Disruptive forms, persistent values: negotiating digital heritage and ‘The Memory of the World’

This chapter discusses digital heritage in the context of the Memory of the World (MoW) programme, established by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1992. It begins by giving an overview of the world heritage enterprise that finds form in UNESCO’s registers, lists and conventions. Concerns regarding the loss of memory and material culture inform the ethos of the organization, and its principles for protecting and safeguarding heritage. This ethos also expresses itself as the desire for memory resistant to loss in MoW’s policy guidelines, which are examined with particular reference to digital documents and digital heritage. The digital medium unsettles established notions of heritage persistence and highlights different dimensions of the persistence loss-relationship. The chapter argues that tensions between heritage and the digital medium may be productive for the figuring of both; the palpable performativity of the latter holds open the potential for a different relationship to memory than MoW would seem to allow for. Likewise, the challenge of preserving digital objects serves to emphasize the varied material forms heritage might take.