Heritagising holy trails: paradata as means for preserving intangible religious heritage

A presentation with Dr Helena Wangefeldt Ström at Intangible cultural heritage in times of crisis: transformations, risks and
governance, and international conference at Collegium Polonicum, Słubice and online organised by the COST Action CRICULT.

Abstract

Preserving intangible heritage and heritagisation processes applied to religion as being changing and enacted in practice rather than existing and preserved as a stable entity is difficult. We posit that it could benefit of means developed in contexts like research data curation and records management. An example rapidly gaining prominence is paradata: data and artefacts that can be appropriated as informative of processes and practices e.g. written descriptions, videos and photographs, or formal metadata describing people and resources involved in practices.

This presentation discusses how the insights from the state-of-the-art paradata research can be applied to inform the theory and practice of preservation of intangible religious heritage. We use the case of the current re-invention and development of ancient pilgrimage routes in Europe to interrogate the applicability, opportunities and challenges of paradata as a useful complement in studying as well as preserving particularly the practiced aspects of intangible religious heritage.