Description: Geopolitics of Digital Heritage analyzes and discusses the political implications of the largest digital heritage aggregators across different scales of governance, from the city-state governed Singapore Memory Project, to a national aggregator like Australia's Trove, to supranational digital heritage platforms, such as Europeana, to the global heritage aggregator, Google Arts & Culture. These four dedicated case studies provide focused, exploratory sites for critical investigation of digital heritage aggregators from the perspective of their geopolitical motivations and interests, the economic and cultural agendas of involved stakeholders, as well as their foreign policy strategies and objectives. The Element employs an interdisciplinary approach and combines critical heritage studies with the study of digital politics and communications. Drawing from empirical case study analysis, it investigates how political imperatives manifest in the development of digital heritage platforms to serve different actors in a highly saturated global information space, ranging from national governments to transnational corporations.
Review Quotes: 'This book takes critical heritage studies in new, exciting and important directions. It introduces a domain of enquiry, digital heritage geopolitics, via fascinating examples that move from the city-state of Singapore, to the continental, to Google's global ambitions. Grincheva and Stainforth's important study provides us with a valuable foundation for understanding how the capturing and codifying, ordering and (re)presenting of culture as data now takes on geopolitical dimensions, and why that matters in a digitally connected and competitive world.' Tim Winter, Professor, National University of Singapore, Author of Geocultural Power (Chicago) and The Silk Road: connecting histories and futures (Oxford)