Analysing the “World Significance” of Documentary Heritage: Quantitative Research on the Memory of the World Register

Background: UNESCO established the Memory of the World (MoW) Programme in 1992 to preserve the collective memory of humanity and the globally at-risk documentary heritage. ‘World Significance’ is one of the most crucial criteria in reviewing nomination forms for the MoW Register. However, research on the MoW Register is limited, and focused studies on the ‘World Significance’ criterion are scarce, making project submission complicated. Purpose: This paper’s purpose is to analyse the “World Significance” criterion of the MoW from the perspective of nomination forms. Thereby raising the world’s recognition of documentary heritage’s world significance and assist future nominators to effectively highlight how their nominated heritage meets this criterion. Methodology: This paper conducted a novel quantitative investigation into the “World Significance” section of 390 nomination forms of inscriptions on the MoW Register, using Latent Dirichlet Allocation as a thematic clustering method. Findings: This paper extracted that “Time”, “Space”, “Form”, and “Value” are the main dimensions of the “World Significance” description, and “War and Politics”, “Culture and Exchange of Civilizations”, “Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences”, “Minority Groups and Human Rights”, and “Oriental Medicine and Society” are the important themes in the description of “World Significance”. Value: This paper innovatively applied thematic clustering to analyse the MoW field where qualitative research is more prevalent. It addressed the problem of insufficient understanding of the value connotation of the existing key accreditation criteria, and selects the “World Significance” criterion for research to enrich the value connotation of this criterion.