HeritaMus: A Tool for Collaborative Curation of Tangible and Intangible Heritage

Abstract

HeritaMus is a digital tool for gathering, retrieving and visualizing complex data on heritage (tangible and intangible), thereby promoting participatory curatorship by mobilizing communities of practice. Developed over a three-year period by a European consortium, the project was based on a cooperative ethnography study on the uses and re-uses of historical sound recordings of two cultural manifestations inscribed on the UNESCO ICH list: fado and flamenco. Taking historical sound recordings as a fundamental actor that informs current musical practice, the project focused on overcoming the artificial divide between tangible heritage (historical phonograms) and intangible heritage (musical practice and community of practice knowledge). HeritaMus was designed to display the networks established by all kinds of actors (human and non-human), deepening the understanding of their intricate relationships.This paper introduces the theoretical background of the HeritaMus project and the conceptual challenges that the consortium faced while developing the tool, describes the tool’s main characteristics and processes, and projects future developments. Some research results are also presented concerning politics of representation, the uneven representation of communities of practice and communities of research, the impact of “heritage excess” and the erasure of controversy among heritage practices—topics that are known to practitioners but often overlooked by academia.