Digital Community Heritage and Open Access

What is our current understanding of community? A community is a fluid, broad and multi-faceted concept, bound by a i. sense of identity, ii. sense of belonging and iii. interconnections among community members (Forsyth, 2012). Τhe UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003), which foregrounds communities in the heritage context, does not specify “community” permitting freedom over its definition. Communities can be self-determined, recognising their representational belonging at grassroots level, or not self-identified (historicised communities). In digital settings, communities can be enabled in more “passive” modes, through user contribution, peer-to-peer or Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Of course, communities can display overlapping factors and a complex web of relations that are often not easily identifiable (Pérez López, 2014).

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