Visitor, contributor and conversationalist: multiple digital identities of the heritage citizen

In this paper we analyse modes of connecting to and interacting with heritage through a range of selected digital applications and social media that all relate to the history of places. With their emphasis on connectivity and online participation, these apps and sites seek to create both repositories and digital communities through which images, information, memories and experiences can be shared. Through comparison to the
rise of ‘citizen science’, we propose a new way of categorising these recent mobile and web-based sites that scrutinises, in a more fine-grained way, the mode of citizen engagement that was inscribed into their designs and purpose. The simple typology of curated sites, content-hosting sites, and social network sites, provides a way to examine the possibilities and the limits for a kind of digitally-enabled ‘heritage citizen’. We ask questions around how digital and social media open up new forms of consumption and production of heritage related interpretation and content, and we tease apart issues of ownership and citizen versus institutional presence, moderation and control, and ongoing engagement.