Abstract
The academic literature contains an increasing quantity of references to Smart Heritage. These references are at the intersection of the smart city and heritage disciplines and primarily within informative, interpretative, and governance applications. The literature indicates the future expansion of the Smart Heritage discourse into additional applications as researchers apply smart technology to more complex cultural environments. The Smart Heritage discourse signals an advancement in the literature beyond Digital Heritage and Virtual Heritage discourses as Smart Heritage pivots on the active curatorship of heritage experiences by automated and autonomous technologies, rather than technology as a passive digital tool for human-curated experiences. The article comprehensively reviews the emergent Smart Heritage discourse for the first time in the academic literature, and then offers a contemporary definition that considers the literature to date. The review and definition draw on literature across the contributing disciplines to understand the discourse’s development and current state. The article finds that Smart Heritage is an independent discourse that intertwines the autonomous and automatic capabilities and innovation of smart technologies with the contextual and subjective interpretation of the past. Smart Heritage is likely the future vanguard for research between the technology and heritage disciplines.
Highlights
Inspired by Smart Mobility, Smart Infrastructure, and other smart discourses, researchers seek further technology-led innovations by converging the smart city discipline with other disciplines
From a survey of the discipline between 1990 and 2016, Ingwersen and Serrano-Lopez described the discipline as a “dominating concept” that colonialises on other disciplines and institutions [8]. They found that distinct smart discourses, such as Smart Mobility and Smart Infrastructure, result from the smart city discipline drawing on novel datasets in adjacent fields and becoming a popular theme for researchers
The article contributes the first comprehensive review of Smart Heritage in the academic literature. It finds that Smart Heritage emerged in the second decade of the 21st
Summary
Inspired by Smart Mobility, Smart Infrastructure, and other smart discourses, researchers seek further technology-led innovations by converging the smart city discipline with other disciplines. The academic literature records an increasing quantity of references to Smart Heritage over the past decade. Such references are currently within informative, interpretative, and governance applications in the literature. They identify Smart Heritage as offering an innovative new frontier in the convergence of smart technology and heritage disciplines; for example, smart devices and systems curating heritage experiences and historical narratives advising technologies’. The review records the patchwork of contributions across various research fields and discusses how they build to form a novel discourse It records the Smart Heritage in its nascent early years, as a distinct discourse within select applications, and its present state as it becomes an established discourse across multiple applications. The definition offers a clear foundation around which researchers can ground their future inquiry into the Smart Heritage discourse and its application
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