Speaker
Description
This theoretical contribution uses the concept of heritage to investigate possible cultural trajectories resulting from the convergence of two distinct but interconnected phenomena: on the one hand the establishment of a virtual dimension of social life, deeply interwoven with its physical counterpart; and the growing importance of the past as a cultural resource that can be consumed, commodified, or more broadly mobilized in identity alignements and place-making processes. Both dynamics seem to question the traditional sense of history, additive and progressive. According to Harvey (2008: 21) heritage is a discursive process that “overturns the traditional historical concern for imposing a supposedly objective chronology onto a linear past receding behind us, by foregrounding the importance of both contemporary context, and of concern for the future” (Harvey: 2008, 21). At the same time, the digitization of the socio-cultural infrastructure of contemporary life makes available much more information than those that traditional knowledge systems can manage. Within digital humanitites the treatment of digital cultural resources shifts the emphasis from their accumulation, to their rendition, retrievability and interoperability (Münster et al. 2016; IIIF Standard). The presentation aims to investigate heritage as an interface between physical and virtual reality, considered under the aspect of two respective constraints: on one hand the "body friction" of the material world, on the other hand, the cycle of continuous obsolescence that characterizes the life of digital cultural resources, which requires an ongoing mobilization of material energies in order to assure stability over time. Questions are raised about the reflections that debates on digital cultural resources can have on the perception of the past and on material heritage. In its discursive and processual dimension, heritage is also a space of representation and pertains to the imaginative dimension of the social production of space.
Biography
Elena Tardivo is an independent scholar in Tourism Studies. She holds an MA in Progettazione e Gestione dei Sistemi Turistici from University of Rome – Tor Vergata. She has been involved in the research project ENTOURAGE, investigating old age residents mobilities and their interaction with tourism in the city of Venice, under the supervision of Wilbert den Hoed and Antonio Paolo Russo. Her research focuses on heritage tourism and the qualitative analysis of heritage as part of tourism infrastructure in urban contexts. In 2024 co-authored papers by her will be published by academic journals Mobilities and Applied Mobilities.
