What is the first thing you associate with digital cultural heritage?

The first thing I associate with digital cultural heritage is the interconnected world where historical artefacts (both tangible and intangible) are available to anyone by the means of technology. What also immediately comes to mind is that for me digital cultural heritage is not just about digitizing existing artefacts and making them machine-readable. The part that truly excites me is the co-creative dimension - as it enables individuals from diverse backgrounds to actively contribute to, reinterpret, and engage with cultural heritage in meaningful ways. 

How developed is this area in Estonia at the moment?

It could be said that the current setup is quite advanced - but at the same time there is definitely some space for further developments. Talking about private initiatives, one project that particularly stands out is Ajapaik (https://ajapaik.ee) - focused on pictorial heritage and particularly on crowdsourcing metadata for historical pictures. One public institution I’d like to

mention here is National Archives of Estonia - as there is a plethora of engaging activities (also focused on blending and enriching digital heritage via crowdsourcing) available on Virtual Reading Room ( https://www.ra.ee/vau/index.php/et).

At the same time, if we take an eagle’s view of Estonian digital heritage ecosystem then I would say there’s definitely a room of improvement in terms of general accessibility. For the digital cultural heritage to be actively utilized by society, there ideally should be one single portal providing easy access to the wealth of heritage data. While Estonia currently has Museums Public Portal (https://www.muis.ee/en_GB), it’s not especially intuitive/user-friendly and is rather meant for GLAM professionals and not society as a whole. There is also MuIS open data portal (https://opendata.muis.ee/) that should theoretically provide machine-centric access to digital cultural heritage - but I would say in its current state it’s also not especially user-friendly.

Overall, quite a lot of exciting initiatives are already in place - just that some of them should be further fine-tuned.  

What kind of good practices from the world or of yourself could you highlight?

Talking further about a user-friendly digital heritage portal - having such a portal in operational mode would be definitely one good practice. If we for example take a look at Finland, they have Finna (https://www.finna.fi/?lng=en-gb) - essentially acting as a one-stop shop for digital cultural heritage content. Another thing I’d like to mention here is the importance of computational accessibility - meaning that digital cultural heritage is getting more traction if there is a machine-friendly way (generally an API) to access the artifacts and related metadata.  

How can we make more use of digital cultural heritage in our lives than before, and what would society as a whole gain from it?

From my perspective digital cultural heritage would be more widely used if two core components would be in place:

1)     Ease of access to digital artefacts (both for humans and computers)

2)     Spreading the knowledge about real-world use cases for cultural artefacts, something like a library of best practices

As for what would be the benefit for the society - well, they say there is no future without the past. Personally, I think one of the most promising avenues would be the world of creatives - makers and creators potentially could benefit from being inspired by artefacts of the past and also repurpose and even reclaim them into future artefacts. Another benefit could be highlighted here based on the definition of heritage - we preserve heritage as it has cultural and historical value, and helps us understand who we are. Engagement with digital cultural heritage could be instrumental in fostering the sense of community, getting empowered and shaping the future of society and humankind. Finally, yet another benefit that especially resonates with me as a Ukrainian is the positive impact digital cultural heritage can have in countering the weaponization of history that’s nowadays often exploited by Russia. Digital cultural heritage provides a vital tool for reclaiming and contextualizing historical narratives, equipping societies with the knowledge and resources to effectively combat misinformation and historical revisionism. 

Basic world cloud based on Bricks collection from Tallinn City Museum

https://www.muis.ee/catalogue:kogu/93619-849

https://www.muis.ee/museaalview/1887998

Playing around with color space conversions of sweater image from Tallinn City Museum’s collection