Reflections from the panel “Dijital Ekosistemlerde Kültürel Miras” at Feshane [in İstanbul], December 20, 2025, organized by Europa Nostra Türkiye Association.
The Infrastructure of Cultural Memory
To understand digital transformation in the context of cultural heritage, we must first recognize it as what Foucault might call a “technology of power” rather than simply a technological process. While digitization promises accessibility and preservation, it simultaneously produces new mechanisms of exclusion, new hierarchies, and new forms of domination.
Three fundamental dimensions of this transformation:
- Infrastructural dependency. Our cultural heritage increasingly exists on the servers of private corporations—Google, Meta, Amazon. This isn’t just a technical matter; it’s a question of sovereignty. What happens to our cultural memory when servers shut down, when algorithms change, when platforms shift their policies? The 2019 MySpace disaster, which lost 50 million music files, stands as a tragic reminder of this fragility.
- Epistemological transformation. Digitization fundamentally alters our assumptions about what knowledge is. Cultural heritage becomes conceived of as “data.” But not all cultural heritage fits into databases. How do you digitize Anatolia’s oral culture traditions, embodied knowledge, and relational memory? What cannot be digitized becomes invisible, no longer perceived as “real” heritage.
The emergence of new participant subjects. In digital ecosystems, it’s not just museums, experts, or states that intervene in cultural heritage—algorithms, platforms, and user communities do too. A 15-second TikTok video about Göbeklitepe might reach more people than an academic publication. Is this democratization or trivialization? It’s both.
Cultural heritage occupies a contradictory position in this structure. On the one hand, it’s more accessible, democratic, and participatory than ever before. On the other hand, it’s more fragile, manipulable, and dependent on hegemonic powers. Digital intermediaries occupy a central role in this new context.
The Digital Divide and Its Asymmetries
The Google Arts & Culture project embodies this paradox perfectly. Millions of artworks from over 2,000 museums have been digitized, yet more than 70% of these collections come from North American and Western European institutions. Anatolia’s rich archaeological heritage is proportionally underrepresented.
The contrast between Göbeklitepe and Hasankeyf in Turkey vividly illustrates this digital resource injustice. Göbeklitepe has 360-degree virtual tours and detailed 3D models. Meanwhile, during the flooding in Hasankeyf, digital documentation was woefully inadequate. The state archives present another dimension of this divide—while the Presidency Ottoman Archive has digitization efforts underway, physical application and fee requirements for access reinforce rather than bridge the digital divide.
Deeper patterns of cultural hegemony operate through algorithmic curation.
Algorithmic Hegemony and the Politics of Visibility
Digital anthropology shows us that platforms and algorithms are not neutral intermediaries but active producers of meaning. Algorithms decide what is “interesting,” “quality,” and “relevant”—and these decisions determine which dimensions of cultural heritage become visible.
Several mechanisms are at work here. The engagement economy commodifies heritage. Social media algorithms are designed to maximize interaction. The tourist-friendly, Instagram-worthy, potentially viral images of Topkapı Palace receive algorithmic rewards. Meanwhile, archival documents, calligraphic details, and everyday life practices within the same complex remain invisible. Heritage is evaluated through “clickability.”
Wikipedia and the Epistemological Divide
Consider the Wikipedia paradox. The English Wikipedia entry for “Byzantine Empire” is extensively detailed. The Turkish entry for “Bizans İmparatorluğu” is about a quarter as long. This is both a linguistic and epistemological hegemony problem. The algorithmic curation of cultural heritage on TikTok presents similar issues—viral moments from Ephesus Ancient City garner millions of views, while content about traditional handicrafts struggles to gain algorithmic visibility.
Standardization itself becomes hegemonic. International metadata standards like Dublin Core and METS are Western-centric. Adapting Ottoman documents or Anatolian oral traditions to these standards can constitute epistemic violence.
The Transformed Public Sphere
Alternative public spheres emerge, too. On platforms like Ekşi Sözlük, user-generated knowledge about cultural heritage and memory construction operate outside traditional academic authority. This raises important questions about expertise, authority, and democratic participation in heritage interpretation.
Disinformation and the Manipulation of Heritage
The intersection of disinformation and cultural heritage presents unique challenges. False claims about “hidden Islamic decorations” in Hagia Sophia during restoration work spread rapidly on social media—a direct connection to fact-checking work. On Pinterest and Etsy, modern products are marketed as authentic “Ottoman calligrapher works,” creating a marketplace of manufactured authenticity.
AI and deepfake technologies introduce new dimensions to this problem. For instance, AI-generated content featuring “Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror speaking” raises profound questions about authenticity, representation, and manipulation of historical memory.
Indigenous Peoples and Digital Consent
Lesson 1: Sovereignty over data
Indigenous data sovereignty asserts that communities have the right to control how data about them is collected, stored, interpreted, and shared.guides.library.utoronto+3
Frameworks such as OCAP, CARE, and US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network stress collective ownership, authority to control, and responsibility to communities, which directly challenge default “open by default” digital norms.lib.guides.umd+3
Lesson 2: Consent and cultural protocols
Many communities hold that certain songs, images, rituals, or sacred objects should not be photographed, digitized, or made openly accessible, even if technically possible.itsartlaw+3
Institutions are being pushed to adopt restrictions on duplication, access tiers, and community-led curation to align digital practices with protocols about who may see, hear, or use particular materials.wipo+3
Lesson 3: Limits of “digital repatriation”
Substituting scans or photos for the physical return of sacred or stolen objects often reproduces colonial control, because institutions retain originals, infrastructures, and metadata while offering only “pixels” back.academia+3
Indigenous critiques stress that digital surrogates can supplement but never replace material repatriation, since they strip away ceremonial, territorial, and communal relations that give heritage its meaning.ijoc+2
Lesson 4: Community-led design and narrative
Digital storytelling projects that are led by Indigenous communities show how platforms can support cultural transmission, language revitalization, and youth empowerment when communities set the agenda.jtacademy+3
These projects prioritize community governance of platforms, security, and narrative framing, countering earlier patterns where archives and museums controlled categorization and interpretation.storii+3
Lesson 5: Rethinking openness and access
Digitized Indigenous knowledge collections reveal that uncritical “open access” can enable misappropriation, misrepresentation, and renewed extraction of traditional knowledge.indigenousclimatehub+3
Emerging practice points toward layered access, community-controlled licensing, and rights of reply and correction, reframing digital archives as negotiated spaces rather than neutral information repositories.lib.sfu+3
Mukurtu CMS originated in collaboration with the Warumungu Aboriginal community and is now used by many Indigenous communities globally. Mukurtu CMS, which provides access control according to “cultural protocols” rather than universal access, respects cultural ontologies over Western assumptions about information universality. The system allows certain objects to be viewed only by specific community members based on gender, age, or initiation status.
AI and the New Problematics of Heritage
Palmyra, Notre Dame, and “which past?”
Critical debates around reconstructing Palmyra after ISIS emphasize that any rebuilding must choose among multiple, layered histories (Roman, Islamic, modern Syrian, etc.), and that such choices are deeply political.archaeologiaexnovo+2
Scholarship on virtual and physical reconstruction of Palmyra explicitly raises concerns about whose interests are served, which period is privileged, and how techno‑solutionism can erase conflict and context.edwebcontent.ed+2
Generative AI, “African tribal masks,” and colonial data
Museum and art‑historical scholarship has long documented how African masks were collected and classified through colonial frameworks and displayed as evidence of “primitivism,” which is precisely the visual archive that now feeds many digitized collections.chicagomag+2
Critical AI work on generative models shows that image generators reproduce and amplify representational biases present in their training corpora; while not always about “masks” specifically, these studies support the claim that prompts like “African tribal mask” tend to return homogenized, exoticized imagery rooted in colonial visual regimes.inclusivejournal
Google Arts & Culture “Art Selfie”
Google’s own description of Art Selfie confirms that it matches user photos to portraits from “international museums” in the Google Arts & Culture corpus, which is heavily dominated by North American and European institutions.artsandculture.google+1
Tech and culture commentary has pointed out that the selfie feature exposes the Eurocentric skew of art collections and that people of color often get matched to a narrow, stereotyped subset of artworks.techcrunch
Māori whakapapa, deepfakes, and “algorithmic mediumship”
Māori scholars and advocates describe whakapapa as a living, relational, and sacred genealogy, not just a data field, and warn that AI systems misrepresent or “hallucinate” pepeha and whakapapa in ways that constitute digital colonialism.taiuru+1
There is growing discussion of harms from deepfakes and voice cloning for Māori communities, including misuse of kin ties, impersonation of whānau, and risks to iwi and hapū governance.linkedin
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