Understanding Heritage

Heritage and Social Media explores how social media reframes our understanding and experience of heritage. Through the idea of ‘participatory culture’ the book begins to examine how social media can be brought to bear on the encounter with heritage and on the socially produced meanings and values that individuals and communities ascribe to it. To highlight the specific changes produced by social media, the book is structured around three major themes: Social Practice. New ways of understanding and experiencing heritage are emerging as a result of novel social practices of collection, representation, and communication enabled and promoted by social media. Public Formation. In the presence of widely available social technologies, peer-to-peer activities such as information and media sharing are rapidly gaining momentum, as they increasingly promote and legitimate a participatory culture in which individuals aggregate on the basis of common interests and affinities. Sense of Place. As computing becomes more pervasive and digital networks extend our surroundings, social media and technologies support new ways to engage with the people, interpretations and values that pertain to a specific territorial setting. Heritage and Social Media provides readers with a critical framework to understand how the participatory culture fostered by social media changes the way in which we experience and think of heritage. By introducing readers to how social media are theorized and used, particularly outside the institutional domain, the volume reveals through groundbreaking case studies the emerging heritage practices unique to social media. In doing so, the book unveils the new issues that are emerging from these practices and the new space for debate and critical argumentation that is required to illuminate what can be done in this burgeoning sector of heritage work.

The publication is the first in a new series on existing and innovative paradigms in Heritage Studies. The series aims at systematising and developing the academic discourse on heritage, which has yielded a wealth and breadth of contributions over the past few years. The publication offers its own emphasis by developing heritage studies with a perspective towards and as a contribution to human development. It thus offers a vision for the construction and establishment of a new discipline. The academic mainsprings and research interests of this repositioning of heritage studies as an academic discipline are discussed by internationally renowned thinkers and heritage practitioners. The publication thus establishes first important points for discussion. Central to this publication are questions concerning the sustainable protection and use of heritage, focussing on the world cultural heritage and intangible cultural heritage, but equally questions on the relation of heritage and memory and how these could mutually enrich our understanding of heritage.

Written by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this authoritative text explores the emotive issues surrounding the commemoration of war and atrocity, and the profound challenges for conservators posed by virtual, intangible and multicultural heritage. New international case studies demonstrate that while interest in the memorialization of the great national upheavals of the last century has never been more acute, many of the problems of conserving the past in diverse and disparate societies remain to be resolved. Aimed primarily at students in heritage studies and professionals in heritage industries, this is book one of three in the Understanding Global Heritage series.

Written by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this authoritative text presents an engaging narrative of the way politics features in heritage conservation and management. New international case studies illustrate how notions of identity, social class and nationhood may be woven into the provision of official heritage, and how heritage may be seen to be less about upholding truth or authenticity and more about delivering political objectives. Aimed primarily at students in heritage studies and professionals in heritage industries, this is book three of three in the Understanding Global Heritage series.

This practical guide provides artists, conservators, curators, and other heritage professionals with tools for understanding, evaluating, and approaching the care and treatment of modern metals. The proliferation of new metals—such as stainless steels, aluminum alloys, and metallic coatings—in modern and contemporary art and architecture has made the need for professionals who can address their conservation more critical than ever. This volume seeks to bridge the gap between the vast technical literature on metals and the pressing needs of conservators, curators, and other heritage professionals without a metallurgy background. It offers practical information in a simple and direct way, enabling curators, conservators, and artists alike to understand and evaluate the objects under their care. This invaluable reference reframes information formerly found only in specialized technical and industrial publications for the context of cultural heritage conservation. As the first book to address the properties, testing, and maintenance issues of the hundreds of metals and alloys available since the beginning of the twentieth century, it is destined to become an essential resource for conservators, artists, fabricators, curators, collectors, and anyone working with modern metals.

Bringing together leading conservation scholars and professionals from around the world, this volume offers a timely look at values-based approaches to heritage management. Over the last fifty years, conservation professionals have confronted increasingly complex political, economic, and cultural dynamics. This volume, with contributions by leading international practitioners and scholars, reviews how values-based methods have come to influence conservation, takes stock of emerging approaches to values in heritage practice and policy, identifies common challenges and related spheres of knowledge, and proposes specific areas in which the development of new approaches and future research may help advance the field.

Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical, and historical contexts. This volume is unique in that it is dedicated to approaching the analysis of heritage through the concepts of social movements. Adapting the latest developments in the field of social movements, the chapters examine the formation, use and contestation of heritage by various official, non-official and activist players and the spaces where such ongoing negotiations and contestation take place. By bringing social movements into heritage studies, the book advocates a shift of perspective in understanding heritage, one that is no longer bound by (at times arbitrary) divisions such as those assumed between the state and people or between experts and non-experts.