Digital Technology for Preserving Cultural Heritage in Tonga

Cultural heritage embodies and carries the stories and values of our ancestors that define our understanding of who we are today. A society's heritage serves an important purpose for educating people about their own culture and aiding in understanding their traditional values. In Tonga, where this research has been conducted, the historical knowledge and cultural values have been usually transferred orally from generation to generation. However, due to the pressures of globalisation, westernisation and migration, cultural heritage is under threat. These threats can potentially impede the transferring of societies' idiosyncratic identity to future generations and erode cultural life. ICT as an option to preserve cultural heritage offers opportunities to not only capture and immortalise tangible and intangible cultural artefacts but also enables the accessibility of those artefacts to a wider audience through the internet. It is against this background that we explore how digital technologies are utilised in the process of preserving cultural heritage.