From policy to platform: the digitization of Danish Cultural Heritage

Abstract

This article scrutinizes the dominant discursive formations within digitization of cultural heritage in Danish cultural policy, with the ‘Danish Cultural Heritage’ portal serving as a case. The paper analyzes how the portal frames users’ participation potentials and how this relates to the objectives of the portal and official Danish digitization strategies issued in the period of 2007–2015. Furthermore, the article incorporates interviews with experts working with the portal and the digitization strategies in order to gain a closer understanding of the transformation from policy to reality. Even though discourses on participation and user engagement are detected within official cultural policy documents, the dominant discourses are those of administrative and managerial effectiveness and cooperation as well as increased production, innovation, and competition. A similar pattern emerges on the portal, where focus is on digitization and preservation rather than access and use. The interactions between technology, user/usage, and content are thus tailored on premises of ‘read only’ and ‘sit back and be told’ cultures rather than on the user-engaging ‘read write’ and ‘making and doing’ cultures.