DICULTHER - Digitalization of Cultural Heritage as Discursive Practice: Mapping the Museums and Citizens-led Initiatives in Graz and Novi Sad

Digitalization of Cultural Heritage as Discursive Practice: Mapping the Museums and Citizens-led Initiatives in Graz and Novi Sad (DISCULTHER) examine how the process of digitalization of cultural heritage (DCH), identified on a discursive level, manifests in two kinds of settings: institutional (museums) and activist (citizens-led initiatives). The main objective of the project is to investigate the plurality of discursive practices of DCH within mentioned settings, the innovativeness, discrepancies and tensions in these practices, as well as the capacity of DCH to make accessible, mobilize and critically engage citizens in opening the space for intercultural dialogue.

It is a project with comparative dimension on two levels: it compares the institutional with non-institutional practices of DCH, but also the processes in two cities, Novi Sad (Serbia) and Graz (Austria). They share in part the common history, culture and heritage. In contemporary framework, comparison aims to highlight social and cultural experience of the cities of which one belongs to the state member of European Union and one is in the process of Europeanization. It is also interdisciplinary research that transcends the boundaries in Social Sciences between Sociology, Heritage Studies and Digital Humanities and foregrounds hitherto neglected aspects of the process of digitalization of cultural heritage.