Digital cultural heritage: Mediating modern migratory memories of space and time

There has been significant interest in both digital heritage technologies and cultural routes over recent years. Digital technologies can improve heritage management with condition capture and maintenance systems, enhance interpretation with interactive media, enrich archives with sensory experiences and augment histories with crowdsourced data. Cultural routes can epitomise the nexus between diverse traditions, acknowledge feats of human ingenuity and endurance, and recognise enduring intercultural dialogue across space, time and societies. Yet both developments have been criticised, the former for taking too narrow a view of a rapidly innovating and seductive environment of digital tools, technologies and applications, and the later for failing to adequately articulate the dynamic and continuously evolving nature of cultural routes. Both also provoke questions about authenticity, ownership and value, and both challenge the concept of ‘living heritage’ and the sustainability of heritage values. The junction between the two, however, remains essentially under-explored.