Negotiating Digital Heritage Infrastructures: Setting the Scene for Participation (Participatory Memory Practices)

Negotiating Digital Heritage Infrastructures examines the infrastructural qualities of museum work that influence the ability of cultural institutions to support participatory and socially inclusive missions.

Drawing on data gathered in Scotland, Sweden, and Germany and taking an infrastructure studies approach, the book focuses on the socio-technical negotiations underpinning the everyday practices of museum staff. The book examines the work that is done behind the scenes, including the everyday tasks of collecting, archiving, displaying museum objects and retrieving information. Tran argues that while the technical components of infrastructure are necessary for memory-making and knowledge production, it is the social part of museum infrastructure that enables more open and decentralised modes of memory-making. The book shows how these negotiations affect the ability of museum infrastructures to accommodate and support growth and development, expanding access and establishing modes of connection to external partners and services. It illuminates the less visible practices of museums, which nevertheless directly affect their more public, outward-facing activities.

Negotiating Digital Heritage Infrastructures will be of interest to academics and students who are engaged in the study of museums and heritage. It will be particularly useful to those with an interest in public participation, social inclusion, heritage management, the digitisation of collections, data aggregation, and human-centred design approaches.

Quoc-Tan Tran holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Hamburg and an MRes in Library and Information Science from the University of Lille. He is a former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the POEM network (Participatory Memory Practices) and he has been a postdoctoral researcher at Bielefeld University since 2025, working on the ROARA project (Repercussions of Open Access on Research Assessment). His research areas include open culture, data infrastructure, and the sociology of scientific knowledge.