(2009). The Estonian Tiger Leap from Post-Communism to the Information Society: From Policy to Practice. Journal of Baltic Studies: Vol. 40, From Post-Communism to the EU: Estonia's Transition 20 Years on, pp. 29-51.

The intersection of serious games, advanced technologies, and culture offers new paths for fostering social inclusion and sustainability. This position paper presents i-Game, an EU project dedicated to transforming the relationship between cultural heritage and the gaming industry. By creating an open-source platform for inclusive game development, i-Game integrates tools such as Explainable AI (XAI) and virtual reality to enable diverse stakeholders—including underrepresented groups—to co-create games that address societal and cultural challenges. Through pilot projects in museums and the textile industry, i-Game explores the potential of gamification to enhance learning, creativity, and collaboration while advancing sustainable practices. The project highlights how interdisciplinary methodologies and ethical-design principles can reshape the cultural heritage landscape, democratizing access to innovative tools and fostering a deeper connection between technology and heritage.

Over several decades, digital cultural heritage has been increasingly reused across research, education, creative practice and through public community engagement. However, these activities remain undescribed or inconsistently documented and difficult to compare. Organisations typically rely on ‘proxy metrics’ such as downloads, page views or reverse searches to assess use/reuse. However, these metrics reveal little about how materials were transformed, interpreted, or how they generated value and impact. GLAMs often rely on unstructured anecdotes to capture/trace reuse, as it is difficult to retrospectively document reuse when GLAMs publish cultural heritage data openly without the expectation of users to tell the organisation what they did with the digital cultural heritage they accessed and used. Documenting reuse approaches often focuses on single dimensions or factors such as sector, content type, audience or impact. This has resulted in fragmented knowledge about digital cultural heritage reuse, which has created limitations in carrying out evaluations across examples, learning from good practice and planning digital cultural heritage initiatives. This article introduces and empirically grounds a flexible, multi-dimensional schema for documenting and planning digital cultural heritage reuse. Using an abductive methodology that combines literature analysis and synthesis, practitioner interviews, user-journey examinations and iterative prototyping, we developed a six-category framework capturing (1) organisation and context, (2) heritage assets and technologies, (3) purpose and process, (4) users and engagement modes, (5) nature of use and availability, and (6) impact and sustainability. Applied across real-world examples, this framework can reveal forms of value, dependency and risk, often absent from conventional reporting in the reuse of digital cultural heritage. We argue that reuse documentation functions as a form of socio-technical infrastructure, enabling a shared vocabulary and understanding for cross-case comparison, cumulative learning and strategic design of digital heritage initiatives. By shifting categorisation from retrospective description to include prospective planning, the framework supports a more meaningful impact assessment and sustainable reuse of digital cultural heritage as a societal resource.

Through a combination of historical research and a series of research visits, this visual essay reflects on how Estonian memorials, related to the Second World War; are discursive-material assemblages, that function as floating signifiers. Grounded in a post-structuralist theorization of contingency, overdetermination and discursive struggle – particularly inspired by Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) work – the notion of floating signifiers captures the significatory diversity of key concepts which have become integrated in different (and competing) discourses. By extending this framework to recent theoretical expansions that aim to validate both the discursive and the material (Carpentier, 2017), also the floating of discursive-material memorial assemblages can be incorporated into this analysis. This article, in particular, focusses on the discursive-material struggles over the articulation of the Estonian Second World War hero in the Estonian memorialscape, at a time when the Estonian government has been removing a considerable number of Soviet memorials from the Estonian public space (and plans to remove more). Beginning with the argument that not every Estonian Second World War memorial has been subjected to this discursive-material struggle, we then analyse the discursive-material struggle over the Soviet hero and the Waffen-SS hero, together with the remarkable absence of memorializations of the independent Estonian (nationalist) hero. In a case study, we zoom in on how a prestigious military decoration, the Cross of Liberty, becomes a significant illustration of the workings of the floating signifier, playing a role in both mainstream and radical-right-wing discourses about the Estonian hero during the Second World War. In our conclusion, we reflect about the absence of closure on what is the past, present and future of Estonia, and the ethical concerns that this absence raises.