Article

Total Recall: How Cultural Journal of Creative Communications

14(3) 235–253, 2019
Heritage Communities Use © 2019 MICA-The School of Ideas
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Digital Initiatives and Platforms in.sagepub.com/journals-permissions-india
DOI: 10.1177/0973258619868045
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Brant Burkey1

Abstract
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.

Keywords
Cultural heritage, collective remembering, collective memory, digital heritage initiatives, multimodal
platforms, social media

Introduction
Museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies are frequently considered memory institutions
because they select, preserve, exhibit, and interpret our cultural heritage and what society collectively
remembers. Their artefacts, commemorative practices, collections, and explanatory narratives can
both direct and reflect a society’s cultural values and imperatives. In this way, cultural heritage
institutions help to shape and reinforce authoritative versions of the causes, significance, and
implications of our shared, collective pasts.
However, whereas cultural heritage institutions have long tried to retain their curatorial authority
as repositories and keepers of our collective pasts, their increasing use of digital interfaces, social
media applications, and multimodal platforms is reorienting the flow of information in the realms of
remembrance. Their versions of our collective pasts must now contend with new meaning conveyed,

1
Department of Communications, California State University, Dominguez Hills, CA, USA.

Corresponding author:
Brant Burkey, Assistant Professor, Department of Communications, California State University, Dominguez Hills,
CA, USA.
E-mail: bburkey@csudh.edu
236 Journal of Creative Communications 14(3)

confronted, and extracted by broader cultural participation across multiple digital platforms. By
using these platforms, heritage communities can now assign cultural value to the digital content they
contribute, interact with, and share, as indicators of their own interests, experiences, and what they are
interested in collectively remembering.
These participatory and reciprocal digital media platforms also provide new formulations and
circumstances to observe, experience, research, and interpret cultural heritage, which pose new questions
about their role as memory agents and make it increasingly important to understand how these digital
platforms can be used by heritage communities as means for collective remembering. This shift towards
a nascent ecosystem of memory practices in the new media landscape rewrites the unexplored boundaries
of cultural remembrance, positions the public as more active and participatory producers of meaning in
the construction of collective memory, and reveals newly contested terrain over whose version of the
past will be remembered. This lends new imperatives for determining how these digital heritage initiatives
can affect a community of users’ relationship to its own shared past and how collective remembering can
be shared in this digital landscape.
While many scholars have examined the roles cultural heritage and digital media play as memory
agents, there is a gap in the literature about how cultural heritage communities are using digital heritage
initiatives and platforms for collective remembering. To fill this gap, part of this discussion will delve
into the literature about how cultural heritage is evolving, as well as how some memory scholars are
arguing that the very notion of collective memory is insufficient in the more participatory digital
landscape, but the primary aim here is to build on these intersecting ideas by saying digital heritage
initiatives deserve more attention as examples for how heritage communities use them for collective
remembering.
According to Addison (2007), these forms of cultural heritage being reproduced in digital contexts
are increasingly considered ‘virtual heritage’, ‘new heritage’, ‘digital curation’, ‘digital heritage’, and
‘digital cultural heritage’. For the purposes of this article, I will refer throughout to digital heritage
initiatives, which encompass the cultural heritage activity, material, and content that are implicitly
produced, presented, circulated, or otherwise interacted with through the means of participatory digital,
social media, and mobile platforms and applications. Equally important is understanding how scholars
have considered studying memory in this digital ecology, where networks and digital practices redefine
what sharing memories means in this environment. As the literature review will show, there has been a
shift in thinking from memory scholars about what constitutes collective memory or if that is even an
adequate term in this participatory digital landscape. Rather than wade too deeply into this divide over
how to consider collective memory, this article instead uses the concept of collective remembering set
out by Kansteiner (2002) and Reese and Fivush (2008) as a guide. They describe collective remembering
as an active process where groups reconstruct memories that are shareable with others and revised with
each telling.
Rather than the resulting collective memory, collective remembering focusses more on the social
processes of collaborative reminding, reminiscing and memory sharing, which highlights both the
community of memory involved and the memory sharing practices that connect them, only here it is
referring specifically to the shared memory experience heritage communities engage in with regards to
digital heritage initiatives. In this way, collective remembering should be considered an active negotiation
among participating heritage communities in a digital ecosystem rather than an authoritative narrative
forged by the cultural heritage field simply for consumption, where the audience can now convey,
confront, and extract meaning across multiple platforms (Giaccardi, 2012; Liu, 2010a, 2010b; Parry,
2007; Russo, Watkins, Kelly, & Chan, 2007).
By focussing on the discursive interpretations of heritage practitioners and participants through
in-depth interviews, participant observations, and thematic analyses regarding the digital heritage
Burkey 237

initiatives of three specific cultural heritage institutions—the Getty Research Institute, the Prelinger
Archive and Library, and Willamette Heritage Center—the primary contributions of this article serve to
clarify how specific heritage communities use these digital platforms as technologies for remembering,
as well as how these platforms can provide new venues and circumstances to observe, interpret, and
research collective remembering. It is my hope that these conclusions clarify contemporary memory
practices in the digital era so researchers can better understand whose voices will be the most prominent
in future articulation of how communities remember the past.

Review of Literature
This section will highlight the gap in cultural heritage and memory studies literature about how digital
heritage initiatives provide fertile new ground for memory researchers to examine how these platforms
and activities can be used to formalize and share in collective remembrance.

Rethinking Cultural Heritage

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) defined cultural
heritage in 1972 as monuments, buildings, sites, and tangible artefacts that should be recognized,
protected, and conserved because of their universal value and significance. UNESCO expanded those
designations in 2003 to include ‘intangible heritage’, which now extend to other cultural domains and
manifestations, such as oral traditions, languages, social practices, rituals, performing arts, and media
forms (Addison, 2007; Ahmad, 2006; Champion, 2007; De Lusenet, 2002, 2007).
A cross-section of institutions, cultural projects, associations, and foundations, including museums,
libraries, archives, universities, galleries, and historical/preservation societies, as well as visual resource,
performing arts, and other humanities organizations, have historically enabled the preservation, pro-
motion, and exhibition of this cultural production for future safekeeping and posterity, which has long
highlighted their role as ‘memory institutions’ (Dalbello, 2009; Terras, 2010; van Dijck, 2011). As much as
they once collected, archived, preserved, and exhibited their collections, a growing number of heritage
institutions are now just as often including or modelling their digital capabilities after social media
applications, such as Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, which fosters new social practices
in knowledge sharing and aggregating digital interactivity (Ardissono, Kufik, & Petrelli, 2012; Klaebe &
Burgess, 2008; Liu, 2010a, 2010b; Stuedahl & Mörtberg, 2012; Terras, 2010).
The fundamental issue is that the tangible artefacts, bits and pieces of material substance, and cultural
production that have always been the hallmark of cultural heritage are now also being made available as
encoded data and digital expressions, representations, and simulations. Even the intangible aspects of
cultural heritage—the oral traditions, rituals, and other performative enactments—are being recorded,
converted, or copied as audiofiles and digital videos. This expanding menu of options in the digital
media ecology forces cultural heritage institutions to devise new ways to both depict evidence of the past
and offer more interactive methods of memorializing across an array of multimodal platforms (Jones-
Garmil, 1997; Malpas, 2008; Walsh, 1992, 2010).
Examples of such digital heritage initiatives and platforms can include all the ways a heritage
community can use a multitude of devices 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, and crowdsourced knowledge exchanges. Many of these
digital platforms also mimic social media networks by enabling interactive capabilities that could also be
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considered multimodal memory practices, including searching, capturing locative information, uploading
user-generated content, liking, tagging, commenting, sharing, collaborative interpretation, and other
alternative curation methods, all of which can serve as shared reminders and collective memories (Garde-
Hansen, Hoskins, & Reading, 2009), continuously open to revisiting, rearranging, and reimagining
(Parry, 2007). Formatted much like Wikipedia and social media platforms, these digital heritage
initiatives are increasingly serving as digital knowledge environments, which offer greater contextual
possibilities, new navigational pathways, additional multimedia, and the inclusion of user-generated
content, narratives, and meanings with their collections (Cameron & Robinson, 2007; Schwarz, 2014;
Silberman & Purser, 2012).
Basically, heritage communities are becoming immersed in this digital economy of attention, and
their communal understanding of the past is increasingly being directed by networks of digital heritage
users who are determining their own pathways for what they hope to find, have more control over what
to preserve, and, subsequently, have preferences for what they want to remember through these
multimodal portals of memory (Carnaby, 2009). This also makes it possible for heritage communities to
record their own experiences and share them with ‘smart objects, smart places, smart materials and
socially connected users’ (Bearman & Geber, 2008, p. 395). The proliferation of digital, networked, and
social media platforms in digital cultural heritage thus opens the door for more user-generated artefacts,
voices, and versions to be considered representative of our collectively shared pasts (Erll, 2011; Falci,
2011; Klaebe & Burgess, 2008; Pentzold & Sommer, 2011; Russo, 2011; Russo, Watkins, Kelly, & Chan,
2008; Sá, 2009).
Another fundamental premise of this reorientation is that cultural heritage institutions that have long
tried to retain their curatorial authority as the keepers of collective memories now have to contend with
new meaning about our shared pasts constructed and shaped by broader cultural participation through
digital platforms (Barwick, Joseph, Paris, & Wan, 2014; Labrador & Chilton, 2009; Simon, 2010, 2012;
Tan & Rahaman, 2009; Van den Akker et al., 2011; van Hooland, 2006; van Hooland, Rodriguez, &
Boydens, 2011). Thus, the conceptualization of cultural heritage as arbiters and keepers of memory must
undergo further expansion as digital heritage initiatives create ‘cultural exchanges’ and ‘knowledge-
sharing networks’ to curate, archive, and allow for the sharing of personal and cultural experiences that
are more audience-centric (Garduño Freeman, 2010; Jensen, 2013; Russo, 2011; Russo et al., 2008;
Simon, 2010). This requires further appraisal of the complexities of user orientation, engagement,
participation, and digital content interwoven with how heritage practitioners and participants use these
digital technologies (Bearman & Geber, 2008; Marty, 2014; Oomen & Aroyo, 2011; Oomen, Baltussen,
Limonard, Brinkerink, & van Ees, 2010; Owens, 2013; Parry, 2010; Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt & Aljas,
2009; Suh, Shin, Woo, Dow, & Macintyre, 2010; Van Vliet & Hekman, 2012).
What these arguments presuppose is that digital platforms do not just provide new presentational
tools but also expand the complete experience with heritage collections, shifting the roles of heritage
practitioners and participants in exploring new interpretations, as well as new forms of engagement
with cultural artefacts, as the heritage community is invited to contribute their own versions of what
should be preserved, privilege their own perspectives, and highlight their own interpretations of how
it should be remembered (Cameron & Kenerdine, 2007; Giaccardi, 2012; Russo, Watkins, Kelly, &
Chan, 2007).
This makes it vital for future memory studies to focus on the active participants, audiences, and
communities themselves who are making the memories, not just the places and things that represent or
articulate the memories (Kansteiner, 2002; Parry, 2007). What was once treated as a narrative from
cultural institutions is becoming something more like a conversation between heritage practitioners and
their communities, where more people can now through digital media platforms assign cultural value to
Burkey 239

what and how they choose to remember (Affleck & Kvan, 2007; Parry, 2007). At stake, then, is more
than just the curatorial authority of these institutions and their commemorative practices. What deserves
equal attention is how digital heritage initiatives can be used to articulate collective remembering
(Cameron, 2007; Erll, 2011; Jakubowicz, 2009).

Rethinking Memory Studies

Another imperative here is to outline the trajectory for how the field of memory studies has developed
through the lenses of such social constructs as shared experience, social interaction, and social mediation
in collective remembrance rather than a focus on memory as only a personal, cognitive affair. Some of
the earliest iterations for studying collective memory as social constructs argue that how a society
conveys understanding of its past from generation to generation can be determined by looking at how its
public selects and reinterprets certain events through communicative, artistic, and commemorative
social interactions (Erll, 2011; Halbwachs, 1992; Hume, 2010; Gombrich, 1986; Nora, 1989; Rampley,
1997).
The legacy or mass media have also been examined by scholars as primary disseminators of meaning
and relevance about the past, derived as a social function of our collective memory from mediated
experiences, particularly when they convey national traumas and significant historical events, such as
the Kennedy assassination and the Watergate scandal (Assman, 1995; Schudson, 1993, 1995; Zelizer,
1992). Many other scholars have followed suit and given more attention to the role legacy media play
in framing, constructing, and transmitting these mediated memories in our contemporary, increas-
ingly media-saturated society (Dayan & Katz, 1992; Grange, 2003; Fogu, 2009; Monaci & Tirocchi,
2010).
The implications are that an increasing amount of our cultural and historical experience is being
absorbed through media presentations, which then become primary transmitters and shapers of what and
how we collectively remember. However, while these scholars all effectively argue that mass media have
long served as agents for disseminating social memory through their productions, it is becoming
insufficient to simply use the broadcasting and reception models of the legacy media environment, or
audiences as nothing more than consumers of media content, to explain the construction of collective
memory in the more participatory age of Web 2.0, mobile technologies, and social networking (Hoskins,
2011a, 2011b, 2017).
The more interactive nature of Web 2.0, social media, mobile apps, and their user-generated, content-
sharing capacities are resulting in the proliferation of new ways to record, preserve, articulate, and share
mediated experience across digital domains, creating what Reading (2011) calls a ‘globital memory
field’. A growing number of media-memory scholars are in agreement that because society can share
even more of its experience through the connectivity of these networked systems and devices, there is
even more opportunity for collective memories to be digitally shared (Brockmeier, 2010; Crownshaw,
Kilby, & Rowland, 2010; Erll, 2011; Falci, 2011; Frith & Kalin, 2016; Garde-Hansen et al., 2009;
Hoskins, 2009; Sá, 2009; Sommer, 2012; Smit, Heinrich, & Broersma, 2015; Van Dijck, 2008; Van
House & Churchill, 2008). This requires new reflection on the ways these digital technologies, their
representational forms, and how we interact with them are reshaping how we consider the past in the new
media landscape.
In a networked world, we must consider the multiplicity of media we increasingly rely on is not just
about using them as a source of historical knowledge but equally as a memorable experience, a sense of
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interactive presence that conveys a ‘relationship between past events, the people who record those events
on film, and the viewer who sees, interprets and remembers the recorded images’ (Morris-Suzuki, 2005,
p. 156). This suggests a fundamental difference from the sort of top-down, institutional explanations that
have traditionally informed our historical knowledge to one that is reinterpreted through an encounter
with various forms of digital media and moulded by our interaction with them, including their capacities
to alter communicative practice, articulate social existence, and privilege perceptual knowledge (Geil &
Rabinovitz, 2004). This would also imply that every bit of data uploaded, downloaded, or shared are
actually digital representations of the past that could be used for managing and preserving memories
(Monaci & Tirocchi, 2010). To further substantiate this point, Haskins (2007) tried to address digital
technologies as ‘vehicles of memory’ and ‘the importance of new media in shaping our contemporary
remembrance culture’ (p. 401).
The more opportunities there are for social networking, tagging, appropriating, and circulating of
these digital expressions the more it leads to communities of interest, the experience of sociality, and
potential for the collective construction of communicative memory (Monaci & Tirocchi, 2010; Multisilta
& Milrad, 2009; Sak, 2011; van Dijck, 2013). The broader implications are that individual memories
shared through user-generated, digital content can become public, get shared globally, and ultimately
shape our collective recollections through cultural practice and digital mediation, or reconfigure our
shared memory of things past (Brockmeier, 2010; Lange, 2009; Savoie, 2010).
If anyone can now contribute and share their own perspective of a past event or object through a
variety of digital heritage platforms, then whole new layers of interpretation can be fostered through
these interactions. Individuals using their smartphones and social networks can now simply record, keep
track of, privilege, 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 institutional gatekeepers to signify what we
should think is important to remember (Garde-Hansen, Hoskins, & Reading, 2009).
Further complicating this issue is that some memory scholars are more frequently arguing that
previous ideas of collective memory are simply becoming obsolete because of this participatory nature
of social platforms and networked environments, which has led to a series of new iterations of memory,
such as connective memory, memory of the multitudes, multidirectional memory, or collaborative
remembering (Hoskins, 2011b, 2011c, 2017; Maswood, Rasmussen, & Rajaram, 2019; Meade, Harris,
Van Bergeren, Sutton, & Barnier, 2018; Rothberg, 2009; Silvestri, 2018). One of the loudest of these
voices is Hoskins (2009, 2010, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2017), who says while digital experiences may
create a ‘connective memory’ among people that does not necessarily mean they share ‘a coherent, deep,
and stable social memory’ (Hoskins, 2011c, p. 287). Also, according to Hoskins (2017), most important
is ‘what we do with media, rather than what media does’ in the shared memory process. Taking this cue,
a few scholars have initiated practice-oriented approaches to studying memory in the digital ecosystem,
including looking at photo-sharing activities (Keightley & Pickering, 2014), location-based route
tracking and checking (Frith & Kalin, 2016), and other user behaviours interacting with visual social
media content (Hand, 2017).
It has also been argued that more attention should be paid to understanding how communities use
digital media for the sake of shared memory construction (Kansteiner, 2001; Reese & Fivush, 2008;
Sommer, 2012), which can lead scholars to the ‘emergence of new constellations of communities of
memory’ (Lagerkvist, 2013, p. 7). This makes it even more essential for exploring digital practices of
memory so that user motivations, perceptions, and strategies for what and how people want to remember
can be understood through their own discursive interpretations, as well as to determine how digital
practices of memory are formulated by communities of memory in the digital ecosystem.
Burkey 241

Filling the Gap

In summary, the literature shows that conceptualizations of cultural heritage are undergoing an expansion
in the digital age, while the evolution of memory studies has been inextricably linked to collective social
practice, the mass media, and other digital platforms and social networks. However, this review of
relevant literature reveals a gap in media-memory research regarding how and why cultural heritage
practitioners and participants are using digital heritage initiatives in relation to shared memory
construction. What now deserve more attention are the specific roles digital heritage initiatives play in
how heritage communities collectively remember. While this article does not wade too deeply into the
widening debate about what specifically constitutes collective memory or whether or not collective
memory is increasingly an antiquated notion, what it does contribute to the literature is the argument that
digital heritage initiatives are worth more attention as new venues and circumstances to observe,
interpret, and research how and where collective remembering occurs in the digital age.

Methodology
While derived from an earlier project that examines the broader effects of social media on cultural
heritage institutions, the specific focus here is to better understand how digital heritage initiatives are
implicated in the articulation of collective remembering through the discursive interpretations of heritage
practitioners and participants. Deeper understanding of this complex issue is gained from the chosen
methods of in-depth interviews, participant observations, and thematic analyses of the data from
practitioners and participants of three heritage organizations: the Getty Research Institute, the Prelinger
Library and Archive, and the Willamette Heritage Center.
The informants for this study were 16 heritage practitioners and participants from these three cultural
heritage institutions, whose collections preserve, promote, and exhibit artefacts for the purpose of
constructing narratives and transmitting from generation to generation certain cultural values and
interpretations for shared remembering. Primary among them was the Getty Research Institute, an
internationally renowned museum and research archive that allows its participants to interact with its
collection of fine arts and art history materials across a variety of digital platforms and social media
applications. Also under study was the Prelinger Library and Archive, a library of cultural ephemera and
amateur film archive that allows users to appropriate and remediate its literature and filmic offerings.
The third was the Willamette Heritage Center, a regional heritage organization that uses its digital portal
to provide access to its archival collection and construct the historical account of a local community.
While each has its own distinct focus and mission, these cultural heritage institutions were selected
because they illustrate the differences in size, scope, and intent of cultural heritage; demonstrate distinct
heritage communities; and each offers varying examples of digital heritage initiatives with new
participatory models of production, distribution, appropriation, and remediation of their digital heritage
collections.
To understand how these digital heritage initiatives and platforms are being used in the context of
shared remembrance, in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted over eight months between June
2013 and January 2014 with 16 heritage practitioners and participants from these heritage institutions to
see what cultural meanings, understandings, experiences, and perspectives would emerge. The interviews
were mostly conducted onsite at each location through several visitations, with a few follow-ups done
synchronously over the phone and via Skype. Although I make no attempt to generalize my findings, this
242 Journal of Creative Communications 14(3)

cross-section of heritage practitioners and participants as active agents and mediators did provide a
multiplicity of perspectives and individual insights regarding the subject at hand. I also spent time at
each location observing and taking extensive field notes of interactions and activities of participants in
the archival and collection spaces, as well as observed heritage practitioners and participants interact
with these multimodal platforms, their various offerings, and their capabilities for participation, to
compare with the self-reported interview data.
While the use of participant observations enabled me to review actual digital practices and processes,
the most significant data came from the in-depth interviews that allowed me to gather self-reported and
expressed perspectives of cultural heritage practitioners and participants for my analysis. I then conducted
a thematic analysis on the data from interviews, their communications, sites, collections, and modalities.
Certain patterns of discursive interpretation, explanation, assumptions, and constructions of meaning
emerged that allowed me to categorize, organize, and contextualize these themes and preferred meanings
through the thematic analysis phase (Aronson, 1994).
In the next section, the themes emerging from this data about how digital heritage initiatives and
platforms can be used to articulate collective remembrance are discussed in further detail. These themes
include the memory of participation, memory of connection, and memory of practice, all of which detail
new modes for examining how collective remembering can be constructed and expressed through digital
heritage initiatives and platforms.

Findings
Informants to this study make a strong case that cultural heritage institutions and their digital initiatives
should be considered keepers of cultural memory or memory institutions. Their rationale is that a primary
purpose for these institutions is to preserve, interpret, and exhibit tangible and intangible objects of
cultural production from the past and present to be reviewed at a later date by future generations. In this
way, these heritage institutes position themselves as spheres of debate about how and what heritage
communities should remember. There is common agreement among informants that their roles as both
repositories of cultural heritage content and facilitators of knowledge are indeed conducive to collective
remembering because their purpose of initiating conversations around evidence of past cultural pro-
duction also promotes a more extensive dialogue about shared interests, knowledge, and content to a
broader audience. Nearly all the informants pointed to the importance of these institutions and their
broadening menus of digital offerings and capabilities as being essential sources for contextualizing the
evidence of collective remembering, particularly by examining the digital participation, connections,
and practices enabled by digital heritage initiatives.

Memory of Participation
According to one informant, cultural preservation and holding on to the past should not be a proprietary
endeavour, with only a select few dictating the terms. In fact, he says, holding on to some notion that
heritage institutions are the only venerable link between preservation and memory puts too much
emphasis on cultural preservation and not enough on cultural performance. His argument is that while
cultural heritage institutions may hold a privileged role in preserving our pasts, particularly as repositories
of cultural production, they are still only as relevant as the extent to which they let their audiences
participate in cultural remembering and contestation, a position that highlights the memory of participation
Burkey 243

over a collection of artefacts. He says we need to consider how communities of interest can use digital
heritage platforms to record/share their personal memories, use them as historical artefacts, highlight
what they privilege, and foster a discussion about how they attribute meaning through the ways in which
they interact with and remember the past. For this informant, the fascination that comes from participating
with digital heritage content is paramount when considering the formation of collective recollection.
Another viewpoint asserts that digital heritage initiatives are particular forms of mediated collaboration
and exchange that are reminiscent of the performative act of selective memory because of the selectivity
of how they can be used to explain what is of value to remember. One informant reinforces this assertion
by noting there are so many versions of explanation surrounding projects, topics, and objects from digital
heritage collections that they force heritage practitioners and participants to be more selective in what
and how they choose to interact with, and how they subsequently inscribe the experience as a shared,
collective memory. She argues that the context they can provide and the ways in which they can shape
the discussion of what and how something should be remembered leads to more differentiated, nuanced
interpretations and multiple points of view rather than a single institutional voice. From her point of
view, it is the participatory element made available by digital heritage initiatives that allow for a
multiplicity of perspectives and multi-vocal form of collective remembering that can both share and
contest official recollections.
In this regard, informants reveal a preference for giving public participants more agency in the process
of cultural heritage. One such description posits that heritage institutions are only as relevant as how
much they let their audiences participate in terms of cultural remembering. Or, as another respondent
indicated, it is less about what audiences get out of digital heritage and more about what they put into
them. In her mind, even though these repositories hold the positional advantage with their collection of
materials, it matters little if their knowledge, cultural production, and collections are not shared,
contested, and reinterpreted in order to shape a community’s memory.
This position also highlights what participants choose to privilege, which fosters further discussion
about how communities attribute meaning through the ways in which they remember the past. Put
another way, cultural heritage organizations can only culturally construct a memory of what happened if
they can reference what a community wants to recall, connect individual stories to a larger narrative of
community identity, as well as develop enough fascination within their audience to get them to want to
interact with collection materials.
Informants also indicate that there are many compelling issues to consider when it comes to the
participatory capacities of multimodal heritage platforms. For example, one stance assumes that
increasing attention to multiple screens, across multiple networks, from multiple locations will inherently
lead to fragmented heritage audiences, whereas an opposing view suggests that communities of memory
could be formed between those who are participating in and interacting with digital content through the
functions of these platforms and applications. Such a conceptualization would seem to indicate that
interacting with content through digital heritage initiatives is less about creating collective memories for
society writ large than it is about creating shared memories between smaller groups of users who have
shared the experience of interacting with specific digital heritage content.
There is a broad agreement, however, that multimodality promises ease of use, broader scales of
interest to be linked together, and increased opportunities for participation. One proposal is that the
performative qualities of multimodal platforms, which allow people to share their interests, experiences,
and content rather than it being broadcast at them, offers equal potential for encouraging broader meaning
because they can connect people more easily for the sharing of knowledge. It is also suggested that
having the ability to circulate digital content and experiences through different devices from different
locations creates a new toolbox for what and how we choose to remember.
244 Journal of Creative Communications 14(3)

Informants indicate it is not just about access but the ability to share a more participatory experience
among their community of users, which then also requires more consideration for how to determine
reasons or motivations for participation. This shows that these multimodal platforms and practices are
inviting the redefinition of what participation means in a digital environment that offers new modes of
interaction, increased engagement, broader interpretation, and new forms of contribution.
The findings point to a certain reactivity for how heritage institutions must confront broader
institutional participation. Informants suggest that comments sections, the initiation of collaborative
projects, or requests for additional information on multimodal platforms are also reshaping the debate as
to who decides what and how we remember. So, the issue then becomes how to determine whose
participation should be privileged. For instance, should a heritage institution base its curatorial decisions
on visiting members of the public, social media feeds, number of website views, links from other sources,
or outside professionals and scholars who choose certain research projects?
In sum, these informants overwhelmingly indicate that the increased possibilities for multimodal
participation by heritage communities with digital heritage initiatives provide abundant opportunities
for collective remembrance to now be observed, interpreted, and researched in novel ways. These
technologies are reshaping how we consider participation and fostering a multilayered conversation that
forces those entrusted with the preservation of heritage to rethink what participation means in multimodal
memory practice. Although heritage institutions may remain as gatekeepers to our collective pasts, it
appears that multimodal participation is opening the gates just a little bit wider to who chooses what will
be remembered.

The Memory of Connection

While recognizing there are still limits on unfettered participation based on platform constraints or
institutional policies, informants explain their primary perspective is that any notion of privileging
participation must also involve breaking down certain barriers and providing connections that are now
possible through digital platforms and social media applications. The promise of digital heritage
initiatives for a participant is the personal connections that can be made between heritage institutes and
their communities, connections he/she thinks have a direct relationship to the formation of social
memory. Similarly, another perspective is that multimodality is not really about the digital material that
is being generated and shared, but that what is most revealing are the connections and filtering processes
that can now be traced and documented, which aids in the formation of both institutional and collective
remembering.
By following the trail of digital fingerprints—the evidence of conversations, searches, Web hits, links,
and likes—heritage practitioners and participants are leaving inscriptions of their shared interests,
inclinations, and behaviours as digital breadcrumbs, even institutional memory, that were never before
available. As a result, this increasingly documented discussion and activity offers the potential to be
rediscovered and revisited much like mementos or souvenirs can stir memories, creating a broader record
of shared reminiscence. Multimodality in these terms can be seen as offering more profound modes of
remembering by thinking of metadata that are analyzed and interpreted in innovative ways—through large-
scale analytic insight, algorithmic analysis, and dynamically contextualized search functions—as forms of
mediated memories. There is a refreshing or referencing practice that allows content and information to
be rediscovered later, establishing another connective node for how we can even refer to the past.
With changes in the rates of how things are viewed, informants argue there is another order of positive
outcomes as a result of the widespread sharing of personal and public experiences made possible by
Burkey 245

multimodality. Some informants believe there is a democratizing principle at work here by pointing to
increasing evidence of the public contributing their own versions, interpretations, and perspectives to
digital cultural heritage through social tagging, annotating, and commenting. It is through these processes
of evocative association, they argue, that could play a key role in how collective remembering is
connected.
The gatekeeping aspect of multimodality also garners more attention from informants as they
recognize that control is increasingly exerted by machine intelligence through password protection,
firewalls, algorithms, and other protocols. According to several informants, this means that connections
can also be restricted through coding and protocols, presenting a form of privileged memory in terms of
who can access and contribute to the system, while at the same time they reiterate that broader access can
also be granted through these technologies. Despite this recognition by informants, most broadly agreed
that in other respects these digital heritage initiatives overall create further opportunities for mediated
curation, widespread dissemination, uninhibited participation, and active discourse. What they indicate
is distinct about the possibilities of these multimodal platforms deals with the scale of how widely
distributed that content and conversation can now be, which one informant says could be likened to the
mycelium connecting the mushrooms underground.
A renewed focus on gatekeeping in this multimodal environment is also suggested for those who
become the new authorities on what gets accessed, distributed, and remembered, such as search engines,
Twitter, and Facebook. Following these connective tissues suggests that trusted sources, opinion leaders,
and gatekeepers are found increasingly through social media applications and multimodal platforms that
are directing people’s attentions and traffic through viewing, following, liking, tagging, linking,
commenting, posting, tweeting, and sharing. From these perspectives, it would seem that our shared
remembrances are being defined and driven by users’ digital activities, coded protocols, and sharing
behaviours on these participatory platforms.
Networked multimodal platforms and social media applications also give users the ability to privilege
the information they want to contribute and share, and from those choices, more is revealed about
interests, preferences, and relationships with the technology. In this way, some informants admitted to a
sense that what is most telling about user choices is what they are choosing to record, share, and how
they are inhabiting certain spaces online represent new and profound modes of remembering. In other
words, they argue that the ways in which heritage users reference and interact with digital content
establishes another node for collective remembering that has implications for cultural heritage or beyond.
Another informant admits that the possible scale and scope of interaction could dramatically increase
because of the interconnected nature of the multimodal platforms, which has the potential for the broader
sharing of content, knowledge, experiences, and memories in different formats, virtually ensuring shared
remembrance. Accordingly, these dimensions of choice, uninhibited participation, simultaneous presence,
larger viewing spaces, broader scales of interest, and other composite aspects of selection and sharing
through digital heritage initiatives show future promise for how and where communities can remember
their shared pasts. Memory scholars simply need to connect the dots.

The Memory of Practice

There are so many ways to propel and interact with digital information through so many platforms and
social media applications that it is equally necessary for heritage professionals and participants to
consider what they are interested in sharing, with whom, and why. These choices play a significant role
in privileging platforms for creating a platformed community of memory by whom they choose to share
246 Journal of Creative Communications 14(3)

information with and in memory construction by what they do with it. According to informants, their
cultural heritage institutions must now consider these ramifications, as they are no longer directing a line
of thinking as much as they are reacting to what their communities of interest want to talk about as they
privilege themselves, their own choices, and their own interests in what they want to remember.
Several informants indicate that it would be more effective for cultural heritage institutions to use
multimodal platforms and social media applications for facilitating dialogue among its community of
users rather than primarily as mechanisms for increasing access to items within their collection. It is
suggested another strong feature would be to privilege platforms that allow users to contribute their own
insight, material, and share content according to their own interests and what is of value to them. This
realization only underscores the necessity to privilege the proper platform not just as the best form of
delivery for reaching an audience but more so for allowing the interaction necessary for promoting
collective remembrance.
Informants to this study also indicate overwhelmingly that they believe these platforms offer users
more performative choices than strict directives by giving users the agency to decide their own comfort
levels for how much they want to get involved and interact. For example, depending on what participants
find of most value to their own interests and pursuits, multimodal platforms and social media applications
gradually allow from casual to more robust engagement and interaction. In other words, it may start with
users finding a digital object they have an interest in and then lead to further participation that can range
from ‘liking’ the object to engaging in further dialogue through commenting to developing their own
alternative curation methods, depending on the capabilities of the platform.
Informants say that of particular interest are the specific ways heritage communities use digital
heritage initiatives and platforms because they help researchers draw correlations between distinctive
patterns of use while also revealing the discursive interpretations for why those practices invite the
formation and sharing of memory in a digital ecosystem. It is proposed that what people privilege about
themselves and share about their own discoveries through multimodal platforms and social media
applications indicates a great deal about what people want to remember. These informants point out that
fresh insight can be gained by interrogating specific modes of interaction with digital heritage initiatives.
One informant wonders what can be learned by looking at the commonalities or differences of
attitudes towards distinct practices, while another indicates that a great deal of meaning can be derived
from users’ navigational decisions or organizing principles. Such decisions might include why users
‘like’ some content while only comment on others; or use filters and hashtags to construct meaning; or
how they filter, aggregate, and organize feeds; or to determine what promotes people to digitally share
or repurpose content and how are those decisions demarcated. According to one informant, other specific
ways to examine what people find meaningful to remember is through the search and discovery process
of what they are looking for and finding, while another says how they share digital content with their
communities of interest and specifically with whom they choose to share it can also influence the process
of collective remembrance.
In other words, what meaning can be attributed to users’ choices of selection, navigating, archiving,
interaction, and sharing practices, and how those activities might shape collective remembrance? There
is broad agreement that the capacity for users to add to the narrative, change the meaning or interpretation,
or create their own versions is much like creating new associations or adding their own memories to the
traces of a larger cultural remembrance. However, the majority of informants argue that measuring these
patterns of digital practice can be useful for assessing both user preferences and observing what, how,
where, and with whom people are choosing to remember.
Most informants indicate that our memory processes are also framed by how deeply involved we are
with an activity or by how broadly the experience is shared in the digital landscape. In other words,
Burkey 247

informants believe it is not really the digital content itself but rather how involved our interaction is with
that content that proves most memorable. One informant proposes that the participation, interaction,
and engagement allowed by the multimodality of these digital applications holds potential for more
memorable experiences, arguing further that the more involved interactions are with digital heritage
initiatives inherently leads to more acute memories.
In fact, the majority of informants made it clear that there were so many means by which digital
heritage initiatives can facilitate new forms of interaction, such as alternative curation methods, sharing
capabilities, tagging functions, and repurposing possibilities, which all have significant implications for
how memorable these activities can be based on their levels of engagement for heritage communities.
Most significant in these findings is that informants believe there is a certain investment in multimodal
interaction, not only in seeking out information but also then having the ability to connect that information
with other artefacts, content, or ideas, which leads to additional forms, dialogue, and previously
unforeseen activities that combined are considered as being most memorable. From their point of view,
the more invested the activity, the more it is remembered.

Conclusion
The findings of this article suggest that researchers need new ways to think about cultural heritage and
memory practices in the new media landscape, or more specifically that digital heritage initiatives
provide fertile ground for where collective remembrance can be observed, experienced, and researched.
The evidence shows the heritage community recognizes that the broadening menu of activities and
assortment of multimodal platforms are profoundly influencing what and how people choose to
remember. The clear implication being that the multifaceted capabilities of the digital revolution are
altering the ways cultural heritage practices facilitate, control, and influence how users interact with the
traces of their past. This is true in regards to the types of artefacts heritage communities encounter, where
they encounter them, who decides what they will encounter, and what they do once they encounter them,
as so much of this range of dynamic memory processes now occurs through digital mediation.
While the informed perspectives of these informants provide key insights to the role digital heritage
initiatives play in collective remembering, it is suggested that continuing studies on this under-examined
topic look at an even broader sample of informants, cultural heritage institutions, and digital heritage
initiatives. However, beginning this conversation through interviews and observations with practitioners
and participants of these three heritage institutions proves informative because we gain further insight
about how their digital heritage initiatives can facilitate the memory of participation, connection, and
practices, all of which are integral to the formation of a heritage community’s collective remembering.
Informants propose that by using multiple devices, across multiple networks, from multiple locations,
they are changing shared memory processes through the ways in which digital heritage initiatives
facilitate interaction with artefacts via multimodal platforms and social media applications. Informants
viewed these activities as creating new ways of socializing, experiencing, and sharing personal and
public memories, where they can be fixed and revisited in new forms of cultural practice that allow for
reinterpretation and reorganization. The findings generally suggest that memory scholars need to re-interpret
the digital practices of posting, commenting, expressing data, sharing, repurposing, or alternative curation
of digital heritage content as prime examples for how to rethink memory practices in a multimodal context.
The evidence also suggests that in considering these forms of digital practice and meaning, researchers
should also direct their attentions to forms of analysis, tagging, cataloging, aggregation, and searching as
248 Journal of Creative Communications 14(3)

equivalent forms of memory recall, retention, and sharing through multimodal heritage platforms, social
media applications, and digital media.
All relate to emerging digital behaviours that demonstrate how communities can articulate collective
remembering in the new media landscape. The clear implications of this research are that new forms of
cultural production are being incorporated into cultural heritage; along with new methods of distribution;
new means of organizing and collecting; and new practices for exhibiting, sharing, and interpretation.
All of this is bound to transform the ways in which society will consider its shared past. Envisioning a
future where expressions of cultural heritage are increasingly digital will likely produce a transformed
landscape for shared social memory, and future scholars will have at their disposal more evidence of
what society deems of value based on what members of the public have digitally recorded, posted, and
shared. The primary challenge this presents for future scholars will be how they determine what to parse
through among the vast panoply of digital traces and evidence.
However, throughout the interview data is the logic that implies digital heritage initiatives and
platforms are redefining objects, associations, structures of meaning, and social practices that we use to
consider the past. Or put more simply, the heritage practitioners and participants informing this article
make a strong and repeated case that digital heritage initiatives are literally repurposing the ways in
which we remember. Considering who controls access, interpretation, and the domains of remembering
is an important feature of this research but there is still much to be learned about the evolving nature of
whose voice and what activities will be most prominent in the future articulation of cultural heritage
through digital heritage initiatives.
Given that digital heritage initiatives are perceived by these informants as providing heritage
communities innovative means for sharing memories, perhaps it is time to think less about the broader
formation of collective memory through the consumption of cultural heritage and more about the
potential for some form of collective remembering, where who remembers what, with whom, and to
what extent is instead shaped by levels of interaction, involvement, participation, connection, and sharing
through these digital platforms. Where users choose to post information is an indicator of how
significant they think of that information, how they tag or caption information lets us know how they
want it remembered, and others’ interactions with that content, such as likes or comments or hashtags,
give us a sense of how it is being interpreted. How communities use these platforms also tells us
something of what they value and allows for more negotiation over what or how something is
remembered by these communities of interest.
Attention to these elements of digital memory practices will further shape our understanding of
cultural remembrance in multimodal environments, particularly in regards to the position of the public
as more active and participatory producers of meaning in our shared recollections. That is why more
scholarly inquiry should be directed towards the underlying significance and meaning of how and why
users interact with digital heritage initiatives and platforms in general if we are to better understand the
future of our collective remembering.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

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

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Burkey 249

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Author’s bio-sketch
Brant Burkey earned his PhD in Media Studies with a Certificate in New Media and Culture from the
University of Oregon. His research consistently focusses on digital practices in journalism, cultural heritage,
digital humanities, and social media. Other areas of specialty in his research and teaching include media-
memory studies, digital culture, media literacy, media criticism, media history, media ethics, multimedia
reporting, and media production. He is currently an assistant professor of Communications at California
State University, Dominguez Hills, USA.