Seite - 243 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Band 3:2

243 | www.limina-graz.eu Chiara Zuanni | Heritage in a digital world tions around, and interpretation of heritage. While there is a need for more research on how knowledge is constructed online, I would also argue that there is also a need of preserving these snapshots in contemporary dis- courses about heritage. Therefore, this section will lead to a discussion of the role of platforms, considered as posthuman agents, in informing these discourses through their algorithmic structures. The last section will con- sequently move to observe how we can preserve not only short fragments of these conversations, but also the platforms, algorithms, and tools that enable them – all contributing to the network of human and non-human agents shaping our understanding of the past, present, and future. Constructing heritage knowledge online The previous section has argued that the recognition of the influence of contemporary social and political structures on archaeological and mu- seological interpretation, as well as on the understanding of the past in the public sphere, has shaped the field of heritage studies (and neighbouring fields) in the last decades. In this same period, the digital transformation has affected the way heritage is communicated, negotiated, and under- stood in the public sphere. The communication of the past in the digital sphere has been at the forefront of research in both digital public archaeol- ogy (Bonacchi 2012; Richardson 2013) and museums (e. g. Sanchez Laws 2015) for more than a decade. If the documentation of cultural and natural heritage collections had prompted the adoption of digital methods in mu- seums already at the end of the 1960s, it was the advent of the World Wide Web and personal computers which – as in any other sector – contributed to the development new solutions. The first museum websites started to appear in the early 1990s (e. g. Natural History Museum London in 1994), in parallel to digital supports (e. g. CD-ROMs) which offered an alternative to the traditional museum guide, with a presentation of the collections and, at times, more interactive presentations. In the 2000s, the beginning of the use of semantic web technologies for cultural heritage collections and a broader diffusion of websites was followed by the explosion of the Web 2.0, which – in turn – led to the development of participatory practices (Jenkins 2006). Nina Simon theorised the participatory museum as a place where everyone is enabled to participate and to contribute information and a per- spective (Simon 2010). Digital media enable such participatory practices, from crowdsourcing projects to showcasing multiple interpretation of an