Globally positioned digital heritage objects: how geo-spatial technologies territorialise the multiplicity, mobility and mutability of digital heritage

This article examines the use of geolocative technologies, methods and data in the production of digital heritage objects. Digital mediations of heritage have become pervasive, yet despite their increased circulation, they largely remain critically under theorised. The production of digital heritage objects is defined by the use of GPS instruments and the iterative processing of geospatial data. Despites this, however, they are rarely used in ways that could be described as cartographic. As such, this article explores the consequences of having so much of what is increasingly circulated, and consumed as heritage being now produced through the same tools and methods associated with maps, GIS or navigation. This article will use empirical data produced through an ethnography of The Cherish Project. Cherish is a multi-national research initiative centred around the objective of delivering a comprehensive baseline of 3D data for heritage sites currently threatened by climate change on both coasts of the Irish Sea. Building upon crucial literatures from the critical GIS and digital sectors of geographical scholarship, this article makes key contributions to how the theoretical orientations of the discipline might evolve towards new understandings of data and digital cultural objects. In both reorienting geographical literatures around theorists like Bruno Latour, Manual DeLanda and Yuk Hui – and contextualising such readings in the empirical work this paper volunteers – something unique and useful materialises. Namely, geospatial technologies, methods and geospatial data are revealed as agents of territorialisation and coding, the likes of which reconcile the situated, performative and thoroughly contingent nature of cartographic science with the derivation of discreet digital heritage objects.