Citizen Heritage: Digital and Community-based Histories of Place
This project explores new digital technologies to enhance the visibility of lesser-known precincts of urban heritage.
The architectural heritage of urban areas is now widely linked to their sense of community, vitality and economic prospects. While iconic areas, like early settlements and memorial parks, are well-recognised in planning initiatives, many other zones of urban heritage compete for survival against re-development and change.
This ARC funded Discovery Project concerns the potential of new digital technologies to enhance the visibility of lesser-known precincts of urban heritage. The tools and conventions of social media offer the potential for local citizens to generate and share recollections, memories and records of their built heritage. In tandem, mobile technologies provide the means for these digital collective memories to become resources for interpretation of built environments in situ. As with the emerging area of citizen science, this new possibility for citizen heritage raises theoretical and practical questions concerning its viability, status and value. This project investigates the nature and potential of these new digital forms of urban heritage interpretation, with the following aims:
1. To develop a critical framework of the various kinds of digital tools that can be used alone or in combination to support citizen heritage; that is, to allow citizens to produce and share collective representations of their local urban heritage.
2. To conduct a longitudinal case study of designing and deploying a mobile digital tool for citizen heritage within the City of Port Philip in inner Melbourne (Pastport.com) an urban area of rich and disparate heritage.
Visit the Citizen Heritage project website.
Access the digital heritage tool Pastport here.
For select publications from the project see:
Australian ICOMOS journal, Historic Environment, edited special issue ‘Digital Heritage.’ 2016