FCJ-174 Constructing the contemporary via digital cultural heritage

Torsten Andreasen University of Copenhagen The digital cultural heritage archive appeared in the discourse of cultural heritage around the beginning of the new millennium and did so with certain specific goals, €”the digital preservation of and accessibility to cultural heritage should serve global tolerance, strengthen regional and national identity and, finally, inspire entrepreneurial creativity and innovation. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the predominant global agent of cultural heritage since the Second World War, has tended to express the potential use-value of cultural heritage by appropriating a quote from Arjun Appadurai: ‘Culture is the resource that society needs to move from today to tomorrow’ (UNESCO, 2010: 7). According to this discursive formation, operated internationally by UNESCO in parallel with its supranational and national counterparts, digital cultural heritage has a specific strategic temporality, €”the digital construction of the past as a force driving the present into the future. […]