From Bricks to Clicks: How Digital Heritage Initiatives Create a New Ecosystem for Cultural Heritage and Collective Remembering

Cultural heritage institutions, such as museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies, are increasingly using digital heritage initiatives and social media platforms to connect and interact with their heritage communities. This creates a new memory ecosystem whereby heritage communities are invited to contribute, participate with, and share more of what they are interested in collectively remembering, rather than simply accepting the authoritative narratives of heritage institutions, which raises questions about what this means for cultural heritage writ large and whose versions of the past these heritage communities will hold onto as their digital inheritance. The primary contributions of this article are to provide both an extended view of the issue by building on several qualitative studies involving in-depth interviews and digital observations with eight cultural heritage communities over a five-year period and to better understand how their digital heritage initiatives are creating a new ecosystem for cultural heritage and collective remembering.

Introduction

Chapter 1 articulates the core research questions underlying the book’s analysis and highlights the theoretical and social significance of the case of collective remembering of the Tiananmen crackdown by Hong Kong society. It discusses the conceptualization of and perspective on collective memory adopted by the book. The processual approach and the six memory processes to be examined are explicated. The chapter also provides information about the methods utilized.

Changing Attitudes toward Tiananmen?

Chapter 7 discusses the impact of young people’s identity shift on collective remembering of Tiananmen. It examines intergenerational memory transmission in an altered social and political context. It illustrates the extent and characteristics of generational differences on the issue of Tiananmen. In addition, drawing upon sociologist Karl Mannheim’s distinction among generation of location, generation in actuality, and generation unit, the chapter examines why and how some young people came to abandon Tiananmen commemoration, yet others were still recruited into the mnemonic community surrounding Tiananmen.

Epilogue

The epilogue recounts the major political events in Hong Kong between 2019 and 2020 and discusses their impact on collective remembering of Tiananmen. Specifically, the chapter discusses how and why the Anti- Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement led to the establishment of the National Security Law. It then discusses the possible impact of the NSL on the collective memory processes described in the book. It ends with some suggestions about the possible future trajectory of collective remembering of Tiananmen in Hong Kong.

Out of Bounds: Confronting War Crimes and the Breakdown of Justice with Contemporary Art

Recent art has turned to judiciary and extra-judiciary practices, specifically in the context of international conflicts, in order to assert art’s political accountability and relevance to our capacity to historicise the present. The war in Iraq inspired works that directly address issues of representation and remediation, such as Marc Quinn’s Mirage (2008), in which the aesthetic experience opens onto an ambiguous experience of the breakdown of justice. Other works have chosen to turn carceral space itself into the site of a collective remembering that harnesses affect to a critical reflection on the administration of justice, on assent and dissent. This article will turn to key works by Marc Quinn and Trevor Paglen that confront extra-judiciary malpractices, but also to recent collective art projects involving an interdisciplinary take on the experience of imprisonment, such as Inside. Artists and Writers in Reading Prison (2016), in which artists of all backgrounds responded to Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis on the very premises of Wilde’s incarceration, as well as the work of 2019 Turner Prize co-recipient: Jordanian sound artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan whose recent works rely on testimonies from Syrian detainees and probe the political pragmatics of aural art. All these works have turned to the document—literary, visual, aural—to reflect on the process of experiential mediation. How does the experience of imprisonment, or extra-judiciary malpractices, come to the spectator? How are they read, heard, interpreted, remediated? The article ponders the remediation and displacement of aesthetic experience itself and the “response-ability”—following Donna Haraway’s coinage—of such a repoliticised embodied experience. It will assess the way by which such interdisciplinary works rethink the poetics of the documentary for an embodied intellection of justice—and injustice—in the present.

Portrait Series of Polish, Bohemian, and Hungarian Rulers in the Nineteenth Century An Interpretation

The article discusses the ubiquity of portrait series of Polish, Bohemian, and Hungarian rulers and determines their place in what Michael Billig calls “the dialectic of collective remembering and forgetting, and of imagination and unimaginative repetition” (Billig 1995: 10), which formed the national identifications of Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians in the nineteenth century. The objective of this article is to demonstrate the broad reception of the cycles along with the wide range of functions which they played in daily life in relation to interpretations of history, the imagined past, and the culture of Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians.

Content analysis of living historical memory around the world: Terrorization of the Anglosphere, and national foundations of hope in developing societies

Recently, researchers have endeavored to extend cultural perspectives of collective remembering by examining communicative or living historical memory (collective memories that emerge from informal communication between ordinary people). The current study examined the content and subjective evaluation of living historical memory from open-ended nominations of historical events provided by samples from 39 societies. Results showed that Western societies were dominated by living memories of terrorism, reflecting a distinctly negative climate. By contrast, many developing societies displayed a more positive climate in living memory that was rooted in events related to their nation’s foundation. The current study opens up avenues for conceptualizing the role of collective remembering in shaping emotional climates that influence (or may be part of) national political culture.

Collective remembering of Confucianism in Chinese language textbooks

This study focuses on the collective remembering of an ancient system of meaning, examining content and changes in the construction of Confucianism in Chinese textbooks. The data consists of 84 editions of Chinese language teaching textbooks published by the People’s Education Press from 1949 to 2019. Content analysis shows that Confucianism is and was barely represented in this corpus. Thematic analysis shows that: (i) Only Confucius and Mencius were recognized as Confucian masters. (ii) Representations of Confucianism in the textbooks come from The Analects, Mencius, The Book of Rites, and The Book of Poetry, all of which are more than 2000 years old. (iii) Except for the 1970s, Confucianism was represented in a positive or at least neutral way. (iv) Confucianism is represented in a distant, abstract, decontextualized, and apolitical way, disconnected from students’ daily life. This gives insight into how a core representation stripped of its peripheral elements can lose meaning, and lose its normative influence on behavior. Contributions to collective memory, and implications for how to edit Chinese language textbooks to be more engaging are discussed.