Memory, Storytelling and the Digital Archive: Revitalising Community and Regional Identities in the Virtual Age

This article discusses how the interplay between the canon, the archive and performance informs the use of digital heritage resources in the construction, interpretation, representation, circulation and preservation of cultural and/or collective memory with a view to animating community and regional identities. To this end, the article draws on a range of relevant theoretical models and ethnographic fieldwork to interrogate how the aforementioned interplay enables and encourages different approaches to meaning and memory-making through the lens of two British case study heritage projects in Stoke-on-Trent (West Midlands of England) and the Isle of Bute (West Coast of Scotland). The overarching argument is that local, alternative, bottom-up approaches to telling (hi)stories and re-enacting the past not only effectively take on a socio-political dimension directed at challenging dominant, hegemonic, institutional narratives and versions of the past, but – in doing so – they also offer new and refreshingly different ways of understanding, representing, remembering and rediscovering the past meaningfully in ways that local communities and regions can relate with.