Amidst a highly interdisciplinary setting comprising anthropologists, architects, archeologists, 3D digitisation experts, semioticians and more, the group focused on moving toward a working definition of heritage infrastructures – as being complex assemblages combining meaning production, social relations and (in)visible material conditions that shape and are shaped by heritage politics across time and space. With presentations ranging from Sepik River Men’s Houses in Papua New Guinea, to Swiss vernacular building techniques and AI as new heritage management infrastructures worldwide, the workshop also included a roundtable and book launch of the new “Heritage Insights” volume: Unveiling hidden heritage: Narratives, politics, and agency.

In their presentation on behalf of the CDHM, Sohnee and Lauren focused on situating the Centre’s work in dialogue with an understanding of archives, their networks and modalities, as heritage infrastructures, where – simultaneously places, processes, (digital) platforms and more – archival materialities are multiple; allowing for heritage practices, heritage governance and their societal impacts to be inscribed and enacted. In addition to introducing the CDHM’s network approach to the digitisation of archives in tandem with research projects in the arts and humanities, the pair noted that CDHM’s focus on OCR-extracted searchable text techniques to valorise digitised archives may lead to hybrid forms of ‘participatory approaches’ to heritage governance that promote access among archivists, researchers, IOs, civil society and the general public. An essay based on their presentation will appear in the next “Heritage Insights” volume.