Page - 248 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 3:2

248 | www.limina-graz.eu Chiara Zuanni | Heritage in a digital world be aware of the differences in posting on a personal profile rather than on a public group. While different levels of attention to privacy settings and awareness of the implications of posting on public pages lead to different usage patterns of the platforms, they may also end up offering an unbal- anced and biased view of opinions on a matter to a viewer. In short, the “encoding” process highlighted by Alaimo and Kallinikos affects not only the users, but also the data that researchers and cultural institutions have access to. Any collection of data therefore needs to ac- count for the role these infrastructures, and the socio-political contexts in which these platforms have been developed, play in shaping the results. It is in this context, that I suggest the idea of interaction, as defined by Karen Barad, to understand the emergence of new configurations of knowledge. Barad writes that “It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the ‘components’ of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful” (Barad 2003, 815). In the context of heritage-making in the digital sphere, where conversa- tions on social media, both initiated by heritage professionals or by inter- ested users (who might have other agendas), it is valuable to research both the content and contexts of these exchanges and, crucially, the affordances of the platforms on which they happen. In this sense, digital ethnographers and data-intensive methods can be fruitfully combined with software and platforms studies (Burgess et al. 2017) in order to contextualise this data within ephemeral and temporary assemblages of human behaviours and technological constraints. It could therefore be argued that the results of each online conversation or search about a heritage topic could constitute a contemporary version of the Mnemosyne Atlas envisioned by Aby Warburg, and – as such – repre- sent an invaluable witness of contemporary knowledge, cultures, and his- tories. Furthermore, Barad’s argument that the separation of epistemology and ontology needs to be overcome (Barad 2007, 185), since the results of any research are intrinsically linked to the entanglements of the research The results of any research are intrinsically linked to the entanglements of the research practice.