Theorising heritage collection digitisations in global computational infrastructures

Digitisations are viewed as immaterial, informational replicants of their parent, the 'real object', and as networked human and machine subjectivities. While material heritage is founded on an artefactual notion of identity, the digitisation is founded on an informational one. Digitisations are coupled to their material parent through their semblance, but they and indeed other copies rarely if ever are the same as each other; they appear on different platforms, browsers, monitors and according to different resolutions. The conceptualisation of heritage objects and digital heritage objects as entangled relations and interactions, as pluri-modal transvisual experiences, as polysemic heritage representational systems and as non-representational dynamic processes signals the demise of the virtual terrorist. Millions of collections of digitisations and three-dimensional visualisations of heritage objects and sites inhabit and circulate in global computational infrastructures. Digitisations as thingness comprise the interoperability of their immediate technicities and locales, but their coordinates are extended through their addressability across multiple, multivalent layers in global computational infrastructures.