While most media-memory research focuses on particular cultural repository sites, memorials, traumatic events, media channels, or commemorative practices as objects of study to understand the construction of collective memory, this dissertation suggests it is our activity, participation, and interaction with digital content through multimodal platforms and social media applications that demonstrate how communities articulate shared memory in the new media landscape. This study examines the discursive interpretations of cultural heritage practitioners and participations from the Getty Research Institute, the Prelinger Archive and Library, and the Willamette Heritage Center to better understand how multimodal platforms are being used, how this use is changing the roles of the heritage practitioners and participants in the construction of meaning, and what types of multimodal memory practices are emerging. This research also underscores a reassessment of what constitutes heritage artifacts, authenticity, curatorial authority, and multimodal participation in digital cultural heritage. My methodological approach for this research takes a multilateral form of data collection, including in-depth interviewing, participant observations, and thematic analysis, informed by the theoretical frameworks of collective memory, remediation, and gatekeeping and unified by the social theories of art practice, social constructionism, symbolic interactionism, and actor-network theory. My primary recommendation from this research is that our digital practices of contributing, appropriating, repurposing, and sharing digital content represent new forms of memory practice in a multimodal context. I propose that these multimodal memory practices of interacting with digital content using different devices across different networks coalesce into platformed communities of memory, where communities are shaped and collective memory is shared by our interaction through social networks. I suggest that we need to think of social media output and metadata as being new forms of cultural heritage artifacts and legitimate social records. I also contend that metadata analysis presents new considerations and opportunities for studying the memory of digital content and institutional memory. It is my hope that these conclusions clarify our contemporary memory practices in the digital era so that we can better understand whose voices will be most prominent in the future articulation of how we remember the past.

No / The first recorded crowdsourcing activity was in 1714 [1], with intermittent public event occurrences up until the millennium when such activities become widespread, spanning multiple domains. Crowdsourcing, however, is relatively novel as a methodology within virtual environment studies, in archaeology, and within the heritage domains where this research is focused. The studies that are being conducted are few and far between in comparison to other areas. This paper aims to develop a recent concept in crowdsourcing work termed `crowd behaviour mining' [2] using virtual environments, and to develop a unique concept in crowdsourcing activities that can be applied beyond the case studies presented here and to other domains that involve human behaviour as independent variables. The case studies described here use data from experiments involving separate heritage projects and conducted during two Royal Society Summer Science Exhibitions, in 2012 and 2015 respectively. `Crowd Behaviour Mining' analysis demonstrated a capacity to inform research in respect of potential patterns and trends across space and time as well as preferences between demographic user groups and the influence of experimenters during the experiments.

Yes / Archaeology is a broad church and its role as a “two culture” discipline is frequently cited. This position at the interface of the arts and sciences remains central to archaeological activity but there have been significant changes in the structure of archaeology and its relationship to society overall. The growth of heritage science, in particular, is driving change and development within archaeology at a national and international level. This paper discusses these developments in relation to the author's own research trajectory and discusses the significance of such change.

Within a context of recent and rapid transformation in authorship and participation practices on the Internet, this thesis explores the implications of an emerging digital culture for heritage institutions, such as museums and archives. Combining insights from internet, education and museum theory it explores different experiences of participation and meaning making around digital heritage collections opened to public engagement and contribution. In particular, the investigation analyses and contrasts the online activities of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), partner in the research, with alternative approaches. The thesis applies ethnographic research methods to investigate embodied and virtual settings. Based on the empirical findings, it identifies different theoretical models of online engagement with heritage content. It then extrapolates from these models a conceptual framework that could be used by heritage institutions to analyse and re-assess their online practices, intellectual positioning and strategic ambitions in the context of the paradigm shift brought about by digitality.

The present work is based on the research and design of a mobile AR experiment performed in the context of the emerging interdisciplinary fields of digital heritage and experience design. In an attempt to find a method to support the justification and discovery of elements that can influence the user towards the fulfilment of an objective in a heritage experience, my experimental research reveals that a combination of play moments including elements of embodiment and sensuousness in mobile AR are most suitable to convey a story. Determining suitable gameplay and game mechanics requires an appropriate setting and context for a user’s encounter with digital heritage. My research outlines a design methodology to reveal how the aesthetics of mobile AR technology can be designed to support critical user experiences through play and discovery. / Designing Digital Heritage. Seeing Secrets

Since the 1990s, a trend in the UK museum sector for developing community partnerships has witnessed a ‘participatory drive’ that aims to embrace social diversity by engaging communities in the co-creation of exhibitions and other museum work. In this context, the Internet broadly, and social media in particular, are seen as complementary to museum processes of reciprocal exchange and public access. However, as this thesis stresses, treating the Internet and social media as complementary and convergent with the participatory drive in museums is assumptive and has been under-analysed, and its difficulties and complexities understated. In this context, this practice-based research carefully unpicks and critically analyses naturalised assumptions about online resources and social media practices in museums by tracing the cultural history through which the participatory museum has developed and contrasting it with the much later sociology of the Internet. The participatory drive is seen to be mediated through society’s agencies for local governance, healthcare and education services, as well as neighbourhood groups and families. These structures act then as a bridge organising people in space and time. In turn, museums’ digital practices often assume similar social organisation in their approach towards public engagement. However, the distributed architecture of the Internet has the effect of compressing time with space, enabling group organisation and public spaces to bypass society’s structures and instead place the individual at the centre of a network of relationships that self-organises according to the social capital displayed in online behaviour. Accordingly, the thesis argues, there is anapparent mis-match between museums on the Web and the online public, which affects negatively public engagement online. By bringing Bourdieu’s theories of social space and social capital into the realm of the Internet, drawing on cultural historical activity theory and reflecting on a research residency at the Whitworth Art Gallery, this thesis goes on to examine why museums find it challenging to engage with online publics. Its research practice aimed to ‘open’ the digital collections of the participating museum into the same time and space as the online public. This included triggering, following, documenting and critically reflecting upon processes, challenges and actions of digital engagement and the people involved in them. The thesis reflects on the research practice’s organisational and cultural challenges, which relate to the fact that it contradicted the museum’s existing departmental organisation and symbolic representation of public access and engagement. It goes on to argue that when digital practices of museums are attuned to the ecology and spatial structure of the online public, the outcomes are misrecognised as unrelated to museums’ core practices of social inclusivity. Instead, the argument continues, museums need to open up to emerging concepts of digital public space and publicness, in order for their digital practices to be relevant to online publics.

This dissertation considers the impact mobile media technologies have on the production and consumption of memory narratives and cultural memory discourses in Canada. Although this analysis pays specific attention to concepts of memory, heritage, and public history in its exploration of site-specific digital narratives, it is set within a larger theoretical framework that considers the relationship between mobile technology and place, and how the mobile phone in particular can foster both a sense of place and placelessness. This larger framework also includes issues of co-presence, networked identity, play, affect, and the phenomenological relationship between the individual and the mobile device. This is then considered alongside memory narratives (both on the national and quotidian levels) at specifically sanctioned sites of national commemoration (monuments, historic sites) and also in everyday urban spaces. To this end, this dissertation covers a wide range of augmented reality apps and forms of digital storytelling including locative media narratives, site-specific digital performances, social media and crowdsourced heritage archives, and urban mobile gaming and playful mapping. Despite common criticism that mobile phones only serve to distract us from our surrounding environment, I argue that mobile technology can generate deeper, more affective attachments to places by reformulating ways of perceiving and moving through them. They do this by insisting that place is more than just its material properties, but rather is composed of a fluctuating relationship between materiality, time, and affect. Following this framework, I also emphasize how mobile technology shifts the traditional mission of the archive to preserve and protect the past to something more playful, more affective, and more preoccupied with the circulation of the past in the present. Included in this analysis are crowdsourced archives created on social media platforms which, I argue, are particularly well suited to capturing the dynamic qualities of memory and living heritage practices. A contributing factor in this is the mobile phone’s position as a site of intimacy and co-presence, which situates it in a long history of communication technologies that employ rhetorical and technological strategies of co-presence, immediacy, and intimacy. Chapter one examines the role that locative media narratives play at official sites of memory in Canada’s capital region from app-based historical tours to more playful narrative encounters, through the lens of the archive and the repertoire. Chapter two then considers the digital site-specific performance piece, LANDLINE, to unpack how mobile media foster everyday place memories in urban spaces through the mobile phone’s position as a site of intimacy for geographically distant, but virtually co-present, individuals. Chapter three analyzes my own experimental method, Maplibs, which follows a mobile game structure to encourage participants to engage in acts of playful placemaking and collaborative storytelling in order to highlight an alternative process of engaging with place that carries the past forward in meaningful ways. And finally, chapter four analyzes the social media group “Lost Ottawa” to explore how collaborative memory communities mobilize through social media platforms like Facebook and create new forms of participatory heritage. In all of this, place is understood as a dynamic assemblage of stories and memories that the mobile phone, through its ubiquitous impact on social practices, plays a key role in shaping.

Esta dissertação articula os conceitos relacionados à comunicação pública e governamental, cidade, memória, democracia digital e patrimônio digital, com o objetivo de diagnosticar o estágio de preservação da comunicação governamental nos sites das capitais brasileiras, analisando sua implicação para a constituição da memória coletiva, social e política das cidades e de seus habitantes. Os conceitos teóricos trabalhados reportam à comunicação pública conforme proposto, principalmente, por Weber e Esteves, e à comunicação governamental de acordo com Duarte e Weber; os estudos da cidade a partir de Pesavento, Weber e Mela; as teorias da memória segundo Halbwachs, Huyssen, Nora, Pollak e Ricoeur; e democracia digital a partir de Gomes, Maia, Marques, Silva e Cepik trabalhados de forma articulada com os estudos de Dodebei sobre patrimônio digital. A opção metodológica é a pesquisa qualitativa de caráter exploratório-documental nos sites oficiais das 27 capitais brasileiras, tendo como procedimentos metodológicos a pesquisa bibliográfica; a pesquisa histórico-descritiva e a pesquisa documental. Os sistemas de comunicação governamental das capitais foram identificados e classificados de acordo sua visibilidade, acessibilidade e considerando o contexto político da última transição governamental. A partir da articulação dessas categorias, foram analisadas as implicações da preservação e do apagamento da comunicação governamental para a constituição da memória da cidade e dos seus habitantes. Dentre os principais resultados, o diagnóstico de que em cerca de 33% dos sites das prefeituras de capitais os produtos da comunicação governamental de governos passados já não estão mais disponíveis ao acesso público, bem como a constatação de que os contextos de disputa entre grupos políticos rivais não são suficientes para explicar os casos de tentativa de silenciamento de governos passados. / This master thesis articulates concepts related to public and government communications, city studies, memory, digital democracy and digital heritage, aiming to analyze the preservation stage of the government’s communications systems in the websites of Brazilian capitals, evaluating its implications for the construction of collective, social and political memory for these various cities and their inhabitants. The theoretical concepts focus in public communication according particularly to Weber and Esteves, and government communication according to Duarte and Weber; city studies according to Pesavento, Weber and Mela; collective memory and memory theory according to Halbwachs, Huyssen, Nora, Pollak e Ricoeur; the concept of digital democracy according to Gomes, Maia, Marques, Silva and Cepik articulated in coordination with Dodebei’s studies of digital heritage. As for the methodology, the choice is for a qualitative research of documental-exploratory nature, in the websites of the 27 Brazilian capitals, with the following methodological procedures: bibliographic research, historical-descriptive research and documentary research. Government’s communications systems are identified and classified according their visibility, accessibility and considering the political context of the last government transition. The implications of conservation and destruction of government’s communications systems to the constitution of the city memory and its inhabitants were analyzed from the articulation of these categories. Among the main results, the diagnosis that government communication of past governments are no longer available to public access in 33% of Brazilian capitals websites and that the dispute contexts between political rivals groups are not sufficient to explain the attempt silencing past governments.

Esta dissertação articula os conceitos relacionados à comunicação pública e governamental, cidade, memória, democracia digital e patrimônio digital, com o objetivo de diagnosticar o estágio de preservação da comunicação governamental nos sites das capitais brasileiras, analisando sua implicação para a constituição da memória coletiva, social e política das cidades e de seus habitantes. Os conceitos teóricos trabalhados reportam à comunicação pública conforme proposto, principalmente, por Weber e Esteves, e à comunicação governamental de acordo com Duarte e Weber; os estudos da cidade a partir de Pesavento, Weber e Mela; as teorias da memória segundo Halbwachs, Huyssen, Nora, Pollak e Ricoeur; e democracia digital a partir de Gomes, Maia, Marques, Silva e Cepik trabalhados de forma articulada com os estudos de Dodebei sobre patrimônio digital. A opção metodológica é a pesquisa qualitativa de caráter exploratório-documental nos sites oficiais das 27 capitais brasileiras, tendo como procedimentos metodológicos a pesquisa bibliográfica; a pesquisa histórico-descritiva e a pesquisa documental. Os sistemas de comunicação governamental das capitais foram identificados e classificados de acordo sua visibilidade, acessibilidade e considerando o contexto político da última transição governamental. A partir da articulação dessas categorias, foram analisadas as implicações da preservação e do apagamento da comunicação governamental para a constituição da memória da cidade e dos seus habitantes. Dentre os principais resultados, o diagnóstico de que em cerca de 33% dos sites das prefeituras de capitais os produtos da comunicação governamental de governos passados já não estão mais disponíveis ao acesso público, bem como a constatação de que os contextos de disputa entre grupos políticos rivais não são suficientes para explicar os casos de tentativa de silenciamento de governos passados. / This master thesis articulates concepts related to public and government communications, city studies, memory, digital democracy and digital heritage, aiming to analyze the preservation stage of the government’s communications systems in the websites of Brazilian capitals, evaluating its implications for the construction of collective, social and political memory for these various cities and their inhabitants. The theoretical concepts focus in public communication according particularly to Weber and Esteves, and government communication according to Duarte and Weber; city studies according to Pesavento, Weber and Mela; collective memory and memory theory according to Halbwachs, Huyssen, Nora, Pollak e Ricoeur; the concept of digital democracy according to Gomes, Maia, Marques, Silva and Cepik articulated in coordination with Dodebei’s studies of digital heritage. As for the methodology, the choice is for a qualitative research of documental-exploratory nature, in the websites of the 27 Brazilian capitals, with the following methodological procedures: bibliographic research, historical-descriptive research and documentary research. Government’s communications systems are identified and classified according their visibility, accessibility and considering the political context of the last government transition. The implications of conservation and destruction of government’s communications systems to the constitution of the city memory and its inhabitants were analyzed from the articulation of these categories. Among the main results, the diagnosis that government communication of past governments are no longer available to public access in 33% of Brazilian capitals websites and that the dispute contexts between political rivals groups are not sufficient to explain the attempt silencing past governments.

Esta dissertação articula os conceitos relacionados à comunicação pública e governamental, cidade, memória, democracia digital e patrimônio digital, com o objetivo de diagnosticar o estágio de preservação da comunicação governamental nos sites das capitais brasileiras, analisando sua implicação para a constituição da memória coletiva, social e política das cidades e de seus habitantes. Os conceitos teóricos trabalhados reportam à comunicação pública conforme proposto, principalmente, por Weber e Esteves, e à comunicação governamental de acordo com Duarte e Weber; os estudos da cidade a partir de Pesavento, Weber e Mela; as teorias da memória segundo Halbwachs, Huyssen, Nora, Pollak e Ricoeur; e democracia digital a partir de Gomes, Maia, Marques, Silva e Cepik trabalhados de forma articulada com os estudos de Dodebei sobre patrimônio digital. A opção metodológica é a pesquisa qualitativa de caráter exploratório-documental nos sites oficiais das 27 capitais brasileiras, tendo como procedimentos metodológicos a pesquisa bibliográfica; a pesquisa histórico-descritiva e a pesquisa documental. Os sistemas de comunicação governamental das capitais foram identificados e classificados de acordo sua visibilidade, acessibilidade e considerando o contexto político da última transição governamental. A partir da articulação dessas categorias, foram analisadas as implicações da preservação e do apagamento da comunicação governamental para a constituição da memória da cidade e dos seus habitantes. Dentre os principais resultados, o diagnóstico de que em cerca de 33% dos sites das prefeituras de capitais os produtos da comunicação governamental de governos passados já não estão mais disponíveis ao acesso público, bem como a constatação de que os contextos de disputa entre grupos políticos rivais não são suficientes para explicar os casos de tentativa de silenciamento de governos passados. / This master thesis articulates concepts related to public and government communications, city studies, memory, digital democracy and digital heritage, aiming to analyze the preservation stage of the government’s communications systems in the websites of Brazilian capitals, evaluating its implications for the construction of collective, social and political memory for these various cities and their inhabitants. The theoretical concepts focus in public communication according particularly to Weber and Esteves, and government communication according to Duarte and Weber; city studies according to Pesavento, Weber and Mela; collective memory and memory theory according to Halbwachs, Huyssen, Nora, Pollak e Ricoeur; the concept of digital democracy according to Gomes, Maia, Marques, Silva and Cepik articulated in coordination with Dodebei’s studies of digital heritage. As for the methodology, the choice is for a qualitative research of documental-exploratory nature, in the websites of the 27 Brazilian capitals, with the following methodological procedures: bibliographic research, historical-descriptive research and documentary research. Government’s communications systems are identified and classified according their visibility, accessibility and considering the political context of the last government transition. The implications of conservation and destruction of government’s communications systems to the constitution of the city memory and its inhabitants were analyzed from the articulation of these categories. Among the main results, the diagnosis that government communication of past governments are no longer available to public access in 33% of Brazilian capitals websites and that the dispute contexts between political rivals groups are not sufficient to explain the attempt silencing past governments.