Digital spectres: the Notre-Dame effect

ABSTRACT

World Heritage is a profound expression of civilization. It connects the past with the present and the future. But the complexities and nuances for World Heritage in the new digital paradigm are not yet fully understood. While discourse on the affordances and limitations of social media for engaging with audiences has burgeoned in the past decade, the social and economic effects of search engines in the mediatization of heritage has largely gone unexamined. Here we consider questions raised by the digital specter generated by search queries on Google in response to two significant losses: the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral, and the destruction of Palmyra, Syria. While search queries appear as neutral engagements for information retrieval, they in fact generate specters in the form of increased search volumes that result in increased social and economic value for specific keywords. In this context, World Heritage becomes mediatized and coded into keywords – valuable linguistic metonyms of our most important cultural sites. By examining readily available data retrieved from Google Ads Keyword Planner, a tool for marketing, we explore how this new digital context reveals who the audiences of heritage are, how tragedy serves to increase value, and who benefits from such loss.

KEYWORDS:

• Notre-Dame
• Palmyra
• World Heritage
• Google Search Engine
• Heritage Destruction
• Digital Mediation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Notre Dame Effect references the Bilbao Effect that Frank Ghery’s Guggenheim Museum created in the industrial city of Bilbao in Spain.

2. Further information can be found at https://artsandculture.google.com/project/openheritage

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cristina Garduño Freeman

Dr Cristina Garduño Freemanis an Honorary Research Fellow in ACAHUCH at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on understanding, evaluating and designing for people’s connection with places, contributing to the fields of architectural history, critical heritage and digital humanities in relation to contemporary cities, modern and industrial architecture. She was the co-Chair for the Shared Cultures stream of the ICOMOS General Assembly, which was to be held in Sydney in October 2020, and is the Secretary of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ), and part of the Editorial Committee for the journal Córima.

José Antonio González Zarandona

Dr José Antonio González Zarandona is an independent scholar who has been awarded fellowships from the British Academy and Columbia University. His research interests are heritage destruction, iconoclasm, and the mediation of the latter in media. His latest book,Murujuga - Rock Art, Heritage and Landscape Iconoclasm, was published in 2020 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. He is currently co-editing the Routledge Handbook for Heritage Destruction.