Mobile Heritage: Practices, Interventions, Politics

Mobile Heritage explores how recent mobile technologies (such as apps, mobile accessible platforms, games, AR, MR, drones, digitized images, GPS, QR codes and NFTs) have allowed for a novel set of heritage projects, practices, and interventions to be organised by diverse constituents and thereby established new players, roles and directions in digital heritage collection, exhibition, digital design, interaction, activism and management.

The volume is not a ’how to’ book - instead it examines this emerging landscape and its unsettling of existing relations between heritage and identity, knowledge, value, sense of place, ownership, tourism, regulatory environments, and the law - outlining a new set of issues, implications, consequences, power dynamics and, ultimately, politics. The volume includes international case studies that reconsider existing theory and explore empirical studies that seek to examine and understand changes related to ’digitising’ aspects of heritage-related practice. The chapters deal with tangible or intangible cultural heritage - including identity, historical knowledge, historical artefacts, built architecture, cities and so on - and they pertain to diverse heritage projects initiated by cultural institutions, artists, activists, commercial organisations, scholars, and communities alike. The case studies are considered from the point of view of scholars in diverse fields of study and disciplines: including museum studies, heritage studies, archaeology, media studies, anthropology, human-computer interaction (HCI), film legal and Indigenous communities (to name a few) - as well as practitioners and the communities involved.

This volume provides a up-to-date exploration of the most recent digital technologies and their implications in the heritage sector that will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners in the field.

Ana-Maria Herman is Senior Lecturer in Multi-Media Design and Creative Industries Production in the Department of Media, Communication and PR at Swansea University, UK.