Creative engagements with the ethics of heritage research in the age of the data deluge

As a result of an increasingly interactional web, the last decade has seen an unprecedented proliferation and combination of born-digital and digitised data. Different digital outcomes of people’s interactions with the past have been variously produced, selectively shared, made hyper-visible, obscured or deleted online. Our chapter draws on case studies from international projects that shed light on the ethical implications of the data deluge for heritage ecologies composed of researchers, practitioners, and communities. We consider the conditions under which and for whom the ‘free’ culture and ‘move fast and break things’ approach advocated by Big Tech may be beneficial or indeed harmful, and any grey areas in-between. First, we draw attention to possible pathways for ethical uses of social media data in heritage research. Second, we discuss the potential of research-creation interventions to examine the ethics of social media and other forms of digitally enabled sharing that account for specific cultural, political, and environmental contexts in which heritage is crafted and researched online.