I was interviewed for and contributed to the British Council’s report Digital Cultural Heritage: Imagination, innovation and opportunity — a study of the global ecosystem of practitioners using technology to reimagine what heritage is, who it belongs to, and how we might preserve it for future generations.
We counter the feeling that ‘heritage isn’t for me’ by making it clear everyone has something to contribute to digitisation. In this way, we can shift the curatorial power of who decides what we need to preserve.
— Chao Tayiana Maina, Founder of African Digital Heritage.
Cultural heritage practitioners globally are developing increasingly imaginative technical solutions, and fostering creative innovation to safeguard rich histories — often in areas where conflict and climate change present significant challenges. Yet while technology can democratise tools, create new public spaces, and break down long-standing barriers to cultural information, it can also reinforce historic biases, perpetuate economic, social and cultural inequalities, and carry damaging environmental impacts.
Taking the Cultural Protection Fund (CPF) as a starting point, the report spotlights the insights of 25 cultural heritage practitioners in Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq and Kenya. It offers deep dives into nine technologies, cutting-edge case studies, and recommendations across the Digital Cultural Heritage pipeline — encouraging practitioners and organisations to balance the creative potential of technologies with their evidenced complexities and limitations.
Key recommendations
Infrastructure: Digital Cultural Heritage infrastructure that considers interconnected social, ecological and technological systems — reliable internet, stable clean energy for servers, and community knowledge together.
Data collection: processes that engage community stakeholders in collection and management, including decisions about which data to preserve.
Data stewardship: models that engage communities in the sustainable ownership of data — long-term communities of practice and small-scale, community-led ownership.
Audience engagement: creative applications of technology to engage audiences — particularly young people and those without pre-existing access — including user-generated content, social distribution and gamification.
Long-term maintenance: models that prioritise sustainability and resilience over continuous innovation, so previously funded projects remain functional and able to adapt.
Read the full report: Digital Cultural Heritage (PDF), or the overview on the British Council Research & Insight site. Executive summaries are also available in Arabic, Swahili and Amharic.
Citation: McKenna, F., Rivera-Carlisle, J., Foale, M. G., Gould, A., Rivera-Carlisle, P., Andrews, H., Grant, S., Hawcroft, A., Head, D. (2025). Digital Cultural Heritage: Imagination, innovation and opportunity. British Council. https://doi.org/10.57884/h3dv-7q98. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.
Written by British Council · Research & Insight — June 2025
