Shaping Narratives and Bridging the Gap: Connecting Digital Realms, Community, and Heritage

Durga Kale1*, Malavika Chatterjee2, and Akash Srinivas3

Digital platforms enable the democratisation of knowledge from a broad range of stakeholders, incorporating traditional and community knowledge in active conversations with academic practitioners. In this paper, we explore the efficacy of digital platforms – social media, digital art, and audio podcasts – for science communication. By centring the conversation on heritage and archaeology, we aim for an equitable future for science communication that involves researchers, heritage organisations, and the public. Some of our work on digital curation lies at the intersection of traditional community knowledge, enhanced through digital and open‑source avenues of dissemination, improving accessibility. One such practice is knowledge visualisation through art. Non‑verbal (or non‑language‑specific) dissemination of knowledge through art on digital platforms has added to the multivocality of knowledge dissemination. Research‑informed visual art offers a more inclusive engagement with culture and heritage, especially in teaching and knowledge dissemination, mitigating the language barrier to some extent. Furthermore, our podcast creates a space for well‑researched dialogue on the various aspects of South Asia’s past – history, archaeology, anthropology, art, and oral traditions of the region. Digital avenues actively engage a broad range of stakeholders – local informants, academia (students, teachers, early‑career researchers, experts, institutions, and organisations), the public, and funding agencies. Through our attempts at science communication, by engaging diverse digital spaces over the past five years, we hope we are contributing towards making the digital mediascape a space to challenge preconceived notions of culture, heritage, identity, ownership, and colonial narratives, by transforming our perception of heritage, its preservation, and ways of dissemination.