ABSTRACT
An increasing amount of attention has been paid in recent years to the role of the amateur in the digital age. In the literature, the rise of a new type of non-specialist-actively committed to creating and distributing digital culture at professional standards-has been advocated, and the value of non-experts’ endeavours acknowledged. Thanks to the opportunities opened by the social evolution of the Web, heritage organisations have been embracing participatory models by promoting activities engaging the public in content co-creation, and amateurs’ online collections have been proliferating. However, ‘outsiders and establishments’, ‘official and unofficial knowledge’, ‘amateurs and professionals’ still seem to belong to separate worlds, tangentially connected. This seems to be due to the technological challenges of integrating expert and non-expert knowledge, as well as to cultural resistances associated with the primacy of institutional authority, and the control of knowledge generation and recognition.
