Merit Zimmermann | Investigating the Heritagization of Digital Culture

Merit Zimmermann | Investigating the Heritagization of Digital Culture | Erasmus University Rotterdam, Department of Arts and Culture Studies | Promotor; supervisors: Stijn Reijnders; Trilce Navarrete Hernandez, Jay Lee | September 2024-September 2028 | Email: zimmermann[at]eshcc.eur.nl

This PhD research explores how institutional, individual, and community stakeholders attach meanings and values to digital culture. Moreover, I am interested in what these meanings and values are, and what they can tell us about people’s relationship to heritage and to the digital itself. By people, I mean cultural and public sector professionals such as curators and government officials traditionally referred to as “heritage experts” as well as individuals and groups in everyday life who are generally viewed as “non-experts”. In critical heritage studies, the relationship between experts and non-experts has widely been framed as one marked by tensions and conflicts over what heritage is and why it matters. But the increasing digitization of the heritage sector in combination with the broadening of the definition of heritage to also include more intangible forms has changed the dynamics between experts and non-experts, democratizing heritage-making processes. Adopting a mixed methods approach, this research aims to gain a better understanding of how exactly these dynamics have changed in the context of digital cultural heritage, one of the fastest growing fields within the heritage sector due, in part, to the COVID-19 pandemic, and a key area tackled by the Digital Agenda of the European Commission. My research question is: How do experts (institutional stakeholders) and non-experts (individual and community stakeholders) experience, evaluate, and legitimate digital cultural heritage?