Open Data, Metadata Regimes and Unequal Infrastructures: Decolonial Challenges for Digital Heritage Preservation

Open data is often presented as a democratising condition for digital heritage, yet this assumption overlooks the unequal infrastructures and classificatory regimes through which data are produced, stored, and made visible. The article introduces the concept of cumulative exclusion, a mechanism that can operate across four layers of the digitisation process, namely infrastructural capacity, selection, description, and preservation. Where it operates, each layer amplifies the distortions inherited from the one before, so that no individual link need be discriminatory for the final outcome to remain systematically exclusionary. From this concept follows an inversion of the causal sequence prevailing in the field. Particular modes of archival treatment actively produce invisibility, and visibility comes to function as a precondition of preservation. The argument proceeds through conceptual articulation, grounded in decolonial thought and data studies, with emphasis on Global South authorship, and draws on limit cases ranging from transborder newspaper collections and proprietary platforms to community-governed description systems and regionally governed open science networks. These cases establish the conditions under which the mechanism operates and do not measure how widely it is distributed across digitisation projects. Understood as the absence of price and permission barriers, openness leaves descriptive and technical authority over collections untouched. Meaningful safeguarding therefore depends on infrastructural sovereignty, descriptive co-authorship, and plural regimes of representation.