some of its collective past. However, these
cultural heritage institutions are increasingly utilizing digital interfaces, social
media applications, and multimodal platforms to create a new ecosystem of
commemorative practices and collective remembering.
These digital heritage platforms and initiatives can now more frequently be
used as portals into the past by heritage communities, allowing them broader
cultural access to, engagement with, and interpretation of digital heritage con-
tent they are interested in collectively remembering (Giaccardi, 2012; Parry,
2007; Russo et al., 2007). That is why it is becoming a particularly vexing
issue to consider the impact of these digital heritage initiatives as they enable
heritage communities to communicate their shared past by interacting with their
cultural production, artifacts, and even privilege user-generated content in their
collections as a digitally shared inheritance. This lends new imperatives to
understanding how heritage communities use these digital heritage platforms
for collective remembering and what that means for cultural heritage.

Review of Literature
The Evolution of Cultural Heritage
Conceptualizations of cultural heritage have been evolving ever since being
designated in 1972 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as monuments, buildings, sites, and tangible
artifacts having universal value and significance. By 2003, these categories
were broadened to other cultural domains and manifestations, termed
“intangible heritage,” which include oral traditions, languages, social practices,
rituals, and performative events (Ahmad, 2006; De Lusenet, 2007).
Subsequently, these tangible and intangible forms of cultural heritage have
Burkey 187

been collected, preserved, exhibited, and interpreted in a cross-section of cultur-

al heritage institutions for future safekeeping and posterity, highlighting their
role as “memory institutions” (Dalbello, 2009).
However, there have in recent years been several disruptions to this para-
digm. For instance, some scholars have questioned the curatorial authority of
these memory institutions by encouraging a “new museology” (Vergo, 1997),
even a “second-wave new museology” (Macdonald, 2006), that rewrites their
functions, practices, and prerogatives to allow for the inclusion of more mar-
ginalized voices (McCall & Gray, 2014; Ross, 2004). Then, with the digitization
of cultural heritage, there came a whole new set of distinct challenges to these
memory institutions (Kalay et al., 2007; Malpas, 2007).
Brick-and-mortar cultural heritage institutions must now grapple with and
enable dynamic interfaces as they digitize at least some of their collections. This
means the fundamental hallmarks of cultural heritage – both the tangible arti-
facts and intangible performative enactments – are now being digitally repre-
sented as encoded data, virtual simulations, and audiovisual content. Cultural
heritage institutions are also just as often including or modeling their digital
capabilities after social media applications, such as Flickr, Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat, fostering new social practices in knowledge
sharing, aggregating digital interactivity, and submitting user-generated materi-
als (Stuedahl & M€ ortberg, 2012).
This has resulted in digital heritage initiatives that include all the ways her-
itage communities can use a multitude of devices and platforms to engage with a
heritage institution’s Web or social media presence, including digital collections,
updateable catalogs, interactive maps, gamification applications, virtual reality
environments, social feeds, blogs, apps, podcasts, and videos. Additionally, dig-
ital heritage initiatives often now include temporal, locative, and categorical
information, generating unprecedented opportunities for historians, librarians,
archivists, curators, and communities of interest to create interactive Web expe-
riences with digital cultural heritage collections, as well as leave a wealth of
metadata of their interactions (Manovich, 2011; Van Hooland et al., 2011).
These forms of digital heritage initiatives also offer greater contextual possibil-
ities, new navigational pathways, and the inclusion of user-generated content,
narratives, and interpretations with their collections (Bearman & Geber, 2008;
Erll, 2011; Schwarz, 2014; Van Vliet & Hekman, 2012).
All of this immerses heritage communities in the digital economy of attention,
where their communal understanding of the past is being directed by networks
of digital heritage users who are determining their own pathways for what they
want to find, have more control of what they want to preserve, and hold pref-
erences for how they want to remember things through these portals into the
past (Silberman & Purser, 2012). Thus, more than just providing new presenta-
tional tools, these digital platforms are allowing for new forms of engagement
with cultural artifacts, shifting the roles of heritage practitioners and
188 Journal of Communication Inquiry 46(2)

participants in exploring new interpretations, while expanding the experience

heritage communities can have with collections (Cameron & Kenderdine, 2007;
Russo, 2012).
This accumulating menu of options in the digital media ecology forces cul-
tural heritage institutions to devise innovative ways to depict evidence of the
past, offer more interactive forms of memorializing, and contend with new
meaning about shared pasts shaped by broader cultural participation across
an array of digital heritage platforms (Barwick et al., 2014). These types of
“cultural exchanges” and “knowledge-sharing networks” that curate, archive,
and allow for more sharing of personal and cultural experiences are becoming
more audience-centric, which requires further appraisal of the complexities of
how user orientation, engagement, participation, and emerging social practices
are increasingly interwoven with digital heritage, and how such practices are
transforming conceptualizations of cultural heritage (Gardu~ no Freeman, 2010;
Oomen & Aroyo, 2011; Owens, 2013; Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt & Aljas, 2009).
While the implementation of this community engagement and co-creation
sounds democratizing and empowering, the question remains of what will
happen to the institutions’ curatorial authority in providing expert meaning
and authoritative knowledge in a digital social environment that invites the
community to produce, seek out, and share their own meanings (Labrador &
Chilton, 2009)? If more people can now assign cultural value to what and how
they remember through these platforms, it becomes even more essential to focus
on the active heritage communities themselves to better understand how they
view digital heritage initiatives as fertile territory for studying memory and
articulating collective remembering (Burkey, 2019b).

Reassessing Memory Studies

Equally important for the purposes of this article is to evaluate how the field of
memory studies has evolved. Some of the earliest iterations for studying collec-
tive memory viewed it as a social construct rather than a personal, cognitive
affair, reasoning that how society interprets and passes on collective memories
of past events for subsequent generations is through communicative, artistic,
and commemorative social interactions (Hume, 2010; Reese & Fivush, 2008).
Some scholars later noted the social functions of mediated experience in
collective memory by identifying mass media as primary disseminators of how
society recollects national traumas and significant events, such as the Kennedy
assassination or Watergate scandal (Assmann & Czaplicka, 1995; Schudson,
1993; Zelizer, 1992). This led other scholars to more closely examine the increas-
ingly media-saturated landscape to further understand the media’s role in social-
ly constructing, framing, and transmitting our broader cultural and historical
experience as mediated memories (Dayan & Katz, 1992; Grange, 2003).
Burkey 189

However, the notion that mass media are primary shapers of how and what
we collectively remember comes under further scrutiny in the more participatory
age of the Internet, mobile technologies, social networking platforms, and dig-
ital applications (Fogu, 2009; Hoskins, 2011a). Whereas audiences previously
observed, absorbed, and shared in certain events through broadcast media cov-
erage, these digital domains now allow networked users themselves to more
actively record, preserve, articulate, and share more of their own experience
into what Reading (2011) calls a “globital memory field.” This has led many
scholars to reflect on what this more interactive ecology means for how society
can interact with and share collective memories through these digital technolo-
gies and their representational forms (Crownshaw et al., 2010; Garde-Hansen et
al., 2009; Sá, 2009; Smit et al., 2017; Van House & Churchill, 2008).
More than just using this multiplicity of digital devices and platforms as new
sources of historical knowledge, it is about their ability to create more memo-
rable experiences and interactive presence (Morris-Suzuki, 2005). This means
that historical knowledge and collective memories are being informed and rein-
terpreted through interactive encounters with various digital media because of
their capacities to alter communicative practice, articulate social existence,
privilege knowledge, and preserve memories (Geil & Rabinovitz, 2004;
Haskins, 2007).
If anyone can now contribute and share their own perspective of a past event
or object through digital heritage platforms, then whole new layers of interpre-
tation can be fostered through social networking, tagging, appropriating, and
circulating these digital expressions as crowdsourced communicative memory
(Multisilta & Milrad, 2009; Sak, 2011). This also implies that individuals using
their smartphones and social networks can now simply record, archive, privi-
lege, and share with their own communities of interest what they consider to be
memorable events, from their own points of view, instead of relying on institu-
tional gatekeepers to signify what is important to remember, which can then
lead to collective remembering with broader communities of interest or recon-
figure our shared memory of things past through digital means (Brockmeier,
2010; Savoie, 2010).
However, a growing chorus of scholarly voices is challenging the study of
collective memory as a paradigmatic construct when everyone is looking at
different screens, on different platforms, yet are still somehow immersed in
and connected by a networked digital ecology (Hoskins, 2011b; Maswood et
al., 2019; Meade et al., 2018; Silvestri, 2018). Responding to this dilemma, some
researchers have advocated for more practice-oriented approaches to studying
memory in the digital ecosystem (Burkey, 2019a; Frith & Kalin, 2016; Hand,
2017; Hoskins, 2017; Keightley & Pickering, 2014).
Recommended here is that scholars now turn their specific focus to the social
dimensions of digital heritage initiatives and their regimes of practice, interac-
tivity, collaboration, and exchange, where heritage communities are increasingly
190 Journal of Communication Inquiry 46(2)

using multimodal media platforms in cultural heritage to produce and distribute

user-generated content, mediate their collective experience, and create shared
meaning for collective remembering.

Methodology
This article is derived from two previous research projects conducted five years
apart, in 2013-2014 and 2018-2019, involving the qualitative methods of in-
depth interviews, digital observations, and thematic analyses of data from 30
practitioners and participants of eight cultural heritage organizations: Getty
Research Institute, Prelinger Library and Archive, Willamette Heritage
Center, Huntington Library, Museum of Latin America Art (MOLAA),
California African American Museum (CAAM), Irvine Fine Arts Center, and
the 1888 Center.
These cultural heritage institutions were selected because they illustrate the
differences in mission, size, and scope of cultural heritage; demonstrate distinct
heritage communities; and offer varying examples of digital heritage initiatives.
To understand how their digital heritage initiatives are being used in the context
of shared remembrance, in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with
16 heritage practitioners and participants in 2013–2014 and then 14 more in
2018–2019 to see what perspectives would emerge. The interviews were mostly
conducted on site at each location through several visitations, along with more
than 90 hours of participant observations of subjects interacting with the digital
platforms, applications, and artifacts to compare with the self-reported inter-
view data. Numerous demonstrations of the design and capabilities of their
multimodal platforms and social media applications were observed, as well as
specific pathways of digital activity and further descriptions of interactions,
settings, and functions. These methods incorporated novel approaches to
observing digital practices, including Robards and Lincoln (2017) method of
“scrollbacking,” where users disclose interpretive repertoires, schemes, and
reflexive narratives about their digital practices, as well as Light et al. (2018)
“walkthrough method,” which involves the user-centric examination of digital
applications based on the intended purpose of their interface elements and how
users actually use them for their own purposes.
Certain patterns of discursive interpretation, explanation, and constructions
of meaning emerged from the collected data that then allowed for the catego-
rizing, organizing, and contextualizing of themes and preferred meanings
through the thematic analysis phase (Aronson, 1994). As a result of the
scope, depth, and granularity of these combined research projects, it would be
difficult here to distill the full complexity and richness of the interview data in
detail, given the space constraints. Therefore, the goal is to only illustrate a few
substantive quotes while focusing more on summarizing this data emerging from
the thematic analysis.
Burkey 191

Findings
Reorienting the Realms of Remembrance
To begin, this study’s informants make clear that what constitutes cultural
heritage is undergoing a dramatic transformation with the vast increase in the
recording and sharing of digital, user-generated content among heritage com-
munities, which can reveal a great deal about their cultural values, priorities,
and what they want remembered. It was suggested that cultural heritage no
longer be limited to primary materials within a collection but rather other
forms of digital interaction occurring between heritage institutions and their
communities of interest should equally be accumulated, preserved, and open
to interpretation. The recommendation was that ephemeral materials not
generally deemed worthy of preservation – social media output, blogs, podcasts,
Web pages, and other digital content – should now be considered legitimate
records of cultural heritage. This could also encompass data sets, annotations,
citations, indices, searches, downloads, uploads, views, likes, shares, hashtags,
and links. While some informants worried this vast trove of data could be
difficult to collect and assess writ large, there was general recognition of
the immense potential for these digital traces to be revealing threads in
weaving together the intricate tapestry of cultural heritage for collective
remembering.
It was maintained that digital platforms expand the collective remembering
experience with heritage collections precisely because the multiplicity of digital
formats manifests more heritage data through a broader menu of contextual
arrangements. The case was made that it is not just a matter of the digital
replacing the tangible as much as broadening the corpus of content cultural
heritage institutions will have at their disposal to collect, preserve, exhibit,
and interpret through innovative methods of analysis. This acknowledges the
increasing value of digital heritage initiatives in producing updateable, dynamic
archives, user-generated citations, as well as new forms of analyses that make
data sets and metadata more discoverable and interpretable. It was also noted,
rather than displaying static digital objects, cultural heritage institutions should
provide digital heritage initiatives that allow for more interactivity and perfor-
mative capabilities. Or as one director of museum content and programming
(2018) explains:

Part of the strategy is to figure out different ways to increase interaction with our
audience. We could possibly re-activate our Tumblr page and have a blog but then
we’d need to be active on it, not just use it as an informational space . . . It’s not
practical or useful for the museum to simply have an app or a blog if it doesn’t
provide interactive content that is useful. We can’t have stuff just to say we have
stuff. It needs to be useful.
192 Journal of Communication Inquiry 46(2)

The data show that digital heritage initiatives are widely considered conduits for
promoting access and ease of use for heritage communities because they are
made available on multiple devices, across multiple networks, from multiple
locations, which promise more opportunities for enhanced engagement. The
signature points being that digital heritage initiatives make content more con-
ducive to searching, discovery, modification, and distribution, as well as offer
users more agency in what, how, when, and where to approach digital heritage
content, providing distinctly different experiences than one might find in a
brick-and-mortar institution alone. One museum research director (2019)
describes it like this:

There are any number of really exciting opportunities for the application of digital
technology. But there is a certain nervousness in this institution about the scenario
where someone is standing in front of Mary Cassatt’s ‘Breakfast in Bed’ and,
instead of looking at the painting, they are looking at their phone. At the same
time, the value that could be added to looking at the painting is remarkable when
you think about how the supercomputer in your hand can supplement that visual
experience with the kind of analytical, evidential, or interpretive material about
conservation, acquisition, cataloging, etc.

The consensus is that greater access through a wider variety of channels equates
to more voices in the conversation and at least the potential for increased
involvement, broader interpretations, and more democratized versions of
remembering through digital heritage initiatives. However, multiple informants
argued the real difficulty is determining how and when to provide access, which
they referred to as both deciding degrees of public involvement as well as under-
standing what critical apparatuses and parameters are necessary for making
their content more accessible to their communities. One programming admin-
istrator (2018) provides this example:

It’s really interesting how technology enables the entity, the museum, to provide
different outputs of communication for whatever content, whether it’s educational
in nature or informative, but sometimes there’s not enough in the budget or fund-
raising efforts were not achieved to the degree that we can print a full catalog for an
exhibition, so what do we do? I’m exploring online alternatives but do I have the
capacity to create a simple PDF-based book or do I want to make an e-book out of
it that is interactive in its nature that I can also include videos with one click?

There was also clear evidence that digital heritage initiatives, social media, vir-
tual reality, and other interactive capabilities were seen as bound to transform
the ways heritage communities can consider their shared pasts and collectively
remember because along with new methods of presentation, they also invite
heritage communities to performatively redefine objects, associations, structures
Burkey 193

of meaning, and commemorative practices, as well as provide new methods for

the public to contribute, participate, and share what they are interested in col-
lectively remembering. This is further explained by one collections curator
(2019):

We now as an institution have been more diligent about how we use our social
media, how we also use our technology, about the incorporation of augmented
reality or virtual reality, to hopefully transport our patrons from within the space
and from other places altogether that will allow them to relive those moments or
particular theme or thesis that the curator or artist is trying to evoke within
them. . .That irrespective of the brick and mortar of these four walls, the investment
in these projects supersedes the physical space. Also, the contributions of the larger
community are vast. It’s actually an untapped market, this crowdsourcing for
curation.

While concerns were expressed about technological obsolescence and the high
costs associated with implementing digital heritage initiatives, the common
refrain is that all of these shifting capabilities and priorities are forcing heritage
institutions to develop critical apparatuses for how and when to provide further
access to their communities through these digital heritage initiatives while at the
same time being able to leverage their understanding of their communities’
preferences and needs for what and how they want to collectively remember
by how they’re being used. Or as another history curator and program manager
(2019) said:

As an institution, for a long time, we did not have a forward-facing digital

presence. . .Now that we have the mechanisms in place and the analytics to see
the click rates on our home page, exhibition page, programming, we can see all of
these digital footprints, and I can say, because we had no baseline before, we’ve
seen a quadrupling of our return digitally and the engagement thereof. Usually
places like this are seen exclusively as repositories, exclusively as places of nostal-
gia, exclusively as memory banks, right? But because of the digital, we’ve seen more
focus on what our collective memory actually is, with a renewed enthusiasm about
who it serves and who it underserves.

New Gatekeepers of Memory

Informants reveal a number of ways heritage practitioners and participants must
now redefine their previously differentiated roles as a result of the new features,
circumstances, and interactive environments presented by digital heritage initia-
tives. One implication is that curators increasingly not only serve in the tradi-
tional capacities of preservation, interpretation, and exhibition of heritage
194 Journal of Communication Inquiry 46(2)

collections but also must now take on new responsibilities involving data cura-
tion, social media documentation, and aggregating digital interactions. One
director of digital art history access (2013) puts it this way:

Do we need to have curators that do the digital curation? I think it’s a really
interesting question. They seem to understand that the digital space is important,
that they need to be involved in it, but they don’t really understand how and they
can’t quite figure out the mechanisms for doing so. . .They’re really struggling with
this, and I think part of it is that they were trained as traditional curators and this
additional work strains the definition of who they are in some fundamental ways.

The evidence suggests this shifts the complexity of how things are communicated
inside and outside the institutions, from managing social media conversations to
articulating new policies. It was stressed that dialogue communicated through
digital heritage initiatives and social media platforms can be particularly diffi-
cult to manage when everyone is enabled to provide their own opinions, per-
spectives, and insights. So, while cultural heritage organizations may strive to
elicit participation and engagement from their communities, new criteria must
now go into how those interactions are initiated, conducted, and controlled. As
one senior editor of museum communications (2013) explains:

There’s a whole new set of skills that go along with learning how to negotiate all
that. This is what we learned from working with social media. . .is what happens
when someone says something that offends everybody else? You know, you can’t
just ignore it. You have to say something. How do you say it? What’s the tone?
How do you deal with it? And that is really challenging for institutions.

This poses further questions as to whether IT specialists or web managers

should now be taking on newfound curatorial roles for what is remembered
in cultural heritage. For instance, more responsibility is already being given to
technology specialists in the digital heritage process as curatorial authority now
extends to what to save, on what servers, or what applications can be used to
exhibit or analyze digital content. This means that curators increasingly have to
defer some of their authority to technology specialists as they incorporate more
digital projects to convey information in this richer media landscape. One digital
repository administrator (2018) describes it like this:

It’s fascinating to me how selective we are about how and what we choose to
remember. Digitization may accelerate that. Because there are going to be
people making decisions, like why do we scan this and not that, and it’s not just
the curators making those decisions but now also the digital IT people, and those
decisions are made for a new variety of reasons, such as storage or cost, more than
just historical significance.
Burkey 195

Also discussed were the introduction and rewriting of institutional positions,

titles, and departments to now include web managers, social media departments,
digital repository curators, etc. This shift requires new skills, functions, and the
hiring of people who are qualified to occupy the emerging roles necessary to
conduct ambitious digital agendas, including managing website content, game
development, and designing the architecture for digital and online applications.
As one senior program officer (2013) explains:

We did manage to get approved a new position here that has not existed before - a
digital humanities specialist. Two of the things we’re asking for is a master’s in
information science or computer science and a master’s or preferably a PhD in art
history. That’s asking a lot because you can’t divorce the technology from the
content. You can’t just get somebody that’s a technology expert without any sub-
ject matter expertise because there is a difference in doing the scholarly computing
for the humanities and the scholarly computing for the hard sciences. It’s a whole
different problem set and these are the kinds of jobs and skill sets that are starting
to emerge.

It has also not gone unnoticed by informants that digital heritage initiatives
provide heritage communities more points of entry to search, contribute, or
interact with heritage collections, including Digital Management Systems
(DAMS) and International Image Interoperability Formats (IIIF), which pro-
vide innovative formats and search capabilities. These access points allow users
more agency to determine for themselves which digital applications are most
appropriate to use and for what purpose, further revealing their interests and
what is of value to them in the process of shared remembrance. The data show
the curatorial authority of heritage institutions also being challenged because
algorithms, comments, social tagging, and citations can now provide multiple
points of view of the past, while specific user data, data sets, and metadata
reveal insight into how collective remembrance is shaped by machine-
mediated or digitally curated experiences. As one curator and program specialist
(2018) explains:

The analytics, the algorithms, almost become the weird thing that is shifting col-
lective memory. . .It becomes a more unfiltered version than just the academic or
curatorial version, which gives an entirely different viewpoint of how people want
something remembered rather than just referring to historical significance. When
we’re talking about all this digital stuff and what we do with it, we’re now creating
these different versions of things that we have to contend with and how they shape
how people remember things. It shifts everything. . .As an institution going for-
ward, we are going to have to be careful about what we put online and how we put
it online. For the cultural memory, we have to hope that we are doing it right
because the gatekeepers are now algorithms.
196 Journal of Communication Inquiry 46(2)

Democratizing Memory
The enhanced position of the public and their expectations in digital heritage
initiatives also emerge as significant topics of debate. It was noted that heritage
communities are increasingly demanding a more democratized heritage process
whereby their voices are heard and their preferences are considered, in terms of
what is preserved and how it is interpreted for future collective remembering.
Another gallery director (2018) poses the question this way:

This economy of attention that is making us question whether something is cultural

heritage because it’s popular or can people themselves, rather than having a cura-
tor tell them what to remember and how to think about it, can they now actually
upload their own content and say this is what I want remembered?

Rather than a one-way transmission with high barriers of access, informants

acknowledge it is the capacities of these digital heritage initiatives that now
invite communities of interest to contribute more user-generated content, social
tagging for archiving, and more interpretive repertoires, furthering the conversa-
tion beyond any one institutional voice of authority and creating a form of
crowdsourcing as curation. A digital repository manager (2018) explains:

If we’re going to stay current, one of the things we are going to have to do is
incorporate those kinds of public interactions with our materials in some format,
and we’re going to have understand how people are looking at our materials and
then redesign our systems to maximize that. What historians thought was impor-
tant wasn’t always what the public thought was important. So, for us, for the
future, we’re going to have to think of data like that. We’re going to have to be
saying, okay, what are people interested in? How can we incorporate that into what
we are presenting to them? Only this way can we meet the needs of scholars,
historians, archivists, and everyone else, by creating a collaborative digital space.

At least in this regard, there is recognition that heritage communities can utilize
digital heritage initiatives as a nexus of information, where more voices can be
brought together in providing a richer set of perspectives and a multitude of
conversations instead of a particular narrative. This offers the promise of no
longer just a top-down version of what and how to remember but instead the
possibility of new perspectives and interpretations not so entrenched in institu-
tional thinking. One administrator of museum communications (2018) makes
this clear:

I think it’s the digital environment that has, in many ways, been the great democ-
ratizer. You have access to information like you’ve never had before. It wasn’t that
long ago, a few hundred years, when only certain people had Bibles and only
Burkey 197

certain people knew how to read them because of the nature of control and power.
Fast forward to the digital era and now there is a tremendous amount of access,
empowerment, and agency for communities to tell their own stories as a multitude
of narratives. I think it adds value in ways that I don’t think we can even begin to
measure at this point.

However, this raises complex questions about institutional identity and public
entitlement in cultural heritage. While certain practitioners consider their insti-
tutions to be authoritative arbiters, others want to become more cultivating
spaces for the public, triggering a balancing act for some heritage practitioners
to both meet the needs of the public and hold on to their own prerogatives. Most
informants express their desires to defer more to the public in the interpretive
process but find themselves equally unsure just how far they should go in letting
the public contribute their perspectives or where to demarcate the differences
between heritage practitioners and participants. As one museum content and
programming director (2019) illustrates:

It’s the concept of how museums are working as an open platform like Wikipedia,
for example, where there are multiple editors, but museums can also contribute
information as an authority but also allow other people to contribute information
or interpretations. So how do we then de-mystify the concept of museums as the
authority and how do we open ourselves up to this type of community sharing?

Another museum digital and technology division administrator (2014) puts it

even more succinctly:

I think some institutions are a little nervous about letting their curatorial decisions
be crowdsourced but maybe there is a balance to be struck as to giving people what
they want and still fulfilling your scholarly mission.

While informants confirm that multimodal platforms and social media applica-
tions can enhance and amplify their research knowledge through such mecha-
nisms as expert social tagging and crowdsourcing, there remain consistent
expressions of concern that these technologies also create a nascent struggle
between their traditional notions of curatorial authority, where cultural heritage
professionals through their own expertise and decision-making determine what
should be collected, preserved, exhibited, as well as how it should be interpreted,
and the growing refrain for democratization that concedes to their communities
a larger role in those same processes and decisions. One curator of collections
and exhibitions (2019) concludes:

As an institution, existentially, we are trying to address our audience, who spend

more time using their smartphone than they are in public. So, we have to present
198 Journal of Communication Inquiry 46(2)

them with more information than they can just Google, that captures their atten-
tion, and is readily available for them to share digitally. That puts us at a nexus of
innovation and pioneering because of this digital conversation, this democratiza-
tion, this imperative nature of making history and art relevant to an audience who
no longer needs institutional validation to engage with it any longer. Our publics
are now becoming archivists, historians, and librarians, themselves, all by using
their smartphones. . .So, there’s going to be a time in the relatively near future
where that’s going to be democratizing the curatorial process and we are trying
to aggressively think about how to position ourselves within that.

Memory Pathways, Protocols and Analysis

Informants expressed wholesale agreement that cultural heritage institutions are
increasingly challenged to redefine their identities, functions, and conventional
approaches to collective remembering in this rapidly changing, digital ecosys-
tem. What they describe is a shift in iterative thinking, as well as their reflexive
and procedural strategies, as they try to adjust to these transformational circum-
stances. It was suggested one way to reposition themselves involves a systematic
turn toward increased transparency.
One indication this is occurring is revealed in how these memory institutions
are more frequently inviting the public to have a peek behind the curtains to see
the entirety of heritage procedures. It was recommended digital heritage initia-
tives could be used to not only provide communities of interest with further
details about items within their collections but also expose them to more behind-
the-scenes decision-making, acquisitions, restoration efforts, interpretive pro-
cesses, scholarly debates, and other activities. Several informants were quick
to point out there are so many internal aspects of cultural heritage their com-
munities rarely get to see that deserve much more attention, including the meet-
ings, conversations, symposiums, panel discussions, and other obscure
deliberations that can now be presented in a more public fashion through
their digital heritage initiatives and social media applications. One art historian
and research associate (2013) makes this salient point:

Most of the time the public only sees the final result and not all the different
aspects that led to it. I think that when you communicate those work processes,
which is a huge part of the digital and participatory media, then you become more
aware of them, which I think is a very good thing because it’s not only the final
product that matters. . .You communicate more steps along the way and from that
new aspects can evolve.

Informants also indicate that making the entire heritage process more transpar-
ent decentralizes authority, allows heritage institutions to be less monotone, and
Burkey 199

lets their communities of interest discover or be exposed to unexpected sources

of knowledge as they become more informed about selection, preservation, and
interpretive processes. A digital infrastructure manager (2018) explains:

Putting things online only drives the use and experience of the physical objects. It’s
more about admitting that this is the way the world is and this is what is expected
of us as stewards of these collections. I think it’s evolving from a one-way conver-
sation from us (the museum) to you (the public) that is breaking down and I don’t
think that’s the way people expect to interact anymore. Everything is a two-way or
multi-way conversation, so we need to adjust and be open to where that goes.

Informants indicate the stark reality is that collective knowledge and memory
are now more broadly circulated through integrated systems, social sharing, and
crowdsourcing, so it is crucial for heritage institutions to assert themselves in
this digital ecosystem to remain relevant. They also point out because shared
remembrance and communal understanding of the past are increasingly being
directed by networks of digital heritage users who want to determine their own
pathways for what they hope to find, have more control of what to preserve,
have preferences for what they want to remember, and decide with whom they
want to share these memories, that it is incumbent upon heritage institutions to
establish a robust digital presence so their communities can use these digital
portals for collective remembering.
Informants say this means employing gamification strategies, virtual exhibi-
tion spaces, augmented reality activities, locative features, or mobile applica-
tions to increase public involvement. However, some of the challenges
mentioned with these interactive strategies include the restrictions and costs
associated with guarded paywalls, proprietary coding language, and the need
for responsive design. They also raised other practical concerns, including how
to plan for and address the costs of digitization, as well as how to navigate ever-
changing legal frameworks and compensate for the anticipated obsolescence of
digital platforms and technologies. As one collections manager and archivist
(2018) asks:

Curatorial decisions now include IT people, algorithms, and the economy of atten-
tion, so it’s no longer one person making these decisions but all of these things
baked into the pie, so to speak. So, what does that do to your curatorial authority?
How do you navigate between the economy of attention, where you want to give
the public more autonomy, and the actual economy of how to manage the costs of
digitizing and make content virtual, etc.?

However, available funding does not always allow for a separate digital infra-
structure when they consider migrating analog content to digital or seek to
establish and maintain a digital corpus as an essential part of their function
200 Journal of Communication Inquiry 46(2)

and purpose. Despite these practicalities, another significant thread of conver-

sation entails how useful digital heritage initiatives can be as the metadata they
provide are analyzed and interpreted in innovative ways – through large-scale
analytic insight, algorithmic analysis, and dynamically contextualized search
functions – as forms of mediated memories. In other words, since all digital
activities can be traced through these data systems, there is even clearer evidence
of what people want remembered and how they want to remember it. As one
history curator and program manager (2019) concludes:

The digital landscape is changing collective memory more democratically. If dis-

tilled or codified in a digital way, it can live beyond the people in ways that we’ve
never seen. It’s literally a new frontier. It also hopefully makes society more astute
about the different sides of truth, the different sides of history, the different sides of
collective memory that had long been omitted or have long been forgotten because
of its inconvenience to a perceived truth. This requires us to shift our perception of
what deserves to be inside of that canon, collective memory-wise, right?

Conclusion
The literature shows that scholars are rethinking prevailing notions of cultural
heritage and collective memory among digital domains, while positing the need
for further appraisal of how multimodal platforms impact user orientation,
regimes of practice, and repertoires of remembering to better understand
these emerging realms of remembrance. That is why this article adds to the
literature by delving more thoroughly into the social dimensions of digital her-
itage initiatives to clarify how these multimodal platforms are being used by
specific heritage communities to create more interactive forms of memorializing
and a new ecosystem for cultural heritage and collective remembering.
While the findings are limited by self-reported responses provided by these
heritage communities, their multi-dimensional insights, triangulated with digital
participant observations, allow for a much richer, deeper understanding of how
digital heritage initiatives are creating a new memory ecology. However, there
exists still plenty of room for future studies to further explore an even broader
sample and assortment of informants, cultural heritage institutions, and digital
heritage initiatives.
That being said, the analysis of research data in this article substantiate the
strong and repeated cases that these heritage communities believe digital heri-
tage initiatives, platforms, and their related social media applications are trans-
forming the process of cultural heritage in myriad ways and providing new
domains for how and where heritage communities can now collectively
Burkey 201

remember. The commonly shared views among these informants are that digital
forms of cultural artifacts are being incorporated into heritage collections, along
with new methods of distribution, organizing, exhibiting, sharing, and interpre-
tation, which are all bound to transform the ways heritage communities can
consider their shared pasts and collectively remember. They also point out this
has profound implications for heritage practitioners, such as curators and IT
specialists, whose roles and responsibilities are undergoing such dramatic revi-
sions so as to sometimes now seem interchangeable. Another salient point is that
digital heritage initiatives are shifting institutions from being brick-and-mortar
sites of storage, preservation, and exhibition of cultural content to also becom-
ing clickable digital knowledge exchanges, where heritage communities are
increasingly being invited to performatively redefine their own roles, structures
of meaning, and commemorative practices.
According to these informants, digital heritage initiatives are also changing
whose versions of the past will be remembered because the public can now
contribute, participate, and share what they are interested in collectively remem-
bering. Another significant proposition emerging from the findings is that social
media comments, metadata, annotations, and other evidence of digital activity
should be considered as both cultural heritage and further record of how they
are collectively remembering in this new memory ecosystem.
Overall, one thing clear from this data is that there is much more uncertainty
of purpose as cultural heritage professionals and participants alike continue to
re-evaluate their own corollary roles using digital heritage initiatives in the pro-
cess of collective remembering. It also means digital heritage initiatives poten-
tially equate to more voices in the conversation, more involvement, more
evocative associations, and more democratized versions of remembering,
which put at stake the curatorial authority of these institutions, their commem-
orative practices, and whose voice will end up being the arbiter of what and how
communities collectively remember in this emerging ecosystem of digital cultural
heritage and collective remembrance.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

ORCID iD
Brant Burkey https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6997-2463
202 Journal of Communication Inquiry 46(2)

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Burkey 205

Author Biography
Brant Burkey worked for more than 10 years as a professional journalist for a
variety of news, education, lifestyles, and business publications; spent 8 years as
a secondary school instructor, where he developed a distinguished journalism
program for a Title I high school in an urban public school district; and has
lectured at the university level for the University of Oregon and CSU Long
Beach. He holds a PhD in Media Studies with a Certificate in New Media &
Culture from the University of Oregon and is currently an Associate Professor
of Communications at CSU Dominguez Hills. Burkey’s research consistently
focuses on digital practices related to cultural heritage, journalism, digital
humanities, and social media. Other areas of specialty in his research and teach-
ing include media-memory studies, digital culture, media literacy, media criti-
cism, media history, media ethics, digital reporting, and multimedia production.