On digital cultural value: What does research tell us?

The value of culture is both essential and contested within the field of cultural policy. It is essential because valuation serves a need to legitimate relevance of and explain the benefits of cultural participation. It is contested because the methods by which we might measure and analyse such value are epistemologically challenging. This paper investigates how the value of digital and digitized culture has been analysed by different strands of cultural research, prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Through a systematic literature review, we find that the identified values belong to three different broad categories: Production, Access, and Participation. The review conducted in this paper shows that digitization has affected the configuration of the values of culture in different ways. It has brought an increased complexity to the valuation of culture, and the views and attributed values of digitized culture have also developed during two decades of cultural digitization. In general, we also find increasingly more critical views on the potential values of digitization in more contemporary research, especially in the categories of Access and Production.