Introduction

Polyvocality is commonly invoked in cultural heritage, museum practice, and digital humanities as a universal and inherently inclusive concept, one that, when implemented, is presumed to automatically diversify narratives, democratise interpretation, and redress historical imbalances. This framing positions polyvocality as a self-sufficient methodological solution: the mere addition of multiple voices is assumed to produce more just, more representative, and more ethical forms of memory work. Within this discourse, polyvocality is often treated as a transferable best practice that can be applied uniformly across contexts, regardless of the historical, political, or epistemic conditions in which those voices emerge. Yet as several scholars have noted, the uncritical adoption of polyvocality risks obscuring the asymmetries of power that structure whose voices are invited, legitimised, or constrained within heritage spaces (Lynch and Alberti 2010). When mobilised as a universal good, polyvocality can become a rhetorical gesture that leaves institutional authority intact, redistributing expression but not control (Boast 2011). In digital heritage especially, the assumption that platforms inherently enable multiplicity often overlooks how infrastructural design, metadata regimes, and archival legacies shape what forms of polyvocality are possible (Risam 2018). Indeed, digitisation can reproduce colonial recordkeeping unless new infrastructures enable multiple agency, multiple provenance, and multivocality. Jeurgens and Karabinos (Jeurgens and Karabinos 2020), for instance, describe digitisation as the creation of new recordkeeping infrastructures rather than a simple transfer of analogue records into digital form, warning that inclusiveness does not necessarily dismantle deeper power structures. In this respect, Comber et al. (Comber et al. 2025) argue that decolonial archives should support situated, plural, and community-grounded practices of meaning-making rather than one universal database logic. This is because, apparently universal interface principles can encode Western epistemic standards, marginalising local languages, cultural values, and communicative norms (Chibueze and Wei 2026). As a result, polyvocality risks becoming a depoliticised ideal, celebrated for its inclusivity while masking the structural conditions that determine whose voices are amplified and whose remain marginalised. The present work builds on these critiques by demonstrating that polyvocality is not universal, but fundamentally position-dependent. It uses findings from the PICCH (Polyvocal Interpretations of Contested Colonial Heritage) project to demonstrate how instead, it is deeply position-dependent, shaped by whether it is enacted within a former colonising nation or a formerly colonised one. The project examined two contrasting contexts: (1) a physical historical exhibition in Paramaribo and the digital historical timeline of Suriname, and (2) the Dutch World museum.

Context of the study

The PICCH project was co-funded by the Joint Programme Initiative for Cultural Heritage and the Dutch National Research Funding (2023-2025). It set out to examine how digital archives created in colonial contexts can be reinterpreted, re-presented, and re-used to enable more inclusive, polyvocal interpretations of European colonial heritage. Across its multiple research strands, i.e., information behaviour studies, audiovisual analysis, digital infrastructure investigation, and public-facing heritage practice, the project has produced converging insights into the relationship between users, archives, and the digital environments that mediate their encounters. Here I present results of observations of enacted polyvocality in two contexts: a heritage institution in a former colonising country, the World Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and a physical historical exhibition in Paramaribo and the digital historical timeline of Suriname (https://tijdlijnvansuriname.sr/), a formerly colonised country. Through a comparative multimodal analysis, combining structured walkthroughs, close reading of textual and visual materials, metadata/interface observation, and comparison of authorship and validation mechanisms, I examine how polyvocality is technically and institutionally produced in the two asymmetrical heritage contexts. The digital interface was observed through structured walkthroughs that recorded how users are invited to move through the material: which entry points are offered, which events or objects are foregrounded, how context is supplied, how visual and textual evidence are combined, and whether users can challenge or supplement the record. The multimodal markers systematically compared were narrative tone, terminology, image selection, use of archival and press materials, contextual labels, warnings, footnotes, metadata categories, authorship statements, validation procedures, navigation paths, linking practices, and feedback or participation mechanisms.

Polyvocality in practice

The Surinamese cultural landscape provides an illuminating example of postcolonial self-narration. The recent physical exhibition in Paramaribo on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of independence from Dutch colonial rule presents a detailed historical overview of Suriname from 1975 to the present, using dense textual panels, local press excerpts, photography, and depictions of community life. Its tone is self-assured, identity-forming, and rooted in lived experience. Events such as political unrest, military coups, migration waves, natural disasters, and economic transformations are framed through the lens of collective memory and societal impact. Polyvocality here takes the form of internal plurality, i.e., ethnic, regional, generational, rather than an outward-facing dialogue with the former colonial power.

The digital timeline of Suriname (tijdlijnvansuriname.sr) extends this narrative into the digital realm. It is constructed by a national “Validation Group” of historians and cultural experts, and designed to function as a sovereign, authoritative yet plural historical canon. Importantly, the platform includes explicit acknowledgments of contested terminology and divergent interpretations, using footnotes and editorial commentary to signal disagreement, an unusually transparent approach to historical contention. However, the timeline is not crowdsourced; public participation is not yet structurally integrated. This results in a model of “expert-mediated polyvocality”: internally diverse, but institutionally controlled, with the primary aim of consolidating Surinamese identity. The site does invites feedback by email, but this is not the same as structural crowdsourcing or shared governance.

In the World Museum, polyvocality functions very differently. Here, the institution is situated as former coloniser grappling with responsibility and the legacy of its own archival authority. The museum employs a curatorial language of neutrality, balance, and reflexive inclusion. Polyvocality is conceptualised as adding community voices to pre-existing colonial collections. The digital plays a central role in this process: infrastructures are redesigned to incorporate community metadata, contextual labels, warnings, alternative terminologies, and linked collections. This produces an institutional infrastructure of repair that however remains constrained by inherited archival systems.

Yet PICCH findings show that these efforts are constrained by the structural foundations of the archives themselves. Metadata vocabularies inherit colonial categories; search interfaces privilege expert knowledge and archival literacy; digital systems remain institutionally controlled, even when community participation is invited (Cere et al. 2023). Polyvocality becomes a methodological goal rather than a lived reality, and neutrality, although purportedly ethical, can become a mechanism for inadvertently muting affect or dissipating accountability. Across both contexts, digital infrastructures play a pivotal role in mediating memory. In Suriname, the digital timeline facilitates narrative sovereignty: it allows the former colony to articulate its own historical trajectory, negotiate internal perspectives, and build a national historical reference point. The digital becomes a tool of consolidation. In the Netherlands, the digital is used to challenge inherited regimes of knowledge. Polyvocality is enacted through metadata reforms, recontextualising labels, community curation, and digital access pathways. Yet the digital can equally become a barrier: technical systems, interface logics, and archival principles often reinforce institutional centrality, reproducing epistemic hierarchies even as institutions attempt to dismantle them. Polyvocality therefore emerges not as a simple representational principle but as an infrastructural condition: it depends on who designs the system, whose categories are encoded, and who is authorised to speak within it.

Conclusions

Polyvocality in postcolonial digital memory work must be understood as position-dependent. Former colonies and former colonisers do not—and cannot—use digital heritage infrastructures in the same way. For Suriname, digital heritage supports self-narration, sovereignty, and nation-building; for the Netherlands, it supports accountability, repair, and critical reflexivity. These two trajectories should not be collapsed into a single framework of “best practice.” Rather, digital humanities must remain attentive to the asymmetrical histories that shape each context. Attempts to enforce universalised models of “participatory digital heritage” risk inadvertently reinscribing the epistemic dominance that decolonisation seeks to undo.

The Memory Track of DH2026 offers a vital space to foreground these complexities. As digital memory practices continue to expand globally, it is essential to recognise the divergent functions of the digital in former colonial and formerly colonised societies, and to develop decolonial digital humanities methodologies that are sensitive to these differences.