The Constituency Isn’t Digital: Rethinking Engagement in Digital Cultural Heritage

This thesis seeks to explore shifting paradigms in digital collections work in the twenty-first century. It puts into conversation different models of digital collection projects, with a particular emphasis on the proliferation of grassroots digital engagement projects and the formation of digital spaces in which community stakeholders (i.e. those “publics” not identified as scholarly or professional experts per se) collaboratively build and interpret collections. U.S. cultural heritage professionals and digital humanists seek to map a future course for digital collections initiatives and to move beyond the techno-optimism that propelled the rapid invention and production of platforms and technical solutions for doing digital cultural heritage work. In the process, we are confronted with “new” issues that are actually not new at all, but rooted in longstanding problems of authority and trust, representation and inclusion. While making significant strides in opening up cultural heritage institutions and processes to a more diverse set of publics, traditional, mainstream cultural heritage institutions are still struggling to significantly address the ways in which digital spaces and digital collections are implicated in considerations of power and identity. We need to seek out new leaders and new models for exploring the humanistic values and possible functions of digital collections in the present if we are to chart a novel course for digital collections and their functions in the twenty-first century.I suggest that critically-informed, innovative models for digital collections projects at the grassroots level offer cultural heritage practitioners and institutions sustainable and ethical blueprints for the future of digital cultural heritage work. By charting different contemporary models for building and mobilizing digital collections in the public sphere, this thesis aims to contribute to the ongoing conversation about the shifting functions of collecting and interpreting in the digital age