Participatory and socially inclusive initiatives in cultural heritage have created a new 'hybrid collective'. The GLAM sector witnesses joining forces for digital transformation on which many memory institutions have already embarked in order to cope with the ever-changing landscape of the new media infrastructure (Lievrouw and Livingstone 2006) and emergent 'social network memory' (Hoskins 2009). Knowledge incorporated in activities of memory making is transferred among distributed agencies. Users are increasingly encouraged to involve themselves in the process of value creation.
This paper aims to deconstruct the design process of ICT systems and clarify institutional mechanisms that prohibit or enable participatory practices at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK), the most robust heritage organization in Germany. The finding is that users' perspective, gaining from actual user practices, could be crucial in enabling digital infrastructures to facilitate participatory interaction. We employ the concepts of 'translation' (Geismar 2013) and 'articulation work' (Strauss, 1988; Star & Strauss, 1999) from the anthropology of technology and infrastructure studies to define the extent of including and integrating diverse types of memories into institutional 'memory doing' and heritage building. By 'memory doing', we mean to look at the settings, motivations and conditions in which memory institutions, with their assumed authorial intent and linear structure, call upon non-hierarchical, collective, participatory memory practices. The case study presents a spectrum of socio-technical potentials of digital memory practices for participatory interaction. At one end of this spectrum, conventional memory-making might reflect marginalization and exclusions that take place in the society; by doing so, it sets limits to the expression of diversity and hinders participation. At the other, digital memory practices show some facets of the institution's commitment to engage with users and reach out to a broader audience. This paper, lastly, reflects upon the qualities that allow a digital infrastructure to support and facilitate participatory memory work.
