research question about cultural heritage

• Research article
• Open access
• Published: 27 October 2022

Practices and challenges of cultural heritage conservation in historical and religious heritage sites: evidence from North Shoa Zone, Amhara Region, Ethiopia

• Habtamu Mekonnen 1 ,
• Zemenu Bires   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4156-3235 2 &
• Kassegn Berhanu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9981-5901 3  

Heritage Science volume  10 , Article number:  172 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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Cultural heritage treasures are precious communal assets that show the past human legacy. It depicts present and future way of life as well as cultural values of a society, and enhances solidarity and social integration of communities. This study is designed to investigate the practices and challenges of cultural heritage conservations in North Shoa Zone, Central Ethiopia. The research employed a mixed research approach and cross-sectional descriptive and explanatory research design. The researchers applied multiple data gathering instruments including questionnaire survey, interview, focus group discussion and observation. Concerning sampling techniques, systematic random sampling technique was applied to select samples from local communities, and purposive sampling was designed to choose interviewees from government authorities, and culture and tourism office experts of North Shoa Zone and respective districts. The actual and valid sample size of the study is 236. The findings of the study revealed that the cultural heritage properties in North Shoa are not safeguarded from being damaged and found in a poor status of conservation. The major conclusion sketched from the study is that the principal factors affecting heritage conservation are lack of proper management, monitoring and evaluation, lack of funds and stakeholder involvement, urbanization, settlement programs and agricultural practice, poor government concern and professional commitment, poor attitude towards cultural heritage and low level of community concern, vandalism and illicit trafficking, low promotions of cultural heritage, and natural catastrophes such as invasive intervention, climate change (humidity and frost, excessive rainfall and flood, heat from the sun). The study implied that the sustainability of cultural heritage in the study area are endanger unless conservation practice is supported by conservation guidelines, heritage site management plans and research outputs, stakeholders’ integration, and community involvement. Most importantly, the study recommends the integration of heritage conservation and sustainable development, and the promotion of conservation is a way of achieving economic and social sustainability.

Introduction

Heritage is our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what we pass on to the future generations. Our cultural and natural heritage resources are both irreplaceable sources of life and inspiration. They are our touchstones, our points of reference, and our identity [ 1 ]. Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artifacts, cultural property, and intangible attributes of a group or society that are inherited from past generations, maintained in the present, and bestowed for the benefit of future generations [ 2 , 3 ].

According to Bleibleh and Awad [ 4 ], and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 1972: Article 1), cultural heritage includes monuments: architectural works, sculpture, painting, inscriptions, archaeological structure, cave dwellings; buildings: groups of separate or connected buildings and their architectures, homogeneity or place in the landscape; and sites: man made creativity or the combined work of nature and man. Cultural heritage should have outstanding universal value from the historical, architectural, commemorative, aesthetic, ethnological or anthropological point of view. Cultural heritage provides communities, groups, and individuals with a sense of identity and continuity, helping them to visualize their world and giving meaning to their way of living together [ 5 ].

In Ethiopian nations, nationalities, and people’s context, the definition of cultural heritage could be used to incorporate their varied social, economic, political, administrative, moral, religious, and psychological conditions [ 6 ]. Ethiopia is a great country with its fabulous 3000 years history [ 7 ], a population of about 114 million people endowed with astonishingly rich linguistic and cultural diversity with more than 80 living languages and 200 dialects, spoken by as many ethno-linguistic communities [ 8 ].

In this era of globalization, there is a growing fear that culture around the world will become more uniform, leading to a decrease in cultural diversity. To counter this potential homogeneity, strategies have been developed to preserve culture of various communities whose very existence could be threatened. Living culture is highly susceptible to becoming extinct [ 9 , 10 ]. Currently, the surge of interest in culture is creating new possibilities for safeguarding cultural heritage as a major component in building a sustainable cultural vision for the world [ 11 ]. In the context of UNESCO’s activities, the value and the importance of safeguarding cultural heritage is universally recognized [ 1 ].

Conservation of cultural heritage can be defined as all measures and actions aimed at safeguarding cultural heritage while ensuring its accessibility to present and future generations. Conservation embraces preventive preservation, adaptation, reconstruction, and restoration. All measures and actions should respect the significance and physical properties of the cultural heritage item [ 12 ].

In Ethiopia, the Authorities for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage (ARCCH) within the Ministry of Tourism and UNESCO Addis Ababa Office established a joint work plan (2006–2007) concerning inventorying and safeguarding both tangible and intangible cultural heritage in the country [ 7 ]. Besides, both the 1995 constitution and the 1997 cultural policy of Ethiopia refers to equal safeguard, recognition of and respect for all Ethiopian languages, heritage, history, handicraft, fine arts, oral literature, traditional lore, beliefs, and other cultural features. Following the ratification of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Cultural Heritage, the ARCCH designed a strategy on the identification, safeguarding, and promotion of cultural heritage through a national inventory-making exercise.

In principle, in Ethiopia, there are policies, guidelines and regulations of cultural heritage conservation. In practice, however, the majority of the heritage attractions are in poor conservation status (for instance light shelter protection to the world heritage site of Lalibela Rock hewn Churches); demolished due to ignorance (e.g. Ankober Archaeological site); intentionally destructed due to misinterpretation and interethnic conflict (as evidenced on Ras Mekonnen Monument in Harar, Ethiopia), and the destruction of Al-Negash Mosque in Tigray, Ethiopia due to the war between the Federal Government of Ethiopia and Tigray Liberation Front.

North Shoa is a special focus from cultural and historical perspectives. Historically, the region had been administrative centres or seats of government for the Kings of Shoa and Ethiopia from the reign of Amde-Tsion (1314–1344) and Zera Yakob (1434–1468) up to Emperor Menelik II (1865–1913). In this regard, the historical sites such as Menz, Tegulet, Debre Berhan, Sela Dingay, Ankober, Liche, and Angolela had served as a headquarter of the government of Ethiopia in the medieval history and in the second half of nineteenth century.

When almost all African nations were under European colonization in the late 19 th and in the first half of twentieth century, Shoa in general and North Shoa in particular, was in position to establish formal diplomatic relations with the Europeans countries. Consequently, European embassies (for instance British, France and Italy) were opened at Ankober for the first time. Most importantly, the region is a birth place of prominent patriots (e.g. Ras Abebe Aregay, Hailemariam Mamo, Buayalew Abate, Fiwtarari Gebeyehu to mention few among many) who sacrificed a lot in defending the sovereignty of Ethiopia against foreign aggressors.

Culturally, North Shoa is also rich with Christian religious sites such as churches, monasteries, and holy water. Famous religious sites include but not limited to Tsadikanie St. Mary Church, Kukyelesh St. Mary, Abune Melike Tsedik monastery, Zebir Gabriel church, Seminesh Kidane   Mihiret church which are known for their annual religious ceremonies, holy water that cure diseases and cleanse sins. Important traditional games such as hockey and horse racing or horse galloping are practiced along with feast days. Besides, North Shoa is not only a special attention for the Christians, but also known for its rich history and incredible Islamic heritage relics. The sultanates of Shoa (9th–thirteenth century), Ifat (thirteenth–fifteenth century) as well as the 13th medieval great mosque of Goze (still existing Islamic architecture) are some of the evidences of the historical and religious Islamic civilizations [ 13 , 14 ].

However, despite the presence of plenty of cultural and historical heritage in Ethiopia in general and North Shoa Zone in particular, their sustainability is in question and the contribution of heritage tourism to the host community is very low due to various impacts such as developmental projects near or on heritage sites, absence of demarked buffer zones, lack of awareness or ignorance, theft and looting, embezzlement, inappropriate conservation practices, and natural damage/ deteriorations. The most widely known problems of cultural heritage include archaeological looting, destruction of cultural sites, and the theft of works of art from churches and museums all over the world are testimonies of cultural heritage destructions [ 15 ].

According to Eken, Taşcı, and Gustafsson [ 16 ] cultural heritage properties are vulnerable to various physical, chemical, natural and anthropogenic factors that worsening the sustainability of heritage attractions. Though North Shoa has a paramount significance from historical and cultural perspectives, it has never received due attention from the government, researchers and other conservationists stakeholders as bold as its potentials. Besides, scholarly works regarding cultural heritage conservation are not sufficient in East Africa in general and in Ethiopia in particular. Hence, to address this research gap, the need to research on challenges and practices of cultural heritage conservation is one of the top priorities.

Literature review

Issues of cultural heritage, cultural ownership, rights, politics and representation.

When the homogenization and standardization of heritage occur, the politics of cultural identity emerges as a critical issue. This is particularly true since heritage is not just a matter of the past, but very much a conduit for constructing the future [ 17 ]. In other words, how the local communities present their cultural heritage to the outside visitors affects the way the community members envisage their future. This has been observed in numerous cross-cultural ethnographic cases [ 18 , 19 ]. Needless to say, how to represent the cultural heritage reflects the present condition of political hierarchies that exist within the society.

Members of local communities have diverse opinions that are positioned in different contexts of their lives. A unified representation of cultural heritage may not be something that some members of the community can easily accept [ 20 ]. This may affect the community negatively in both socio-cultural and political domains. Sometimes, the cohesiveness within the community is weakened, and some members even decide to leave the community altogether which is a serious breach of the cultural rights of these members.

Identification and documentation of cultural heritage

Inventories should identify threats that certain elements of cultural heritage is facing. Based on such information, a plan for safeguarding or revitalization can be developed. When conservation of heritage property is impossible due to lack of funds and experts; digital preservation deemed to be an alternative means of safeguarding cultural heritage. According to Koiki- Owoyele, Alabi and Egbunu [ 21 ] heritage digitization is a process of taking photographs or scanning a material and transferring it to a computer. The dissemination of digital preserved heritage on websites, social media platforms and Google search optimization helps to reach more users which in turn reduce the cost and energy of users to undertake a journey to a library, archive or museum to visit the heritage. Digital preservation is a long lasting solution to threats such as decay, war, fire and flood and enables to secure the availability of useful resources for academicians of future generations [ 22 ].

Danger of extinction

According to Karin and Philippe [ 23 ] the new alternative approaches to cultural heritage conservation recognize the importance of preserving vital and living elements of culture. Because of natural and human factors, developments around cultural heritage, conflict of interest among stakeholders, theft and vandalism, and inappropriate conservational practices, and hence, the danger of losing them is sometimes underestimated [ 24 ].

Truscott [ 25 ] argued that local communities themselves often do not see the importance of preserving their cultural heritage properties. They may consider their cultural heritage as backward and as a hindrance to their ability to access "modern society" and economic wealth. It is essential, therefore, not only to create a system that values and respects minority culture but also to encourage communities to become aware of their cultural treasures and to help them find ways to preserve those treasures [ 26 ].

Roy and Kalidindi [ 27 ] stated that rapid growth of urbanization, mass tourism, lack of funds, improper project selection, lack of traditional know-how among conservation professionals, poor handling system or heritage management, corruption, and erroneous conservation policy are responsible for the poor performance of heritage conservation projects [ 28 ]. Besides, adverse factors that threaten heritage conservation include heritage trafficking, limited community participation in conservation, cultural degradation, and inadequate attention from government bodies, and poor coordination among stakeholders [ 29 ]. Other critical issues of heritage conservation encompass indigenous claims of ownership and access to material culture, authentic, original value embodied in material culture [ 30 ]; removal of monuments from their original site, damage through the flooding of agricultural land, resettlement programs and rebuilding of urban centres [ 31 ].

Cultural heritage properties have been attacked in wars of conquest and colonization, during interstate and civil conflicts, by governments, protestors or rebels across the world [ 32 ]. Monuments such as historical buildings and statues; religious sites like synagogues, mosques, temples, monasteries, churches; material culture exhibitions and collection sites (e.g. museums, art galleries, and libraries) which depict the collective narratives, stories and memories of people have become vulnerable to destructions [ 33 ].

It has been documented that over 13,000 cultural heritage sites were destroyed in the Middle East particularly in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya [ 34 ]. The widespread devastation or attacks include world heritage sites. For instance, the six UNESCO World Heritage sites of Syria such as the Ancient City of Damascus, the Ancient City of Bosra, the Site of Palmyra (ancient temples, tombs and antiquities with the age of more than 2000 years), the Ancient City of Aleppo, Crac des Chevaliers and Qal’at Salah El-Din, and the Ancient Villages of Northern Syria or Dead Cities are either destroyed or partially damaged during the armed conflict between ISIS (also called IS, ISIL, Da’esh or the Islamic State) and state government [ 35 , 36 ].

The ISIS has systematically been destroying the cultural heritage (ancient monuments, mosques, shrines, cemeteries, works of art at museums and libraries) blowing up the Armenian, Syrian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, monasteries and the tombs of prophets. Thousands of archaeological and cultural sites (including those aged in the Bronze, Iron, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic periods) in Syria are victims of the on-going fighting or war [ 37 ].

The destruction of Yazidi shrines and the obliteration of ancient sculptures called “lamassu", a vital symbol to the modern Assyrian Christian population, and the devastation and vandalism of other Christian relics and churches in the Tadmor and Palmyra area were deliberate to deface the minority religious and cultural sites as well as to terrorize and subdue the minorities [ 38 ].

As noted in the work of Wollentz [ 39 ] during the Yugoslavian Civil War, cultural heritage such as the medieval Stari Most Bridge was destroyed, and the old town of Dubrovnik, one of the first sites inscribed by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites was bombarded.

In Africa, the most outstanding cultural site of Timbuktu (Mali) famous for its world heritage sites of mausoleums and mosques having exceptional cultural, historical and spiritual significance were targeted to destruction [ 40 ].

By the same token, the Eritrea–Ethiopia war in 1998–2000 was responsible for the devastation of an essential archaeological monument nearby the Ethio-Eritrea border [ 41 ].

The major causes for the destruction of cultural heritage and systematic cultural cleansing include civil war, ignorance and negligence, religious differences or fundamentalism and radical ideologies (for instance, ISIS perceived that most of the cultural and religious heritage in the middle east are false idols that are heretical to Islam) [ 42 , 43 ], a mission to accomplish military, political, and economic objectives [ 34 ] and developmental projects such as urban reconstruction [ 44 ].

Lack of funds and experts, and organizational structure problem

The custodian of cultural heritage is not always good at organizing or management of funds [ 31 ]. On the other hand, those who are experts in organizing and managing funds are not always experts or even interested in cultural heritage. So the solution has been creating collaboration between these two kinds of people: between the cultural heritage custodians and those who are experts in managing and organizing these kinds of projects [ 45 ]. Another mechanism of securing funds and initiating experts is devising means of discussions regarding the values of cultural heritage on different media such as social media, broadcast media, and printed media. The other issue mentioned by Mancacaritadipura [ 45 ] the younger generation is less interested in the local culture. To overcome this issue, Mancacaritadipura suggested that the school curriculum should include cultural heritage at local content [ 45 ]. Besides the main curriculum, Mike and David [ 46 ] forwarded that awareness creation about the significance and promotion of cultural heritage should be undertaken in schools, colleges, and universities.

As observed in many African countries, states have not yet created an official section and positions in the Department of Culture and Tourism to be specifically responsible for cultural heritage [ 26 ]. Truscoot (2000) forwarded that the government may create a sub-directorate of cultural heritage which will make it easier to do long-term programs [ 25 ]. Besides, UNESCO (2005) has been identified difficulties in finding qualified human resources to participate in efforts to preserve and develop cultural heritage [ 47 ].

Opportunities for safeguarding cultural heritage

Stakeholders involvement.

Cultural heritage must be thoughtfully managed if it is to survive in an increasingly globalized world [ 47 ]. True partnerships are required between all relevant stakeholders, particularly governments, private tourism sectors, NGOs, and local communities. Through mutual understanding, key stakeholders can build on their shared interest in cultural assets, in close consultation with local communities, the ultimate bearers of humankind’s cultural legacy [ 48 ]. The awareness and attitude of among stakeholders towards the conservation of cultural heritage is crucial to have a common stake among interest groups towards cultural heritage and development, to keep sustainable conservation management, and to promote cultural tourism [ 49 ]. Community-based tourism projects allow for direct communication between communities and heritage tourism while sustainably developing cultural assets as tourism products [ 50 ].

Community participation

Communities must be actively involved in safeguarding and managing their cultural heritage since it is only the one who can consolidate their presence and ensure its future [ 51 ]. Each community, using its collective memory and consciousness of its past, is responsible for the identification as well as the management of its heritage [ 52 ]. Communities, in particular indigenous communities, groups, and, in some cases, individuals, play an important role in the production, safeguarding, maintenance, and re-creation of the intangible cultural heritage. Within the framework of safeguarding the cultural heritage, each state party shall endeavour to ensure the widest possible participation of communities, groups, and, where appropriate, individuals that create, maintain, and transmit such heritage, and to involve them actively in its management [ 53 ]. Apart from stakeholders’ participation and community involvement, resource mobilization, ecotourism activities, and corporate fundraising mechanisms could be devised to achieve conservation programmes, and contribution should be based on willingness and abilities of stakeholders [ 54 ].

UNESCO committee and convention for safeguarding cultural heritage

Today, even in a world of mass communication and global cultural flows, many forms of cultural heritage properties are being preserved or conserved in every corner of the world [ 55 ]. Other forms and elements of cultural heritage resources which are more fragile, and some are even endangered and needs measures called for by the UNESCO Convention of safeguarding cultural heritage at the national and international levels can help communities to ensure that their heritage remains available to their descendants for decades and centuries to come [ 56 ]. The Convention recognizes that the communities, groups, and, in some cases, individuals who safeguard and maintain cultural heritage must be its primary stewards and guardians, but their efforts can be supported or undercut by state policies and institutions [ 5 ]. The challenges facing such communities, and those who work on their behalf, are to ensure that their children and grandchildren continue to have the opportunity to experience the heritage of the generations that preceded them and that measures intended to safeguard such heritage are carried out with the full involvement and the free, prior and informed consent of the communities, groups, and individuals concerned [ 56 ].

Theoretical framework of the study

Recently, heritage conservation domains received adequate attention from both the academia and practitioners [ 57 ]. According to Sinamai [ 58 ] the practices of heritage conservation and management must align with the principle of community-based cultural heritage conservation which recognizes the communities’ well-being and empowers the host community through the harnessing of endogenous knowledge and skills. And, heritage conservation practices shall respect local culture such as vernacular architecture. Certain principles shall be adhered when cultural heritage conservation is applied. The heritage shall continue to be used according to its earlier purpose, and when this is not feasible, a compatible use should be sought with minimal alteration to the heritage and its context. Conservation techniques shall also focus on repairing rather than replacing. Since, heritage relics are authentic evidence of our past, historic fabrics should be kept as much as possible. While repairing and maintaining the heritage, emphasis shall be paid to respect the heritage context, location and significant views shall be maintained [ 59 ]. Cultural heritage can be deteriorated, damaged or destructed due to anthropogenic and natural factors. The anthropogenic or human factors include conflict of interest and ownership issues, contestation and cultural politics [ 12 , 60 ], negligence, ignorance and poor handling system, theft and illicit trafficking, civil war, unprofessional conservation, urbanization, developmental projects, large scale agriculture and mining activities [ 58 ]. The natural factors may encompass climatic and geological factors such as solar radiation, rainfall, humidity, wind pressure, and natural catastrophes such as earth quake, flooding, lighting and thunder as well as biological factors like plants (e.g. invasive specious, weeds) and animals such as rat can harm the heritage [ 16 ]. Depending on the level of impact on the heritage, various conservation approaches can be applied or practiced. These are: Maintenance -continuous protective care of the fabric and setting of heritage [ 57 ]; Preservation - maintaining the fabric of heritage in its existing state and retarding deterioration [ 61 ]; Restoration -returning the existing fabric of a place to a known earlier state by removing accretions or by reassembling existing components without the introduction of new material [ 62 ]; Reconstruction - returning a place to a known earlier state and is distinguished from restoration by the introduction of new material into the fabric [ 61 ]; and Adaptation - modifying a place to suit the existing use or a proposed use [ 63 ].

Based on the literature review and theoretical framework, a conceptual framework is formulated as illustrated in Fig.  1 .

Conceptual framework of the study (Own compilation, 2021)

Methods and materials

Description of the study area.

North Shoa Zone of Amhara regional state is located in the central part of Ethiopia, north of the capital city of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. North Shoa Zone is blessed with plenty of cultural, historical, and natural tourism resources [ 64 ]. The study area is chosen due to its rich medieval Christian and Islamic historical and cultural heritage relics of Ankober historical site, Koremash of bullet factory, Angolela Tera of King Sahilesillassie palace and Goze Mosque (See Fig.  2 ).

Map of the Study Area (Researchers own map, 2021)

Research approach and data analysis techniques

The research employed both qualitative and quantitative research approaches which is a mixed research approach. A descriptive and explanatory method of cross-sectional research design was used. The descriptive research design helps to describe the current heritage conservation practices and challenges. And, explanatory research design was used to examine the impacts of predictors or explanatory variables such as anthropogenic and natural factors on cultural heritage conservations.

The quantitative data was collected through a questionnaire survey whereas qualitative data was gathered using interviews, site observations, focus group discussions and document analysis. Due to the nature of the study, the researchers applied multiple data gathering instruments as stated above. For instance, survey questionnaire helps to collect information regarding community’s sense of belongingness, access to capacity building trainings, community’s concern or attitude of cultural heritage. And, information such as status of cultural heritage conservation, on-going conservation practices, and buffer zones demarcation can be obtained through field observations. Interview and focus group discussions help to get information with respect to roles of stakeholders towards cultural conservation, promotion of cultural heritage, fund and expert issues. Document analysis helps to gather information such as action plans of respective offices, conservation procedures and guidelines and management of heritage.

The subjects of this study include the local communities, North Shoa Zone and district’s Culture and Tourism office staff, Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage (ARCCH) and religious institutions having direct and indirect involvement in tourism activities. Self-administered questionnaire were disseminated using random sampling techniques to 384 households.

Informants for interview were selected purposively based on their knowledge and closeness to the research problem under study. A total of 10 purposively selected individuals (from North Shoa Culture and Tourism, Debre Berhan Culture and Tourism Office, Angolola and Tera Culture and Tourism Office, Ankober Culture and Tourism Office, and ARCCH) were interviewed. Focus group discussants were selected from local representatives such as religious leaders, local elders, and 4 focus group discussions (total 28 discussants) was performed at prominent heritage sites, namely: Ankober, Koremash, Goze and Angolela district. The interview and focus group discussions were undertaken through taking notes and recording followed by transcribing.

The quantitative data was analysed through descriptive statistics (frequency and percentage, mean and standard deviations) and inferential statistics such as exploratory factor analysis, correlations and regressions whereas, content analysis was employed to thematically analyse the qualitative data.

Reliability and validity analysis

The reliability and validity test has been conducted to assure the appropriateness of the instrument and the consistency of the results using the pilot study. The validity of the research explains how well the collected data covers the actual area of investigation [ 36 ]. Hence, to assure the validity of the instruments, the research adapted the standardized questionnaires and interview checklists from literature [ 8 , 15 , 18 , 27 , 29 , 50 , 57 , 59 , 60 , 61 , 65 , 66 ] and the items were checked by consulting the research advisors and subject area experts. Hence 15 questionnaires were distributed to tourism and heritage management experts working at universities, culture and tourism offices, and ARCCH to check content validity. And, experts forwarded important inputs regarding the contents, layout and structure of the questionnaire.

Besides, the reliability concerns the extent to which a measurement of a phenomenon provides stable and consist result, or it is all about the consistency of the result to measure inter-item homogeneity of each construct using Cronbach’s alpha value greater than or equal to 0.70 and the inter-item correlations were greater than or equal to 0.30 were included to collect data and included in the analysis [ 67 , 68 , 69 , 70 ]. According to Sharma [ 71 ] reliability statistics is classified the depending on the Cronbach alpha value: α ≥ 0.90 = Excellent, 0.90 > α ≥ 0.80 = Good, 0.80 > α ≥ 0.70 = Acceptable, 0.70 > α ≥ 0.60 = Questionable, 0.60 > α ≥ 0.50 = Poor and α < 0.50 = Unacceptable.

In the present study, the reliability analysis was made by employing 58 observations which are nearly 15% of the total sample population [i.e., 15%*384 = 57.6) for a pilot survey. The items from each of the constructs having very low inter-item correlation below.30 were removed. The reliability analysis (see Table 1 ) revealed the Cronbach alpha coefficient that exhibited the consistency of the results that ranges from 0.741 to 0.802 that made the result acceptable [ 69 , 70 ].

Results and discussion

Respondents characteristics.

From a total of 384 disseminated questionnaires, 198 valid observations (52% response rate) were useful for analysis, and the majority of the respondents were males that account for 143 (72. 2%) whereas 55 (27.8%) were female respondents (see Table 2 ). And, the majority of them were youngsters under 18–35 years of age that accounting for 175 (79.3%). The survey indicates the youngsters are the majority of employees working and residing around cultural heritage which can be basic to apply cultural heritage conservation practices for better off.

Regarding place of residence and livelihood strategy of the respondents, 68 (34.3%), 52 (26.3%) and 44 (22.2%) reside in and around heritage sites namely, Ankober Medahnealem , Koremash and Goze whereas few respondents accounted for 34 (17.2%) lived in Angolela Kidanemihret area. Regarding the livelihood strategy people employed, the majority of the respondent led their household through employment in government offices followed by engaging in agriculture and working as a private employee accounts for 61.6%, 12.1% and 9.6% respectively (see Table 3 ).

Practices of cultural heritage conservation

The research finding indicates that 12.1% and 30.8% of respondents strongly disagreed, and disagreed respectively whereas 33.8% and 7.6% of respondents agreed and strongly agreed regarding an attempt of cultural heritage conservation in the study areas. The result revealed that there is insufficient attempt to conserve the heritage. Similar to this study, in Africa and many developing countries, cultural heritage have been facing hindrances of multiple platforms in unplanned manner that didn’t account for heritages sustainable use [ 72 ]. Unlike the finding of the present study, Ekwelem, Okafor and Ukwoma [ 72 ] pointed that the preservation of cultural heritage properties enhances historical and cultural continuity, fosters social cohesion, enables to visualization of the past and envisioning the future, and hence it is indispensable for sustainable development. Another study that supports this argument revealed that a need for conservation of heritage is subjected to a desire to transfer away from object oriented conservation and preservation practices, and the theoretical commitment to social constructivism that consider heritage a socio-cultural process [ 73 ]. The aforementioned two findings assured that heritage conservation practices should not only prepare for their objective value like source of economy but also as a social and cultural process that could maintain history which in turn escalate social cohesion, promote identity and proud. The finding revealed that the local community has a sense of belongingness and identity to the cultural heritage as it is portrayed by the respondents' response shown by 34.3% and 7.1% of agreement and strong agreement. This significant level of community belongingness and awareness about the cultural heritage will overpoweringly support the conservation efforts at heritage sites [ 74 ].

The practice of cultural heritage conservation in the study area is not based on research as 16.2% & 38.4% of the respondents strongly disagreed and disagreed in this regard. The present finding suggests that in-depth and strong research to develop conservation guidelines and undertake conservation activities in heritage sites. According to Garrod and Fyall [ 75 ], conservation management should consider timeliness and managerial prudence. The timeliness concept stated that conservation funds should be allotted in a timely fashion to save high conservation costs in the future. From the managerial prudence angle, parallel measures or techniques should be designed to prevent further deterioration [ 75 ]. Moreover, the study of Oevermann [ 76 ] scrutinized the “Good Practice Wheel” that is composed of management, conservation, reuse, community engagement, sustainable development and climate change, education, urban development, and research that expresses each of the good practice criteria spinning wheels which also needs the consideration of those criteria while practising heritage conservation. In this regard, the conservationist expert from ARCCH (personal communication, 21 June 2021) also underlined that,

Though there are efforts by the conservationists to undertake in-depth research, there are initiations mainly from the political leaders showing a commitment to conserve the heritage without adequate research and analysis.

Another participant from the Authority for Conservation of Cultural Heritage (Head, Conservators, personal communication, June 17, 2021) portrayed;

The basis and detrimental problem in the practices of conservation especially in cultural heritage is either lack of original material to conserve perfectly as it was or unavailability of raw materials that resemble originality which makes the conservation practice less effective. He added that the problem exacerbated by the lack of conservationists in the field makes the Ethiopian Heritage in danger.

Besides, regular follow-up of existing status for conservation hasn't been made with 20.7% and 37.9% of strong disagreements and disagreements that revealed poor status of conservation. Similarly, capacity building training on heritage conservation is not delivered at different times to the communities, conservationists and other key stakeholders that are exhibited by a total of 65.7% level of disagreement (where 26.3 replied with strong disagreement and 29.4% replied with a disagreement scale). Only 17.7% of respondents were found in the agreement response category whereas 16.7% were unable to fall in the two categories either (see Table 4 ). Hence, the finding of this study revealed that there is a low-level practice of cultural heritage which needs to be improved. Analogues to this, the conservation of heritage requires the three most important elements of heritage conservation underlined by professionals (curators, academics and consultants) are training and expertise of maintenance staff, budget and financial planning, and conservation plan [ 77 ]. Conservation efforts should be monitored that could follow up information for condition, risks and value assessment, strengths and support strategic heritage planning regularly which in turn should be developed based on an inventory system that requires continuous monitoring [ 78 ].

Challenges of cultural heritage conservation

This study was also concerned with the investigation of the various barriers that hinder cultural heritage conservation practices for better management and sustainability of cultural heritage. Thus, to identify these factors, factor analysis was employed to extract the list of factors and to group each of the linear components onto each factor if found significant. A total of 22 items or linear component factors (variables) were employed after checking the reliability of items in the pilot survey. Those variables were coded as: 01-The local community have no positive attitude towards cultural heritage; 02- The local community are not concerned to the cultural heritage; 03- Population growth and settlement programs have impacts on cultural heritage of the area; 04- Conflict of interest among stakeholders to safeguard the cultural heritage; 05- A practices of heritage conservation without the involvement of professional; 06- Practice of illicit trafficking of cultural objects; 07- The cultural heritage is not promoted for sustainable tourism development; 08- Practice of farming in and around the cultural heritage; 09- Adequate budget/ financial allocation for conservation of cultural heritage; 10- Little concern of government and local authorities about the heritage; 11- Professionals lack enough commitment to engage in conservation practices; 12- Media failed to expose the problems of heritage to the community in time; 13- Travel agents and tour operators are negligent to the sustainability of heritage; 14- Inappropriate conservation practices of cultural heritage; 15- Lack of buffer zone demarcations of the heritage sites; 16- Natural catastrophes and climate variations (flooding, frost, acidic rain, storm, heat from the sun) deteriorate cultural heritage; 17- Development projects such as buildings, roads affect the sustainability of heritage; 18- The heritage hosts more than its carrying capacity during different events; 19- Funding agencies lack willingness to provide aids and loans to cultural heritage; 20- There is no regular monitoring and evaluation of cultural heritage status by the concerned body; 21- The growth of vegetation over the heritage, and 22- The heritage are challenged by biological factor such as rat and other biological organisms.

The assumptions of relationship, randomness and sampling adequacy were checked in the analysis of exploratory factor analysis (EFA).

The descriptive statistics revealed that all the 22 linear component factors or variables have a mean value greater than 3 with a range varied from 3.41 to 3.95 for a total of 198 valid observations made for analysis. And, there was no missing data in the analysis.

The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Bartlett's Test of Sphericity (see Table 5 ) also indicated that the sample size employed was adequate and the assumption is met with the KMO and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity value of 0.768 and Sig. = 0.000. A value varies between 0 and 1 where the value close to 1 indicates that patterns of correlations are relatively compact and so factor analysis should yield distinct and reliable factors. Kaiser [ 79 ] recommends accepting values greater than 0.5 as acceptable. Hence, the current value of KMO Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity meets the assumption [ 79 ].

The communalities table also presented the relationship of one of the variables with the other variables before rotation with which a value greater or equal to 0.30 indicates the employed sample is acceptable and results will not be distorted. The current finding has confirmed this assumption of factor analysis with the value ranging from 0.315 to 0.784 which is significantly above 0.30.

Factor extraction and variance explained

The present finding indicated that 59.51% of the total variance is explained by the seven factors extracted out of 21 linear components variables included in the model with Eigenvalues greater than one. Hence, the Rotation Sums of Squared Loadings indicated that the first factor contributed about 14.726% and the 2nd contributes 9.412% whereas the 3rd and 4th factors accounted for 8.808% and 7.503% of the variance explained. The 5th, 6th, and 7th factors contributed to about 7.222%, 6.509% and 5.325% of variance explained in cultural heritage conservation (see Table 6 ).

Factor rotation

The rotated factor matrix indicates the rotated component matrix (also called the rotated factor matrix in factor analysis) which is a matrix of the factor loadings for each variable on to each factor. The component loadings for each factor are positive that shows the positive relationship between the variable and each principal component. The values below 0.45 were suppressed while extracting the factors, and are not displayed in the rotated component matrix and the factor loadings were sorted by size. The orthogonal rotation was used with the assumption that the variables are independent of each other [ 80 ]. Before rotation, most variables loaded highly onto the first factor (21.554% variance explained) and the remaining factors didn't get a look in. However, the rotation of the factor structure has clarified things considerably with the equivalence of variance explained. As can be depicted in the rotated matrix table, there are seven components or factors that have been extracted as a factor hindering the management of cultural heritage conservation. Hence, Principal Component factor analysis with Varimax rotation was conducted to assess the underlying structure for the 22 items of the challenges of cultural heritage conservation practices. The assumption of independent sampling, normality, linear relationships between pairs of variables, and the variables being correlated at a moderate level were checked.

Seven factors were extracted after rotation, the first factor accounted for 14.726% of the variance and was composed of seven items related to lack of proper management, monitoring and evaluation, whereas the second factor accounted for 9.412% that consisted of a cluster of three variables that were related to lack of stakeholder involvement and population settlement. The third factor accounted for 8.808% and it comprised of two items which are related to lack of government concern and professional commitment. The fourth factor consisted of three items and it is related to lack of community concern, illicit trafficking and promotion for sustainable development and accounted for 7.503%. The group of two items related to poor destination management and conservation practice make the fifth factor that accounted for 7.222% whereas the sixth factor accounted for 6.509% and comprises two items that are related to natural catastrophes and agricultural practices (see Table 7 ). The 7th factor encompasses only a single variable that is related to the lack of communities' positive attitudes towards cultural heritage.

Table 7 displays the items and factor loadings for the rotated factors, with factor loadings less than 0.40 omitted to improve clarity. Similar to the present study, heritage properties can be affected by the impacts of visitors such as overcrowding which may result in wear and tear including trampling, handling, humidity, temperature, pilfering and graffiti [ 75 ].

Mathematical representations of factor loadings

Like regression, a linear model of the mathematical equation can be applied to the scenario of describing a factor. The factor loadings are represented by b ‘s. According to Field [ 80 ], the equation can be written as.

Fi = b1X1i + b2X2i + … + bnXni.

Where Fi is the estimate of the ith Factor; b 1 is the weight or factor loading of variable X1, b2 is the factor loading of variable X2, bn is the factor loading of variable Xn, and n is the number of variables.

Accordingly, it was stated that seven factors were found underlying the construct Factors affecting cultural heritage conservation. Consequently, an equation can be constructed for each factor in terms of the items that have been measured.

Factor 1 = 0.671(X1) + 0.668 (X2) + 0.664 (X3) + 0.626(X4) + 0.571 (X5) + 0.571 (X6) + 0.485(X7).

By substituting the mean value of each item (question), the approximate percentage variance that factor 1 can explain can be calculated.

Factor1 = 0.671(3.58) + 0.668 (3.36) + 0.664 (4.33) + 0.626(3.60) + 0.571 (3.60) + 0.571 (2.88) + 0.485(2.86) = 14.2

Factor 2 = 0.742(X8) + 0.710(X9) + 0.576(X10) = 0.742 (4.53) + 0.710(4.42) + 0.576(4.72) = 9.23.

Applying similar formula for the remaining factors, and adding the calculated values together, or the summation of all factors will be a total of 58.51 which means using the mathematical equations, the seven factors together can explain 58.51% of the variance. As explained before in the total variance explained in Table 7 , in the rotated sums of squared loadings column, it has been said that the seven components explained 59.51% of the variance. Hence with a minor difference, values calculated from the equation and summations of a percentage of variance in the total variance explained Table 7 provide an approximately similar result. The difference may be resulted either from using the approximate values after the decimal point or the factor loadings less than 0.4 that were suppressed.

After conducting the exploratory factor analysis and extracting the seven factors, the multiple linear regressions was applied to confirm which factors affect the practice of cultural heritage conservation.

Assumptions of multiple linear regression

The relationship between the independent variable and dependent variables is linear. This assumption was confirmed as it is reflected by the scatter plot that showed the relationship is linear for all independent variables: lack of proper management, monitoring and evaluation, lack of stakeholder involvement and population settlement, lack of government concern and professional commitment, lack of community concern, illicit trafficking and promotion towards sustainable development, poor destination management and conservation practice, natural catastrophes and agricultural practices, and the local community have no positive attitude towards cultural heritage conservation.

There is no multicollinearity in the data set. Multicollinearity exists when the correlation coefficient r between independent variables is above 0.80. Hence, no independent variable was found to have multicollinearity problems with each other with all below 0.80 where the highest Pearson correlation value of 0.688. Besides, the multicollinearity issue can be checked by VIF and tolerance level where VIF is below 10 and tolerance level > 0.20 [ 81 ]. Hence, VIF and Tolerance are found within the acceptable region.

The values of the residual are independent. The residuals of the data set in the sample stratum were found independent or uncorrelated which can also be tested based on Durbin-Watson statistics (above one and below 3). The Durbin Watson statistics is 1.821.

The assumption of homoscedasticity: the assumption that shows the variation in the residual is a similar constant at each point of the model. As it can be shown, the closer the data points to a straight line when plotted, the points are about the same distance from the line meaning the data points have the same scatter. This can be shown by the normality probability curve of the scatter plot (see Fig.  3 ).

The values of the residual are normally distributed. This assumption can be tested by looking at the p-p plot for the model. The closer the dote lies to the diagonal line; the closer to normal the residuals are distributed. The normal p-p plot dotes (see Fig.  4 ) line indicates that the assumption of normality has not to be violated.

Scatter Plot; Conservation of Cultural Heritage (Field Survey, 2021)

Normal P-P Plot of Dependent Variable (Field Survey, 2021)

Regression results

The Pearson`s correlation table indicates (see Table 8 ) that there was a significant relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variable i.e. cultural heritage conservation at a p value of 0.05 level of significance. However, lack of stakeholder involvement and population settlement, poor destination management and conservation practice and lack of the local community positive attitude towards cultural heritage were not significantly correlated with the cultural heritage conservation practice (r = 0.057, sig = 0.212; r = − 0.008, sig. = 0.458 and r = 0.016, Sig = 0.410). Thus, the indicators were removed from the regression model.

The Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) table (see Table 9 ) exhibits the goodness of fit of the model and revealed the model is appropriate and the introduction of the independent variables has improved by at least one predictor (P = 0.001) significant at 1% level of significance. Thus, the model is the best-fitted model presenting the regression that presents the significant independent variables that significantly explain the dependent variable.

The model summary shows the predicted variable i.e. practices of cultural heritage conservation is explained by the introduced independent variables viz., natural catastrophes and agricultural practices, lack of community concern, illicit trafficking, promotion towards sustainable development, lack of government concern and professional commitment, and lack proper management, monitoring and evaluation accounted for 7.9% with an adjusted R square value of 0.079 (see Table 10 ). The variance explained in the model summary table is also supported by the coefficients table that exhibited some of the extracted factors that were significant.

The coefficient result shows that the largest β value is the greatest predictor of heritage conservation. Among the independent variables, lack of community concern, illicit trafficking and promotion towards sustainable development was found the most significant factor affecting practices of cultural heritage conservation (β = − 0.213, p < 0.05) followed by natural catastrophes and agricultural practices (β = − 0.132, p < 0.05). Besides, lack of stakeholder involvement and population settlement was the factor found to be significant β-value (β = 0.179 & Sig. = 0.007). Furthermore, there was a negative relationship between lack of community concern, illicit trafficking and promotion towards sustainable development, and natural catastrophes and agricultural practices with the predicted variable.

As far as this study was concerned, lack of community concern, illicit trafficking and lack of promotion towards sustainable tourism development with β = − 213; p. = 0.002 and natural catastrophes and agricultural practices in and around the cultural heritage with β = − 0.132; p = 0.026 were found to be significant challenges hindering the heritage conservation practices (see Table 11 ). This finding was confirmed by the previous studies that revealed air pollution; biological causes like invasive intervention, humidity and vandalism have negative consequences on the survival of heritage tourism. The present finding was also in line with the findings of Irandu and Shah [ 82 ] that portrayed the cultural heritage conservation of Kenya faced challenges such as funding, poor enactment of policies, land grabbing and lack of adequate trained personnel. Besides, another finding revealed that tackling the calamities of climate change mainly global warming and extreme weather events combined with the implementation of varied strategies to moderate the impact of a growing tourist demand towards heritage sites become the growing problem in the conservation efforts of cultural heritage conservation which supports the present finding [ 83 ]. This finding also revealed the land use issue is an emerging problem for conservation. Therefore, the present study underlines that effective planning, proper land use strategy and environmental conservation policies shall be enhanced by the local and national governments.

Unlike the present study, as noted in the work of Eken, Taşcı, and Gustafsson [ 16 ] public participation along with governmental strategies is vital to deciding preventive conservation. Their finding indicated that local communities have an awareness regarding the significance and preservation of the World Heritage Site of Visibility, but they were not adequately cognizant of the practical aspect of preservation. The other issues raised by the authors are difficulties concerning guidance and promotion of regular maintenance which is also similar to the present study. Besides, restoration works have been carried out without a detailed report of the current condition of the cultural heritage [ 16 ]. On the opposite, the interview was found in line with the aforementioned previous study revealing the disintegration of the heritage concerned authorities, the poor intervention of the government and inadequate collaboration of the local and regional governments with the local communities. Besides, the political implication of understanding the heritage also nailed our challenge in the conservation of cultural heritage. Similar to the present finding, the study scrutinized owing to conflicting claims, representations and discourse of urban heritages become contested [ 84 ]. Unlike the present finding, the study of Tweed and Sutherland [ 85 ] indicates that conserving heritage properties contributes to the sustainability of the built environment, and it is a crucial element of the cultural identity of the community which describes the character of a place.

Moreover, lack of stakeholder involvement and population settlement was identified as a significant challenge with β = 0.179; p = 0.007 in the present study. The previous findings revealed that the lack of collaborations to date in terms of managing the assets between the local authority and other stakeholders was found a significant challenge in cultural heritage conservation [ 86 ]. The findings of this study were supported by the findings of the previous study on the adaptation of land use for new purposes and functions, especially for the heritage buildings which demand new strategies for the indoor quality and efficiency of heritage for the new functional use was found the challenge that affects heritage conservation and management of heritage sites [ 83 ]. To overcome this problem, stakeholder collaboration and involvement, community empowerment and the adaptive reuse approach should be adopted that in turn increases the tourism demand and receipts which again escalate the multiplier effects within the industry combined with the job creation [ 87 ] and livelihood diversification through the enhancement of conservation enterprises around protected areas [ 88 ]. It is argued that cultural heritage sustainability relies on training and education that can produce competent human capital who are in charge of heritage protection and promotion [ 89 ]. The cultural heritage understudy is facing various natural and manmade problems which were verified by the interview made with officials of ARCCH who are working at the department of Heritage Restoration and Conservation (Personal communication, 21 June 2021) that revealed structural problems of the heritage authority from federal to the local level, lack of skilled manpower, and lack of clear proclamations and guidelines regarding private heritage conservation. This finding was supported by the technical aspects such as limited availability of experts (lack of skilled forces, absence of educational training for new skills, and lack of technical staff in the heritage maintenance team) and availability of original or authentic materials were the major constraints in conservation projects [ 90 ]. Besides, the interviewees added lack of sufficient funds for restoration and conservation and the difficulty of conservation of heritage in and nearby urban areas due to urbanization and urban renovation were significant challenges for conservation. In line with the interview, the findings of Dias Pereira et al. [ 83 ] pinpointed the conservation of cultural heritage and the maintenance of its original characteristics and identity which could have been exacerbated by the unavailability of raw materials for conservation. Moreover, the unavailability of raw materials for restoration and maintenance of heritage, and keeping authenticity was found a very serious problem in the applicability of cultural heritage conservation practices [ 91 ]. Besides, there is an increasing interest to replace old cultural heritage with modern buildings, and hiding movable heritage are problems in escalating conservation efforts. An ideal example is the church of Ankober Medahnealem Church where only remnants or ruins of buildings are visible and the historical ruins of old church was replaced with the new modern buildings. Generally, the finding of the present study indicates the various challenges that should be overcome to assure the sustainability of cultural heritage. This was also supported by the study of [ 85 ], whose heritage conservation theme encompasses technical, environmental, organizational, financial and human issues.

Practical implications

There should be a mechanism and plan to evaluate, follow up and supervise the conservation status of heritage side by side with the activities of heritage inventory made each year in each study area by the respective district. In this regard, it has been suggested that heritage sites shall receive an urgent response from the government in collaboration with the host community [ 92 ].

Appropriate guidelines for conservation should be developed based on research and scientific evidence to escalate the conservation practices. In line with this, to make the conservation effort effective, the right heritage management professionals and appropriate mapping guidelines should be hired to conduct the management of cultural heritage conservations and preservations [ 92 , 93 ].

Besides, conservation activities should be made through allocating sufficient budget, training, technical support and human resources equipped with the latest technology and required raw materials to keep the authenticity of the heritage.

Furthermore, heritage conservation funds should be organized institutionally and come into the practice to support conservation efforts. The local communities, the private travel and tourism organizations and government bodies should be engaged in the planning, execution and monitoring of the heritage conservation and renovation process. In addition, better platforms for stakeholder collaboration should be developed and management of conflict of interest threats should be seriously addressed. The study of Aas, Ladkin, and Fletcher [ 94 ] recommended that the function of involving the local communities and all other key stakeholders in decision making and the view of right participation which in turn can empower the stakeholders’ engagement in conservation activities [ 66 , 95 ].

Though there are a few attempts, especially at Angolela Kidanemihret Site at King Sahle Sellassie Palace and Goze Mosque, the practices of cultural heritage conservation were found to be very low which needs to be enhanced to assure the sustainability of cultural heritage. The finding of this study revealed that local communities feel as if the heritage belongs to them and consider it as part and parcel of their identity. However, conservation of activities was not based on research, conservation practices and the status of heritage follow-up are not made on regular basis and capacity buildings are not provided for the sustainable conservation of cultural heritage in the study areas.

Concerning the status and practice of cultural heritage conservation, lack of community concern, illicit trafficking and promotion of sustainable tourism development and natural catastrophes and agricultural practices in and around the cultural heritage were found to be significant factors affecting the heritage conservation practices in the study areas. Lack of stakeholder involvement and population settlement around the heritage sites were also identified as the challenges hindering the conservation of cultural heritage and their environs. On top of these, lack of government concern, community interest, lack of appropriate funding and skilled manpower were also found to be significant factors that hinder the practices of conservation of cultural heritage. Moreover, the structural weakness of the heritage-related government institutions and political implication of leaders and the urbanization and urban renovation programs added are exacerbating the existence and practices of cultural heritage conservation. From the findings of the present study, it can be understood that the conservation of cultural heritage is not an easy task which cannot be undertaken by a single actor such as the government or heritage destination managers. The multitude of the contribution of various relevant stakeholders is demanding to upscale the conservation efforts and grant sustainability of cultural heritage. The sustainable conservation of cultural heritage will also be important for the wise use of the heritage for many purposes such as a means for enhancing socio-cultural ties, building the image of a place or destination and fosters tourism development.

Generally, poor conservation practices of cultural heritage and insufficient commitment of concerned bodies to conserve cultural heritage exacerbated by various manmade and natural factors demand strong and vivid solutions to the problems to reverse the existing severe conditions of the cultural heritage. The present study revealed that the likelihood of cultural heritage conservation highly depends on not only man-made bottlenecks but also natural catastrophes such as flooding, climatic variations and invasive species. Thus, to improve the effective conservation and use of cultural heritage, especially in developing countries like Ethiopia, government and political leaders’ positive attitude and understanding of the relevance of cultural heritage to the society and the country at large should play a fundamental role in this regard. The improved view of the leaders toward cultural heritage has the potential to enhance funding possibilities and pave the way for a meaningful participation of stakeholders.

Moreover, the enhancement of conservation practices and sustainable use of cultural heritages should be supported through proper land use planning around heritage sites, preparation of heritage conservation plans and efficient heritage destination management. This tells us the practices of conservation efforts for cultural heritage and heritage sites demand the involvement of various actors from various sectors viz., tourism, agriculture, government administration bodies, religious and community institutions and heritage conservation organizations, environmentalists and development agencies to assure sustainability and community benefits from the heritage.

Furthermore, the conservation of cultural heritage shall be seen in a wider scope beyond the conservation of heritage property itself. It should include the vitality of cultural heritages for promotion of destination and country image, enhancement of socio-cultural bondage, and serving as a tool of economic integration through tourism. Therefore, a system of management of cultural heritage needs to be developed that takes significant issues and challenges into consideration through participatory decision-making process to optimize the values and sustainability of cultural heritage in Ethiopia.

Availability of data and materials

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Abbreviations

Analysis of Variance

Authorities for Research and Conservation of cultural heritage

Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

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Acknowledgements

First of all, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to the Omnipotent God for the strength and determination to accomplish this academic research paper. Praise God! God Grace! The authors are really delighted to express sincere gratitude to Debre Berhan University, College of Social science and Research and Community Service Directorate for funding, duplicating questionnaire, writing letters to concerned offices and stakeholders during data collection. The authors are also indebted to all the respondents (local communities, culture and tourism offices, Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage (ARCCH), Angolola Seminesh Kedanemihiret Chruch, Goze and Koremash Mosque) who participated in the interview sessions and filling the questionnaire or survey. The authors are also very grateful to Dr. Lemma Demissie for his diligent editing and proofreading of the manuscript. The Authors would love to express their genuine thanks to Rashmi Jenna JEO Assistant of Heritage Science, Professor Richard Brereton, Editorial teams, and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. Thank you all for your invaluable information, precious time, enthusiasm and cooperation.

This research received internal/ local funding from Debre Berhan University.

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Mekonnen, H., Bires, Z. & Berhanu, K. Practices and challenges of cultural heritage conservation in historical and religious heritage sites: evidence from North Shoa Zone, Amhara Region, Ethiopia. Herit Sci 10 , 172 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-022-00802-6

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A bibliometric analysis of cultural heritage research in the humanities: The Web of Science as a tool of knowledge management

• Ionela Vlase   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5117-3783 1 &
• Tuuli Lähdesmäki   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5166-489X 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  10 , Article number:  84 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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Substantial research on the topic of cultural heritage has been conducted over the past two decades. At the same time, the overall output volume of journals and citation metrics have become important parameters in assessing and ranking researchers’ performance. Even though the scholarly interest in cultural heritage has recently increased world-wide, a comprehensive analysis of the publication output volume and its correlation to the shift in the cultural heritage regime starting in 2003 is still lacking. The article aims to understand the role of Web of Science (WOS) as a tool of knowledge management in academia by drawing on the scholarly output volume, the patterns displayed by this volume, and the intellectual structure of cultural heritage research based on WOS-indexed journal articles. The data include 1843 journal articles published between 2003 and 2022 and indexed in the WOS Core Collection. The article draws on a bibliometric analysis by using WOS tools and employing VOSviewer software to map and visualize hidden patterns of research collaboration and avenues of knowledge progress. The cultural heritage research indexed in WOS was found to be Eurocentric, corresponding to the increasing funding provided by European national and supranational agencies for research funding. Although the indexed research has grown significantly, the bulk of studies on cultural heritage in WOS is concentrated in a reduced number of European institutions and countries, written by a small number of prolific authors, with relatively poor collaborative ties emerging across time between authors, institutions, and countries. The central themes reflect the development of digital technologies and increased participatory emphasis in cultural heritage care. This article brings new insights into the analysis of the cultural heritage research in correlation with the emergence of international heritage governance with new institutional actors, professional networks, and international agreements, which are all constitutive elements of scientific production. The article seeks to critically assess and discuss the results and the role of WOS as a tool of knowledge management in academia.

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Introduction.

Cultural heritage is a multidisciplinary topic that has garnered increasing scholarly interest world-wide during the past few decades (Waterton and Smith, 2009 ; Harrison, 2013b ; Lähdesmäki et al., 2020 ; SoPHIA, 2020 ). This interest is reflected in the launch of new research centers, study programs, scholarly associations, conference and seminar series, and research projects that go beyond the traditional view of cultural heritage as material objects requiring conservation and preservation. Publication has a central role in strengthening cultural heritage scholarship: more and more studies are published in peer-reviewed journals on topics ranging from natural to social sciences and from education to the humanities. The increase of publications on cultural heritage across a wider range of publication fora corresponds to the general increase of publication output volume in academia (see for a general tendency, e.g., Kyvik and Aksnes, 2015 ; Fire and Guestrin, 2019 ). Cultural heritage scholarship is not only on its way to become international, but also seeks to improve its quality according to productivity metrics and quality assessment methods borrowed from natural sciences.

Even though scholarly interest in cultural heritage has recently strengthened and extended to cover a broad spectrum of topics, the scholarship’s tradition has its roots in the humanities, more particularly in the rise of antiquarianism, the emergence of archeology, and the collecting of antiquities and other rarities in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. This history is well documented in the literature (see e.g., MacGregor, 2007 ; Bahn, 2014 ; Miller, 2017 ). Since the early nineteenth century, research on cultural heritage has served various nationalist agendas: histories of cultural heritage and practices of exhibiting and conserving it have played (and often still play) an important role in the construction of nation-states and national identities (see e.g., Gillis, 1994 ; Aronsson and Elgenius, 2015 ; Huber, 2021 ). In the twentieth century, the destruction of material cultural heritage during the World Wars and, after the wars, the emergence of international heritage governance with new institutional actors, professional networks, and international agreements such as UNESCO and its heritage conventions stimulated professional interest in heritage conservation and legislation. The institutional and legislative development of the field has been broadly explored in the literature (see e.g., Bendix et al., 2013 ; Swenson, 2016 ; Meskell, 2018 ). At the end of the twentieth century, cultural heritage scholarship was broadened by new critical approaches. For instance, the established uses of cultural heritage were criticized by several researchers scrutinizing how nationalist sentiments and collective identities have been created through the invention of traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983 ), the fabrication of heritage myths (Lowenthal, 1985 ), or by cultivating nostalgia for the past (Hewison, 1987 ). In the following decades, cultural heritage research was enriched by advancements in memory studies (e.g., Macdonald, 2013 ; van Huis et al., 2019 ) and the investigation of previously un-told or marginalized histories and heritage narratives of minorities and indigenous people (e.g., Seglow, 2018 ). Such interests reflect the critical turn in heritage studies starting with the 2000s, as we will show in the present article. During the past two decades, the scope of cultural heritage research has continued to expand when scholars have approached it as a discursive and performative practice (e.g., Smith, 2006 ; Waterton and Smith, 2009 ; Lähdesmäki et al., 2019 ), an affective and embodied experience (e.g., Waterton and Watson, 2015 ), and/or emphasized its social, societal, political, ideological, economic, and touristic meanings (e.g.; Ashworth et al., 2007 ; Chirikure et al., 2010 ; Zhu, 2021 ; Lähdesmäki et al., 2020 ). Moreover, recent research has explored cultural heritage as a source of individual and social well-being (e.g., Wallace and Beel, 2021 ), an asset for equal, inclusive, and fair societies (e.g., Silverman and Ruggles, 2007 ; Logan, 2012 ), and a key for sustainable futures (e.g., Harrison et al., 2020 ).

The development of cultural heritage scholarship is reflected not only in the extended scope of research and in the sheer quantity of publications, but also in the publication’s scholarly quality and recognition in international publication indexes. Among research databases, for instance, ProQuest Central yields 30,809 results in a field search for peer-reviewed publications with the search term ‘cultural heritage’. Only a small portion of these publications is, however, included in the most established and highly ranked scholarly journal database, such as the Web of Science (WOS).

WOS is one of the core global providers of knowledge, encompassing more than 50,000,000 articles covering 250 scientific categories and about 150 research areas; the articles’ performance is assessed through different indicators, quantifying their impact in terms of citations (Cancino et al., 2017 ). Since the 2000s, publication output volume and citation metrics have become important parameters in assessing and ranking academic researchers’ performance (Fischer et al., 2012 ; Fire and Guestrin, 2019 ; Wahid et al., 2022 ), even though scholars are aware of the shortcomings of these metrics (Wilsdon, 2016 ).

Even though cultural heritage scholarship includes a broad body of literature, as well as literary reviews on more specific topics, such as the social and economic value of heritage (Dümcke and Gnedovsky, 2013 ), the societal impact of cultural heritage (SoPHIA, 2020 ), climate change and cultural heritage (Orr et al., 2021 ), contested heritage (Liu et al., 2021 ), or heritage diplomacy (Lähdesmäki and Čeginskas, 2022 )—to mention just a few—the scholarship still lacks a comprehensive analysis exploring publication volume and its patterning in relation to structural forces such as the change in cultural heritage regimes and the emergence of new powerful institutional actors that shape this scientific production. The core objective of our article is to uncover such patterns and understand the intellectual structure of cultural heritage research that is regarded as high-quality due to its presence in one of the most respectable journal databases. Our article contributes to cultural heritage research by providing knowledge on the recent evolution of publication volume and the particularities of this output while paying attention to the cultural heritage regime structuring the intellectual field in heritage studies (Bourdieu, 1983 ). Moreover, our article contributes to the research of knowledge production by underlining the position of journal databases and the information they collect and provide as a means of producing and structuring knowledge. We understand WOS as a knowledge management tool in academia. As one of the core global providers of bibliometric data, WOS identifies, organizes, and disseminates information on scholarly production and therefore exerts a significant impact on the reputation of different research fields.

In order to reach our objectives, we conducted a bibliometric analysis using WOS ‘analyze results’ and ‘citation reports’ tools to generate descriptive statistics on the growth and impact of 1843 journal articles indexed in WOS. To explore the interdependency of authorship and key topics in the dataset, we then made use of the VOSviewer software to visualize networks of co-authorship and co-occurrences of clustered keywords showing different patterns of research collaborations between authors, institutions, and countries, as well as prominent inter-related lines of inquiry related to cultural heritage. By employing these tools, we seek to illustrate the WOS-indexed evolution of cultural heritage research conducted in the multidisciplinary humanities over the past 20 years.

A wide range of scholars have utilized WOS as a data source for bibliometric studies (Donthu et al., 2021 ; Crețu and Morândău, 2022 ; Wahid et al., 2022 ). These studies indicate how bibliometric analysis can bring out recent thematic tendencies and explain changes in publication output volume to help researchers make informed decisions about their future work (Cancino et al., 2017 ). However, scholars have noted the limitations of bibliometric analysis and of WOS as a source of data (Holden et al., 2005 ; Cascajares et al., 2021 ). One of these shortcomings is that disciplinary differences in the indexation process can have a great influence on citation. Moreover, bibliometric analysis draws on the assumption that citation reflects the quality of the cited source and that all citations are equally important (Poole, 2015 ), which is not necessarily the case. The humanities were among the last to adopt the bibliometric performance assessment, leading to bibliometric studies in different fields. We identified four studies that have utilized the method in order to explore literature on certain sub-fields or topics in cultural heritage research. Kumar et al. ( 2020 ), Bhowmik ( 2021 ), and Zhang et al. ( 2022 ) have conducted bibliometric analyses to show the development of the main topics in heritage tourism research, as well as its most prominent authors, research institutions, and their host countries. In their article, Zhu et al. ( 2022 ) conducted bibliometric mapping and visualization of literature on historical wall paintings, revealing its main thematic focuses and the correlation between the most productive authors and key research institutions. Chen et al. ( 2020 ) used the WOS database and CiteSpace bibliometric analysis software in their study in order to explore articles on intangible cultural heritage.

Our article builds on the previous bibliometric research seeking to map, visualize, explain, and understand the publication output volume, the patterns distinguished in the output, and the interdependencies of cultural heritage scholarship. We also draw on previous criticism directed against the method and seek to critically assess the WOS as a tool of knowledge management. The article is structured into five sections. After the introduction, we explain how we built our dataset of bibliometric information for 1843 articles on cultural heritage and describe the growth of this scholarly output over time, across countries, and in the most populated research areas and most used languages. Next, we map the patterns of cultural heritage publications in the humanities to reveal emerging collaborative networks between authors, research institutions, and countries, as well as the most prevalent thematic clusters of cultural heritage research and the recent knowledge-oriented approaches. Subsequently, we discuss the results in the context of the development of cultural heritage research during the past two decades, particularly against the backdrop of its critical turn and the generative matrix of the shifting cultural heritage regime. Finally, we summarize how WOS manages the knowledge on cultural heritage research, discuss the limitations of our study, and suggest future research avenues for scholars working on cultural heritage.

Data and methodology

To achieve our aim, we selected the most appropriate methods and techniques of bibliometric analysis described by Donthu et al. ( 2021 ). Bibliometric analysis is used to detect trends in research evolution within a specific field, to point towards emerging topics shaping the intellectual advancements in that field, as well as to reveal patterns of collaboration among prolific researchers, their countries, and the institutions they are affiliated with. The recent developments in bibliometric analysis allow for the use of various techniques enabling scientists to make sense of large unstructured data that show the growth and impact of relevant publications selected in accordance with the objectives of each bibliometric study, which usually revolve around identifying knowledge gaps within a research topic, informing researchers about the state-of-the-art, and eliciting new research questions. We use common variants of bibliometric analysis such as performance analysis and science mapping . The former is used to profile relevant research constituents such as authors, institutions, journals, and countries. The latter enables us to understand the relationship between these research constituents by drawing on visual tools such as those provided by VOSviewer software. While performance analysis uses quantitative indicators (e.g., number of total publications, by year, publication, or country, citations per research item), science mapping focuses on patterns of collaboration between selected units (e.g., authors, institutions, countries) to document the social interactions shaping the intellectual structure of research on a topic within a timeframe. In the VOSviewer software, we conducted a co-authorship analysis at the levels of authors, institutions, and countries. Subsequently, we have examined the emerging themes connected to cultural heritage by using co-occurrence analysis based on the assumption that frequently co-occurring keywords bear a strong thematic relationship and therefore, the resulting clusters of these keywords in articles indicate the emergence of subtopics that share an inner consistency as ‘communities of topics,’ characterized by a ‘latent relationship between those topics’ (Emich et al., 2020 , p. 662).

Based on these methodological considerations and seeking to understand the evolutionary trends of cultural heritage research across humanities over the last two decades, we collected the data from Web of Science (WOS) by introducing ‘cultural heritage’ in the topic (TS) search field of WOS while maintaining the quotation marks, so that the bibliographic results include this search string as it is instead of separate occurrences of the words ‘cultural’ and ‘heritage,’ that would have yielded results that do not fit the topic of cultural heritage. This selection procedure is informed by recent developments in search strategies using search strings (Ng et al., 2022 ) and by similar bibliometric research on intangible cultural heritage (Chen et al., 2020 ). Following such prior studies based on WOS, we have privileged the Topic (TS) search field over the Title (TI) field, which would have limited the results to documents referring to ‘cultural heritage’ in their titles while omitting a large number of relevant studies engaging with cultural heritage that do not mention these search strings in the title but do so within their abstracts or keywords. As our article aimed at mapping the cultural heritage research in the humanities, regardless of its tangible or intangible form, our search strategy ensured that search results cover indexed documents that contain the search string ‘cultural heritage’ within the title, abstract, or keywords. Out of the 27,205 results of the initial query produced on August 5, 2022, when the search was run on the full period covering WOS recorded documents, we have excluded those that were classified by WOS in categories other than humanities by refining the results by using the WOS category filter of ‘Humanities Multidisciplinary’. This filter yielded 2410 documents, almost 9% of those identified by the initial query (see Table 1 ). Subsequently, we used the WOS document type filter to remove the documents classified other than ‘article’ from the dataset, which reduced our sample to 1,845 entries. Beyond—but increasingly within—the humanities, articles are commonly considered more important scientific contributions than conference proceedings, book reviews, or editorials, and are therefore worth taking into consideration in bibliometric studies (Su et al., 2019 ).

The present article is focused on the development of cultural heritage research over the past two decades, that were marked by the shift in the cultural heritage regime (Cokisler, 2018 ; Hølleland and Niklasson, 2020 ). This shift draws on the development in international and national heritage governance and management. During the past 20 years, the core international conventions established by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and charters by International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) have provided new guidelines and management principles, for instance, for safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage (by UNESCO in 2003), the preservation of digital heritage (by UNESCO in 2003), interpreting and presenting cultural heritage (by ICOMOS in 2008), the conservation of architectural heritage (by ICOMOS in 2003), industrial heritage (by ICOMOS in 2011), historical urban landscapes (by UNESCO in 2011), and the management of rural landscapes as heritage (by ICOMOS in 2017). Moreover, several international conventions and guidelines, such as the Council of Europe’s so-called Faro Convention (established in 2005), have emphasized the need to better acknowledge the economic and social value of cultural heritage and the significance of promoting citizens’ right to access and participate in heritage. Against this backdrop, national and international bodies have designed governance strategies geared towards the preservation of cultural heritage and the increase of funding dedicated to its research, as reflected in the prominent role occupied by topics related to cultural heritage in the European Union’s recent research and innovation program HORIZON EUROPE for 2023–2024 (EC European Commission, 2022 ). Acknowledging that the production of scholarly literature on cultural heritage is shaped by powerful structural forces in which researchers are assimilated (Bourdieu, 1983 ), we only consider articles published after 2003, i.e., that are linked to the turn in the heritage regime, and therefore exclude earlier documents. The final dataset encompasses 1843 articles. Regarding the language, no restriction was applied during the search phases, but the 1843 articles were commonly published in English (71%), followed by Spanish (6.7%) and Russian (6.3%) (see Table 2 ). For the articles published in other languages, WOS policy requires publishers to also provide titles, keywords, and abstracts in English.

The final search result encompassing 1843 articles was saved as a marked list in WOS. The data was exported as a tab-delimited file using the full record and cited references option to enable subsequent science mapping using the VOSviewer software (version 1.6.16). VOSviewer was used to trace several item clusters (authors, institutions, countries, keywords, or other information from the dataset) based on their high similarity and their dissimilarity with items from other clusters. In the resulting figures, the size of the dots shows the prevalence of an item (e.g., prolific authors, journals, institutions, countries, and frequently co-occurring keywords), while clusters of dots are visually represented through distinct colors. We look at two variables: the co-authorship network at the level of researchers, organizations, and countries, as well as the co-occurrence of author keywords. Therefore, the dots represent authors, institutions, countries, and keywords.

The most populated research areas within Humanities (when looking at the number of publications on cultural heritage in multidisciplinary collaboration with a humanities discipline) are ‘Social Sciences Other Topics’ and ‘Science Technology Other Topics’, while ‘Linguistics’ and ‘Area Studies’ are less popular. The first ten research areas selected in Table 3 account for half of the sampled articles in our dataset.

The production of scholarly articles on cultural heritage over time

The steady growth of research on cultural heritage over the last 20 years increases exponentially starting from 2017. 1509 articles were published during the past six years (about 82% of the documents included in the final dataset). This growth can be explained as the result of large funding provided by supranational bodies such as the European Commission and other national funders such as UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), as detailed in the ‘Discussion’ section.

The examination of data by publication year shows two peaks in 2019 and 2021, each with over 320 articles per year (Fig. 1 ). In order to shed better light on the publications’ performance, we subsequently examine the countries and institutions with a more significant contribution to this growing trend in the scholarly research on cultural heritage. We expect an uneven contribution made by researchers from different countries and organizations, since the tradition of this research in some regions is bound to a rich cultural heritage, including a concentration of historical monuments and archeological sites listed as World Heritage by UNESCO, complemented by expertize in conserving such heritage. Moreover, a few influential scholars have been most productive, and new regional funding opportunities have become available for heritage research.

Source: Authors based on WOS list of indexed articles 2003–2022 on the topic (TS) of ‘cultural heritage’ published in Humanities Multidisciplinary. N  = 1843. Articles indexed in by 5th August 2022.

Productive countries and institutions

In order to describe the performance of different research constituents on cultural heritage over the past 20 years, we scrutinized the most productive countries and institutions. Table 4 shows the top 10 countries that together account for 69% of the articles in our dataset. Italy, England, and Spain are the most prominent, since one third of the articles are written by authors affiliated with institutions based in these three countries. This result is in line with the expectations drawn from the literature documenting the scientific production in relation to cultural heritage governance prevalently oriented towards safeguarding heritage and sustainable tourism, especially in countries such as Spain and Italy, marked as they are by growing concerns regarding touristification and its consequences; in England, however, the prominent debates revolve around the enhancement of cultural experiences through digitization (Echavarria and Samaroudi et al., 2020 ).

The remarkable contribution made by the University of London and one of its major member institutions, the University College of London (together responsible for 86 articles) is seen in the table listing the most productive institutions (Table 5 ). These institutions have published at least 15 articles within the past 20 years, which together make up a bit more than a fifth of all sampled articles in our dataset.

Influential journals and articles

Our dataset includes more than 630 publication titles. The leading position is occupied by the International Journal of Cultural Heritage , that accounts for 269 of the sampled articles on cultural heritage. The second most productive publication is Heritage , followed by ACM Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage , with 200 and 143 articles, respectively. These three publications account for more than a quarter of the total number of articles included in our sample, while half of the articles are issued by the eight most productive journals listed in Table 6 .

The 524 articles published in the three most productive journals amassed a total of 2977 citations in WOS, which represent almost half of the total citations recorded for the whole dataset. Therefore, a little more than a quarter of the sampled articles (i.e., 28.4%) accounts for the 49% of citations, suggesting that these journals are the most influential in cultural heritage. It is worth mentioning, however, that the journals which ensured the highest total citation count contain words related to heritage in their title. For instance, the International Journal of Heritage Studies with an Impact Factor of 1.692, ranked in Q3 in Social Sciences Interdisciplinary, gathered a total of 2493 citations, while ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (IF 2.356, Q4 Computer Science, Interdisciplinary applications), and Heritage Science (IF 2.843, Q2 Spectroscopy), produced 1,083 and 604 citations, respectively. These journals scored higher average citations per published paper (i.e., 8, 11, and 6, respectively) compared with the average citation of 3.34 of the full article dataset. This finding suggests that authors looking for higher exposure of their research on cultural heritage could seek to publish in journals with the word ‘heritage’ in the title.

The articles in WOS with the highest number of citations are listed in Table 7 . The two leaders are articles jointly written by five and four authors, affiliated to different organizations based in different countries. The most cited paper (202 citations) is entitled ‘A Survey of Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality for Cultural Heritage’ (Bekele et al., 2018 ) and was published by five authors affiliated with institutions from three countries (University of Cape Town in South Africa, Curtin University in Australia, and Marche Polytechnic University in Italy) published in 2018 by the ACM Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage , the journal with fifth highest mean citation (8) per article on cultural heritage. This higher impact needs to be contextualized with respect to the average number of authors per article in this field. About 48% of the articles in our dataset are authored by one researcher, another 21% have two authors, while 31% of the sampled documents have three or more authors.

The author with the highest number of articles on cultural heritage in our dataset is Massimo Montella, University of Macerata (Italy), who authored 12 articles, along with other various types of texts written during the past decades and published online in Il Capitale Culturale: Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage in 2020. He specializes in economics, heritage marketing, the theory of cultural heritage management, and cultural heritage as service (see e.g., Montella, 2020 ). Melissa Terras from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, is the second most prolific author, having published seven joint articles in two journals (i.e., Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and Big Data and Society ) between 2017 and 2021, with 53 citations. Her expertize is in digital cultural heritage and her recent work exposes the dissimilarities between some Western European and Russian policies of open access to digitized museum objects (see, e.g., Terras et al., 2018 ).

Collaborative ties between prolific authors

Despite the small number of prolific authors with three articles or more (78), we further mapped the strength of links between authors based on the direct collaboration through joint publications. After creating a thesaurus file on authors to eliminate duplicates from the dataset by merging different spellings of the same name, we used VOSviewer to perform a co-authorship analysis for the 78 authors who met the criteria of having published at least three articles on cultural heritage. For those authors, a total link strength was calculated using the full counting method of co-authorship ties between two authors (with a total link strength score ranging from a minimum of 1 to maximum 21). No connection was found for 32 prolific authors. For the remaining 46 prolific authors, VOSviewer mapped the emergence of 12 clusters that indicate distinct patterns of collaboration (Fig. 2 ).

The green cluster groups together seven authors from a more territorially bounded institutional setting: Ilia Adami, Danai Kaplanidi, Effie Karuzaki, Sotiris Manitsaris, Nikolaos Partarakis, Xenophon Zabulis, and Emmanouil Zidianakis. With only two exceptions (i.e., two other Greek speakers, Manitsaris from PSL Research University Paris and Kaplanidi from Piraeus Bank Group Cultural Foundation, Greece), the authors in this cluster are all affiliated with the Foundation for Research and Technology—Hellas, Greece. Partarakis and Zabulis are the most connected researchers of this group. They have both co-authored several papers with other researchers from our dataset (e.g., scholars from research institutions based in Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy). These collaborations resulted in a total link strength of 21, indicating strong collaborative ties for each of them. Karuzaki is the next most connected researcher from this cluster, with a total link strength of 17, followed by Adami and Kaplanidi, with 15 and 14, respectively. They wrote joint articles on topics including the representation of the traditional craft and its transfer in the museum and the role of recipes in the culinary tradition (e.g., Partarakis et al., 2021 ). This analysis on collaborations carried out at the author level suggests that co-authors work in small groups, most commonly affiliated with the same institutions.

Another sizeable cluster in red encompasses seven authors from four different institutions, namely the University of Brighton (Karina Rodriguez Echavarria and Myrsini Samaroudi), University College London (UCL, Lindsay MacDonald, Melissa Terras, and Tim Weyrich), Norwegian University of Science & Technology (Pillay Ruven), and Durham University (Claire Warwick), who co-authored papers on the esthetic judgment of Spanish art through eye tracking the visual reactions of people exposed to Francisco de Zurbaran’s paintings in a laboratory setting (e.g., Bailey-Ross et al., 2019 ). Within this cluster, the highest total link strength of four is recorded for three authors, namely Echavarria, Samaroudi, and Weyrich, the rest of the authors being less connected with other scholars publishing on this topic. In 2020, Echavarria and Samaroudi co-authored ‘Heritage in lockdown: digital provision of memory institutions in the UK and US of America during the COVID-19 pandemic’ published in Museum Management and Curatorship , that has received 29 citations in WoS, the most cited paper from this cluster.

Note: Minimum number of papers per author n  = 3, number of authors meeting this threshold n  = 78. The authors represented in the map ( n  = 46) have a total link strength of at least 1 and are grouped in 12 clusters in different colors.

The third most populated cluster of co-authors in blue is made up by six researchers, namely Paolo Clini, Emanuele Frontini, Marina Paolanti, Roberto Pierdica, and Ramona Quattrini, all affiliated with Marche Polytechnic University (Italy), and Ferrara Cocetta from University of Macerata (also Italy). Roberto Pierdicca had the highest link strength in this cluster, 13. The role of digital technologies such as apps in the promotion of tourism is one of the contributions of these authors to cultural heritage (e.g., Clini et al., 2019 ).

The next cluster in yellow-green groups together five authors, three Spanish and two Italian scholars. Ortiz Pilar has the highest link strength of seven, followed by Ortiz Rocio and Javier Becerra with six each. All these three authors are affiliated with the Spanish university Pablo de Olavide in Seville, while Marialuisa Mongelli, from the National Agency for the Development of ICT (Italy), and Roberta Fantoni, from the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy & Sustainable Economic Development have rather modest collaborative ties.

The fifth cluster in violet comprises another five scholars, four of whom are affiliated with the Italian Centre for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia: Fabio Bettio, Enrico Gobbetti, Fabio Marton, Pintus Ruggero. The fifth scholar, Holly Rushmeier, works at Yale University, and co-authored an article with Ruggero on the preservation of fragile handwriting manuscripts. The most connected author from this cluster is Gobbetti, with a link strength of 8.

Greek scholars Angeliki Antoniou (University of Peloponnese, Greece), Yannis Ioannidis (University of Cyprus), and Akrivi Katifori (National & Kapodistrian University of Athens) make another (light blue) cluster producing research on the importance of innovative pedagogies that build on digital tools to stimulate narratives and storytelling in order to spur interaction and co-learning among the visitors of cultural heritage sites (e.g., Antoniou et al., 2022 ).

The remaining seven clusters present only two to three interconnected authors, usually from the same institution. One of these clusters consists of Polish scholars Marek Milosz and Jerzy Montusiewicz, both from Lublin University of Technology, who co-authored three articles in our dataset, two in ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage and the third in Heritage Science .

A small but statistically significant association of 0.19 ( p  < 0.1) was found between the 78 prolific authors’ total link strength and the number of citations for their publications, which can suggest that co-authorship can increase the chance of being cited. The most cited authors on cultural heritage come from Italy, Sweden, and England, but also Australia and the US (Table 8 ).

Co-authorship on cultural heritage at the institution level

In the next step of co-authorship networks analysis, the analyzed unit was the institution. Out of the 1747 institutions identified by VOSviewer in the dataset, 36 institutions reached the minimum threshold of eight published papers during the last 20 years. We analyzed these institutions. One needs to be cautious about the results of the co-authorship analysis at the institutional level, given the imperfect match between institutions identified in WOS and those delineated by VOSviewer with respect to the number of articles. This inconsistency derives from the numerous variants in how the author institution is referred to, not only in spelling but in whether the whole institution or different smaller research units from within said institution are referred to. Starting from the initial 1802 institutions exported from VOSviever, we reduced the discrepancies between the two files through a tedious manual search, enabling us to compare both lists of institutional names and merge the institutions with different spellings. Even if we did not eliminate all the inconsistencies from the dataset, this procedure provided a more trustworthy list, which we then used to generate a thesaurus file and imported into VOSviewer software for co-authorship analysis at an institution level.

Notwithstanding this shortcoming, our results show meaningful connections between 25 institutions that have co-authored at least one paper with at least one different institution. The total link strength for these institutions ranges from 1 to 11. The National Research Council (CNR), Italy, emerges as the most connected institution, co-authoring papers with other institutions, not only from Italy (e.g., University of Pisa and University of Turin), but also from elsewhere, including Spanish universities (e.g., Complutense University of Madrid), Portuguese universities (e.g., NOVA University Lisbon), and British universities (e.g., King’s College London, KCL). Figure 3 shows the seven interconnected clusters of different colors made up by two to six institutions, which vary in size according to the strength of their links.

Note: Minimum number of papers per institution n  = 8, number of institutions meeting this threshold n  = 36, most connected 25 institutions are represented in the map grouping them in 7 clusters. Nod’s size indicates link strength.

The largest cluster in red has six items and is dominated by Russian research institutions (National Research Tomsk State University, Russian Academy of Science and Siberian Federal University). The next cluster in green consists of CNR, University of Florence, NOVA University Lisbon, and Uppsala University. The third cluster in blue is made up of two Italian universities (of Bologna and Turin) and two Spanish research institutions (The Spanish National Research Council CSIC and Complutense University of Madrid); the University of Bologna has the most connections with other universities. The fourth cluster in yellow includes the University of Curtin (Australia) and three universities from Italy, namely University of Macerata, Marche Polytechnic University and, with the most connections, Sapienza University Rome. The fifth cluster in violet comprises the Polytechnic University of Milan, University of Amsterdam, and University of Naples Federico II, the latter being the most connected. The sixth cluster in light blue groups together the KCL, University of Ljubljana and UCL. Finally, University of the Aegean, Greece, and York University, England, make up the last cluster, in orange.

For co-authorship at the institution level, there is a moderate but statistically significant correlation of 0.45 ( p  < 0.01) between the number of citations and the total link strength of an institution, as well as a rather strong statistical association of 0.72 ( p  < 0.01) between an institution’s total link strength and its number of articles in the dataset. These findings suggest that co-authorship at the institutional level brings higher numbers of citations. At the same time, the larger the number of publications on cultural heritage, the higher the chance of inter-institutional collaboration on those papers.

Collaboration between countries

In our third analysis of collaboration, that between countries, we included countries with at least 10 publications on cultural heritage. Out of the 104 countries, 40 met this minimum threshold. The total link strength provided by VOSviewer showed that Italy has the highest number of publications on cultural heritage (291) with a total of 97 occurrences of collaborative ties with other countries. Close behind, England has a link strength of 95 identified among the 171 articles in the dataset. The least connected countries in this subsample (by link score), are Slovakia (3), Turkey (3), Argentina (2), Ukraine (1), and Lithuania (0). Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, and Ireland have a ratio of number of articles to link strength less than or equal to one, which could indicate that there are intense exchanges between these authors and their colleagues from other countries. These countries are more involved in cross-national cooperation in knowledge production, even if they have rather moderate number of articles on this topic, ranging from 13 articles in Ireland to 64 in Germany. By contrast, some of the very prolific countries, such as Russia, which has 126 documents on cultural heritage, displays a very poor total link strength of 3, which explains its rather isolated scientific production in this field. Eight clusters emerge from the analysis of co-authorship at a country level, indicating different patterns of cross-country collaboration. The largest cluster, in red, includes nine items (i.e., Australia, Denmark, Iran, Japan, Mexico, China, South Africa, South Korea, and ultimately Switzerland, which has the highest number of collaborative ties). The next cluster in green consists of seven countries (Croatia, England, Russia, Scotland, Slovenia, Turkey, and the US). The cluster in blue also contains seven (Germany, the most connected, with Austria, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Wales). The cluster in yellow consists of five countries (Brazil, Colombia, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain). Four countries make up the violet cluster (Argentina, Italy, Norway, and Romania), with Italy having the highest number of links with other countries in the co-authorship of papers on cultural heritage.

The sixth cluster, represented in light blue, encompasses only three countries (Belgium, Canada, and Finland) with Belgium being the leader as regards its total link strength. The last two clusters are similar in composition, each being constituted by two neighboring countries, namely the Czech Republic and Slovakia on the one hand, and Poland and Ukraine on the other. Although these countries share many features of their socio-historical and political past, there is hierarchy within each cluster: the second country is exclusively connected to the first, which is linked to countries in other clusters. This pattern of co-authorship is present also in the connection between Italy and Argentina in the violet cluster on the map in Fig. 4 .

Note: Minimum number of papers per country n  = 10, number of countries meeting this threshold n  = 40, most connected 39 institutions are represented in the map grouping them in eight clusters. Nod’s size indicates the countries’ total link strength.

Themes connected to cultural heritage and knowledge-oriented research

In order to examine the main topics that authors dealing with cultural heritage write about, we performed a co-occurrence analysis of authors’ keywords in VOSviewer. We created a thesaurus file in order to merge similar words such as ‘3d model’ and ‘3d models’, ‘communities’ and ‘community’, ‘museum’ and ‘museums’, ‘digitization’ and ‘digitization’, ‘performance art’ and ‘performing arts’, and so on. Out of 6240 keywords from the full dataset, 108 words co-occurred at least six times in the list of count analysis. The normalization method of association strength was applied to the network of co-occurring author keywords. The most recurrent keywords in our dataset, co-occurring six times or more, are grouped into 10 clusters that are visually represented in different colors in Fig. 5 . The dot size represents the number of times each word occurs, and the link shows the number of co-occurrences. The shorter the distance between two inter-related keywords, the more frequently they co-occur in the same articles. The most inter-related keywords in our dataset are ‘cultural heritage’ and ‘intangible cultural heritage’, with 476 and 114 link strength scores, respectively. A significant bulk of the research deals with digital aspects of cultural heritage, as shown by the largest cluster in red, which encompasses 21 keywords such as ‘virtual reality’, ‘visualization’, ‘augmented reality’, ‘3d models’, ‘3d scanning’, ‘storytelling’ and ‘serious games’, mostly in relation to museums, as this is the most inter-related keyword in this cluster. The second cluster in green brings together 18 keywords including ‘authenticity’, ‘identity’, ‘gender’, ‘resilience’, ‘empowerment,’ and ‘sustainability’; in national contexts such as Italy, China, and Japan; focusing on ‘industrial heritage’ and ‘landscape’ in connection with ‘urban heritage’. The third cluster, in dark blue, includes 13 inter-related keywords indicating a major interest in ‘heritage protection’, ‘intangible cultural heritage’, ‘community’, ‘participation’ ‘ethnography’, ‘folklore’, ‘tradition’, ‘world heritage,’ and ‘UNESCO’. The fourth cluster, in yellow, includes preoccupations with ‘digitization’, ‘social media’, ‘archives’, ‘archeology’, ‘design,’ and ‘heritage education’ among the most connected keywords alongside ‘cultural heritage’.

Note: each node represents a keyword sized according to its number of occurrences. Minimum number of keywords’ occurrence is 6. Nodes are connected through links that mark the co-occurrence of their attendant keywords, while the thickness of links signals the frequency of co-occurrences between keywords (i.e., the more frequently they appear together in articles, the thicker the link between two keywords).

Structural and institutional features regulating the cultural heritage domain are dealt within research using specific keywords, such as ‘national identity’, ‘legislation’, ‘politics,’ and ‘cultural politics’, often discussed in relation to ‘European Union’ and especially European countries that are typical destinations of ‘cultural tourism’, such as Spain and Greece, indicating a growing concern for ‘cultural heritage management’. These keywords are united in a fifth cluster, in violet, with 10 keywords. The sixth cluster in light blue connects nine keywords that reveal researchers’ growing contribution to material or tangible cultural heritage in the form of ‘built heritage’, ‘historic buildings’ requiring ‘restoration’, conservation’ alongside the intangible ‘values’ and ‘education’, with some emphasis on Turkey as a context requiring a special attention to values, human rights, and management of its archeological sites.

The seventh cluster of keywords, presented in orange, includes rather soft items such as ‘art’, ‘culture’, ‘language’, ‘history’, ‘living heritage’ that may be affected by ‘globalization’. In the eighth cluster, in brown, with nine keywords, ‘monuments’ and Poland provide some materiality and context to the scientific production on cultural heritage; ‘cultural memory’, ‘migration’, ‘digital cultural heritage’, ‘music’, and ‘cultural landscape’ show how the preservation of memory is an integral part of cultural heritage; other themes include the impact of the ‘COVID-19 pandemic’ on ‘cultural tourism’ and its management, as well as the effects of ‘climate change’ on ‘built heritage’. Finally, the tenth cluster in light brown groups four inter-related items on ‘architectural heritage’ and the policies of ‘risk management’ to ensure ‘protection’ and ‘reconstruction’ of cultural heritage.

During the past decade, some scholars (e.g., Smith, 2006 ) have pinpointed how cultural heritage is about knowledge production of the past, present, and future, and also about who ‘we’ and ‘others’ are. In our analysis of the subsample of 37 articles that include some reference to knowledge in the author keywords, we identified 119 keywords related to this relatively new cultural heritage research subfield. These are organized in 12 clusters (Fig. 6 ) revolving around prominent terms such as ‘knowledge management’, ‘knowledge representation’, ‘knowledge map’, and ‘knowledge mobilization’. The first largest cluster include 15 keywords such as ‘knowledge representation’, ‘semantic web’, ‘ontology’, ‘diversity’, ‘open data’, ‘fine art’, and ‘legacy data conversion’. The second cluster consists of 14 co-occurring keywords, among which the most prominent in terms of their total link strength are ‘digital heritage’, with a total link strength of 15, followed by ‘archives’, ‘copyright’, ‘heritage’, indigenous cultural material’, ‘knowledge mobilization’, ‘provenance’, ‘repatriation’, and ‘repositories, with a total link strength of 8, indicating moderate levels of co-occurrence with other keywords. The third keyword group includes themes related to ‘heritage professions’ and ‘conservation’, while paying attention to aspects linked to ‘education’, ‘values’ and ‘cultural change’, with an emphasis on knowledge about ‘minority groups’ and ‘ethnic identity’. The next cluster of interconnected keywords from knowledge-oriented articles deals with ‘crafts’, ‘women’ and their’empowerment’, ‘creative legacy’, and ‘cultural expression’, as well as with aspects regarding ‘social inequality’, ‘popular culture’, and ‘rurality’. The relationship between cultural heritage and knowledge is also studied through ‘innovation’, ‘sustainable development’, ‘underwater cultural heritage’. Another way to engage with knowledge among researchers focused on cultural heritage is to connect knowledge to ‘information and development’, ‘libraries and society’, and ‘memories’, as suggested by prominent keywords from the seventh cluster. Another strand of research deals with ‘knowledge management’ and ‘heritage impact assessment’, alongside ‘ethnography’, ‘dress collections’, and ‘fashion’. Likewise, some researchers explore the links between ‘traditional knowledge’, ‘indigenous data sovereignty’, and ‘legislation’. Knowledge-related research on cultural heritage also considers the aspects of ‘semantics’, ‘narratives’, ‘storytelling’, alongside ‘image retrieval’ and ‘augmented reality’. Finally, the last two keyword clusters stemming from the knowledge-specific research on cultural heritage focus on the connections between the performance of ‘identity’ and ‘funerary traditions’ set in ‘Caribbean culture’, and on ‘citizen science’, ‘vernacular architecture’, and the development of ‘web and mobile applications’ for the study and consumption of cultural heritage, respectively.

Note: VOSviewer co-occurrence analysis of 119 author keywords present in the articles containing terms referring to knowledge. Node size reflects the number of occurrences of keywords. Nodes are connected through links that mark the co-occurrence of their attendant keywords, while the thickness of links signals the frequency of co-occurrences between keywords (i.e., the more frequently they appear together in articles, the thicker the link between two keywords).

Our analysis reveals that only a handful of scholars have started to include these knowledge-related terms in their scientific production, which means that the level of awareness about the assimilation of the knowledge-oriented approach in the study of cultural heritage is still in its infancy.

The earliest article in this subsample dates back to 2009 and examines the moral knowledge in Turkey in relation to value teaching and religious culture (Taşdemir, 2009 ). Articles dealing with the relationship between cultural heritage and knowledge have gradually increased in number since then, reaching a peak of nine articles in 2021, written mostly by authors located in Italy, Germany, and Greece (where nine, six, and five articles contain phrases related to knowledge, respectively).

Knowledge-oriented research has a high potential for innovation in the field of cultural heritage, since it brings new underexplored themes to this field, such as the contribution of women and various vulnerable minorities to existing knowledge on cultural heritage, as well as their participation in its preservation. Knowledge-oriented research also highlights the heritage professions and the potential of big data to create knowledge maps of cultural heritage. All these represent promising avenues for researchers.

Discussion in the context of recent developments in cultural heritage

The results of our analysis reflect the rapid change in the cultural heritage field since the 2000s. These changes include the technological development of systems and tools used for conserving, preserving, and managing cultural heritage, as well as the digitization of various basic functions of museums, archives, and libraries including the identification, organization, storage, and dissemination of information. Moreover, institutions dealing with cultural heritage have boldly tested and put into service virtual and augmented reality applications and enhanced their exhibitions and audience work through gamification. The increasing awareness of the climate crisis and the need for sustainability measures in the last two decades has broadly impacted the cultural heritage field. These concerns are closely connected to social inequality and exclusion. Heritage institutions have sought to respond to these concerns through community-oriented projects, encouraging bottom-up initiatives and facilitating the participation of diverse population groups.

As indicated by our analysis of the themes connected to cultural heritage and knowledge-oriented research, WOS-indexed cultural heritage research actively tackles the above-mentioned changes and timely challenges and concerns that impact not only the cultural heritage field but society more broadly (Su et al., 2019 ; Schmid, 2020 ). Moreover, the results of the co-occurrence analysis of authors’ keywords reflect the development of international cultural heritage governance and management and the focus points of international heritage conventions and charters from the past two decades, ranging from digital to intangible cultural heritage and from landscapes to the economic and social value of cultural heritage for society. The results underline the societal relevance and timeliness of cultural heritage research, particularly during the past five years containing over 80% of WOS-indexed articles in our data.

The analysis of publication volume and production patterns in terms of co-authorship, collaboration, citation, and keywords reflects the current paradigmatic emphasis and power relations in cultural heritage research. In the 2000s, cultural heritage embraced a new critical research paradigm. Scholars have become increasingly interested in complex questions regarding the power entailed and produced by heritage among and between people, communities, and societies (Ashworth et al., 2007 ; Waterton and Smith, 2009 ; Mydland and Grahn, 2012 ; Logan, 2012 ; Harrison, 2013a ; Lähdesmäki et al., 2019 ). The interdisciplinary field of critical heritage studies has emerged in order to address uneven power relations, hierarchical power structures, explicit and implicit politics of dominance and oppression, silenced narratives, and alternative, emancipatory, and empowering identity projects based or drawing on cultural heritage (Lähdesmäki et al., 2019 ). Through research interests of this kind, the conception of cultural heritage has been extended to include political, societal, and ideological meanings, as well as dissonant and contested dimensions (Kisić, 2017 ; van Huis et al., 2019 ). Our results on the co-occurrence of keywords and the host countries and institutions of the most actively publishing scholars reflect this paradigm change in cultural heritage research. Critical heritage studies have been strongly developed by scholars from English and Australian universities—including Harrison and Winter. As shown in Table 7 , most cited articles include critical stances regarding the suitability of mainstream ‘western’ approaches to heritage preservation on different continents (Winter, 2014 ), or the lack of thoughtful consideration by heritage practitioners who, when they conduct their work as a purely technical endeavor, decoupled from the political and social contexts in which communities live (Chirikure et al., 2010 ; Logan, 2012 ), obliterate human rights and communities’ identities. Other influential works on cultural heritage focus on micro-processes of ascribing value to popular music, as opposed to authorized discourses on music heritage in the UK (Roberts and Cohen, 2014 ), or on the voluntary work conducted by laypeople with no professional background dedicated to the maintenance of traditions, which is not listed as heritage by authorities in Norway but is seen as critical for local communities’ identity (Mydland and Grahn, 2012 ). Power asymmetries in establishing the worthiness of being officially acknowledged and celebrated as heritage are therefore hotly debated and attract scholars’ interest, as reflected in the number of citations. Other highly cited articles study the damaging impact of climate change on built heritage (Leissner et al., 2015 ) or the use and effectiveness of digital games in facilitating the acquisition of historical knowledge by teenagers in Italy involved in experimental research design (Rubino et al., 2015 ).

Despite the critical scholars’ aim to break with a Eurocentric tradition and with a Western focus in cultural heritage scholarship (Waterton and Smith, 2009 ; Winter, 2014 ), our results show that WOS-indexed cultural heritage research is still very much biased towards scholars from European countries and research institutes. Moreover, our analysis shows how European scholars and institutes actively collaborate among other. Such results can be partially explained by the funding of their research projects. In our data, the European Union, with its various funding programs, was the most acknowledged financer or co-financer of research (in 117 articles), followed by UK Research and Innovation UKRI (43), and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (33). During the 2000s, the European Union has increased its emphasis on cultural heritage as a policy tool that is expected to have a broad positive impact on European societies (Lähdesmäki et al., 2020 ). This emphasis is reflected in European research funding seeking to strengthen heritage conservation and protection and heritage-related innovations in Europe, as well as intercultural dialog and participation in European societies. The European Union invested around €100 million in heritage research between 2007 and 2013 through its Seventh Framework Program (Zabeo and Pellizzon, 2017 ), and increased this funding to €500 million between 2014 and 2021 in the next program, Horizon 2020 (EC European Commission, 2022 ). The emphasis on cultural heritage research continues in the current funding program. The key criteria for the European Union’s research funding are multidisciplinary collaboration between European scholars and research institutes producing high-quality research, disseminated effectively through open access publications. Other major European research funders, such as UKRI, value similar features (multidisciplinary international collaboration, excellence of research, and open access). Such funding criteria have a major impact on cultural heritage research in general and strengthen its Eurocentric profile.

Conclusions

Our article contributes to cultural heritage research by providing critical knowledge on structural aspects shaping the publication volume and production patterns in multidisciplinary humanities exploring cultural heritage. The scholarship had previously lacked such knowledge, although publication volume and citation metrics are currently important parameters in assessing researchers’ performance in humanities as well. Besides such knowledge, the article contributes to broadening methodology in the scholarship of cultural heritage, which includes only a few earlier studies drawing on bibliometrics. At the same time, the methods and techniques of bibliometric analysis underline the article’s theoretical contribution to the scholarship: the analysis brings forth various interdependencies drawing on authorship, co-authorship, research collaboration, institutional affiliation, countries of affiliation, citation, and research funding. We summarize our key results in the following.

Our study shows how humanities research on cultural heritage is a broad and multidisciplinary field covering topics that reflect technological, social, and environmental changes, the adoption of international heritage conventions, and the deepening of knowledge in the scholarship during the past 20 years. Recently, publication productivity of WOS-indexed journal articles on cultural heritage has steeply increased, while the few leading journals in the field have strengthened their position as preferred and sought-after dissemination fora for research results. In our study, the leading journal in terms of publication quantity was the International Journal of Cultural Heritag , which has an interdisciplinary profile and welcomes critical contributions and debates on the nature and meaning of heritage. In such critical contributions, cultural heritage is often considered as a complex process of knowledge production. Our study indicates, however, that such an approach to cultural heritage is still underdeveloped in WOS-indexed journal articles.

In cultural heritage research, practices have become more collaborative, not least due to funding criteria. Our analysis shows, however, that cultural heritage researchers often collaborate in small teams affiliated with the same institution. Based on our analysis, international collaboration and co-authorship increase the chance of being cited and, implicitly, the scientific impact. This result aligns with previous research noting how publication volume is strongly associated with international collaboration (Abramo et al., 2009 ; Kyvik and Aksnes, 2015 ; Fursov et al., 2016 ) and receiving research funding (Kyvik and Aksnes, 2015 ; Wahid et al., 2022 ).

Our study points towards the Eurocentrism of cultural heritage research indexed in WOS. The results show how the authorship of WOS-indexed journal articles concentrates on a limited number of institutions and countries: Italian, English, and Spanish scholars are the most productive authors. Likewise, the most cited scholars in our data were Europeans (from Italy and Sweden). These figures on quantity do not paint the full picture of high-quality cultural heritage scholarship. Our study underlines the nature of WOS as a tool of knowledge management in academia: it organizes information on cultural heritage research by structuring it into categories and research areas which such multi- and interdisciplinary research is difficult to fit into. As one of the core global providers of publication volume and citation data, WOS has an impact on the image of esteemed cultural heritage research, as well as on scholars’ understanding of their own field. WOS itself can be seen as a Western platform continuing the Eurocentric history of science (Poskett, 2022 ).

Our study naturally has its limitations. We have focused our analysis on peer-reviewed journal articles, albeit many humanities scholars still consider monographs and edited volumes as the most respectable way of publishing research results. Furthermore, we limited our analysis to articles written in English or including a title, keywords, and/or abstract in English. Even though English is the contemporary lingua franca in academia, many non-English-speaking scholars in cultural heritage research want to publish their results in their mother tongue, particularly when researching local, regional, or national case studies in order to serve the researched communities.

Our results and the identified limitations of the study underline various challenges in cultural heritage research and WOS. The key challenge faced by research is broadening the field in order to include various voices and views from all continents in its knowledge production. Cultural heritage research would benefit from a more active cross-continental collaboration of scholars and research institutes. In general, Eurocentrism and the focus on Western academia are central traits displayed by WOS. Its key challenge is to more generously acknowledge high-quality publications conducted globally in various humanities fields and in various languages.

Based on our bibliometric analysis, we have formulated suggestions for developing the scholarship in cultural heritage research. First, international collaboration and co-authorship are likely to increase citations and therefore pay off in terms of research impact. Second, strengthened collaboration between scholars from other continents will deconstruct the Eurocentrism of cultural heritage research, diversify research topics, and increase the multitude of voices in research outcomes. Third, we suggest applying bibliometric methods and approaches in the analysis of more specific cultural heritage topics in order to illustrate how such research is produced, by whom, and where. Finally, we suggest exploring the complexity of knowledge production in cultural heritage in order to open new research avenues.

Data availability

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated during the current study that is based on bibliometric information on published articles from Web of Science.

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This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under Grant 101079282 (ELABCHROM), by the Academy of Finland under Grant 330602 (HERIDI), and by the Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization under Grant 28PFE/30.12.2021 (TEHNE). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or granting authority. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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Vlase, I., Lähdesmäki, T. A bibliometric analysis of cultural heritage research in the humanities: The Web of Science as a tool of knowledge management. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 10 , 84 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01582-5

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Digital topics on cultural heritage investigated: how can data-driven and data-guided methods support to identify current topics and trends in digital heritage?

Sander münster.

Digital Humanities, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany

Ronja Utescher

Selda ulutas aydogan, associated data.

Data publication is foreseen for non-copyright protected and anonymised material.

In research and policies, the identification of trends as well as emerging topics and topics in decline is an important source of information for both academic and innovation management. Since at present policy analysis mostly employs qualitative research methods, the following article presents and assesses different approaches – trend analysis based on questionnaires, quantitative bibliometric surveys, the use of computer-linguistic approaches and machine learning and qualitative investigations. Against this backdrop, this article examines digital applications in cultural heritage and, in particular, built heritage via various investigative frameworks to identify topics of relevance and trendlines, mainly for European Union (EU)-based research and policies. Furthermore, this article exemplifies and assesses the specific opportunities and limitations of the different methodical approaches against the backdrop of data-driven vs. data-guided analytical frameworks. As its major findings, our study shows that both research and policies related to digital applications for cultural heritage are mainly driven by the availability of new technologies. Since policies focus on meta-topics such as digitisation, openness or automation, the research descriptors are more granular. In general, data-driven approaches are promising for identifying topics and trendlines and even predicting the development of near future trends. Conversely, qualitative approaches are able to answer “why” questions with regard to whether topics are emerging due to disruptive innovations or due to new terminologies or whether topics are becoming obsolete because they are common knowledge, as is the case for the term “internet”.

Introduction

Cultural heritage can be understood as traces and expressions from the past that are used in contemporary society (cf. UNESCO 1989 ). Cultural heritage can be regarded as the only legacy that cannot be inherited; instead, it must continuously be acquired (Kuhnke 2017 ). Since cultural heritage traditionally focuses on tangible objects, a broader understanding of adding intangible heritage and computer-based materials has become important over the last decade. This concept also includes digital cultural heritage materials, such as texts and images, which are created digitally or converted into digital form as well as digital resources of human knowledge or expression (e.g., cultural, educational, scientific) (UNESCO 2018 ).

The latter context also includes various digital technologies for studying cultural heritage. Various scholarly communities have formed around these topics in recent decades. In our previous research, we made some attempts to determine the boundaries of digital heritage studies as a scholarly field, e.g., with regard to the boundaries of adjacent scholarly fields such as digital humanities, digital archaeology or digital history studies or concerning related scholarly communities (Apollonio, F., S. Münster, H. Richards-Rissetto, F. Rinaudo, and R. Tamborrino: Exploring complementary overlap in digital humanities and digital heritage, in preparation; Münster et al. 2018 , 2019 ). One main claim is that digital heritage consists of technologies to preserve, research and communicate cultural heritage (cf. Georgopoulos 2018 ).

Our overarching research question is as follows: How can data-driven and data-guided methods support the identification of current topics and trends in digital heritage?

The purpose of this paper is twofold. One interest is related to methodology. As a discipline, policy analysis still mainly uses qualitative analysis and quantitative modelling (cf. Browne et al. 2018 ) within case studies. Conversely, Big Data analytics that cover an entire sector rather than focusing on limited cases and text analytics that cover large collections of documents are still rarely used in policy studies, but with regard to adjacent domains (Agarwal and Dhar 2014 ), they may help gain more comprehensive and informed insights. In this research, we combine topic mining, trend analysis and pattern recognition technologies to track large-scale amounts of text, e.g., research publications and policy documents.

Regarding the complexity of the area of study, the methodical novelty of our approach lies in the combination of methods and scopes of analysis to enable cross-fertilisation and validation. This includes the qualification of patterns found via Big Data analysis, data-driven modelling and the interpretation of empirical findings. To investigate this topic, quantitative and qualitative empirical methods as well as linguistic analysis were used in four inductive corpus-based and deductive corpus-driven (Scharloth et al. 2013 ) stages of analysis:

• Survey among scholars: To examine the trends in and perspectives on digital heritage, we conducted a survey among 4500 scholars in digital heritage, receiving approximately 1000 responses.
• Scientometric analysis: To examine the core topics of and trends in digital heritage research, we analysed approximately 4500 articles from main conferences in the field of digital heritage.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) and trend analysis: The use of large-scale text mining and text analysis is relatively new in innovation research and is primarily used in prototypical settings (Massey et al. 2013 ). A trend analysis of European Union (EU) Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) 1 data and research publications retrieved via the arXiv repository 2 is used to examine the overlapping patterns and congruency of research policies and publications on digital heritage topics.
• Qualitative investigation of heritage policies: This stage involves a cultural heritage and digitisation-relevant policy framework, that is, policy analysis via a thematic inquiry.

The other interest is related to learning about trends and topics within the frameworks of research and policies. Historic environments are no longer considered merely obstacles to economic growth (Licciardi and Amirtahmasebi 2012 ). Cultural heritage is increasingly being recognised as contributing to economic added value, increased resilience, a reduction in ecological problems, the upgrading of neighbourhoods and increased property values (European Commission 2014 ; CHCfE Consortium 2015 ). Especially in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, there is a huge demand for social and economic recovery and appropriate mechanisms to foster the resilience and sustainability of cultural heritage for innovation after the global COVID-19 outbreak comes to an end. While the changing role of cultural heritage is at present widely accepted, knowledge about concrete mechanisms, temporal and topic-related developments and measures concerning digitisation and cultural heritage is still lacking. Why is such knowledge important? A better understanding of the interplay between innovation and research in cultural heritage is an important prerequisite for understanding timing and success factors for a rewarding transformation. Therefore, this research may contribute to filling the information gap to better develop, implement and monitor policy actions for cultural heritage.

The study presented in this paper is exploratory, and it provides initial insights and findings within individual studies and in terms of an overarching methodology and cross-fertilisation across research frameworks. Sections 2 and 3 show global studies, while the studies described in Sections 4 and 5 are European studies.

Survey of technological prospects

To analyse current demands from a community perspective, we conducted an online survey. Our specific interest was as follows: What are the forecasts for technologies of relevance?

Related works

Various surveys have been conducted to investigate digital use and topics in the humanities and heritage studies. The Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) Digital Methods and Practices Observatory (DiMPO) survey published in 2016 had 2100 participants and a specific focus on regional coverage and the use of digital methods (Digital Methods and Practices Observatory Working Group DARIAH-EU European Research Infrastructure Consortium 2016 ). The main findings were that the community in Europe is widely driven by German and French researchers. Similarly, the e-Science survey series with 860 participants covered the use of digital tools with regard to private and professional use. As one of its main findings, the use of digital tools for private use does not differ much between researchers from the humanities and researchers from other disciplines. Conversely, professional use is highly divergent between single humanities disciplines, but the tendency is lower than that in other disciplines (Albrecht 2013 ). In the context of digital heritage studies, various surveys on specific topics have been conducted. The Virtual Multimodal Museum (ViMM) survey with 700 participants queried digital challenges and protagonists (Münster et al. 2017 ). The INCEPTION project 3 and the EUROPEANA 3D Task Force surveys (Fernie et al. 2020 ) were specifically on the use of 3D technologies. On an international basis, the authors studied the field via 3 panel surveys conducted since 2017 (Münster 2017 ).

Methodology

Surveys are well-known instruments in the social sciences, and their principles, methods and practices have been well investigated (eg., Bhattacherjee 2012 ). The methodology of this survey was determined as follows:

• Open-ended questions: Due to our study’s interest in exploring the field, our survey used only open-ended questions to allow for diverse answers and to retrieve additional items (Reja et al. 2003 ).
• Sampling: The survey was sent to ~ 5000 individuals who were authors in the main conference in the field of digital cultural heritage as well as members of the International Centre for Archival Research (ICARUS), the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) and Time Machine. The survey took place during May and June 2019.
• Survey participants: In total, 968 participated, and 406 completed the survey. Since the questions were not dependent on each other, we also included only partially completed forms in the evaluation.
• Data analysis: Data clustering was performed by alternating inductive and deductive steps of qualitative content analysis (Mayring 2000 ).
• Ethics: All answers were provided anonymously. The acquired metadata contained location information only. These data were used to investigate the coverage of the survey.

Concerning the question on suggestions for promising technologies and demands, we received 995 answers by 377 individuals (Fig.  1 ).

Question: “Which technologies would you suggest as most promising for your field of work?” Coding: 436 out of 995 answers—min. occurrence 5 per group (Source: the author)

Machine learning is the most frequently mentioned topic. It consists of various strands, such as artificial intelligence and deep learning, and specific technologies, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs). Extended reality, consisting of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality, is the second most frequently mentioned topic. Further technologies are mentioned with significantly lower numbers, such as semantics and data linkage, which consists of linked open data, the semantic web, and semantic processing. Big Data technologies rank fourth, and computer vision, including sub-categories such as image recognition, ranks fifth.

From the survey evolved a very clear view that machine learning and extended reality are currently assessed as the most promising technologies. This finding is in line with various European-scale endeavours, e.g., the strong emphasis on extended and mixed reality in the Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe framework programmes (FPs) (e.g., DT-20, 4 DT-12, 5 DT-24 6 ). In addition, various EU projects have assessed and developed mixed-reality approaches in cultural heritage, e.g., ViMM, 7 3D-Coform, 8 and Inception 9 (cf. Rigauts and Ioannides 2020 ).

It also seems interesting to examine the topics that were mentioned only occasionally. Data acquisition and digitisation technologies such as laser scanning, photogrammetry or light detection and ranging (LiDAR) are only occasionally noted as promising technologies, although—as discussed in the following paragraph—they were the most prominent topics at conferences during recent decades and even at conferences currently taking place (Münster 2019 ). In addition to specific technological strands, various overarching and non-technical concepts were named, among them open data, crowdsourcing and (massive) digitisation. This finding corresponds to the results of a qualitative survey of various expert meetings and conferences to identify current challenges in the field of digital heritage (Münster et al. 2015b ), which noted the development of scientific transparency, standards and sustainable strategies for linking data as still unresolved major challenges.

Questionnaires are appropriate for easily examining a phenomenon without empirical data; therefore, as stated in this research, they allow not only retrospective analysis but also predictions. Despite these benefits, the reliability and validity of questionnaires are highly vulnerable to bias. These effects have been well investigated in many areas of research (e.g. Preisendörfer and Wolter 2014 ; Krosnick 1999 ; Bogner and Landrock 2015 ) and include phenomena related to both questionnaire design and methodology (e.g., with regard to acquiescence as “positive answering” (cf. eg. Rammstedt and Farmer 2013 ) or satisficing (cf. eg. Menold and Bogner 2015 ) as “overexposure of middle values”) or the respondent (e.g., social desirability (cf. eg. Krumpal 2013 ) and overexposure of short-term influences as current trends). As an alternative approach that is less vulnerable to these influences, the following stage is based on publications to assess the relevance of topics for current research.

A bibliometric analysis of topics

A second stage was intended to identify relevant topics by studying publications. The underlying approach was taken from bibliometrics, which deals with the quantitative investigation of scientific structures and productivity based on publications (Egghe and Rousseau 1990 ).

Regarding digital heritage, Scollar ( 1997 ) investigated the Conferences on Computer Application in Archaeologies (CAA) from 1971 to 1996 and the European Commission reports about projects completed under FP5-FP7 (European Commission 2011 ). Both studies found that researchers in the field of digital heritage are primarily located in Mediterranean countries and have backgrounds in various disciplines, including computing, the humanities, architecture and geo- and natural sciences. Concerning topics, Koutsabasis performed a literature-based survey about employed technologies and scenarios for interaction with cultural heritage (Koutsabasis 2017 ). According to his investigation, the most prominent scenarios are virtual museums and on-site presentations of cultural heritage. In addition to these quantitative studies, there have been various qualitative discussions (Ciolfi et al. 2017 ; Benardou et al. 2018 ). Regarding adjacent disciplines, a fundamental analysis of topics in the humanities was conducted by Leydesdorff et al. ( 2011 ) and most recently by Spinaci et al. ( 2021 ). For digital heritage studies, Spugnoli investigated the topics in Italian conference series (Sprugnoli et al. 2019 ). We studied these aspects by analysing 4500 publications stemming from six major conferences in digital heritage studies and dating from 1973 to 2015 (Münster 2019 ).

As examined within the publications described above, a key problem in all bibliometric research is the identification of relevant publications within a specific area. While standardised indexes such as the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuter 2015 ) or the European Research Index in Humanities (ERIH) cover the whole range of disciplines, there are no indexes available specifically for the field of digital heritage. Thus, the first task consists of index construction for this field. Prior to creating a database, a survey with 988 participants in 2017 was conducted to identify and rank relevant journals and conferences in the field of digital heritage (Münster 2017 ).

In the analysis presented here, conference series were included. The sample was restricted to articles written in English and available electronically—these restrictions excluded specific issues (e.g., the 2008 CAA) available as printed proceedings only. The sample construction process has been discussed in previous articles (Münster 2019 ) and included the full set of articles meeting these requirements. The final sample presented in Table  1 included 4484 publications dating from 1973 to 2017.

Sample (4484 articles)

a Contributions published as special issues of ISPRS Archives: http://www.isprs.org/publications/archives.aspx , visited: 10.1.2018

b Proceedings published online: http://proceedings.caaconference.org/ , visited: 10.1.2018

c Contributions published by Eurographics: https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/1003 , visited: 10.1.2018

d Proceedings available via IEEE: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6729393 (2013); http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=7406203 (2015), visited: 10.1.2018

e Proceedings 2006-2008: https://www.euromed2018.eu/download_file/view/2323/241 Contributions from 2010 published in Springer LNCS Series

f Contributions published as special issues of ISPRS Archives and ISPRS Annals: http://www.isprs.org/publications/Default.aspx , visited: 10.1.2018

The topics are tightly related to the technologies and disciplines of cultural heritage preservation and archaeology (Table  2 ). While nearly all publications mention remote sensing technologies, particular approaches such as laser scanning and photogrammetry are named in half of the articles. Presentation and visualisation issues such as virtual reality and user-centred design are mentioned by 87% of the articles, and aspects of rendering and visualisation are included in 82% of the articles. In contrast to survey results, data management and access aspects such as databases and interfaces are slightly less frequently mentioned, in total by 3/4 of the articles. Aspects of documentation and data linking, such as ontologies and semantics, are mentioned by only 21% of the articles. Nevertheless, there is a vivid community specialising in these latter topics. In addition, content was frequently mentioned. Regarding this aspect, archaeology and computing are frequently referred to. Additionally, conservation and cultural heritage aspects are mentioned in 85% of the articles. Built heritage and related technologies such as Building Information Modelling (BIM) are another important topic and are mentioned by 85% of the articles. Geo-based content and technologies such as geographical information systems (GISs) are also frequently mentioned by 70% of the articles.

Topic map retrieved by factor analysis ( n  = 4484; the No. of publications included 15 out of 20 retrieved topics; keywords were not named manually but identified via exploratory factor analysis (cf. Kim and Mueller 1978 ))

Since a majority of articles include multiple topics, this characteristic of the articles may indicate a high level of cross-topic cooperation. Furthermore, topics such as remote sensing, presentation and data management are shown to be very important in both individual research topics and publication content. There are disciplinary links to computing, archaeology, geosciences and preservation. Similarly, architecture and landscapes are the most important contents, which matches findings of previous investigations (Münster et al. 2015a ).

Regarding the findings of the bibliometric analysis, the community discourse is primarily about technologies and workflows, and new technologies are adopted early. For example, augmented reality, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and LiDAR were discussed at conferences and employed in projects shortly after their availability as ready-to-use technologies. Additionally, issues such as documentation, accuracy and semantics have been widely discussed by the community for many years. The topic mapping shows that temporal development has yet to be taken into consideration—this will be addressed by the research shown in the next stage.

Data-driven trend analysis

The core intent underlying this work is to analyse academic trends and to move towards a model that can predict whether a topic will become (more) popular in the future. In general, there are two major aspects of such research: first, identifying topics of interest or finding appropriate signifiers of a topic and, second, analysing their prevalence in different academic contexts over time. This section focuses on the latter of the two.

Related work

The use of large-scale text mining is relatively new in innovation research and is primarily used in prototypical settings (Massey et al. 2013 ). On a technical level, innovation research draws from text processing methods such as topic clustering (Aghabozorgi et al. 2015 ) and keyword extraction (Liu et al. 2010 ; Florescu and Caragea 2017 ). While many of these approaches are static, some consider topic development over time (Wang and McCallum 2006 ). However, much of the more recent work in this direction is in the social media domain (Salloum et al. 2017 ). Quantifying developments on platforms such as Twitter is superficially a similar task. However, the frequency of the data (relatively few and infrequent academic publications vs. a constant stream of tweets) and the nature of the vocabulary make trend mining a task with very different practical constraints.

The data used for the project are threefold: FP7 and FP8 project data, a subset of papers published on arXiv and author keywords from a list of digital object identifiers (DOIs). The FP7 and FP8 (Horizon 2020) datasets contain short descriptions and various metadata of approved EU-level research grants. These data are provided in two parts by CORDIS through the EU Open Data Portal.

The arXiv data cover the 1993–2018 period, whereas the CORDIS data cover the 2004–2020 period. However, it needs to be taken into account that the data for 2020 are incomplete and, consequently, much sparser than those of other years. Therefore, these data will be excluded from our analysis.

Both datasets contain the project/paper titles as well as short texts. Specifically, the project proposals contain a description of the project objective, whereas the arXiv dataset contains the papers’ abstracts.

Arxiv.org is an open-access archive for academic articles. For our model, we selected a random sample of the 1.8 million papers hosted in it.

Our model uses a sample of 810 unique author-defined keywords from the domain of digital cultural heritage. These keywords were scraped automatically from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS), and Springer websites.

Keywords and topics can be extracted automatically; however, these methods typically cover only those keywords that achieve significant usage in the first place. Since this project is interested in differentiating between popular and unpopular topics, we decided to use author-defined keywords and to analyse their occurrence over time. As a first step towards analysing the behaviour of our now-retrieved keywords in both the arXiv and CORDIS data, we collected the frequencies of each keyword for each timestep. Due to the sparseness of the publication and project data, our analysis was performed using one-year intervals. Here, our primary metric is the normalised frequencies of terms. These normalised frequencies are expressed as a fraction of the absolute frequency over the number of documents at the given timestep.

We propose a prototype classification model that classifies keywords as either popular or unpopular. To train and evaluate such a classifier, it is necessary to provide a ground truth of what is and is not popular. We offer a simple heuristic: if the overall trend (as modelled by linear regression) is positive (> 0.05) overall, a keyword is considered popular. To avoid circularity, the models use only the arXiv data to predict the popularity in the CORDIS dataset. The model itself is a simple perceptron classifier that receives the normalised keyword frequency as input. Perceptrons are trained and evaluated on a set of features and the ground truth. In our case, the normalised (arXiv) keyword frequencies at each time step are the features, and our popularity heuristic provides the ground truth. Each feature is assigned a weight. 10 During training, these weights are adjusted to reduce errors.

A preliminary quantitative analysis of the data revealed that the relationship between the popularity of a keyword in the EU research grant corpus and the arXiv corpus is, on average, not a straightforward correlation. There are a number of patterns. Some keywords are nearly exclusive to one of the corpora, e.g., digital heritage (Fig.  2 c). Others show coinciding rises and falls in popularity, e.g., Fig. ​ Fig.2b. 2 b. At the same time, these developments are not always of the same magnitude (e.g., Fig. ​ Fig.2 2 a).

Examples of keyword frequency over time in the CORDIS and arXiv corpora (Source: the authors)

To train the classifiers, the popularity criteria are applied to each keyword. In our case, this application yields a 270/540 popular/unpopular split. We reserve a random 10% of both popular and unpopular keywords for testing. Table  3 shows the accuracy for all model types. Note that all of the models perform better than the majority baseline (0.666), with the perceptron performing the best (0.777).

Classifier scores

The work presented in the section exemplifies two important challenges for quantitative trend research in general: (1) grounding what keywords are popular and (2) building a model that can integrate varying timespans of data.

For our measure of popular topics, it should first be reiterated that both heuristics introduced in the previous section make the assumption that a popular keyword is one that is used increasingly often in the CORDIS data. The underlying rationale is that being part of an approved EU project grant is itself a greater measure of success than “just” occurring in a publication.

As mentioned above, one major technical challenge in building a model is posed by the different timespans covered by the two corpora. It is possible to simply discard older publication data; doing so, however, would also entail a loss of information.

Fundamentally, our prototype models work by simply feeding the usage history of a keyword into a statistical model. The classifier scores signify that this sample of usage history can provide some information but is insufficient to completely explain its present usage. Consequently, future work in this direction could pursue broadening the amount of information that can be given to such models. After this data-driven view of EU policies, the next section will focus on investigating EU policies from a qualitative perspective.

Qualitative investigation of heritage policies

This section examines the recent European policy framework concerning digitisation and cultural heritage. The most recent European-level policy documents, initiatives and programmes reflect a multi-dimensional approach to the digitisation of cultural heritage and the benefits to be acquired from it. This section focuses on research conceptualising cultural heritage associated with digitisation, innovation and the broader context of sustainability.

Cultural heritage is mainly perceived as a factor in innovation, employment and development. In this respect, three main interrelated strands of conceptualisation in relation to the European policy framework were defined: 1) cultural heritage as a factor of sustainability; 2) cultural heritage for innovation and economic value; and 3) the institutional framework for cultural heritage and digitisation. 11

• Cultural heritage as a factor of sustainability is currently regarded as a common good and can be described as a process of change and constant flux (ICOMOS 2019 ). Cultural heritage is present in everyday society and is a resource linked to social capital, economic growth, and environmental sustainability (Bandarin and Van Oers 2014 ). With respect to this view, in the UN 2030 Agenda (Hosagrahar 2017 ), cultural heritage plays an important role in achieving most of the named global goals for sustainable development by enabling social cohesion and inclusion and be serving as a driver of equity and economic development.
• The culture-driven production of meaning and skills is perceived as one of the main factors in a new logic of innovation and economic value generation. Currently, the spillover and cross-over effects of investments in cultural heritage are indisputable and have become a key asset at the top of any kind of value chain (Stanojev and Gustafsson 2019 ). Regarding its social effect, cultural heritage is understood as a “vector” for sustainable area development, where heritage determines the direction of spatial projects and developments (Janssen et al. 2017 ). The growth of creative content and modern digital technologies has given way to new conceptions, application fields, business models, initiatives, policies, projects, etc. The convergence of the cultural sector and modern technologies has triggered novel correlations among culture, the economy, society, technology and policy (Filip 2015 ).
• The institutional framework of the European policy-making landscape has been subject to research from the perspective of legal settings in support of the digitisation of cultural heritage (Marinković et al. 2016 ), strategic approaches to cultural heritage as a domain of intervention by European cultural policy, and institutional rigidities in the digitisation of cultural heritage (Evens and Hauttekeete 2011 ), among others.

Policy analysis of the cultural heritage and digitisation domain mainly rests on and is fed by comparative policy and qualitative document analysis (Betzler and Fluturime 2019 ), presenting the normative EU framework for the digitisation of cultural heritage (Marinković et al. 2016 ), conducting an overview of European and national initiatives to monitor the state of digitisation (Bakker et al. 2011 ), surveying the state of digitisation across European cultural heritage institutions (Stroeker and Vogels 2014 ), and analysing the digitisation of cultural heritage and intellectual property through an interdisciplinary approach (Borissova 2018 ).

The most recent reference documents were retrieved through the culture and creativity, cultural heritage policies and initiatives website of the European Commission. 12 Additionally, the European Commission’s Shaping Europe’s digital future, digital cultural heritage website 13 was visited. The most recent policy and initiatives having contemporary effects on the digitisation of cultural heritage, research and innovation activities and framework conditions were analysed. Moreover, the Council of Europe, Culture and Cultural Heritage website 14 was analysed to obtain contemporary policy references and initiatives. For this exercise, 15 policy reference documents having contemporary effects were analysed. Qualitative content analysis was applied to understand and articulate the content and main reference points of the policy documents with regard to digitisation, research and innovation.

In an attempt to conduct a qualitative investigation of current digitisation and cultural heritage policies, the conceptual basis of the recent European policy framework is discussed. This discussion is coupled with an examination of state-of-the-art research on policy analysis.

The current European policy framework of digitisation and cultural heritage is based on a set of strategies, initiatives and programmes. They grasp cultural heritage mainly in relation to education, tourism, sustainability, development, competitiveness and job creation. Additionally, the most recent policy objectives reflect a multi-dimensional approach in support of cultural heritage-led innovations.

The policy framework in support of the digitisation of cultural heritage and the innovations driven by it gained a new momentum in search of strategies to combat the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This new momentum is based on support for the further digitisation of cultural heritage institutions and relevant sectors for their recovery and response to adverse effects of the crisis caused by the pandemic. In 2020, the European Commission launched calls with the aim of helping the digital transformation of museums and cultural institutions and helping invigorate the interregional ecosystems for digital and sustainable tourism as part of the response to and recovery from the COVID-19 crisis. 15 Additionally, the new EU Research and Innovation Framework Programme Horizon Europe has an individual domain, Cluster 2 “Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society”, which provides more space for cultural heritage-, digitisation- and innovation-related actions (European Commision 2019a ).

Moreover, the European Commission launched a public consultation to collect stakeholders’ views on digitisation in cultural heritage and on the Commission’s recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation (2011/711/EU). 16 The consultation also aimed to understand the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the sector and how stakeholders perceive the role of digitisation of cultural heritage under these circumstances. 17 This could be seen as an attempt to restructure the European policy framework concerning the digitisation of cultural heritage in the context of the challenges posed by the pandemic.

Most recent policy documents, programmes and initiatives that have contemporary influence on the European policy framework for the digitisation of cultural heritage mostly aim to enable an aligned policy landscape and favourable framework conditions and ecosystems. These include The European Cultural  Heritage Strategy for the   21 st Century (Council of Europe 2017 ), A New European Agenda for Culture (European Commision  2018 ), The Work Plan for Culture 2019–2022 (Council of the European Union 2018 ), The European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018, which boosts community engagement and the role of cultural heritage across a wide body of stakeholders in Europe and enables evidence-based policy-making (European Commision 2019b ), and The Declaration of Cooperation on advancing digitisation of cultural heritage (launched in 2019, Digital Day). 18

Moreover, The Recovery Plan for Europe (European Commission 2020 ), aims to address the adverse effects of the pandemic in economic and social terms and to determine way out of it, rests on the EU’s long-term budget and NextGenerationEU as a temporary tool to foster recovery. It mentionsl of “...a greener, digital and more resilient economy and society...” (European Commission 2020 ). The Plan makes mention of digital transitions, including the culture and tourism sectors. Resources will be allocated for digital transitions and capabilities to address the impact of the crisis for resilience and recovery.

The recent European policy framework on digitisation and cultural heritage is mainly based on four axes. The first axis concerns boosting the innovations driven by cultural heritage and the social and economic benefits proposed by it. The second has to do with raising and sustaining institutional and legal frameworks in support of the digitisation of cultural heritage, and the third is about helping to reverse the negative effects of COVID-19 on cultural heritage-relevant sectors through digitisation. A further cross-cutting strand could be identified around the topic of sustainability.

Sustainability is at the crossroads of innovation, development, and resilience aspects, which appear to be at the forefront of the EU policy context. This process could be assessed as having been triggered by recovery efforts against the COVID-19 crisis.

Within this policy framework, the ViMM project’s Manifesto, 19 Roadmap and Action Plan 20 of 2019 provide a vision and a set of measures for a future strategy and practicality for virtual museums and digital cultural heritage in a five-year span. There is an emphasis on assisting the European Commission and other public bodies in the decision-making process, including the funding context. This output is an example of EU-funded projects that, in a bottom-up manner, feed into decision and funding strategy processes at the EU scale.

What can we learn from the multi-method analysis of the trends in and topics of digital heritage? Some preliminary findings are:

As stated in the previous analysis, research projects highly depend on technological trends and the advent of new technologies (Münster and Ioannides 2015 ). This finding contrasts with the long-term relevance of overarching concepts, e.g., “cultural heritage”, “geo-based approaches” and “architecture”, as scholarly domains or “open data” as conceptual approaches. Regarding the comparison of research and policy documents in Section 3 , interestingly, these meta-concepts are frequently mentioned in policy papers but rarely used as descriptors of research work. Concerning the results of Section 2 , research papers use more specific and particular descriptors. A resultant assumption is that policy papers more frequently use high-level and non-technical concepts than research papers.

Another question concerns the technologies of rapidly changing “disruptive” prominence, such as machine learning or extended reality. Such technologies are assessed as most relevant in the survey in Section 1 but were not traceable in either the bibliometric study in Section 2 or—prior to 2015—the policy papers investigated in Section 3 . Since the topic of machine learning gained breakthrough momentum through the practical application of convolutional neural networks for computer vision in 2012 (Krizhevsky et al. 2012 ), extended reality has appeared as a terminological replacement of the previously used virtual and augmented reality. Both examples are significant due to the limitations of current automated evaluation strategies. Topic mining may reveal the proximity of concepts such as virtual, augmented, mixed and extended reality and their link to computer visualisation. However, an answer to the “why” questions regarding the link between those terms is lacking—did one term replace, extend, or diminish another and does it represent a completely new concept or is just a new iteration of an old concept? This kind of answer can currently be provided only by qualitative empirical studies, as shown in Section 4 .

A third example is related to the influence of policies on research topics. The cross-national collaboration in research intended by the European Commission and highlighted in Section 4 has already led to cooperation patterns in research publications that differ from those of other continents: The fertilizers are no longer proximity or the same language of the co-authors but their location within the EU. This aspect was studied and quantified via a bibliometric analysis and described in a previous publication (Münster 2019 ). It will be interesting to see whether the current policy interventions sketched in Section 4 —such as the strong link to impact and valorisation in current programmes such as EU Horizon Europe or the COVID-19 Recovery Funds—will shape research topics and cooperation patterns in a way similar to the cross-national cooperation required for projects in many EU funding programmes. This topic may be studied via a bibliometric analysis (Section 2 ) and with regard to temporal patterns via NLP (as shown in Section 3 ).

What do these findings mean with regard to technologies? The findings show the potential gain of a mixed-methods approach, where the results obtained via one method can enhance the results obtained via another approach and vice versa. Since this paper currently presents a couple of first findings, our interest and proposed next steps are to assess the extent to which and under which conditions the meaning and quality of findings can be amended by a mixed-methods approach. Finally, we are interested in assessing the boundaries of data-driven approaches with regard to the currently missing answer to “why”.

Within this framework, the question of the interface between policy and research proposes methodological enrichment and challenges. For a data-driven policy analysis that shows the community perspective, scientific and project topic trends complement the qualitative content analysis of the policy content and messages. The challenge is to derive insightful conclusions from the data and findings obtained via quantitative methods based on the timewise correlation of research and project topic trends to better identify the pathways and direction of influence. Moreover, the topic popularity aspect can be coupled with a more granular analysis of emerging topics (low in popularity but with a high potential of growth) and tested against community needs for a possible translation into the policy space. Doing so would also require an analysis of interdisciplinary networks and nodes emerging via publication and project collaborations.

The findings of this article show that the digital heritage research community sees advanced technologies that are promising for this field. The bibliometric analysis shows that technologies such as remote sensing, laser scanning and photogrammetry are mostly referred to in publications. Interdisciplinary linkages are observed across the humanities, computing, archaeology, the natural sciences, among others. Coupling these findings with FP7 and Horizon 2020 data is a challenge, as the CORDIS data provide information on abstracts and project titles that may not provide an opportunity to grasp the full picture of the technological references of the projects in question.

The current move towards digitisation and the use of advanced technologies, which is observed in the policy documents and programmes in relation to digitisation and cultural heritage, seems to couple with the prospects of the research community. Additionally, research outputs show that new technologies are adopted early. Interdisciplinary research collaborations exist. On this basis, the question of sustainability in the context of the digitisation of cultural heritage as a cross-cutting policy axis, together with the other four defined in this paper, could be revisited. The research and innovation nodes, research outputs and innovations driven by digitisation and cultural heritage, innovation diffusion and adoption patterns would be among the sustainability-relevant contemporary issues in the European policy framework.

A data-driven analysis of the dependencies between policies and research is an important prerequisite for supporting evidence-based policy-making with tools and insights for policy-makers to better manage innovations in digital cultural heritage for enhanced sustainability. Especially in the current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, such an analysis may support a quick and efficient policy response, which is important for economic and societal recovery.

Acknowledgements

The research which this paper is based on was carried out in the projects TMPC (Sächsische Aufbaubank, 100377090), TMPCJ (Thüringische Aufbaubank, 220FGI0045) and the Time Machine FET Flagship CSA (European Commission, GA No. 820323).

Abbreviations

Authors’ contributions.

Authors contributed as following: Münster: Survey & bibliometric analysis, Utescher: NLP analysis, Ulutas-Aydogan: Qualitative study. All author(s) read and approved the final manuscript.

The project has received funding by the Thüringische Aufbaubank (Grant No 220FGI0045).

Availability of data and materials

Declarations.

The author declare that they have no competing interests.

1 https://cordis.europa.eu/

2 https://arxiv.org/

3 https://inception-project.eu

4 DT-TRANSFORMATIONS-20-2020-European Competence Centre for the preservation and conservation of Monuments and Site: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/dt-transformations-20-2020

5 DT-TRANSFORMATIONS-12-2018-2020-Curation of digital assets and advanced digitization: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/dt-transformations-12-2018-2020

6 DT-TRANSFORMATIONS-24-2020: European Museum Collaboration and Innovation Space: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/dt-transformations-24-2020

7 ViMM Project Website: https://www.vi-mm.eu/

8 3D-Coform Project Website: https://web.archive.org/web/20180514102115/https://www.3d-coform.eu/

9 Inception Project Website: https://www.inception-project.eu/en

10 Weights reflect the feature’s relevance to the classification. The classification decision is made based on whether the sum of the weighted inputs is > 0.

11 Please also see (Loebbecke and Thaller 2005 ) for a literature review and classification of the literature in relation to the digitisation of cultural heritage.

12 European Commission, Culture and Creativity, Cultural heritage: https://ec.europa.eu/culture/cultural-heritage

13 European Commission, Shaping Europe's Digital Future, Digital Cultural Heritage:  https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/cultural-heritage

14 Council of Europe, Culture and Cultural heritage, Cultural heritage at the Council of Europe: https://www.coe.int/en/web/culture-and-heritage/cultural-heritage

15 One of the mentioned calls launched under Horizon 2020 is DT-TRANSFORMATIONS-24-2020 European Museum Collaboration and Innovation Space, reachable via https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/dt-transformations-24-2020 . The other is the Pilot Action on Interregional Innovation Call for Expression of Interest for COVID-19 Response and Recovery Partnerships. It involves sustainable and digital tourism as one of its thematic focuses and is reachable via Publication of Calls for expressions of interest - DG REGIO - Regional Policy - European Commission to be supported under the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) available at:  https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/newsroom/funding-opportunities/calls-for-expressions-of-interest/

16 The public consultation on digitisation and the online access of cultural material and digital preservation is reachable via https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/11837-Evaluation-of-the-Recommendation-on-digitisation-and-online-accessibility-of-cultural-material-and-digital-preservation/public-consultation

17 The Factual Summary Report on the open public consultation on digital for Cultural Heritage is reachable via https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/11837-Evaluation-of-the-Recommendation-on-digitisation-and-online-accessibility-of-cultural-material-and-digital-preservation/public-consultation

18 European Commission, Shaping Europe's digital future, DIGIBYTE | Publication 09 April 2019, EU Member States sign up to cooperate on digitising cultural heritage:  https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/eu-member-states-sign-cooperate-digitising-cultural-heritage

19 The ViMM Manifesto for Digital Cultural Heritage available at:  https://www.vi-mm.eu/vimm-results/

20 ViMM Project, 13 March 2019, Deliverable 7.3: Roadmap and Action-Plan available at:  https://www.vi-mm.eu/vimm-results/

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Contributor Information

Sander Münster, Email: [email protected] .

Ronja Utescher, Email: [email protected] .

Selda Ulutas Aydogan, Email: [email protected] .

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15 Thesis topics related to Heritage Conservation

More than just history, heritage conservation aims at preserving the characteristic elements of a cultural resource to retain its heritage value and extend its life. Traditional conservation practices focus on tangible commodities and follow simple guidelines of minimal intervention and appropriate reversible methods. In recent years, however, the definition of heritage and subsequently conservation has changed as our understanding of what constitutes a community has changed. 

Moving beyond the realm of the tangible, cultural heritage is now considered to be just as significant as built heritage. Conservation not only helps in safeguarding a cultural resource but also in revitalizing local economies , and in bringing about a sense of identity, pride and belonging to the community.

As we evolve our built environments, heritage conservation becomes crucial in maintaining a common identity that is reflected in different forms of expression. Here are 15 such thesis topics for you.

1. Contemporary Architecture over Historic Environments | Heritage Conservation

Common conservation practices aim to replicate and preserve the architectural elements of the historic structure being restored. Newer additions in these built environments are designed to assimilate seamlessly with the original structure and maintain a common visual narrative for the entire site. However, some projects have chosen to challenge these methods and create contemporary elements over historic environments. 

This co-existence can be studied to shed light on architectural philosophy’s progression over the years and create a comprehensive timeline for the site. 

2. Making of Architectural Heritage

While many historic sites are managed and maintained, many are integrated into the lives of the community they inhabit. This integration not only prohibits intervention but also warps its cultural significance at times. Significant structures thus are sidelined and lost to time and function. Architectural heritage may be a product of time and culture but it also relies on its image for consideration. 

Mapping such lost heritage raises the question of what constitutes architectural heritage. Is it governed by our perception or the amount of significance we allot to it?

3. Heritage Legislation | Heritage Conservation

Heritage sites are often governed by a strict set of conservation laws to regulate construction methods on or around the site. The laws allow for a standardised approach to conservation practices in a region. However, different governing bodies may have different approaches to conservation. 

A comparative study of conservation laws and legislation in different countries can be done to understand how different approaches are reflected in the process of identification, analysis, and intervention. The laws can also be scrutinised and analysed by studying sites with differing contexts.

4. Economic Valuation of Heritage

Though heritage conservation adds a social value to the community, an economic point of view is also required. The economic feasibility of a conservation project plays a significant role in the maintenance of architectural heritage. The value of a cultural heritage asset can be determined by the benefits that can be derived from its use. 

The contributors can be both tangible like tourism, business, and training, or intangible like social regeneration, quality of life, sense of belonging. Qualitative analysis can be conducted to identify and understand all the factors involved. 

5. Balancing Tourism and Conservation at Heritage Sites

Tourism is a key driver of growth for many communities and has proved itself instrumental in the economic development of a region. However, unmonitored tourism growth can have a negative impact on the destination . Human involvement has caused the deterioration of many sites forcing the authorities to close off sites to preserve the asset. 

It is thus prudent to analyse how tourism development can be enhanced to maintain the quality of environment and culture of the site while offering the highest level of visitor satisfaction through careful planning and execution. 

6. Conservation of Sacred Sites | Heritage Conservation

Religion and faith have played crucial roles in shaping the world we live in today. Sacred sites and places of worship are important social and political symbols in most communities. Thus intervention in such areas requires a unique sensitivity and understanding of these spaces. 

These sites can range from open fields to cluster structures and may perform different functions. These physical manifestations of faith and spirit can be studied and interpreted to create solutions for conservation practices of these locations.

7. Cultural Heritage in Postwar Recovery

In the aftermath of the death and destruction caused by war, the immediate human needs of shelter , food, and health have top priority. A concern for cultural heritage during such a time may appear inconsequential. Though, an argument can be made that the role of culture may be crucial in the early recovery phase. 

Documentation of the evident role that cultural heritage plays in postwar situations can be done for better preparation to confront such situations of conflict.  

8. Social Heritage Conservation

While heritage conservation is usually linked to physical buildings, sites, and objects, cultural heritage involves many intangible components as well. It includes traditions or inherited forms of expressions, like performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, and craft skills. These components have a major impact on our built environment and must be studied for better public spaces tailored to celebrate these traditions. 

9. Public Engagement in Heritage Conservation

Although conservation plays an important role in enhancing the cultural heritage of a community , public engagement in conservation practices is a much recent change. Local ownership and leadership of heritage conservation projects is an important aspect of contemporary heritage practices. 

Such involvement may be pivotal in sites that have integrated built environments. Thus a layout can be created where the conservation methods are formulated by and for the community. 

10. Urban Heritagization | Heritage conservation

A common theme in cities like New York, heritagization of neighbourhoods helps turn neglected and stigmatised historic areas into ‘ aesthetic ’ desirable places with a new value and higher rents. While this process aligns itself with conservation practices, the intention is to capitalise on heritage rather than preserving it for the community. Such practices also have racial and social implications that sideline minorities.  

11. Ecological Heritage

From sacred forests to native agricultural methods, ecological heritage forms an important part of our history and our interaction with our natural environment. With climate change looming over the planet, preservation and revitalisation of our natural heritage may be a way to combat the capitalist development spread around the globe. Understanding the intersection of nature and culture may inform our future architectural practices.

12. Contemporary Derivatives of Historic Structures

The need to preserve architectural heritage is significant but it is also important to develop our built environment to maintain life activities. Hence, a revitalization method with the purpose of reinterpreting and reimagining historically significant elements in the present context to adjust historical buildings to modern requirements needs to be developed. 

13. Restoration Practices

After the infamous fire at Notre Dame, many designers presented their opinions on how the damage should be fixed. While some suggested traditional restoration methods, others designed modern facades with symbolic metal flames to whimsical pools . A conversation was created on how to confront such situations; whether to restore the buildings to their former self or to acknowledge the fading past and adding a contemporary layer.

14. Sustainability and Conservation

There is a synergistic relationship between conservation and sustainability but due to a lack of initiative, both these efforts have not been fully integrated. In some instances, this has led to conflict between heritage conservation efforts and environmental regulations. A comprehensive understanding of both concepts is required to formulate a fully integrated module that addresses both issues.

15. Archiving for the Future | Heritage conservation

One contributor to heritage is time as it defines the period of influence. Many buildings that we use and interact with may be considered an integral part of cultural heritage in the future. Thus, an archive of potential buildings may be created for future reference. This will involve identification and mapping of areas of interest, creating a timeline, understanding the current significance of the community , and tentative preservation techniques. 

Calder, M., n.d. Material Migrations: Finding a Landscape Architectural Tectonic Practice at the Former Maribyrnong Migrant Hostel . Post-Graduate. RMIT.

De Cesari, C. and Dimova, R., 2018. Heritage, gentrification, participation: remaking urban landscapes in the name of culture and historic preservation. International Journal of Heritage Studies , 25(9), pp.863-869.

Del, M., Sedghpour, B. and Tabrizi, S., 2020. The semantic conservation of architectural heritage: the missing values. Heritage Science , [online] 8(70). Available at: <https://heritagesciencejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40494-020-00416-w> [Accessed 5 April 2021].

Heritage 21. n.d. What is Heritage Conservation? . [online] Available at: <https://www.heritage21.com.au/owners-of-heritage-buildings/what-is-heritage-conservation/#:~:text=Professional%20Associations,and%20extend%20its%20physical%20life.> [Accessed 24 May 2021].

ICCROM, 2005. Cultural Heritage in Postwar Recovery . Rome.

Ich.unesco.org. n.d. UNESCO – What is Intangible Cultural Heritage? . [online] Available at: <https://ich.unesco.org/en/what-is-intangible-heritage-00003> [Accessed 5 April 2021].

Rogers, S., n.d. A Study in Architectural Contrasts: 12 Modern-Meets-Historic Additions . [online] Web Urbanist. Available at: <https://weburbanist.com/2016/08/08/a-study-in-architectural-contrasts-12-modern-meets-historic-additions/> [Accessed 5 April 2021].

Sen, M., n.d. Beyond the title of ‘India’s First World Heritage City’ . Post-Graduate. National University of Singapore.

Sohie, C., n.d. HERITAGE DIS-CONTINUED – Tracing cultural ecologies within a context of urban transition . Post-Graduate. University of Cape Town.

The National. 2021. Intellectual India: discovering the charms of Kolkata . [online] Available at: <https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/intellectual-india-discovering-the-charms-of-kolkata-1.48333> [Accessed 24 May 2021].

Currently pursuing his Bachelor's in Architecture, Vaibhav Gurung is a writer, conservationist, and artist. He aims to bring the worlds of sustainability, indigenous culture, and design philosophies closer together through his work. A vivacious conversationalist, he takes pride in his aesthetical and empathetic abilities to guide his designs as well as his daily life.

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Cultural heritage: 7 successes of UNESCO’s preservation work

The power of preserving cultural heritage to build a better world

Why do we go to great lengths to preserve culture and make it bloom? Culture is a resource for the identity and cohesion of communities. In today’s interconnected world, it is also one of our most powerful resources to transform societies and renew ideas. It is UNESCO’s role to provide the tools and skills we need to make the most of its ultimate renewable energy.

Historical landmarks, living heritage and natural sites enrich our daily lives in countless ways, whether we experience them directly or through the medium of a connected device. Cultural diversity and creativity are natural drivers of innovation. In many ways, artists, creators and performers help us change our perspective on the world and rethink our environment. These are precious assets to respond to current global challenges, from the climate crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The notion of culture has greatly evolved over the last 75 years. UNESCO’s actions over the past decades bear witness to the many ways in which humanity tried to understand how culture can strengthen the sense of who we are – from the awareness of the necessity to protect heritage from destruction at the end of World War II, to the launch of international campaigns to safeguard World Heritage sites and the concept of living and intangible heritage, a focus on creative economy and the need to sustain cultural jobs and livelihoods. Our relationship with culture has deeply evolved over the last century. If we look into the past, we might be better prepared to tackle further changes ahead.

The United States will be participating in an international effort which has captured the imagination and sympathy of people throughout the world. By thus contributing to the preservation of past civilizations, we will strengthen and enrich our own.

Abu Simbel – We do not have to choose between the living and the dead

A few minutes before sunrise, thousands of visitors line up inside the temple of Abu Simbel, holding their breath. They are about to witness a rare phenomenon that has taken place twice a year for the last 3,000 years. Every February and October at 6:29 am, the light of the rising sun pierces through the narrow entrance. The rays penetrate over 70 metres deep across the giant pillared hall up to the inner sanctuary, illuminating the statue of the man who built the temple during the 13th century BC, Pharaoh Ramses II.

Carved out of a rocky hill, the Temple of the Rising Sun had been conceived to show the might of Egypt’s greatest pharaoh to the Nubian people in the Upper Nile. Over time, the great temple and the smaller buildings became covered in sand and lay forgotten for centuries, until their rediscovery in 1813. The supreme example of ancient Egypt’s knowledge of astronomy and the skill of its architects could be admired again.

But just over a century later, the southernmost relics of this ancient human civilization were threatened with underwater oblivion and destruction by the rising waters of the Nile following the construction of the Aswan High Dam. The construction of the Dam was meant to develop agriculture as well as Egyptian independence and economy, and triggered a global debate that has fuelled media front pages and discussions ever since: should we have to choose between the monuments of the past and a thriving economy for the people living today? Why should people care for ancient stones and buildings when so many people need food and emergency assistance?

In the course of an unprecedented safeguarding campaign to save the temples of Egypt, UNESCO demonstrated that humanity does not have to sacrifice the past to thrive in the present – quite the opposite. Monuments of outstanding universal value help us understand who we are and also represent massive opportunities for development. Two millennia after a Greek author and scientist drew the famous list of the world’s seven wonders, the very notion of World Heritage came to life.

The race against time began in 1964 , when experts from 50 nations started working together under the coordination of UNESCO in one of the greatest challenges of archaeological engineering in history. The entire site was carefully cut into large blocks, dismantled, lifted and reassembled in a new location 65 metres higher and 200 metres back from the river, preserving it for future generations.

Today, the four majestic statues that guard the entrance to the great temple stare at the river and the rising sun every day. As they did 3,000 years ago. The success of the international cooperation to save Abu Simbel raised awareness about the fact that all over the world there are places of outstanding universal value. Just like the Nile valley temples, they must be protected from many threats such as armed conflict, deliberate destruction, economic pressure, natural disasters and climate change.

The World Heritage Convention was adopted in 1972 as the most important global instrument to establish this notion, bringing all nations together in the pursuit of the preservation of the World’s Natural and Cultural Heritage. With its 194 signatory Member States, it is today one of the world’s most ratified conventions.

How is a site inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List?

For a site to be inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, it must first be nominated by the country where it is located. The nomination is examined by international experts who decide whether the inclusion is justified. Finally, the World Heritage Committee, a body of 21 UNESCO elected Member States, takes a vote.

Venice – Can the safeguard of cultural heritage and global tourism coexist?

Launched only a few years after the Nubian temples initiative, the safeguarding campaign for Venice was a response to various challenges including the rising waters and the explosion of global tourism.

Stepping  outside the railway station early on an autumnal morning, visitors are met with the view of the chilly air colliding with the water, forming a thick, soft blanket of fog over the Grand Canal, the ‘main street’ of Venice. The church of San Simeone Piccolo, with its oversized dome and slender neoclassical columns, and the neighbouring buildings appear to be floating on the water of the lagoon. It’s a sight that has welcomed millions of visitors from all over the world since the heydays of the Serenissima, when the city ruled as one of Europe’s economic superpowers.

Yet, the breath-taking beauty that inspired countless painters, writers and artists over the centuries remains fragile and at risk of being lost forever. Like the Abu Simbel temples, the city’s survival is threatened by rising water levels. The inexorable increase in sea level has caused flooding to become a regular occurrence. Humidity and microorganisms are eating away the long wooden piles that early dwellers drove deep into the muddy ground of the lagoon to build the first foundations of Venice, 1,600 years ago.

After 1966, the year of the worst flooding in Venice’s history, UNESCO and the Italian Government launched a major campaign to save the city. An ambitious project involving giant mobile flood gates was undertaken to temporarily isolate the lagoon from the high tides and protect the lowest areas from flooding. Thirty years later there is unanimous agreement on the successful results both of the technical achievements and international cooperation.

But Venice still needs attentive care, and its continued survival calls for unflagging vigilance. The city remains threatened on several fronts – mass tourism, the potential damage of subsequent urban development and the steady stream of giant cruise ships crushing its brittle foundations.

International mobilization and pressure around the status of Venice led to the Italian Government’s decision in 2021 to ban large ships from the city centre, as a necessary step to protect the environmental, landscape, artistic and cultural integrity of Venice. This decision came a few days after UNESCO announced its intention to inscribe the city on its World Heritage in Danger list. Until a permanent big cruise docking place is identified and developed, liners will be permitted to pull up in Marghera, an industrial suburb of Venice. Such decisions illustrate the great complexity of protecting historic cities and cultural heritage urban centres, which in this particular situation called for tailor-made measures and techniques different from those implemented for the safeguarding of the fabled Egyptian temples.

If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.

Angkor – A successful example of longstanding international cooperation

Deep in the forests of Cambodia, in the Siem Reap Province, the five lotus-flower-shaped towers of majestic Angkor Wat soar towards the sky. When approaching from the main gate, the vast scale of the temple and the precise symmetry of the buildings are awe inspiring. This is the world's largest religious monument.

Angkor Wat was part of a sprawling city as big as London, the heart of an empire that between the 9th and 15th centuries extended from southern Vietnam to Laos, and from the Mekong River to Eastern Myanmar. By around 1500 A.D., the Khmer capital was abandoned, most likely after heavy floods and lengthy droughts. Its temples, buildings and complex irrigation network were swallowed by the surrounding forests and lay hidden until their rediscovery in 1860.

By the early 1990s, the site was under major threat, with many of the temples at high risk of collapse and several sites looted. Conservation work at Angkor had not been possible since the outbreak of the civil war, the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime and the following civil unrest.

Angkor Wat’s inclusion in UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1992 marked a milestone in the country’s recovery after years of conflict. The UNESCO-backed preservation of the temples aimed to assist in nation-building and national reconciliation. The action of the International Coordinating Committee (link is external) (ICC-Angkor) for the safeguarding and development of this exceptional cultural site is a striking example of international solidarity and testifies to one of UNESCO's most impressive achievements for heritage. Thirty countries and an ad hoc experts group for scientific, restoration and conservation projects were brought together under an innovative approach, closely linking safeguarding operations to sustainable development efforts.

In 25 years, Angkor has thus become a living laboratory demonstrating the potential of sustainable tourism and crafts, with the mobilization of local communities for social cohesion in 112 villages. The gigantic site now supports 700,000 inhabitants and attracts some five million visitors whose flow must be managed each year. The park authorities are carrying out several projects aimed at improving the lives of communities through the implementation of sustainable tourism that respects local sensitivities. The removal from UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger just fourteen years later is a credit to the Cambodian people.

The fact that a project of such magnitude was successfully carried out in a country emerging from more than two decades of conflict in 1992 is a testament to the potential of the World Heritage Convention and the international solidarity led by UNESCO.

Walking through the temple, I saw reminders of the prosperous civilization that built it: hundreds of beautiful figures carved into the walls telling the stories of these ancient people; wide galleries they must have prayed in; long hallways lined with pillars they must have walked down.

No one knows for sure what caused the empire to abandon this temple and the surrounding city, but in the 15th century almost everyone left. Trees grew over the stones. Only Buddhist monks stayed behind to care for — and pray in — the hidden temples.

But that didn’t stop pilgrims and visitors from continuing to journey here to take in these incredible structures. And now, centuries later, I couldn’t be more thankful to count myself as one of these visitors

Mostar – Symbols do matter, in war and peace

It’s the end of July in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Peak summer means an influx of tourists to the cobbled alleys of Mostar. The cosy medieval town has a long, rich history marked by the peaceful coexistence of three communities: Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats. Once they arrive in town, visitors from all over the world make a beeline for Mostar’s most emblematic monument, the Old Bridge.

A masterpiece of Ottoman architecture, Stari Most – as it’s known locally – is a symbol of the different communities that have existed side-by-side in the area. Since the 16th century, the bridge had brought them together across the Neretva river – until the Bosnian war. The bridge was a symbol of unity between the Bosnian community (Muslim), in the east of the city, and the Croats and Serbs to the west. The bridge of Mostar (of Ottoman, therefore Muslim origin) served as a link between all these communities – as a pedestrian bridge, it had no military or strategic value. Its destruction in 1993 was only meant to force the communities to separate, to deny their mixing with their neighbours. The bridge was in ruins and, with it, the values of peace and understanding this centuries-old structure had embodied.

Five years later, UNESCO coordinated a reconstruction project to rebuild the Old Bridge. Despite the scars of the war that are still visible today on the city walls, the reconstructed bridge has now become a symbol of reconciliation and post-conflict healing.

Today, the crowds jam the street to watch the traditional diving contest from the top of the bridge, a long-held custom resumed once Stari Most was restored to its former glory. Every July, young people of Mostar’s three communities compete with courage by jumping into the river 29 metres below, just like they did before the war.

For over four years after the ceasefire, former enemies worked together to retrieve the stones from the riverbed and rebuild their former symbol of friendship. Reconstructed in 2004 and inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 2006, Stari Most today is a bridge between a common past and a common future. It is certainly not enough to rebuild a bridge to restore confidence and rebuild peace in a war-torn society. But it certainly matters to care for the symbols of peace.

I was in my office, working to the sound of mortar fire, when we heard the cries in the street – cries that the bridge had fallen. And what happened then was so impressive that I will never forget it. Everyone came out to see. Grenades and bombs were falling everywhere, but still they came out of their hiding places: young and old, weak and strong, Muslim and Christian, they all came, all crying. Because that bridge was part of our identity. It represented us all.

Timbuktu – When warlords target heritage, peacemakers respond with more heritage

Sitting at the gateway to the Sahara Desert, Timbuktu conjures images of a mythical city at the end of the world, where Arab and African merchants would travel from afar to trade salt, gold, cattle and grain. In the English language, the city in northern Mali has come to represent a place far away. Undaunted, caravans still ply the cross-desert route and come to the city several times a year. They carry rock salt extracted from the northern Sahara, just like their ancestors did for centuries.

In its heyday, during the 16th century, the city had 100,000 inhabitants, as its mosques and holy sites played an essential role in the spread of Islam in Africa. The city became an important centre of learning in Africa and its libraries the repository of at least 700,000 historical manuscripts on art, science and medicine, as well as copies of the Qur’an. These manuscripts, written in ornate calligraphy, bear witness to the richness of African history and intellectual life.

During the conflict of 2012–2013, more than 4,000 of the 40,000 manuscripts kept at the Ahmed Baba Institute were lost. Some were burnt or stolen, while more than 10,000 remained in a critical condition. The inhabitants of Timbuktu helped save their precious heritage by secretly spiriting away more than 300,000 manuscripts to the capital, Bamako. Other texts were sheltered between mud walls or buried. Although protected from immediate destruction, the manuscripts are now preserved in conditions that may not safeguard them for future generations.

To help preserve Timbuktu’s cultural heritage and encourage reconciliation, UNESCO has been supporting the local communities to take part in ancient manuscript conservation projects and ensure their lasting preservation for humanity.

UNESCO has coordinated the work to rebuild the fourteen mausoleums inscribed on the World Heritage List, as well as the Djingareyber and Sidi Yaha mosques, that were deliberately destroyed by armed groups during the conflict.

The reconstruction of Timbuktu’s devastated cultural heritage aimed to foster reconciliation among communities and restore trust and social cohesion. An important aspect of the project was the drive to include the reconstruction of the mausoleums in an overall strategy aimed at revitalizing building traditions and ensuring their continuity, through on-the-job training activities and conservation projects.

To ensure the rebuilt shrines matched the old ones as closely as possible, the reconstruction work was checked against old photos and local elders were consulted. Local workers used traditional methods and local materials, including alhor stone, rice stalks and banco – a mixture of clay and straw.

The destruction of the mausoleums of Timbuktu has been a shock, and a clear turning point revealing the importance taken of culture and heritage in modern conflicts fuelled by violent extremism and fundamentalist ideologies. It has shown how strongly fundamentalists are willing to destroy other Islamic cultures, and any other vision which differs from their own. Similar direct destruction of Islamic, pre-Islamic, Christian or Jewish heritage, has then been seen in Iraq and Syria. The need to restore heritage has become far more than a mere cultural issue – it has become a security issue, and a key component for the resilience and further cohesion of societies torn by conflicts.

At present, the monuments in Timbuktu are living heritage, closely associated with religious rituals and community gatherings. Their shape and form have always evolved over time both with annual cycles (that of the rain and the erosion of the plastering); that of regular maintenance (every three to five years); repairs of structural pathologies, often adding buttresses; and at times more important works, including extensions and raising of the roof structure. How to take that into account while trying to guide and assist the local people in their self-capacity, their resilience in keeping their heritage as they have done for over 600 years? What should be done and to what extent? Who should be responsible for what? These are tricky questions of heritage preservation, far beyond the mere inscription of a site on the famous World Heritage list.

Salt comes from north, gold from south and silver from the land of Whites, but the Word of God, the famous things, histories and fairy tales, we only find them in Timbuktu.

Preserving cultural identity and Korean traditions: The bond of living heritage

It’s the end of November in the countryside near Jeonju, the capital of the North Jeolla Province. The weather is getting chilly and winter is just a couple of weeks away.

It’s time to prepare for the long, icy-cold season. It’s time to make kimchi.

The Republic of Korea’s staple food is a side dish of salted and fermented vegetables that makes its appearance at every meal. It’s not just the country’s emblematic dish: its preparation ( kimjang ) is a community event.

Housewives monitor weather forecasts to determine the most favourable date and temperature for preparing kimchi. Entire families, friends and neighbours gather together to make it. The process is rather laborious and requires many hands to process the large quantities of vegetables required to last throughout the winter months. They all work together, exchange tips and tighten their relationships through kimjang. Families take turns making kimchi to form closer bonds.

Today, the entire village will get together in one of the houses for the occasion. Together, they will wash the napa cabbage that was pickled in salt the night before and mix in the seasonings that will give kimchi its unique sour-and-spicy flavour. The specific methods and ingredients are transmitted from mother to daughter so that kimjang culture is preserved through the generations.

Since 2013, kimjang has been included in UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity as an important part of Korean culture, embodying the country’s cooperative and sharing team spirit. Kimjang is a vital cultural asset of a community and worth preserving and celebrating for the rest of humanity. Even though there may be regional differences in the preparation of kimchi, it transcends class, regional and even national borders.

Cultural practices often precede the instauration of national borders and the start of conflict among its citizens. Shared cultural practices may even be a path to reconciliation. 

Such hopes materialized in 2018, when the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea decided to work together to submit a joint submission for traditional wrestling as an element of UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Ssirum/Ssireum (wrestling) is a physical game and a popular form of entertainment widely enjoyed all across the Korean peninsula. In the North, two opponents try to push each other to the ground using a satpa (a fabric strap connecting the waist and leg), their torso, hands and legs. Ssirum/Ssireum is distinguished by the use of the satpa and the awarding of a bull to the winner. In the South, Ssirum/Ssireum is a type of wrestling in which two players wearing long fabric belts around their waists and one thigh grip their opponents’ belt and deploy various techniques to send them to the ground. The winner of the final game for adults is awarded an ox, symbolizing agricultural abundance, and the title of ‘Jangsa’.

As an approachable sport involving little risk of injury, Ssirum/Ssireum also offers a means to improve mental and physical health. Koreans are widely exposed to Ssirum/Ssireum traditions within their families and local communities: children learn the wrestling skills from family members; local communities hold annual open wrestling tournaments; its instruction is also provided in schools.

Following UNESCO’s mediation, the two States Parties agreed for their respective nomination files to be jointly examined by the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in November 2018. UNESCO welcomed this initiative of regional cooperation and, through a historic decision, inscribed "Traditional Korean wrestling (Ssirum/Ssireum)" on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, as a joint inscription from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea. While the Lists of the Convention include several examples of multinational nominations prepared by several States (from couscous to the art of falconry and the Mediterranean diet), the coming together of the two States Parties for the joint inscription of Korean traditional wrestling by the Committee is unprecedented. It marks a highly symbolic step on the road to inter-Korean reconciliation. It is also a victory for the longstanding and profound ties between both sides of the inter-Korean border, and for the role cultural diplomacy may have in international relations.

It was the time when the women would gather and gossip. There would be matchmaking. There would be some marriages that came about during the time of kimchi making.

Promoting culture in a post-COVID-19 world

The cultural and creative industries are among the fastest growing sectors in the world. With an estimated global worth of US$ 4.3 trillion per year, the culture sector now accounts for 6.1 per cent of the global economy. They generate annual revenues of US$ 2,250 billion and nearly 30 million jobs worldwide, employing more people aged 15 to 29 than any other sector. The cultural and creative industries have become essential for inclusive economic growth, reducing inequalities and achieving the goals set out in the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

The adoption of the 2005 Convention for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions was a milestone in international cultural policy. Through this historic agreement, the global community formally recognized the dual nature, both cultural and economic, of contemporary cultural expressions produced by artists and cultural professionals. Shaping the design and implementation of policies and measures that support the creation, production, distribution of and access to cultural goods and services, the 2005 Convention is at the heart of the creative economy.

Recognizing the sovereign right of States Parties to maintain, adopt and implement policies to protect and promote the diversity of cultural expression, both nationally and internationally, the 2005 Convention supports governments and civil society in finding policy solutions for emerging challenges.

Based on human rights and fundamental freedoms, the 2005 Convention ultimately provides a new framework for informed, transparent and participatory systems of governance for culture.

A constant rethinking of culture and heritage

The history of UNESCO bears witness to the deep transformation of the concept of culture over the past decades. From global Conventions mostly dealing with building and stones in the 60’s and 70’s, the international cooperation opened new fronts for the protection and promotion of culture, including intangible cultural heritage, cultural diversity and creative economy. The definition of "culture" was spearheaded by the committee led by former UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuellar and the Mondiacult Conference in 1982. In 2022, the global Mondiacult conference is expected to take stock of progress made in the past 40 years in cultural policies, and re-imagine its future in a post-COVID-19 world.

Have a look at these World Heritage sites

The 30,000-kilometre-long road system was built by the Inca Empire across mountains, valleys, rainforests and deserts to link the Inca capital, Cuzco, with distant areas of the empire, from the Amazon to the Andes. Thanks to its sheer scale, Qhapaq Ñan is a unique achievement of engineering skills, highlighting the Incas' mastery of construction technology.

The granting of World Heritage status in 2019 has made its trail – which every year sees thousands of visitors on their way to the area’s archaeological sites such as Machu Picchu in Peru – eligible for much-needed restoration funds.

Borobudur Temple Compound

Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple in the world and one of the great archaeological sites of Southeast Asia. This imposing Buddhist temple, dating from the 8th and 9th centuries, is located in central Java. It was built in three tiers: a pyramidal base with five concentric square terraces, the trunk of a cone with three circular platforms and, at the top, a monumental stupa. The walls and balustrades are decorated with fine low reliefs, covering a total surface area of 2,500 m 2 . Around the circular platforms are 72 openwork stupas, each containing a statue of the Buddha. The monument was restored with UNESCO's help in the 1970s.

Bamiyan Valley, Afghanistan

This cultural landscape was simultaneously inscribed on the World Heritage List and the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2003. The property is in a fragile state of conservation, having suffered from abandonment, military action and dynamite explosions. Parts of the site are inaccessible due to the presence of anti-personnel mines.

Related items

• Lists and designations
• Intangible cultural heritage
• Intangible heritage
• Diversity of Cultural Expressions-2005 Convention
• Intangible Cultural Heritage-2003 Convention
• Underwater Cultural Heritage-2001 Convention
• World Heritage 1972 Convention
• Fight Illicit Trafficking-1970 Convention
• Armed Conflict and Heritage-1954 Convention
• Culture & Sustainable Development
• UNESCO Creative Cities Network

Coastal and maritime cultural heritage: from the European Union to East Asia and Latin America

• Open access
• Published: 16 May 2024
• Volume 23 , article number  26 , ( 2024 )

Cite this article

You have full access to this open access article

• Alyne E. Delaney   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0516-1343 1 , 3 &
• Katia Frangoudes 2  

Introducing the Special Collection on Coastal and Maritime Cultural Heritage , this article focuses on the cultural heritage of coastal regions and maritime cultures and presents a summary of threats and topics found in recent cultural heritage research, especially around the themes of governance, resilience, transformation, and power (including gender and marginalization). Cultural heritage (CH) is a super-concept: it connects a wide diversity of heritage types (tangible and intangible), and cuts across a variety of public policies. Yet coastal and maritime cultural heritage (CMCH) faces risks from conflicts, environmental hazards, and from a neglect arising from lack of understanding and consideration of its value. Additional risks from governmental Blue Growth policies and economic factors put CH at even greater risk. As cultural heritage is increasingly being tapped for its economic importance in development and tourism– and neglected in maritime policy– greater scholarly understandings and conceptualization of CMCH are needed. This special collection is one step in the direction towards further understandings, protections, and utilization of CH for coastal societies and culture. As economic valuations increase, however, we should not forget that cultural heritage in and of itself holds intrinsic value. Looking across Europe and the world, coastal peoples’ cultural heritage tells us a story of generations of linkages and bonds with coastal environments. Such CH imparts a sense of place and belonging to people, and connects people to one another, their pasts, and their futures. We hope this Special Collection provides a sense of the beauty of CMCH and inspires further exploration and research around this super-concept.

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

Social scientists working in coastal, maritime, and fisheries communities have long investigated and described aspects of culture in their research which can be categorized as coastal or maritime cultural heritage. The narratives in such research contains, for example, various descriptions from fish sheds, to women’s roles in the fisheries, to boat building techniques, and fishing gears; to keepers of lighthouses, descriptions of fish processing and oral histories of livelihood activities, these all revolve around coastal cultural relationships. Indeed, coastal residents’ and ocean-going peoples’ relationships with one another and their coasts and seas form community and individual identities, and in so doing, further generate living coastal and maritime cultural heritage.

We define coastal and maritime cultural heritage (CH) as the material and immaterial cultural attributes of coastal or maritime-connected groups which have been inherited from previous generations. A key point to be made about CH is that it has persisted over time. Such endurance indicates an implicit value placed on it by cultural members and may show special, localized aesthetic values. Critically, the heritage connects cultural community members to one another and their local environments and provides a sense of identity. Intangible culture is often difficult to comprehend but it generally includes, for example, knowledge and skills such as with building boats, processes involved in sewing distinct clothes, singing songs, and relating stories. Cultural Heritage is a concept which offers a bridge between the past and the future with the application of particular approaches in the present day. Due to its attached values for these groups or societies, cultural heritage is maintained in the present and bequeathed for the benefit of future generations. A 700-year-old festival in Miyagi, Japan, for example, is most likely not celebrated the same today as in the 13th Century when it was founded. Indeed, in recent years, the kami (god/spirit) brought down from the mountains to be bathed in the sea was brought down in a mikoshi (portable shrine) in a kei truck rather than a boat (fieldnotes, 2015; Kimura 2016 ). Nevertheless, the festival persists into the 21st Century in some form as it holds value to the coastal residents of the area.

Research on these social and cultural aspects of coastal and maritime cultural heritage is vast and can be found over decades of research and across multiple disciplinary fields including anthropology, archaeology, cultural and heritage studies, and geography (e.g., see Brumann 2014 ; Chio 2022 ; Jones 2009 ; Meskell 2015 ; Vecco 2010 ). In the past, much of the work was siloed in nature, but recent years have seen increased interdisciplinarity and the borrowing of methods. As Meskell points out, “The particular focus on materiality with which archaeology is synonymous, and which anthropology has more recently adopted, provides an appropriate methodology for taking heritage seriously… An ethnographic sensibility has also emerged around heritage work as methodology to connect the lived experiences… with broader international policies and politics” ( 2015 : 2). Anthropology-related CH research, though it can be the focus, is often spread throughout other topical research (e.g., women and fisheries, governance, or ethnology) and related journals and often may not focus on the heritage itself. In the 1980s research on heritage primarily focused on management with the 1990s still witness to heritage being synonymous with castles and manors in an, often, static manner (Meskell 2015 ).

The concept of cultural heritage is also one of specific meaning to particular disciplinary groups and thus definitions and understanding can vary. Historically, especially in Europe and the United Kingdom, for example, heritage most often referred to tangible, built heritage, not intangible heritage (Brumann 2015 ). Furthermore, preservation was the prevailing view rather than finding new uses for heritage, such as with hard structures (e.g., port warehouses turned to flats or restaurants), ideas (e.g., use of sea shanties in art and memes), and tourism development.

As attention on cultural heritage has grown, so have the instruments naming and protecting it. Indeed, much of these came about as a result of loss and threatened loss (Brumann 2015 ). And again, tended to focus on tangible heritage, the government of Japan’s naming of intangible cultural property and “national living treasures” (e.g., individuals who possess unique folkcraft skills and knowledge) is a significant exception for intangible heritage (Vecco 2010 ). Intangible cultural heritage remained outside of international conventions for decades longer, with the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage not passed by UNESCO until 2003 Footnote 1 (Ounanian et al. 2021 ). Cultural heritage, like culture itself, is incredibly broad and though we could not possibly present the full breadth of current research, this Maritime Studies Coastal and Maritime Cultural Heritage Special Collection presents examples of some of the most recent work on-going in social science research in Europe and around the world. Focusing on shared themes --resilience, space and place, and power– and distinctive methods and creative adaptation, the issue highlights the wealth of tangible and intangible cultural heritage and experience in European and the world’s coastal and maritime zones.

Cultural heritage

In 2014, the Council of Europe chose cultural heritage to serve as a “strategic resource for a sustainable Europe.” Footnote 2 In so doing, it was acknowledged that “cultural heritage plays an important role in creating and enhancing social capital, has broad, economic impacts, and can be used in goals for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth (CEU 2014 ). Cultural heritage is what we (authors) consider a “super-concept.” Like a superfood which is packed with an inordinate amount of nutrients in a single package, the single, super-concept of cultural heritage cuts across public policies beyond the cultural, and includes those “related to regional development, social cohesion, agriculture, maritime affairs, environment, tourism, education, the digital agenda, research and innovation” (CEU 2014 : 2).

Yet, what precisely is “cultural heritage”? Simply put, cultural heritage is the tangible and intangible aspects of culture which have been passed down through time and generations and, as a consequence, are viewed as containing value. In terms of generally accepted understandings, “cultural heritage” stems from heritage preservations, researchers and practitioners whereby such “heritage” arises from tangible and material objects, including built structures, which by virtue of their remaining over time and through history, hold value. Though not always explicitly understood or acknowledged, by virtue of it remaining over time and being valued, such heritage in this form often tended to belong to elites and wealthy classes. Cultural heritage was often traditionally viewed in the West as tangible (Ahmad 2006 ) (e.g., a wooden fishing boat), today however, intangible cultural heritage (e.g., the knowledge for making the fishing boat) is increasingly being recognized. The inclusion of intangible cultural heritage not only acknowledges the importance of other types of heritage, but also often acknowledges value of other groups, ethnicities, and classes, and genders. The omission of such groups is often at the center of research by those in critical heritage studies who often focus on the socio-political processes of heritage designation (Chio 2022 ).

Conceptualising coastal and maritime culture heritage

Often rooted in specific seascapes, stories, buildings, language, and traditions, cultural heritage is a critically important part of coastal societies and cultures. It connects people to each other and to history, social values, beliefs, religions, customs, and worldviews from the past—and helps guide their cultural and economic futures. Place identity and people’s ‘place in the world’ can often be tied to cultural heritage (Nadel-Klein 2020 ; Ferreira da Silva 2022 citing Delaney 2020a ). Cultural heritage also involves communities of practice (Ounanian et al. 2021 ) and shared values. The loss of cultural heritage can weaken people’s attachments with one another, their history, and with society, thereby increasing strife and a sense of anomie and decreasing cooperation and sense of identity. Alternatively, cultural heritage, can be the catalyst for strengthening identity, resolve, and revitalization, such as found in the support given for the revival of local folk dances and cultural heritage activities following the tsunami generated by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake (see, e.g., Kaneko 2020 ; Kimura 2016 ; Takakura 2023 ; Delaney 2024 ).

Coastal cultural landscapes and communities form the crossroads of peoples, connecting each other with other regions and with the world, whether that be from commerce to conquest, from cultural exchange to mass tourism. As such, they represent an extremely rich tangible heritage seen through coastal towns and villages, submerged landscapes and underwater artefacts, harbours, dams, light houses, arsenals, buildings of the fishing and marine industry, boat builders, and the like. As a result of the combination of geological features found naturally and human ingeniousness applied to them, specific coastal cultural landscapes emerged on the shores (e.g., Van Tilburg 2014 ) and seabeds (e.g., Saiji 2023 ) which include unique types of transcultural communication and ethnic diversity. This tangible heritage is intimately embedded into multiple layers of intangible heritage, from language and cultural traditions to myths and songs to arts and crafts of local cultures of communities of, for example, sailors, Scottish “herring lasses”, and boat builders.

Today this rich heritage of coastal cultural landscapes is at particular at risk due to environmental and economic challenges such as climate change, pollution, development, urbanisation, pressure from tourism, the transformation of the fishing industries due to falling fish stocks and disjointed policies of sea or shore conservation at national, EU, and international levels (Delaney 2020a ). Coastal zones are typically the among the densest populated areas in the world; half the world’s population lives within 60 km of the sea, and three-quarters of all large cities are located on the coast (Geographer Online. n.d. ) In Europe, over 40% of the EU-27 population lived in coastal regions (EEA 2013 ). Many mixed metropolitan-coastal landscapes have emerged around historic port cities which pose new challenges for conservation, management and transmission of existing tangible and intangible values.

Competition for marine space and the cumulative impact of human activities on marine ecosystems and cultural landscapes require a collaborative and integrated approach to the wide range of policy areas affecting maritime issues. This century has seen a rise in the EU policies and directives which can both impact and support coastal cultural heritage, including the Integrated Maritime Policy (IMP), the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, Maritime Spatial Planning, and Integrated Coastal Zone Management (pushed for by the European Parliament since 2002). The aim of the IMP is to maximise the sustainable use of oceans and seas, enhance Europe’s knowledge and innovation potential in maritime affairs, ensure development and sustainable growth in coastal regions, strengthen Europe’s maritime leadership and raise the profile of maritime Europe. This policy stresses the importance of coastal regions due to their geographic location and aims to develop sea basin strategies.

Tourism in coastal regions can provide employment opportunities and also contribute to regional development and economic and social integration. The European Commission recognised the importance of maritime and coastal tourism as a catalyst for economic development and encourages tourism development as part of an integrated maritime policy. Coastal tourism, for example, is a sector of the Blue Economy which involved more than 2.8 million people and accounts for annual revenues of over €231 billion (EU Maritime Forum n.d. ). Yet, with development comes risks.

Protection and advocacy for cultural heritage can strengthen identity and local society, thereby improving overall quality of life and economic opportunities. Culture and heritage are imperatives for the healthy and robust development of any society. Furthermore, “Cultural heritage must be seen as a special, but integral, component in the production of European GDP and innovation, its growth process, competitiveness and in the welfare of European society. Like environmental protection, it should be mainstreamed into policy and regarded as a production factor in economic and wider policy development” (Gelonch 2015 :1).

Indeed, cultural heritage has a vital role to play in sustainable development. Throughout Europe, the contribution of cultural heritage to sustainable development has been critical, especially in the cities and landscapes (Thurley et al. 2015 ). “More holistic management of the environment, bringing cultural and natural heritage together in single systems, has resulted in greater efficiencies and improved quality of life” (Thurley et al. 2015 : 7).

As a living concept, cultural heritage is a part of local and regional culture. Local cultural members, stakeholders and end-users must be included in work to strengthen and protect heritage. Scientists and practitioners value cultural heritage, but locals live and breathe it and their identities are formed by it. Their knowledge, connection, and enthusiasm must be included in any work on cultural heritage and provided with ways to channel their knowledge and creativity into cultural heritage research (Delaney 2020b ).

Throughout the globe, maritime and coastal cultural regions are at the crossroads of connections and movements of diverse peoples and cultures. These coastal zones are also historically rich with unique land/seascapes, tangible artefacts, and intangible cultural heritage. Maritime and coastal cultural heritage (CH), rooted in specific landscapes, seascapes, buildings, stories, traditions, language, and cultural practices, is a fundamental part of society. It is based on the past, but it is also living—constantly changing and adapting—as all culture is. Yet, maritime and coastal CH is also at risk through diverse drivers, such as climate change, non-CH sensitive economic and spatial development, and demographic change. (Delaney 2020b ). With calls for growth in different economic sectors, it is important to make explicit connections to the values of CH, the risks it faces and to the benefits to preserving and safeguarding CH for current and future generations. CH should not be conceptualized, in a static sense but include ongoing adaptation to new circumstances and opportunities, providing a springboard for sustainable exploitation. With due consideration, CH can be both preserved and sustainably utilized.

The glue that binds

The discussions in the articles presented in this Special Collection on Coastal and Maritime Cultural Heritage focus on a number of key themes of which we would like to highlight, particularly: resilience, governance, power/empowerment and transformation. From these, spring connected subthemes such as gender and marginalization. We present a brief discussion here as these are shared threads found throughout the articles.

The concept of resilience is closely connected with cultural heritage. By its very existence, extant cultural heritage (Flannery et al. 2022 ) is resilient, managing to have survived and continued over time enough to become heritage. Yet, through neglect, conflicts and wars, and now climate change, the continued resilience of cultural heritage is often in doubt. With these pressures and doubts, policies and protections emerged. Yet, how, and by whom, shall CH be protected? Who has a say? And whose heritage and voices will be heard? Thus, not only issues of governance come to the forefront, but also of power and empowerment. These three themes connect to the concept of transformation as the CH which remains may be altered. Whether transformation of the participation of cultural practitioners over time (e.g., from only men to mixed sexes) and events such as disasters (e.g., Delaney 2024 ; Klien 2016 : Wilhelm 2005 ), or even with CH becoming frozen in time (e.g., from a UNESCO listing) and not evolving naturally as it may have otherwise, transformation remains another critical theme surrounding CMCH.

In addition to these key themes of resilience, governance, and transformation, in the following discussion, we also draw attention to the variety of methods used including visual/photo elicitation, discrete choice (value), oral history, space and place, and focus on species of fish to tease out data and understandings of CMCH.

Cultural Heritage research is often presented through materiality with actual items on display or with photos used to represent the heritage. Beyond documentation and providing examples and “back-ups” (e.g., in digital archives and in museums), photos can be used as a tool to elicit deeper thinking from participants (Antoniou et al. 2023 ), which also elicits meaning (Pafi et al. 2023 ). Photos can also support storytelling around the heritage (Antoniou et al. 2019 ) and photography can also provide context and key “details that, although visible, may become part of the wallpaper in the wider… view” (Levis 2024 : 84; Shotton and Prizeman 2024 ).

In addition to visual methods, oral history can be used to both find and protect CMCH (Westerdahl 1980 ), as well as serve to bring in missing voices, details, and intangible CH (Frangoudes et al. 2023 ). Combined with photos, these can be used to elicit values from local inhabitants and tie them to local social contexts. Such methods remain critical for such work around CMCH as documentation for planning, such as around the blue economy (Pafi et al. 2023 ) and in post-disaster contexts (Delaney 2023 ).

Connected with these innovative methods of data collection we find creative adaptation, such as through digital storytelling, which connects full circle back to the theme of transformation.

Though the articles in this Special Collection focus on varying themes, all have resilience in the sense of an “on-going nature,” as a backdrop given the critical connection cultural heritage has with the concept of time. Indeed, most of the authors in this CMCH Special Collection present CH as a continuous process: Rogelja et al. ( 2023 ) present “fish” as vehicle to assess how heritage as particular type of imaginary conveys social, cultural, political and economic transformations of the area; Flannery et al. ( 2022 ) provides a framework which allows for extant, dormant and transformed CH; Hansen et al. ( 2022 ) draws on this to show how CH contributes to reconstruction of narratives and identities related to dormant CH, creating new attractiveness of place. Continuing the time theme by tying the past to the present, Frangoudes et al. ( 2023 ) uses oral histories and other methods to fill in gaps of knowledge left from historical documentation. Hansen et al. ( 2022 ) also emphasises the planning and governance aspects which, like Pafi et al. ( 2023 ), presents how similar blue growth-oriented economic development can affect local identities. Macias et al. ( 2023 ) also looks into development, in this case tourism, and how digital tools can bridge fishing CH and tourism. As the question of continuation comes to the fore, Ounanian and Howells ( 2022 ) examine the maintenance of knowledge (ICH) for clinker boatbuilding in Nordic countries.

Within this continuous process, some articles focus on CH as being at risk, and thus resilience discussions focus on supporting and saving the CH into the future. Particularly given the prominence of climate change impacts in the popular press and academic research, discussions of resilience are put center stage. This is in contrast to traditional heritage studies which argue for preservation of “pure” CH, grown out from the care of built architecture. Flannery et al. ( 2022 ), in particular, draw from Holtorff ( 2018 ) to focus on “evolving” heritage to develop a framework for steering resilience of coastal and maritime cultural heritage. In the manner of the anthropological concept of cultural as ever-changing, Flannery et al. ( 2022 ) aim to increase people’s acceptance of the transformation of CH. Tied to this is the importance of effective forms of participation and “potential” heritage (through transformation). Flannery et al. also focus on the deliberative governance aspect here, a view which can be seen in local level, anthropological studies, as well. For example, following the impacts of the tsunami generated by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, Klien ( 2016 ) demonstrates that “practitioners play an essential role in redefining the nature of [CH] performances in the wake of the earthquake and that the adaptation of the performance to changing circumstances helps to maintain its relevance” ( 2016 : 359). Klien further argues, as Flannery et al. ( 2022 ) do with potential CH, that the concept of “the authenticity of practitioners” -- a concept used to understand folk performing arts as evolving rather than static, “authentic” cultural phenomena– remains key.

In recent years, researchers, activists, stakeholders, and governments are increasingly working towards preserving and protecting coastal and maritime cultural heritage. Such moves tie into greater understandings of the value of CH on a variety of levels and connects to important concepts of governance (including spatial governance), power/empowerment, and transformation. Governance measures can be local, regional, national and EU-level, include actions from local movements to the passage of EU and international conventions.

Given the nature of CMCH, space remains a key concept underlying governance, which, given the nature of heritage can be said to morph into “place.” Space is a geographic concept as it encompasses physical locations and geography; it can also be quantitatively measured. Place on the other hand, is a cultural and social construct; place develops through the meanings people ascribe to locations. As such, place matters to people (Harvey 1993 ).

In the Western world, sea and ocean spaces, including coastal zones, are often viewed as open access without ownership, following the Dutch jurist Grotius’ publication (1609) of Mare Liberum (“the Free Sea”) in which he argued that the sea belonged to all. Despite the argument that the oceans are free, the resources found therein are a different matter. Interest in the seas over the centuries tended to focus on environmental and economic needs (Gee 2019 ). Consequently, ocean-related governance legislation and plans also traditionally fell along these lines, passed with the purpose to either protect or profit from ocean natural resources. The rise of the EU’s Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) and Integrated Maritime Policy (IMP) (2014), and subsequent push for a Blue Economy, are examples of this mindset.

What tends to be missing from these conceptualizations are the human, cultural aspect of seas, oceans, and coastal connections. The sea and coasts can be places, with people holding strong attachments. Residents of coastal communities, especially those who fish and gather ocean resources often hold a strong sense of belonging. Frangoudes et al. ( 2023 ) alludes to such identities while others have written to its importance more explicitly (e.g., Delaney 2023 , 2024 ; MacKinnon and Brennan 2012 ). “The sea is thus just as much a place as the land, with subjectivity of place not only arising from direct use of the marine environment but also imagery and traditional knowledge” (Gee 2019 :40). As the importance of oceans and coasts for culture and society, including the related cultural heritage, became better understood, new legislation and conventions have been passed, conflicting in some ways with other plans, such as the European Union’s Integrated Maritime Policy (IMP).

Such conflicts highlight issues of agency, power, and empowerment. Who has the ability to participate and speak up (Escobar 2017 )? Who has a role in decision making? Whose voices are being heard? Pafi et al. ( 2023 ) provides a discussion of the challenges of locals having input as they contest various Blue Growth projects in Ireland. In this case, the authors argue for an empowerment of sort for locals, which would include the investment in “knowledge, assets, networks, and skills.” Ounanian and Howells ( 2022 ), in their article on ICH of Nordic “clinker” boatbuilding point out that in the European Union, “State (government) interventions can obscure the multiple layers of governance: among member states, and within countries (central, regional, local authorities, and jurisdictions). In the case study in question (Denmark and Scandinavia), the municipal level holds fairly high decision-making powers, yet impacts to the living ICH, is affected by legislation and regulations at multiple levels (e.g., EU fisheries policy).

Hansen et al. ( 2022 ), on the other hand, presents a case of the efforts of local stakeholders to use the CH concept to reconstruct place narratives and identities in local and regional strategies and plans. Given the relatively little research conducted on CMCH in spatial policy and planning, Hansen et al. ( 2022 ) provide valuable insights from their case studies in Scotland, France, Northern Ireland and Denmark, not least due to each case being representative of different stages in the governance process. Key issues included multiple stakeholder voices, what is the CH to be used for, and how to balance CH-related needs to that of other needs (e.g., profit-oriented development). As a part of this is the need for planning for participatory strategies, leading us back to power and empowerment viewpoints.

Power/empowerment

A critical point to come out of many of the articles in this Special Collection is the acknowledgement of there being a variety of stakeholders. In some development projects, such as the development of Belfast Harbour for tourism, some local microculture voices were marginalized at the expense of other stories (Flannery et al. 2022 ). In other cases, the role of certain groups, including along gender lines, can also be overlooked, as seen in Frangoudes et al. ( 2023 ).

Traditional consultation of projects often involves a component of citizen input but, as Hansen et al. ( 2022 ) argue, the style of involvement is critical. “Citizens are not just there to be enrolled and co-opted in formal decision-making, but also [must be] empowered and recognized” ( 2022 : 433) such as for their skills and knowledge. As their Danish and French case studies showed, ongoing and meaningful engagement through deliberative participatory exercises and between a purposefully differentiated crowd of stakeholders and citizens is vital. Such inclusion can not only generate CH insights, but also provide strengthened alliances and share identities. Undertaken with formal actors, this can build common agendas and influence spatial planning when involving local stakeholders and authorities; it can also spark reflection on the participatory methods (Hansen et al. 2022 ).

These calls for open stakeholder collaborations also highlight the dominance of certain voices over others, as shown in Flannery et al. ( 2022 ), Macias et al. ( 2023 ) and Pafi et al. ( 2023 ), and the need for better inclusivity. The dominance of limited voices is tied with power dominance, critical issues as we look at the rise of Blue Growth and Blue Transformation agendas (see, e.g., Pafi et al. 2023 ). Such dominance is often historical with authors calling for better inclusion of stakeholders and gender roles (Frangoudes et al. 2023 ); Perez-Alvaro 2023 ; Ounanian and Howells 2022 ).

Overcoming such dominance can be challenging, but realization is the first step. Velho points out, that yes, indeed “every cultural policy is inserted within a field of power, complete with interests, factions and often conflicts” ( 2012 : 148) but argues that research and reflection can lead us to an effective policy of knowledge through inclusivity. Moving beyond the local level, international conventions also play a role in giving a voice to groups and their CMCH knowledge (see. e.g., Frangoudes et al. 2023 ; Ounanian et al. 2021 ; Ounanian and Howells 2022 ), and providing some protections.

In some cases, however, the international conventions replicate the hegemony of colonialism and state-centric systems by failing to protect indigenous rights to underwater cultural heritage, as detailed in Perez-Alvaro ( 2023 ), an article which speaks to human rights and (de)constructs international conventions around underwater cultural heritage. The paper highlights not only the need for increased local engagement but also calls for the empowerment of indigenous voices and worldviews, a sort of indigenization rather than simple decolonialization.

Empowerment is also related to the question of who is responsible for safeguarding CH. Ounanian and Howells ( 202 2), in their focus on intangible CH (ICH) around clinker (wooden) boats, bring up the question of responsibility for needed interventions in safeguarding the knowledge around boat building. In this, they discuss how “the clinker boatbuilding knowledge highlights the complexity of CMCH in its spread over various policy domains—culture, fisheries, local development, education, tourism—and geographic scales” ( 2022 : 422). Indeed, the history of clinker boats is extensive and has persevered over millennia, evolving over time from innovations related to local, environmental constraints, adaptations to different fisheries and, more recently, in recreational and leisure uses. Unlike the preservation of boats in museums, the clinker boat tradition is a living one which requires on-going innovation and creativity for building fit-for-purpose working (fishing) vessels. The authors thus uncover a potential blind spot in UNESCO’s ICH designations and efforts: as an industrial craft, “supporting the education of new boat builders through years of apprenticeships and apprentice-like roles as a necessity to safeguard the intergenerational transmission of knowledge between those that embody the clinker craft” ( 2022 : 421). Critically, as the tradition (knowledge) is one of living heritage, there are competing aesthetic and industrial values, an issue which, they argue, calls for investigation into the “fit for purpose” aspect of UNESCO’s heritage frameworks.

Methods and methodologies

In addition to standard, qualitative fieldwork methods which include interviewing, workshops, and focus groups, articles in this CMCH Special Collection present some creative ways of uncovering and discussing CMCH. Two unique methodologies used include utilizing discrete choice analysis (Martino et al. 2023 ) and ethnographies of fish species (Rogelja et al. 2023 ). Martino et al. ( 2023 ), after realizing there was limited quantitative analysis (monetary valuation) of the influence of maritime heritage on people’s choices, undertook a choice experiment on seafood preferences to elicit cultural and heritage values of fishing. Their results add weight to branding and tourism movements which build on the idea of preferences for locally caught fish (see, e.g., Delaney and Yagi 2017 ; Pascual-Fernández et al. 2019 ) increase value.

An inspired methodology undertaken by Rogelja et al. ( 2023 ) involved using a critical heritage approach through the ethnography of two fish species to assess the ways in which a cultural heritage discourse can convey sociocultural, political, and economic transformations in coastal regions. In this case, wild mullet and farmed seabass highlight competing and complementary discourses in the Northeastern Adriatic Sea. Though mullet is view as traditional and economically small, it plays an outsized role in regional politics; farmed seabass is a symbol for blue growth transformations. Together, they both highlight the desires for livelihoods and presentation of local identities along the Slovenian coast.

In addition to these unique methodologies, the articles in this Special Collection also used inspired methods such as using visuals and photo elicitation, oral history, and digital storytelling. Pafi et al. used photo elicitation as a primary field method for elicitation on local view on seascape changes. The methods were “chosen to enable the community groups to reflect on their own experiences and concerns while collecting rich data that can open a meaningful dialogue about important community issues and visions” ( 2023 : 28). By using photo-elicitation in community focus groups, the researchers were able to uncover local values and perspectives related to the coast and tie them to their social contexts in a way which cannot be as easily done with straightforward individual interviews. In this case, the photo-elicitation mapped what heritage assets were important to communities and highlighted how their relationships embedded in their places were perceived as being threatened by Blue Growth initiatives (Pafi et al. 2023 ).

The use of photos and visuals used by locals were also analyzed by Rogelja et al. ( 2023 ). In this case, the photos were not only signifiers of past community life around mullet, but also as adding legitimacy to the more newly farmed seabass activities. Frangoudes et al. ( 2023 ), though focusing on oral history, provides discussion on how oral history gives depth and detail to historical visual sources (e.g., paintings, woodblock prints, postcards, and photographs) on women’s participation in fisheries.

Connected with methods, we find creative and co-created CMCH outputs in the form of digital storytelling in Macias et al. ( 2023 ). In this case, researchers worked with local stakeholders to understand how cultural heritage-based experiences can be co-created through digital platforms using an action research approach. The focus was on audio tours, but it relied on mapping and provides photos and visuals on its platform. The authors concluded that digital platforms such as they used (izi.TRAVEL) can be utilized for collaborative governance in tourism develop and can empower local communities in the process.

Focusing on the cultural heritage of coastal regions and communities, and maritime-related cultures and industries, this Coastal and Maritime Cultural Heritage Special Collection unites the CH articles found herein to underscore central themes newly risen around the “super-concept” of cultural heritage. CMCH faced risks over the decades and generations from not only war and conflicts—which is what first made Western decision-makers concerned about loss– but also from the neglect arising from lack of understanding and consideration of its value. In more recent years, risks from environmental (e.g., climate change, pollution), policy (e.g., development, fisheries and environmental ocean policies), and economic (e.g., rise of neoliberal capitalism, urban development, mass tourism) factors put CH at greater risk. In particular, focus on society’s economic needs around ocean and coastal resources put heritage on the backburner so-to-speak. As ocean-related governance legislation and plans arose in recent decades, these also fell along the lines of either protecting the environment or profiting from coastal and oceanic natural resources (e.g., the EU’s MSP and IMP); the most recent push for Blue Growth and the Blue Economy serves as stark illustrations of this mindset, which often provides for little space for CH.

This push for profits or protections (e.g., marine protected areas) overlooks the importance of the cultural heritage found in coastal and maritime zones for people, cultures and society. The sea and coasts are places where local peoples and communities hold strong attachments and identities based on a sense of belonging from lived and historical experiences. From this, specific knowledge and skills developed, including aspects of culture such as folk songs, boat building skills, and seafood culture. Tangible, material culture also developed, such as specific dress, tools, and architecture.

There are often conflicts between Blue Growth agendas and protecting and utilizing cultural heritage. Such conflicts can highlight issues of resilience, agency, power, and empowerment. Who has the ability to speak up? Who holds decision making roles? Whose voices are being heard?

Consequently, this Special Collection highlights the common threads found within the articles of governance, power and empowerment, resilience, sustainability, and transformation. Related to the key themes, the subthemes of gender and marginalization sprang forth emphasizing the power and empowerment aspect. In addition, we highlight the variety of methods used by the CMCH researchers including visual/photo elicitation, discrete choice valuation, oral history, and ethnographies of fish species to tease out data and understandings on CMCH. Novel methods provide both unique data collection techniques, and inventive methodologies which enable the conceptualization and presentation of CH in creative ways, such as through co-creation through digital storytelling.

Cultural heritage is increasingly being tapped for its economic importance in development and economic booms related to tourism even as it faces risks from development and climate change. Thus, understandings and conceptualization of CMCH are needed. This special collection is one step in that direction for further understandings, protections, and utilization of CH for coastal societies and culture. We found that, despite the importance of CH one of the largest sectors in Blue Growth (in the EU), i.e., tourism, CMCH is not provided space within policies such as the Marine Spatial Planning (MSP). Scholars need to create this such as through conducting research and participating in collaborative studies.

We should not forget, however, that culture heritage in and of itself holds intrinsic value. Looking across Europe and the world, coastal peoples’ cultural heritage tells us a story of generations of linkages and bonds with coastal environments. Such CH imparts a sense of place and belonging to people; it connects people to one another, to the past, and can help guide our future (Delaney 2020a ). Indeed, coastal residents’ and ocean-going peoples’ relationships with one another and their coasts and seas form community and individual identities, and in so doing, further generates coastal and maritime cultural heritage. We hope this Special Collection provides a sense of the beauty and value of CMCH and inspires further exploration and research around this super-concept.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to stakeholders for their input and collaborative activities during the research phase. We acknowledge funding for the research underlying this article from the European Commission’s CEC Research and Innovation Grant program (Grant ID: 770504) for PERICLES (Preserving and Sustainably Governing Cultural Heritage and Landscapes in European Coastal and Maritime Regions). Additionally, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) (Grant 19K12454) and Tohoku University (SOKAP-Connect project SEAQUEST) funded supplementary research.

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Cultural heritage in Chinese qiaoxiang is constructed where Chinese and foreign cultures gather, connecting overseas Chinese with their country of origin. However, conflicts concerning this type of heritage comes out frequently, such as house reconstruction clash, host-guest conflicts and destructive competition in heritage tourism. The economic and cultural duality of heritage is perceived as the source of intrinsic contestation in heritage tourism, and conflicts related to different types of heritage may take on different appearances and causes. Extant tourism studies have generalised cultural heritage in Chinese qiaoxiang , neglecting the unique characteristics of the diaspora and their corresponding influence on heritage protection and utilisation, that makes the reasons for these conflicts remain unclear. By answering the basic question of what heritage is, this research proposes an analytical framework to understand the intrinsic contestation of cultural heritage tourism in Chinese qiaoxiang . The paper points out that the contradiction between ‘ancestral root culture’ and modernity and between flow and stillness is the trigger for intrinsic contestation. The paper also summarises the core issues in conflicts that need further discussion by answering the questions of ‘what is heritage’, ‘whose heritage’ and ‘how to interpret heritage’. The core issues include heritage selection and identification, the commercialisation of ‘home’, heritage interpretation and so on.

1 Introduction

There are three main relationship types between heritage and tourism: automatically harmonious, inevitably in conflict, and potentially sustainable (Ashworth 2000 ). The inevitable conflicts of heritage tourism have been under academic scrutiny for the past 30 years. Researchers have reached a general consensus that the economic and cultural duality of heritage can cause a power imbalance among stakeholders, leading to conflicts in heritage tourism (Graham et al. 2000 ). The economic and cultural duality of heritage is also perceived as the source of intrinsic contestation in heritage tourism (Peckham 2003 ).

Conflicts related to different types of heritage may take on different appearances and causes (Dahrendorf, 2000 ). The cultural heritage in Chinese qiaoxiang is such a special type. It was born from a unique social structure which the diaspora brought about, distinctively different from other native-place concepts of heritage (Clifford 1995 ). Here, the term ‘Chinese qiaoxiang ’ refers to the birth and living place of overseas Chinese before they go abroad. The Chinatowns and overseas Chinese farms (in the 1960s, some Southeast Asian countries expelled ethnic Chinese, and the overseas Chinese farms were where the returned overseas Chinese and refugees were accepted and resettled in China) that were built outside the ancestral hometowns of overseas Chinese are not included in this discussion. The cultural heritage of Chinese qiaoxiang mainly refers to houses in China built using remittances from overseas family between the late 19th century and the 1930s. The diaolou and qilou in China’s Guangdong Province are typical examples of these buildings. Due to the long diasporic history of overseas Chinese, these cultural heritage sites are often spatially separated from their owners and influenced by many unresolved historical issues (including takeovers during land reforms), further complicating the question of property rights. There are also numerous successors of the original diaspora sharing a claim to property rights, often with heavy emotional involvement (Chen 2001 ). These unique characteristics of the cultural heritage in Chinese qiaoxiang lead to conflicts related to heritage protection and utilisation, such as the contradiction between private property rights involving heritage sites and the argument that heritage should be accessible to all people and politically sensitive issues in the use of heritage resources.

However, previous research tends to generalise the cultural heritage in Chinese qiaoxiang with minimal effort to examine the uniqueness of the diaspora involved and how involvement from these different overseas communities influences the specific point of contestation. Some researchers have noticed the influence of the diaspora and have responded with studies aimed at analysing the change in how residents perceive their hometowns (Zhang and Deng 2009 ) and the reproduction of community space for tourism purposes (Sun and Zhou 2014 ). However, the Chinese diaspora’s power to influence heritage construction and interpretation is still largely ignored, even though it may lead to different conflicts in heritage tourism. Therefore, this paper attempts to highlight the uniqueness of cultural heritage tourism in Chinese qiaoxiang and proposes a conceptual framework to understand this unique heritage type.

2 The intrinsic contestation of heritage tourism

2.1 heritage tourism and the intrinsic contestation.

The word ‘heritage’ originates from Latin in which it referred to the father’s legacy. Even after the passage of centuries since its origin, heritage has not significantly changed its connotations and largely retains its original meaning (Zhang 2008 ). Current common concepts in heritage studies, such as ‘cultural heritage’ and ‘natural heritage’, were first formally defined in the ‘Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage’ by UNESCO on November 23, 1972. At this convention, heritage was classified as monuments, buildings, and ruins (Wang 2010 ). However, the scope of heritage has been broadened and diversified since the mid-1980s; local cultural and historical figures have been included in the heritage category, with increasingly acknowledgement of the heritage traditions of the general public (Corner and Harvey 1991 ). Moreover, intangible cultural heritage has received increased attention since UNESCO’s announcement of the ‘Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore’ in 1989, the ‘Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity’ in 2001 and the ‘Istanbul Declaration’ in 2002. These movements signify a change in the connotations of heritage beyond physical artefacts such as treasures, antiques, and cultural relics to intangible forms of heritage such as cultural practices.

Concerning the complexity of the dynamic nature of heritage and tourism, McKercher, Ho, and Du Cros ( 2005 ) put forwards seven possible relationships in cultural heritage management and tourism: denial, unrealistic expectation, parallel existence, conflict, imposed comanagement, partnership, and cross-purposes. Most studies regard the relationship between heritage and tourism as one of ‘contradictions and conflicts’ (Nuryanti 1996 ; Robinson and Priscilla 1999 ). Ashworth and Larkham ( 1994 ) argue that heritage is both an economic resource and cultural capital under the new sociopolitical and economic background. The economic part is shown in the development of the heritage industry. The cultural part is represented in heritage’s connection to place and time, which helps remind and strengthen a sense of meaning and purpose for individual humans, groups, and even nations. There is also an inseparable relationship between heritage and identity (Peckham 2003 ). The economic and cultural duality of heritage leads to contradictions in heritage tourism, resulting in the intrinsic contestation of heritage tourism (Graham et al. 2000 ). Because of this duality, stakeholders fight for power and resources in the process of producing and consuming heritage, inevitably leading to conflicts (Peckham 2003 ). Robinson and Priscilla ( 1999 ) propose a conceptual framework in which imbalanced power distribution in heritage tourism is the root of all contradictions. Based on Robinson’s framework and the inclusion of politics in heritage tourism, Graham et al. ( 2000 ) believe that stakeholders’ different power statuses and their distinct value orientations towards heritage utilisation create the source of contradictions over how best to handle heritage sites, ultimately resulting in the inherently contradictory nature of heritage tourism. For example, experts such as archaeologists, museum curators, and architects led the authoritative discourse on heritage in the past. The value of heritage was technically verified and evaluated by expert analysis of the material part of the heritage, and the correct transmission and inheritance of heritage required expert intervention. At this point, physical heritage artefacts were mainly preserved. With the emergence of the international critical heritage research trend in the 1990s, the construction of heritage was highlighted, and the ‘democratisation’ of heritage was respected. Heritage and democracy have become new topics in international heritage protection. ‘The Delhi Declaration’, adopted at the 19th ICOMOS Conference in 2017, called for promoting an inclusive democratic community process – elected by people and governed by and for the people – and emphasised the idea that heritage belongs to all. Traditional heritage production and consumption dominated by elitist narratives of validation were thereby threatened (Smith 2003 ; Walsh 1992 ). When authorities try to force others into their own discursive system of heritage protection, the inconsistency of value cognition often results in conflicts in heritage practice.

2.2 Three core issues in heritage tourism

Based on the above discussion, Peckham ( 2003 ) built a theoretical framework of intrinsic contestations. There are three contested aspects: multiple values of heritage, multiple interpretations of heritage, and the production and consumption of heritage. These three aspects highlight three core issues in the intrinsic contestation of heritage tourism: ‘whose heritage’, ‘what value heritage presents’, and ‘how to interpret the value of heritage’.

‘Whose heritage’ is mainly concerned with the stakeholders involved in heritage tourism. This can be explained through the production and consumption of heritage. Heritage production is the valuable historical accumulation of natural evolution and human civilisation, but not all production can be regarded as heritage (Xu 2005 ; Hornby 2005 ). What is retained, replaced, and emphasised among numerous resources results from power manipulated for different purposes (Peng and Zheng 2008 ). Usually, heritage identification and declaration are determined by international value systems and the validation by domestic experts (Dai and Que 2012 ), such as UNESCO, domestic governments, and heritage experts. These experts dominate the heritage discourse and highlight a top-down process of constructing heritage production (Zhao 2018a , 2018b ). Thus, even though members of the general population, such as local communities, may be the actual builder of a heritage artefact, they may not be able to control the heritagisation and touristification process and remain marginalised in heritage production. In terms of heritage consumption, the role of mass consumers starts to emerge as they are no longer passive recipients of heritage production but consumers whose preferences influence the content and representation of heritage (Hu 2011 ). For example, the construction of Zhouzhuang and Wuzhen in China considered the demands of tourists during the transformation of heritage into tourist commodities (Zhang et al. 2008 ). The standard of authenticity for architectural heritage in Hong Village, China, was also influenced by stakeholders such as administrative and social elites. As various stakeholders become involved in heritage production and consumption, their different identities may trigger conflict and spark fierce contestation on who has the authority to decide what heritage is and its selection criterion (Zhang and Li 2016 ).

‘What value heritage represents’ is mainly about the responses to the economic and cultural duality of heritage tourism (Hu 2011 ). Heritage transmits its cultural values through economic behaviours, and the economic value created in the process also fosters the generation of cultural identities. However, stakeholders in heritage practice have their individual stances that lead to different preferences for economic and cultural attributes of the heritage, thereby affecting the representation of the heritage value. At this point, heritage is actually determined by a cultural process rather than proof of its simple physical existence (Harvey 2001 ), as questions such as representation (‘whose heritage) and value interpretation (Zhang and Li 2016 ) are put forwards. Behind the representation of historical value, the power game among stakeholders continues.

‘How to interpret the value of heritage’ is mainly about how to give and disseminate meaning onto material representations of heritage. Tilden ( 2009 ) first raised the issue of interpretation in heritage protection in the book ‘Interpreting Our Heritage’. Tilden believes that ‘understanding could be achieved through interpretation, appreciation could be achieved through understanding, and protection behaviour could be generated after appreciation’. Regardless of the type of heritage, it is necessary to let the public understand its value through interpretation. When considering heritage interpretation, it is about how to tell the story, who will tell the story and to whom the story is told. In interpreting heritage tourism, the purpose of storytelling is to yield economic benefits. Authorities and commercial organisations become the main storytellers telling the story to public consumers. The story itself has turned into a kind of ‘discourse of power’ (Peng and Zheng 2008 ), with questions such as how to interpret and construct heritage and how tourism affects the heritage site and its interpretation (Zhang and Li 2016 ).

This framework shows the source of intrinsic contestations in heritage tourism, and the three core issues it emphasises also depict specific conflicts during heritage production and consumption. This framework is also accepted and adapted in heritage tourism studies (Hu 2011 ; Zhang and Li 2016 ). Accordingly, the paper also adapts this framework to illuminate the intrinsic contestation of cultural heritage tourism in Chinese qiaoxiang .

3 The uniqueness of cultural heritage tourism in Chinese qiaoxiang

3.1 diaspora and cultural heritage in chinese qiaoxiang.

The diaspora is a complex and dynamic concept that was born 2500 years ago (Duan 2013 ). Etymologically, ‘diaspora’ consists of the word ‘sperio’ in Greek, meaning sowing seeds everywhere, and the prefix ‘dida’, referring to passing through. It was originally used to describe Jews scattered outside Palestine after the Babylonian exile, expressing a sense of being expelled or replaced. Currently, ‘diaspora’ is extended beyond its original point of reference (i.e., Jews) to refer generally to groups living outside their ancestral homeland. These groups usually maintain material or emotional ties with their motherland despite having adapted to the environment and institutions of their current country of residence (Esman 2009 ). Along with the emergence of nation-states, the phenomenon of migration has been given new meanings. The concept of diaspora expresses migrants’ attachment and identification with their homeland. Brubaker ( 2005 ) summarises the basic characteristics of the diaspora: departure from one’s place of origin, with the possibility of returning home, and the maintenance of a boundary between the diasporic group and the host society. That is, the concept of diaspora is considered as a trinity of the home country, the settled country and diasporic groups (Esman 2009 ). The rich connotations of the term diaspora also attract the interest of geographic scholars, and concepts such as transnational community (Portes 1996 ), transnational social fields (Levitt and Schiller 2004 ) and transnational social space (Faist 2000 ) have been created to discuss the transnational phenomenon created by diasporas. Anthropologists suggest that overseas Chinese are seen as a diaspora group in terms of their status and business networks. The transnational spatial distribution of overseas Chinese makes the migrant heritage and surrounding space a prism for group migration and mobility, showing the overlapping area of migration and ethnic research under the global cultural approach (Tuan 1977 ). The old barriers, such as space and national boundaries, are gradually broken, and migrant heritage in the homeland of overseas Chinese people functions as a carrier for the flow of material, culture and emotion, bringing changes to the traditional static local relationship. The Chinese diaspora builds an interrelated social field in the flow and gives birth to the reproduction of local culture (Zhang 2017 ).

The cultural heritage in Chinese qiaoxiang was born in such an interrelated social environment. First, such heritage differs from traditional cultural heritage, which is located within the territory of a country and helps to build a national identity (Evans 2002 ). Cultural heritage in qiaoxiang mainly consisted of houses brimming with international elements, such as diaolou and qilou in Kaiping, Guangdong Province of China. The historical houses were often built and funded using remittances from overseas Chinese. Additionally, the then-overseas Chinese provided postcards of foreign architecture for local craftsmen as references (Zhang 2004 , 2006 ). Thus, the architecture of diaolou demonstrated a fusion of Chinese and Western culture. Presently, the Diaolou Museum in Liyuan, Kaiping, still displays two sets of postcards of ancient Western buildings brought back by overseas Chinese in their early years. These postcards bear witness to the transnational flows of resources and people (Erdal 2012 ). The mix of international cultures makes it an ambivalent heritage showing the intrinsic uncertainty entailed in heritage production, utilisation and meaning-making (Wang 2021 ).

Second, cultural heritage in Chinese qiaoxiang conveys rich meaning to the Chinese diaspora. Influenced by the traditional Chinese philosophy of ‘fallen leaves returning to their roots’ (i.e., to return to one’s place of origin), the Chinese diaspora were eager to return to their original homeland, explaining why they were willing to spend large amounts of money building qiaoxiang houses. For them, their hometowns and belongings left in the homeland represented their roots, spiritual homes and ties connecting them and their ancestral country (Maruyama and Stronza 2012 ; Maruyama 2015 ). Hence, homecoming tourism among the diaspora became a way to identify the collective national and ethnic identity connecting the diaspora and their ancestral country (Ari and Mittelberg 2008 ). They return to Chinese qiaoxiang to visit, expecting everything here to be the same as in memory. Additionally, they hope to spread the value of Chinese qiaoxiang and its cultural heritage to the world, as seen in the world heritage declaration process of Kaiping diaolou and villages. Diaolou ’s application for World Heritage status was not favoured initially because its construction style was considered strange, and the historical period of construction was not long ago. In terms of architectural value, it did not meet the criteria for World Heritage (Huang et al. 2007 ). To promote the application, the local government of Kaiping sought help from overseas Chinese. The overseas Chinese in the United States submitted a joint letter to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage to highlight the value of diaolou , which attracted attention at the national level. Then, they contacted UNESCO experts and invited them to verify the value of diaolou as an example of world heritage. Chinese overseas leaders, such as Fang Chuangjie, chairman of the Chinese Association in the United States, also wrote to UNESCO to express his support. These measures have greatly helped to realise the designation of world heritage status for qiaoxiang .

Third, cultural heritage in Chinese qiaoxiang is greatly influenced by the change in government policies towards overseas Chinese houses. The houses of overseas Chinese, such as diaolou and qilou, were turned over to collective ownership in the land reform around 1956, as they were considered the property of ‘landlords’, even though the owners were overseas. A number of overseas Chinese thus abandoned their ancestral homes and businesses and went abroad out of concern for their personal safety. After the economic reform and opening up in 1978, the Chinese government gradually implemented a policy recognising and returning housing such as the diaolou to their overseas Chinese owners. As seen, the policies towards overseas Chinese houses have been improved. However, most of the original owners had passed away with their descendants scattered around the world, and some diaolou are presently unoccupied or dilapidated due to long-term neglect. This brings property rights problems to the subsequent adaptive use of cultural heritage.

Fourth, the management of this type of cultural heritage is more complicated because of the reasons mentioned above. Many inheritors of these physical historical relics are living abroad. Therefore, the management of cultural heritage relies on the principal-agent relationship among relatives and friends. The owners often entrust family members in the village with a series of rights, such as use, operation and income, and the right of disposal, to help manage the historical property. The geographical advantages of the agents enable them to gradually dominate these resources, leading to conflicts in the process of converting them for tourism (Jiang and Zhang 2021 ). During the expropriation of the qilou in Chikan Ancient Town in approximately 2017, there were cases where the agent pretended to be the property owner to claim the expropriation subsidy.

3.2 The source of intrinsic contestation for cultural heritage and tourism in Chinese qiaoxiang

As discussed above, economic and cultural duality is the source of intrinsic contestation in heritage tourism. The duality is often manifested as the contradiction between protection and development, which is seen as the cause of various conflicts in heritage tourism (Zhang 2010 ). Influenced by the transnational and cross-cultural characteristics of the Chinese diaspora, the conflicts aroused by the economic and cultural duality may reflect differently in cultural heritage tourism of Chinese qiaoxiang . Based on the uniqueness of cultural heritage tourism in Chinese qiaoxiang , the specific source of intrinsic contestation can be depicted from the following aspects, such as the contradiction between ‘ancestral root culture’ and modernity. People experience ancient places and objects through feelings and emotions (Byrne 2013 ; Waterton and Watson 2013 ) and generate attachment to places based on past experiences. Therefore, objects often become a stimulus, triggering memories of related history (Byrne 2016a , 2016b ). The cultural heritage in Chinese qiaoxiang serves such functions as it portrays a link with the overseas Chinese and conveys memories of and feelings for of the homeland and elders who have passed on. Tuan ( 1990 ) highlights the concept of ‘place attachment’ and suggests that the diaspora living abroad could reconnect with the culture and society of their hometown through tourism of their ancestral home, thereby inspiring them to develop, deepen or alienate attachment and identification with their homeland. Migrant heritage has surpassed its original function (Meskell 2004 ) by entering into interactions with local people and even appearing as a substitute for the ‘absence’ of the Chinese diaspora in the homeland (Byrne 2016a , 2016b ). However, such ‘ancestral root culture’ has been gradually impacted by modernity. The intensification of migration worldwide has increased communication between the Chinese diaspora and the outside world during modernisation. The immigrant heritage and its local boundaries have been blurred during the course of reform, resulting in the loss of local culture (King and Christou 2011 ). The local connection and cultural identity of the emigrant Chinese diaspora are both challenged. Diasporic Chinese may try to maintain traditional culture (Muhammad 2017 ), but their cultivation of their ‘roots’ increasingly occurs without the original material carrier. Achieving harmonious coexistence and identification among multiple cultures and constructing an intercultural world have become significant problems (Zhang et al. 2018 ). On the other hand, the market economy, the government, the experts and scholars, the new technologies and the traditional local culture, etc., continue to lead the ‘heritage movement’ (Fang 2008 ). The desire of other interest groups for development of the local economy conflicts with the place attachment of the Chinese diaspora, which increases the difficulty for the Chinese diaspora to retain its original authentic ‘heritage’.

The other contradiction is between flow and stillness. On the one hand, there is confusion regarding place identity. Previous studies on heritage were limited to a boundary perspective (Levitt and Schiller 2004 ), arguing that heritage is produced within the scale of power relations and used to create a stable and well-defined national identity (Innocenti 2013 ). The Chinatowns in foreign countries go beyond the host nation’s borders and functions as a tool to establish the national identity of the diaspora’s ancestral country instead of the living country (Byrne 2016a , 2016b ). Nikielska-Sekula ( 2019 ) terms this ‘migrating heritage’ and highlights how immigrants and their children born in new homeland use their ancestral heritage to maintain group identity. Although the heritage in Chinese qiaoxiang is within the boundary of the diaspora’s ancestral country, it also illustrates the culture of foreign countries. This mixture generates a unique cultural identity partly influenced by Western values, which can be seen in the discussion of the diaspora’s state of homelessness. On the other hand, heritage is often presented as material culture, continuously producing new interpretations and understandings over time. The dissemination of a static interpretation of heritage completed by different stakeholders (Merriman 2004 ) also cannot fully represent its flow state.

Based on the contradiction between protection and development, conflicts often arise between the authenticity of the subject and the object, between the development motivation and the results (mainly about commercialisation), between the theoretical framework and the management tools (mainly about carrying capacity), and between reproduction and reconstruction (mainly about display and interpretation) (Zhang 2010 ). Nevertheless, affected by the specific source of intrinsic contestation mentioned above, the core issues raised in cultural heritage tourism in Chinese qiaoxiang heterogeneously form the objective of discussion in the next section (Fig. 1 ).

A framework for the intrinsic contestation of cultural heritage tourism in Chinese qiaoxiang. (Source: the author)

4 Core issues of cultural heritage tourism studies in Chinese qiaoxiang

4.1 whose heritage.

‘Whose heritage’ emphasises the issue of heritage identification and selection. Whether it is the identification, selection, interpretation, construction of heritage (Peng and Zheng 2008 ) or the production and consumption of heritage (Daher 2000 ), both are closely related to power. Watson ( 1975 ) notes that in the qiaoxiang in Hong Kong, the social meaning of physical housing is reproduced over time in a game of power relations, which changes qiaoxiang from a place of production to a place of consumption. Diasporic Chinese and other diaspora groups have played an important role in promoting the production and consumption of heritage (Andreea 2019 ). Relying on their own advantages, they have increased their power (Chan and Cheng 2015 ), broke the original balance of interests, and created a new balance in their hometown. The majority of local communities are regarded as marginal groups; they often give in to the authority of the capital or local leaders and lose the rights to manage the heritage. As the sponsor of migrant heritage, the Chinese diaspora has international influence that enables them to have more power than other average community residents. They can influence heritage identification and selection instead of being anxious or helpless as other underprivileged community residents usually are. Cultural heritage in China has also received more attention from conservation organisations. The concern over qiaoxiang follows the trend of balancing heritage protection and democracy and responds to the topic of community empowerment in tourism studies.

On the other hand, the flow of people, goods, and money caused by the diaspora has created a confusion over ‘whose heritage’, reflecting the contradiction between space and culture essentially. A built heritage occupies a certain physical space. Its foundation is buried in the soil of a specific space, and it is injected with the meaning of place through social constraints such as religions and rules. However, the immigrant heritage in the hometown of the Chinese diaspora is one of mobility. They are located in China but shaped by Western culture and remittances (Watson 2004 ). This is contrary to the culture of the space to which they belong. This inconsistency between space and culture has led to the question of whose heritage and whose responsibility, and it has created difficulty in heritage protection and conversion for use with tourism.

4.2 What value the heritage represents

‘What value the heritage represents’ emphasises the topic of the commercialisation of ‘home’. The contradictions between ‘root’ and modernity and flow and stillness gives rise to the problem of the commercialisation of ‘home’. Influenced by local development, the spatial structure and function of immigrant heritage have been changed. The public space highlighting a village’s traditions has become a commercial space, and houses have become a place for exhibitions (Wang 2014 ). When diasporic Chinese return to their homeland, their complex desire to retain a ‘stationary’ hometown becomes a significant obstacle to heritage tourism development.

Knapp and Lo ( 2005 ) have published two books on Chinese houses, focusing on residential practices that have lasted for three or four centuries. These houses were microcosms of Chinese society in different periods. They were built following the tradition of ‘fengshui’, and the furniture inside (including materials, construction techniques, decorations and placement) also showed a symbiotic relationship with the house. The structure and material of the house reflected the historical period in which it was built and condensed group living memories at that time (Morton 2007 ). Erdal ( 2012 ) summarises the practical and symbolic reasons for migrants to build houses in their ancestral country. The practical reasons include improving the living standard of their relatives in their hometown and returning to China for short-term vacation and investment, whereas the symbolic reasons include winning social capital and improving a sense of belonging. The built houses are generally related to cultural and social values. To protect these houses, overseas Chinese often entrust their relatives to look after the houses and create a unique principal-agent relationship based on kinship. However, with the diaspora of property owners and agents, the relationship is breaking, and many houses in Chinese qiaoxiang were destroyed because of disrepair.

Cultural heritage tourism in Chinese qiaoxiang gives the houses there the opportunity to be reused, but the commercialisation brought about by tourism was not welcomed by most overseas Chinese. Some owners of diaolou in Kaiping refused to change the original diaolou style and prefer to use the diaolou as a museum rather than a tourist attraction (Jiang 2019 ). For the government, turning such houses into museums provides a channel for patriotic education and contributes to the spread of official ideology (Wang 2014 ). Nevertheless, the transformation from home to heritage still leads to overcommercialisation, igniting the fuse of the contradiction among stakeholders (Snepenger et al. 2007 ). For instance, the continuous influx of tourists has changed the house’s attributes of residence and defence. In the tulou’s architectural design in Fujian Province, China, the tulou’s central lobby used to symbolise family unity but has since become a public commercial space both in use and in place meaning. The house has in essence changed from being a cultural symbol of ‘roots’ and comfort to a popular commodity in the tourist market (Su 2012 ). The Hakka people living inside have no choice but to negotiate with traditional and habitual lifestyles (Zhang 2014 ), resulting in larger conflicts in their struggle for resources.

4.3 How to interpret the value of heritage

‘How to interpret heritage’ emphasises the issue of authenticity. Authenticity is difficult to define due to its use in multiple contexts and levels. Immigrants have a definite emotional connection with their hometown (Huang, Hung, and Chen 2018 ), and they often act as tourism ambassadors assisting with the promotion of destinations (Seraphin, Korstanje, and Gowreesunkar 2020 ). In different social situations and historical backgrounds, immigrants’ local identity will also constantly evolve and change (Zhu et al. 2010 ), resulting in challenges to the interpretation of heritage due to fluidity. The way the Chinese diaspora conveys the meaning of the people, places, and events (Hall and McArthur 1996 ) they identify with may also change as a result.

Another issue is heritage interpretation. Interpretation studies in tourism emphasise the ‘reconstruction’ of heritage value, that is, to explain heritage value in a way tourists can understand and may even expect. It may include the presentation of artefacts and some staged performances, though these have been criticised by the cultural heritage field (Zhang 2010 ). In research on Kaiping diaolou and villages, tourists interpret diaolou as a place displaying the past lives and stories of Chinese diasporic families (Jiang and Zhang 2019 ). Concurrently, local experts consider diaolou to be the result of Chinese actively accepting Western culture, absorbing useful parts and creating the unique culture in Chinese qiaoxiang (Zhang 2004 ). This disparity demonstrates the contradiction between heritage representation and interpretation. The different results of the power game between stakeholders show different outcomes of the conflicts between heritage protection and utilisation.

5 Conclusion

In general, there is a relative lack of research exploring heritage tourism in Chinese qiaoxiang , even though they can highlight the uniqueness of diaspora heritage. Research needs to be promoted in both depth and breadth. Accordingly, this paper constructs a conceptual analytical framework to understand this special heritage type and points out the intrinsic contestation within it. The paper explores the contradiction between ‘ancestral root culture’ and modernity and between flow and stillness and analyses how this contradiction leads to the core issues of heritage tourism in Chinese qiaoxiang . Following the questions of ‘whose heritage’, ‘what value the heritage represents’, and ‘how to interpret the value of heritage’ in heritage tourism, the paper also frames these research topics of cultural heritage tourism in terms of Chinese qiaoxiang .

The contradiction of heritage tourism in the homelands of the Chinese diaspora is evolving along with the heritage and tourism development process. Based on this analytical framework, comparative studies can be carried out on cases with obvious differences in heritage types, tourism development stages, and diasporic degrees. Future research can empirically analyse the formation, evolution, and results of the contradictions and discuss the possible governance methods.

Availability of data and materials

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Acknowledgements

The research is funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China [project serial number: 42001146].

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Jiang, T. A conceptual framework for understanding the intrinsic contestation of cultural heritage tourism in Chinese qiaoxiang . Built Heritage 6 , 28 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s43238-022-00075-9

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• Heritage tourism
• intrinsic contestation
• diaspora groups
• Chinese qiaoxiang

• Some Possible Questions

Because every individual is unique and every interviewer has his or her own special interests and research goals, there is no single set of questions that will fit every situation. The following are some that might help guide an interview with a relative or community member about family folklore and local traditions. Pick and choose among them to suit your own interests, and change the wording as you see fit. Ultimately, the most useful questions will be those that you develop yourself based on your knowledge of your own family and/or community. Remember not to be tied to a formal list of questions; rather use your questions as guideposts for the interview. Be flexible and have fun!

Biographical Questions

• What is your name?
• Where and when were you born?
• Where did you grow up?
• Where have you lived?
• What jobs have you had?
• What do you do for a living now?

Family Folklore

Q : What do you know about your family name? Are there stories about its history or origins? Has it undergone any changes? Are there any stories about those changes? Are there any traditional first names or nicknames in your family? What are they? How did they come about? Are there any naming traditions? What are they?

Q : Do you know any stories about how your family first came to the United States? Where did they first settle? Why? How did they make a living? Did your family stay in one place or move around? How did they come to live in this area?

Q : If your tradition-bearer is a first-generation immigrant, you might ask him or her: Why did you leave to come to the United States? What possessions did you bring with you and why? What was the journey like? Which family members came along or stayed behind? What were some of your first impressions and early experiences in this country? What traditions or customs have you made an effort to preserve? Why? Are there traditions that you have given up or changed? Why?

Q : What languages do you speak? Do you speak a different language in different settings, such as home, school, or work? Are there any expressions, jokes, stories, celebrations where a certain language is always used? Can you give some examples?

Q : What stories have come down to you about your parents and grandparents? More distant ancestors? (If you are interviewing your grandparents, ask them to tell you stories about what your parents were like when they were young!)

Q : Do you know any courtship stories? How did your parents, grandparents, and other relatives come to meet and marry?

Q : What are some of your childhood memories? What games did you play when you were a child? Did you sing verses when you played games? What were they? What kinds of toys did you play with? Who made them? Did you make any yourself? How did you make them? What kinds of materials did you use? What kind of home entertainment was there? Was there storytelling? Music? Were there craft traditions? Describe these traditions.

Q : Does your family have any special sayings or expressions? What are they? How did they come about?

Q : How are holidays traditionally celebrated in your family? What holidays are the most important? Are there special family traditions, customs, songs, foods? Has your family created its own traditions and celebrations? What are they? How did they come about?

Q : What special foodways traditions does your family have? Have any recipes been preserved and passed down in your family from generation to generation? What are they? What are their origins? Have they changed over the years? How? Have any of the ingredients been adapted or changed? Why? Are there certain foods that are traditionally prepared for holidays and celebrations? Who makes them? Are there family stories connected to the preparation of special foods?

Q : Does your family hold reunions? When? Where? Who attends? How long have the reunions been going on? What activities take place? Are awards given out? Is there a central figure who is honored? Why? What sorts of stories are told at these events?

Q : What family heirlooms or keepsakes and mementos do you possess? Why are they valuable to you? What is their history? How were they handed down? Are there any memories or stories connected with them?

Q : Do you have any photo albums, scrapbooks, home movies? Who made them? When? Can you describe/explain their contents? Who is pictured? What activities and events are documented?

Local History and Community Life

Q : Describe the place — urban neighborhood, small town, rural community, suburb — where you grew up. What was it like? How has it changed over the years? What brought about these changes? What did people do for a living? What do they do now?

Q : Can you draw a map of your local community? Of your neighborhood? Your family home? Your farmstead? What places stand out most in your mind and why? What are/were your neighbors like? What kinds of local gatherings and events are there? What stories and memories come to mind?

Q : What community traditions are celebrated today? Church suppers? Chinese New Year parades? Saint’s day processions? Cinco de Mayo celebrations? What are they like? How long have they been going on? How have they changed? Who is involved? Why are they important to the community?

Q : How have historical events affected your family and community? For example, what were some of your experiences during World War II, the Civil Rights Movement? Cultural Traditions/Occupational Skills

Q : How did you first get started with this particular tradition/skill? What got you interested?

Q : How did you learn your skills? Who taught you? When? What was the learning process like? What is the most challenging or difficult aspect of the tradition to learn? Why?

Q : What are the key characteristics of the tradition? What is its history? Do you know how and where the tradition originated? How has it traditionally been practiced? How has it changed or developed over time?

Q : Does the tradition have different styles or variations? What are they?

Q: Describe the steps of the process from start to finish. What’s involved?

Q : What special knowledge, skills, and abilities are needed? What techniques and methods?

Q : What raw materials are used? Where do you get your materials/supplies/ingredients? How are they prepared? Have they changed over time? How? Why?

Q : What tools are involved? How and when are they used?

Q : How do you judge excellence within the tradition? What standards and criteria are used to evaluate the way the tradition is performed? What makes someone respected in the tradition?

Q : In what context is the skill/tradition performed? For whom? When?

Q : What do you value most about what you do? Why?

Q : What do you think is the future of this tradition? What are its challenges and opportunities? Are others learning and practicing the tradition?

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• Introduction
• The Interview
• Presenting Your Findings
• A Glossary of Key Terms
• Selected Bibliography
• Internet Resources
• Sample Forms
• Credits and Acknowledgements

Family photos can evoke memories and trigger stories. Photo courtesy of Marjorie Hunt.

Afrolatinidad: Art & Identity in D.C. is an interview series highlighting the vitality of the local Afro-Latinx community. Before the term Afro-Latinx entered popular discourse, Latin Americans of the Diaspora have been sharing their stories through artistic manifestations online and in community spaces throughout the district. Their perspectives are intersectional in nature of existing in between spaces of Blackness and Latinidad.

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Top 200+ Engaging Culture Research Topics: Ideas to Explore

Culture is all about the beliefs, traditions, art, and ways of living that make up different groups of people worldwide. Cultural studies open up interesting paths for learning. Researchers can explore how people express themselves, their identity, and their interactions. 

Cultural research gives a view into our diverse world, whether studying traditions over time, how cultures mix, or the impacts of globalization. This blog lists the top 200+ engaging cultural research topics from varied topics and perspectives to excite researchers, students, and anyone interested in exploring questions that highlight human cultural diversity.

Studying culture covers art, stories, social rules, beliefs, and how communities shape their environments. By exploring cultural research, we gain insights into shared experiences, histories, and worldviews that unite people and cultural uniqueness. 

Researchers untangle complex threads weaving a culture’s identity and meaning through expressions like religion, language, food, and art.

As our world interconnects, understanding cultural differences grows important. Digging into these areas builds cross-cultural understanding, appreciates diverse views, and works towards inclusive societies. 

This blog explores potential research paths, encouraging scholars and students to take learning journeys highlighting the rich tapestry of human cultures.

How Does Culture Impact Various Aspects Of Society?

Table of Contents

Culture deeply affects nearly every part of society. It influences how we interact, build communities, govern, teach, create art, approach healthcare, and make economic choices. Understanding the role of culture is key to analyzing social issues and dynamics.

• Social Rules and Beliefs

Culture lays the foundation for the shared beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that define what is considered okay or not okay within a society. It shapes gender roles, communication styles, concepts of privacy, rules of politeness, and moral principles.

• Family and Relatives

Cultural traditions largely decide family structures, parenting styles, marriage practices, and generational relationships. Rituals surrounding birth, becoming an adult, marriage, and death are deeply rooted in culture.

• Education Systems

Cultural contexts and education philosophies heavily influence the subjects taught, teaching methods, classroom setup, grading approaches, and even the idea of learning itself.

• Religious and Spiritual Beliefs

Culture and religion are closely linked, with faith and spiritual practices playing a profound role in an individual’s identity, worldview, ethics, and community connections.

• Art and Stories

Creative expression through art, music, dance, folklore, and literature reflects a culture’s collective identity, history, and artistic values passed down over generations.

• Food and Eating 

Food is intimately tied to culture, with food traditions, ingredients, cooking methods, and dining customs reflecting agricultural practices, values, and social hierarchies.

• Health and Medicine 

Cultural backgrounds shape attitudes towards physical and mental health, preferred treatment methods, views on the human body, and institutional structures around healthcare delivery.

By understanding how culture underpins so many areas of society, we gain critical insights into resolving conflicts, bridging gaps between communities, and creating policies and initiatives that resonate across all groups of people.

Topical Diversity in Culture Research

Cultural research covers various fascinating topics and angles that give us insight into human societies worldwide. Researchers explore everything from the arts and traditions to belief systems, languages, social structures, etc.

Exploring Various Sides of Culture

• Art and Creative Expression (music, dance, stories, visual arts, theater, etc.)
• Traditions and Customs (holidays, rituals, milestone celebrations, folk practices)
• Food and Eating Ways (ingredients, cooking methods, dining customs)
• Language and Communication Styles
• Clothing and Decorative Styles
• Social Rules and Value Systems
• Gender Roles and Family Structures
• Spiritual and Religious Beliefs
• Cultural Identity and Sense of Belonging

Different Ways to Study Culture

• On-the-Ground Research: Observing and documenting cultural practices and perspectives firsthand by living in the community
• Historical and Archaeological Study: Examining artifacts, records, and evidence to understand cultural evolution
• Comparing Cultures: Identifying similarities and differences across cultures.
• Sociological and Anthropological Views: Studying cultures through theoretical frameworks
• Mixed Methods: Combining insights from fields like psychology, linguistics, economics, and more
• Personal Stories and Oral Histories: Exploring culture through first-hand accounts and stories
• Digital Research: Researching cultures and communities online and in digital spaces

By considering the diverse topics and varied approaches, cultural researchers gain a multi-angle understanding of the rich tapestry of human experience worldwide.

Recommended Readings: “ Top 201+ Narrative Project Ideas To Spark Your Creativity! “.

Top 200+ Culture Research Topics For Students

Here is the list of the top 200+ culture research topics, provided in different categories; let’s look. 

Arts and Literature

• Evolution of modern art movements.
• Impact of digital technology on literature.
• Representation of gender in classical literature.
• Role of art in social change movements.
• Cultural significance of traditional folk music.
• Influence of literature on societal norms.
• The intersection of art and politics.
• Comparative analysis of different art forms.
• Cultural implications of street art.
• Depiction of war in literature and art.

Media and Communication

• Effects of social media on cultural identity.
• The portrayal of race and ethnicity in mainstream media.
• The role of memes in contemporary culture.
• Influence of advertising on consumer behavior.
• Evolution of journalism in the digital age.
• Cultural impact of reality TV shows.
• Representation of the LGBTQ+ community in media.
• Cultural appropriation in fashion and media.
• Role of censorship in shaping cultural narratives.
• The rise of streaming services and cultural consumption.

Language and Linguistics

• Evolution of slang and its impact on language.
• Language revitalization efforts and their effectiveness.
• Influence of colonialism on indigenous languages.
• Sociolinguistic variations in different cultures.
• Language acquisition in multicultural societies.
• Impact of globalization on language diversity.
• Language and identity formation.
• Cultural implications of bilingualism.
• Role of language in preserving cultural heritage.
• Linguistic relativity and cultural cognition.

Religion and Belief Systems

• Rituals and ceremonies in different religions.
• The role of religion in shaping moral values.
• Impact of globalization on religious practices.
• Interfaith dialogue and cultural understanding.
• Evolution of religious art and architecture.
• Influence of religion on political ideologies.
• Religious syncretism and cultural fusion.
• Sacred texts and their interpretation across cultures.
• Secularization and its effects on cultural norms.
• Religion and cultural conflicts throughout history.

History and Heritage

• Cultural impact of colonialism and imperialism.
• Oral history and its role in preserving culture.
• Cultural significance of historical monuments.
• Impact of migration on cultural identity.
• Evolution of family structures over time.
• Cultural exchange along ancient trade routes.
• Archaeological discoveries and cultural insights.
• Cultural legacy of ancient civilizations.
• Historical trauma and its effects on culture.
• Preservation of intangible cultural heritage.

Sociology and Anthropology

• Cultural differences in concepts of beauty.
• Social hierarchies and cultural stratification.
• Cultural perceptions of mental health.
• Gender roles and expectations in different cultures.
• Cultural aspects of food and culinary traditions.
• Rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death.
• Cultural expressions of love and intimacy.
• Impact of globalization on cultural homogenization.
• Cultural practices related to education.
• Cross-cultural communication and misunderstandings.

Politics and Governance

• Cultural factors influencing voting behavior.
• Nationalism and its impact on cultural identity.
• Cultural diplomacy and soft power.
• Role of culture in international relations.
• Cultural policies and government funding.
• Indigenous rights and cultural preservation.
• Cultural dimensions of conflict resolution.
• Impact of authoritarian regimes on culture.
• Cultural movements and political activism.
• Cultural implications of refugee crises.

Technology and Innovation

• Cultural attitudes towards emerging technologies.
• Digital divides and cultural disparities.
• Cultural appropriation in technology design.
• Impact of AI on cultural production.
• Virtual reality and cultural experiences.
• Ethical considerations in technological advancements.
• Technological innovations in cultural preservation.
• Cultural resistance to technological change.
• Cultural implications of genetic engineering.
• Technological determinism and cultural evolution.

Education and Learning

• Culturally relevant pedagogy in education.
• Indigenous knowledge systems in education.
• Role of cultural competence in teaching.
• Cultural factors influencing learning styles.
• Education and cultural reproduction.
• Multicultural education and curriculum development.
• Cultural barriers to access education.
• Language diversity in educational settings.
• Cultural perspectives on childhood and adolescence.
• Impact of globalization on educational systems.

Identity and Diversity

• Intersectionality and cultural identity.
• Cultural assimilation versus cultural preservation.
• Cultural hybridity and identity negotiation.
• Cultural stereotypes and their impact.
• Cultural identity and belonging in diaspora communities.
• Cultural representations of disability.
• LGBTQ+ rights and cultural acceptance.
• Cultural dimensions of age and aging.
• Cultural perceptions of beauty standards.
• Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism.

Environment and Sustainability

• Indigenous perspectives on environmental stewardship.
• Cultural attitudes towards climate change.
• Impact of consumer culture on the environment.
• Traditional ecological knowledge and conservation.
• Cultural practices promoting sustainability.
• Environmental justice and cultural disparities.
• Cultural dimensions of food security.
• Indigenous land rights and cultural survival.
• Cultural influences on consumption patterns.
• Eco-tourism and cultural exchange.

Health and Wellness

• Cultural variations in healthcare practices.
• Traditional medicine and cultural beliefs.
• The stigma surrounding mental health in different cultures.
• Cultural factors influencing diet and nutrition.
• Cultural representations of illness and disability.
• Cultural rituals related to healing and well-being.
• Access to healthcare in diverse cultural contexts.
• Cultural attitudes towards body image and health.
• End-of-life care and cultural practices.
• Cultural barriers to health education and promotion.

Migration and Transnationalism

• Cultural adaptation and acculturation processes.
• Transnational communities and cultural exchange.
• Impact of remittances on cultural dynamics.
• Diaspora identities and cultural preservation.
• Cultural challenges faced by immigrants.
• Cultural hybridization in multicultural societies.
• Cultural dimensions of refugee resettlement.
• Transnational media and its cultural effects.
• Cultural nostalgia and longing in migrant communities.
• Cultural integration policies and their effectiveness.

Economics and Globalization

• Cultural dimensions of economic development.
• Globalization and cultural homogenization.
• Cultural branding and marketing strategies.
• Cultural industries and creative economies.
• Cultural value chains and commodification.
• Cultural entrepreneurship and innovation.
• Cultural tourism and economic impact.
• Intellectual property rights and cultural heritage.
• Global supply chains and cultural production.
• Cultural implications of income inequality.

Leisure and Recreation

• Cultural significance of sports and games.
• Festivals and celebrations across cultures.
• Cultural norms surrounding leisure activities.
• Tourism and cultural authenticity.
• Cultural representations in entertainment media.
• Indigenous forms of entertainment and recreation.
• Cultural rituals of relaxation and rejuvenation.
• Impact of technology on leisure habits.
• Cultural perspectives on outdoor recreation.
• The role of leisure in community building.

Family and Kinship

• Cultural variations in family structures.
• Cultural expectations of parenthood.
• Intergenerational transmission of cultural values.
• Cultural rituals surrounding marriage and partnership.
• Cultural attitudes towards child-rearing.
• Kinship systems and cultural identity.
• Cultural perceptions of caregiving.
• Family dynamics in multicultural households.
• Cultural practices related to eldercare.
• Cultural representations of family in media.

Urbanization and Urban Culture

• Cultural diversity in urban environments.
• Urbanization and the erosion of traditional culture.
• Cultural gentrification and displacement.
• Street art and graffiti as cultural expressions.
• Cultural communities within urban spaces.
• Urban legends and folklore.
• Cultural aspects of urban planning.
• Impact of migration on urban culture.
• Cultural revitalization projects in cities.
• Subcultures and countercultures in urban settings.

Governance and Policy

• Cultural rights and human rights discourse.
• Multiculturalism policies and their effectiveness.
• Cultural diplomacy in international relations.
• Cultural heritage preservation laws.
• Indigenous land rights and sovereignty.
• Cultural dimensions of public policy.
• Cultural sensitivity training in government.
• Cultural impact assessments in policy-making.
• Cultural representation in political institutions.
• Cultural heritage protection in conflict zones.

Memory and Commemoration

• Cultural memory and collective trauma.
• Commemorative practices and cultural identity.
• Museums and cultural representation.
• Oral history projects and cultural preservation.
• Memorialization of historical events.
• Cultural heritage sites and tourism.
• Digital archives and cultural heritage.
• Cultural monuments and their meanings.
• Cultural responses to historical revisionism.
• Rituals of remembrance in different cultures.

Cultural Capital and Social Mobility

• Cultural capital and its role in social stratification.
• Cultural barriers to upward mobility.
• Cultural capital and educational attainment.
• Cultural capital and access to resources.
• Cultural capital and employment opportunities.
• Cultural dimensions of social capital.
• Cultural capital and political participation.
• Cultural mobility and globalization.
• Intergenerational transmission of cultural capital.
• Cultural capital and urban development.
• Cultural capital and well-being outcomes.

These topics cover various cultural aspects and can be a starting point for further research and exploration.

Tips For Choosing the Right Culture Research Topic

Picking a good topic is super important when researching culture. The topic you choose decides what your whole project will be about. If you pick the wrong topic, you might get bored or not learn anything useful. 

But if you pick a cultural topic that interests you, your research will be more fun and valuable. With so many fascinating cultural issues, choosing just one to study can feel overwhelming. But by considering a few key points, you can find the perfect research topic that fits your interests, goals, and resources as a cultural researcher.

• Pick a topic you’re genuinely interested in and passionate about. Your enthusiasm will make the research process much more engaging.
• Consider cultural issues or phenomena that puzzle you, or you’ve personally experienced and want to understand better.
• Look for gaps in existing research on cultural topics. Identifying an understudied area can make your work more novel and valuable.
• Think about the practical applications of your research. Work that provides insights into reducing cultural misunderstandings or conflicts can greatly impact.
• Choose a topic that is narrow enough to explore in-depth within the scope of your project yet still broadly relevant.
• For a cross-cultural study, select cultures that provide an interesting contrast to compare and analyze.
• Ensure you have access to the necessary data sources, whether archival materials, interview subjects, survey populations, etc.
• Consider the ethical implications of your research, especially if studying vulnerable populations. Prioritize, not harm.

The right topic sparks your curiosity, fills a need, and is feasible to execute thoroughly and responsibly with your resources.

Trends To Come in Culture Research

Researchers are looking at lots of new and interesting cultural topics these days. Here are some of the latest areas scholars are studying when it comes to culture:

Culture and Technology Research Topics

• How social media is changing cultural values and norms
• Comparing how different cultures use and adopt new technologies
• Whether technology helps preserve cultural traditions or makes them disappear
• The rise of global digital cultures and subcultures online
• Cultural impacts of artificial intelligence and automation

Environmental Culture Research Topics

• What indigenous cultures know about living sustainably in the environment
• How climate change is affecting cultural practices and traditions
• Where environmental justice and cultural identity overlap
• The role culture plays in environmental-friendly (or unfriendly) behaviors
• Different cultural views on humanity’s relationship with nature

Contemporary Cultural Issues Research Topics

• Cultural experiences of immigrants, migrants, and refugees
• How popular culture (movies, TV, music, etc.) shapes cultural attitudes
• The cultural side of social movements like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ rights
• Impacts of globalization on mixing and blending cultures
• How culture factors into political conflicts and clashing worldviews

These new and emerging cultural topics give researchers a chance to learn things that are very relevant to today’s world.

How can I choose the right culture research topic?

Consider your interests, societal relevance, and the availability of resources. Choose a topic that resonates with you and contributes to existing discourse.

Are there any ethical considerations in cultural research?

Researchers must respect cultural sensitivities, obtain informed consent, and avoid misrepresenting or exploiting cultural practices.

Can I conduct cross-cultural research as an undergraduate student?

Absolutely! Cross-cultural research offers valuable insights and can be conducted at various academic levels with proper guidance and supervision.

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10 Cultural Heritage Questions You Should Ask Your Relatives

Documenting your family’s culture and history is important. In this post, learn 10 cultural heritage questions that you should be asking your relatives.

Many people don’t really think of themselves or their family as having a particular culture. For most people, it’s “just how things were done”.

Every family has a culture that is based on their unique community and ancestry. We will all learn something new about the roots of the traditions that our family observes, and the answers to many questions might surprise us.

That’s why asking the right questions is so important. We need to get our relatives to open up to us and share important information about their life experiences as a member of a particular cultural tradition.

Who should you ask cultural heritage questions?

Many people are under the mistaken impression they don’t have anyone in their life that can help them document their family’s cultural heritage. This is almost never the case, however, since almost any of our older relatives have a wealth of family knowledge.

Anyone in your family or community who is older than you can provide insight into your family and community’s cultural history.

People to interview to learn about your cultural heritage:

• Grandparents
• Aunts and uncles
• Great-aunts and uncles (siblings of your grandparents)
• Older first or second cousins
• Older siblings
• Older neighbors and friends

The cultural heritage questions below are great for students wanting to learn more about their family because of a project, but also for those of us who love to do family history research in order to document our unique cultural heritage for future generations.

10 of the most important cultural heritage questions to ask

Once you have decided who to interview, be sure to ask the questions listed below. These questions, along with the discussion that should naturally occur during your conversation with your relative, will help you thoroughly document your family’s cultural history.

How would you describe your cultural identity or ethnicity?

This seems like a simple question, but it is important to ask your relative to describe the culture to which they belong in their own words. Many people have never thought about their culture as separate from the broader community, so it might take your relative a few minutes to think about this question.

Many of us consider ourselves to be a few generations removed from a unique culture, especially if we are the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants. Even if this is the case in your family, as it is in mine, your family may still have a cultural connection to these immigrant ancestors.

Sometimes, the answer to this question is different than you thought it would be.

Do you belong to a group of people that you consider to be different than others where you come from?

Many times sub-cultures exist within a larger cultural context. Finding out whether our family members were part of a unique sub-culture is important because this will help us better understand how our family interacted with the community.

What family traditions did you have growing up?

This is my favorite question, because it gives us the opportunity to learn something tangible about our ancestors that we can pass down to our own families.

Family traditions also provide insight into religion, history, and the society in which our family lived.

Did anyone in your family or community speak another language?

We usually know the name of a main language spoken in a particular location. Sometimes people who live there speak less commonly-known languages.

Ask your relatives which languages were spoken in their family and which languages were commonly spoken by other people in the community.

Describe the traditional way that people in your culture dress for regular and special occasions

While most places in the world now have a more homogenized “modern” style of dress, many communities still treasure the more traditional way that people in their culture dressed for different occasions.

Ask your relative to describe how they remember people dressing in their community for normal and special occasions.

What is a unique belief that people from your community have?

Almost everyone that I know has something that they grew up believing or that their parents believed. These beliefs are often a clue about our cultural history.

Beliefs about animals, the weather, health conditions, and other general topics are very common all over the world.

For example, my parents told me that if the wind changed while I was making a face (probably while crying), that my face would stay that way.

This is a common expression in the United States, and I don’t know the origin. Expressions like this are often based on beliefs or superstitions.

What are the three most important things that people should know about your culture

Ask your relative if they could boil their culture down to three most important elements, what would they be?

It is interesting to know how your culture is perceived by different members of your family.

What do you consider to be traditional music where you are from?

For most cultures, music is an important and unique tradition. Ask your relative what they consider to be the traditional music in their culture.

They might be able to provide insight into the instruments that are used, and the type of music that is enjoyed for special occasions and daily entertainment.

What types of foods were cooked for special occasions when you were growing up?

This is my favorite, favorite question. Ask your relative why types of foods they ate, or were served, on special occasions during their childhood.

Special occasion foods are often an important detail that you can use to explore your culture further . Food traditions are often passed down for many generations in a family, even when other obvious cultural traditions have disappeared.

Where did people go when they traveled when you were younger?

Ask your relative where their family members or people from their community traveled to when they were growing up. This is just a unique question that will help you learn something interesting about your family’s culture.

What to do with the information learned from the cultural heritage question

Be sure to take good notes while you are talking with your relatives, and keep your notes in a place where you will have access to them in the future. If your relative wouldn’t mind, consider asking them if you can make an audio or video recording of the interview.

You can even upload this audio file to your Ancestry tree to preserve it for the future.

One of the things that I wish I had was a recording of my grandfather’s voice while he told me stories about his family. I know that videos and audio recordings are treasured and can be preserved for years to come.

You might want to consider building a family tree and attaching notes to the members of your tree that you interviewed. This is helpful for sharing your research with future generations.

For tips on doing family tree research for beginners, consider getting my book, available softcover on Amazon or as an e-book download .

To learn more about how to do a cultural heritage interview and find more questions to ask, read this post:

• How to do a Cultural Heritage Interview

If you have any questions about something that you read in this post, or if you would like to share your own suggestions for questions to ask your relatives, please join us in the discussion below.

Thanks for reading this post today 🙂

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none of your busniess

Thursday 22nd of February 2024

this is the fucking dumbest wedsite ever!

this was the worst thing ever I did not see the questions and whatever pictures that were trying to load did not even load!

share this!

May 14, 2024

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

fact-checked

peer-reviewed publication

Researchers elucidate ultrafast laser-induced solid-to-overdense-plasma transitions

by TranSpread

The interaction of solids with high-intensity ultra-short laser pulses has enabled major technological breakthroughs over the past half-century. On the one hand, laser ablation of solids offers micromachining and miniaturization of elements in medical or telecommunication devices. On the other hand, accelerated ion beams from solids using intense lasers may pave the way for new opportunities for cancer treatment with laser-based proton therapy, fusion energy research, and analysis of cultural heritage.

However, challenges still need to be overcome in order to push ahead laser ablation performance to the nanometer scale, and to bring laser-driven ion acceleration to industry and medical use.

During the interaction of an ultrashort laser pulse with a solid target, the latter evolves to an ionized state or plasma over an extremely short time period (less than a picosecond [ps]), where multiple of complex and coupled physical processes take place, while their interplay is still not fully understood.

Due to the ultrafast target evolution, the initial stage of the interaction, i.e., plasma formation, is hardly accessible in experiments. Hence, this ultrafast solid-to-plasma transition, which sets the initial conditions for subsequent processes like ablation or particle acceleration, has so far been treated by rough assumptions in most of the numerical models that describe such an interaction.

In a new paper published in Light: Science & Applications , an international team of scientists, including Yasmina Azamoum and Malte C. Kaluza from the Helmholtz Institute Jena and the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany, Stefan Skupin from the Institut Lumière Matière, France, Guillaume Duchateau from the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA-Cesta), France and co-authors have made a significant step forward in elucidating the ultrafast laser-induced solid-to-plasma transition and by providing an in-depth understanding of the interplay of fundamental processes.

They present a cutting-edge all-optical single-shot probing technique that enables complete visualization of the target's dynamics, from a cold solid passing through the ionization stage to an overdense plasma. This is achieved through the use of a laser probe pulse with a broadband optical spectrum that illuminates the interaction of the pump pulse with a nanometer-thick diamond-like carbon foil. The probe pulse's different colors arrive at different times of the interaction due to a temporal chirp.

Therefore, the evolution of the target state encoded in the transmitted probe light can be captured with a single probe pulse. Such single-shot probing technique is advantageous compared to conventional pump-probe methods, where the probed process must be reproduced identically by the pump for each delay of the probe. This is particularly relevant when employing high-power laser systems, which often suffer from strong pulse-to-pulse fluctuations.

Furthermore, the scientists demonstrated that for the correct interpretation of the measured probe transmission profiles, the accurate description of the early solid-to-plasma transition is crucial. A two-step interaction model was developed, where the first step accounts for the ionization dynamics of the target being in the solid state , and the second step considers the target in the plasma state.

A detailed evolution of the target state with high time- and space-resolutions (sub-ps and nm, respectively) is provided, together with unprecedented insight into the interplay of fundamental processes such as ionization dynamics, particle collisions, and plasma hydrodynamic expansion.

The results from this new probing technique and their interpretation are expected to contribute to a deeper insight into various target dynamics and a better understanding of the underlying physical processes. These achievements are likely to help to go beyond the traditional methods of ultrafast laser processing of materials and to make laser-accelerated ion technologies usable for societal applications.

Journal information: Light: Science & Applications

Provided by TranSpread

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