Articles de revues sur le sujet « Digital humanities, art history, cultural heritage »

The development of Information Technology and Digital Humanities has brought numerous significant changes to the Cultural Heritage domain. The Digital Humanities has become a dynamic and fertile research field, and new projects and opportunities are constantly flourishing. The BYZART project perfectly fits this context. This project is coordinated by the Department of History and Cultures of the University of Bologna, embracing a wide consortium of partners from Bulgaria, Greece and Italy. It aims at enhancing Byzantine and Post-Byzantine artistic and cultural heritage within the Europeana platform. This project will enrich the existing Europeanacollections with about 75,000 new cultural and artistic multimedia objects relevant to Byzantine history and culture, including collections of digitized photos, video and audio content, and 3-D surveys and reconstructions. We have also established a liaison between the new materials and Byzantine-related content already existing on Europeana. The archival material collected and digitized by the BYZART consortium is of the greatest cultural and art-historical importance, but until now, it has not been properly evaluated or published. For this reason, BYZART aims to guarantee the preservation and evaluation of significant cultural heritage objects from a wide range of contexts, while also making them accessible to scholarly and general audiences alike.

Cultural heritage is at the heart of Russia’s war on Ukraine, still underway five months after the invasion on February 24, 2022. Statements from the Kremlin indicate that the fundamental goal of Putin’s regime is to undermine and eliminate the distinct and distinctive Ukrainian national identity, culture, and language – three concepts that are manifested through cultural heritage. During a war with such an agenda, internationally recognized frameworks such as the 1954 Hague Convention can be subverted, turning the blue shield symbol meant to protect cultural property into a target. While practices codified by the Hague Convention provide both opportunities and challenges for physical cultural heritage in this war, the biggest challenge for preserving digital cultural heritage is the lack of precedent. Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO, sucho.org) began on March 1, 2022, as an emergency response effort organized by three digital humanities practitioners, and quickly grew to over 1,300 volunteers. In this brief essay, the three co-founders – Anna Kijas, Sebastian Majstorovic, and Quinn Dombrowski – reflect on the first five months of SUCHO, the differences between physical and digital cultural heritage, the urgency of preserving digital cultural heritage during a war, and the importance of these materials for the future of art history.

The Digital Humanities have challenged all disciplines of Art History to engage with new interdisciplinary methodologies, learn new tools, and reevaluate their role within academia. In consequence, art historians occupy a new position in relation to the object of study. Museums have been equally transformed. The possibilities of creating virtual realities for lost/inaccessible monuments poses a new relationship between viewer and object in gallery spaces. Digital Humanities interventions in museums even allow us to preserve the memory of endangered global heritage sites that cease to exist or are inaccessible (celebrated examples including the lost Great Arch of Palmyra reconstructed with a 3D printer). Curatorial practices are now trending towards a sensorial and experiential approach. Is the role of Digital Humanities, in academic as well in museum settings, to “reveal” the object itself, through an empirical display of existing material, or to “reconstruct” something of the original experience of the object to engage spectators? Can we propose a reconciliation between these two “poles”? The Sixth International Day of Doctoral Studies promoted by RAHN aims to investigate the role of Digital Humanities by fostering a dialogue between the protection of cultural heritage sites, museology, the history of art, and the digitalization of Big Data.

In this paper, we analyze some of the platforms and technologies that influence the manner in which we interact and experience historical sites and heritage. Acknowledging that history is a constructed narration of the past, this paper demonstrates how contemporary technologies have agency in reconstructing histories in the present via digital platforms. By comparing online platforms for digital heritage production like Google Heritage with Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) platforms, we demonstrate how digital heritage may undergo a process recontextualization or decontextualization from its originating settings. We also show that digital heritage’s reconstruction of history is done through the act of remediation: by turning actual remnants of the past into digital models or by replacing such remnants with virtual representation that are globally accessible, something new is created and alternative stories can be told. Within that, we consider some of the ethical issues that are raised by the migration of historical narratives into digital platforms, as we point towards a growing tendency in which history and its production can be subjected to major data companies.

Abstract Although the digital humanities have traditionally been conceived as a text-based discipline, both digital visualization techniques as well as visual analysis are increasingly used for research in various humanities disciplines. Since there are several overlaps in epistemic cultures of visually oriented and digitally supported research in art and architectural history studies, museology, and archaeology, as well as cultural heritage, we introduce ‘visual digital humanities’ as novel ‘umbrella’ term to cover research approaches in the digital humanities that are dependent on both consuming and producing pictorial, rather than textual, information to answer their humanities research questions. This article aims to determine this particular field of research in terms of (1) research topics, (2) disciplinary standards, and (3) a scholarly culture as well as (4) researchers’ habits and backgrounds. This study is intended to highlight a scope of phenomena and aspects of relevance. Information is gathered by interviews with researchers at London universities and workshops held in Germany and Sweden.

The penetration of ICT in the management and study of material culture and the emergence of digital cultural repositories and linked cultural data in particular are expected to enable new paths in humanities research and new approaches to cultural heritage. Success is contingent upon securing information trustworthiness, long-term preservation, and the ability to re-use, re-combine and re-interpret digital content. In this perspective, we review the use in the cultural heritage domain of digital curation and curation-aware repository systems; achieving semantic interoperability through ontologies; explicitly addressing contextual issues of cultural heritage and humanities information; and the services of digital research infrastructures. The last two decades have witnessed an increasing penetration of ICT in the management and study of material culture, as well as in the Humanities at large. From collections management, to object documentation and domain modelling, to supporting the creative synthesis and re-interpretation of data, significant progress has been achieved in the development of relevant knowledge structures and software tools. As a consequence of this progress, digital repositories are being created that aim at serving as digital cultural memories, while a process of convergence among the different kinds of memory institutions, i.e., museums, archives, and libraries, in what concerns their information functions is already evolving. Yet the advantages offered by information management technology, mass storage, copying, and the ease of searching and quantitative analysis, are not enough to ensure the usefulness of those digital cultural memories unless information trustworthiness, long-term preservation, and the ability to re-use, re-combine and re-interpret digital content are ensured. Furthermore, the widely encountered need for integrating heterogeneous information becomes all the more pressing in the case of cultural heritage due to the specific traits of information in this domain. In view of the above fundamental requirements, in this presentation we briefly review the leveraging power of certain practices and approaches in realizing the potential of digital cultural memories. In particular, we review the use of digital curation and curation-aware repository systems; achieving semantic interoperability through ontologies; explicitly addressing contextual issues of cultural heritage and humanities information; and the services of digital research infrastructures. Digital curation is an interdisciplinary field of enquiry and practice, which brings together disciplinary traditions and practices from computer science, information science, and disciplines practicing collections-based or data-intensive research, such as history of art, archaeology, biology, space and earth sciences, and application areas 38 such as e-science repositories, organizational records management, and memory institutions (Constantopoulos and Dallas 2008). Digital curation aims at ensuring adequate representation of and long-term access to digital information as its context of use changes, and at mitigating the risk of repositories becoming “data mortuaries”. To this end a lifecycle approach to the representation of curated information objects is adopted; event-centric representations are used to capture information “life events”; the class of agents involved is extended to include knowledge producers and communicators in addition to information custodians; and context-specificity is explicitly addressed. Cultural heritage information comprises representations of actual cultural objects (texts, artefacts, historical records, etc.), their histories, agents (persons and organizations) operating on such objects, and their relationships. It also includes interpretations of and opinions about such objects. The recording of this knowledge is characterized by disciplinary diversity, representational complexity and heterogeneity, historical orientation, and textual bias. These characteristics of information are in line with the character of humanities research: hermeneutic and intertextual, rather than experimental; narrative, rather than formal; idiographic rather than nomothetic; and, conformant to a realist rather than positivist account of episteme (Dallas 1999). The primary use of this information has been to support knowledge-based access, while now it is gradually also being targeted at various synthetic and creative uses. A rich semantic structure, including subsumption, meronymic, temporal, spatial, and various other semantic relations, is inherent to cultural information. Complexity is compounded by terminological inconsistency, subjectivity, multiplicity of interpretation and missing information. From an information lifecycle perspective, digital curation involves a number of distinct processes: appraisal; ingesting; classification, indexing and cataloguing; knowledge enhancement; presentation, publication and dissemination; user experience; repository management; and preservation. These processes rely on three supporting processes, namely, goal and usage modelling, domain modelling and authority management. These processes effectively capture the context of digital curation and produce valuable resources which can themselves be seen as curated digital assets (Constantopoulos and Dallas 2008; Constantopoulos et al. 2009). The field of cultural information presents itself as a privileged domain for digital curation. There is a relatively long history of developing library systems and museum systems, along with recent intense activity on interoperable, semantically rich cultural information systems, boosted by two important developments: the emergence of the CIDOC CRM (ISO 21127) 1 standard ontology for cultural documentation; and the movement for convergence of museum, library and archive systems, one manifestation of which is the CIDOC CRM compatible FRBR-oo model 2 . Advances such as those outlined above allow addressing old research questions in new ways, as well as putting new questions that were very hard or impossible to tackle without the means of digital technologies. Significant enablers towards this direc- 1 http://www.cidoc-crm.org/ 2 http://www.cidoc-crm.org/frbr_inro.html 39 tion are the so-called digital research infrastructures, which bear the promise of facilitating research through sharing tools and data. Several trends can be identified in the development of research infrastructures, which follow two main approaches: a) The normative approach, whereby normalized collections of data and tools are developed as common resources and managed centrally by the infrastructure. b) The regulative approach, whereby resources reside with individual organizations willing to contribute them, under specific terms, to the community. A set of interoperability conditions and mechanisms provide a regulatory function that lies at the heart of the infrastructure. Both approaches are being pursued in all disciplines, but the mix differs: in hard sciences building common normalized infrastructures appears to be a necessity, with a complementary, yet significant role to be played by a network of interoperable, disparate sources. In the humanities, on the other hand, long scholarly traditions have produced a formidable variety of information collections and formats, mostly offering interpreted, rather than raw material for publication and sharing. These conditions favour the development of regulated networks of interoperable sources, with centralized, normative infrastructures in a complementary capacity. By way of example, a recent such infrastructure is DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ 3 , one of the national constituents of DARIAH-EU 4 , the Europe-wide digital infrastructure in the arts and humanities. DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ is a hybrid -virtual distributed infrastructure, bringing together the strengths and capacities of leading research, academic, and collection custodian institutions through a carefully defined, lightweight layer of services, tools and activities complementing, rather than attempting to replicate, prior investments and capabilities. Arts and humanities data and content resources are as a rule thematically organized, widely distributed, under the custodianship and curation of diverse institutions, including government agencies and departments, public and private museums, archives and special libraries, as well as academic and research units, associations, research projects, and other actors, and displaying a diverse degree of digitization. The mission of the infrastructure is then to provide the research communities with effective, comprehensive and sustainable capability to discover, access, integrate, analyze, process, curate and disseminate arts and humanities data and information resources, through a concerted plan of virtual services and tools, and hybrid (combined virtual and physical) activities, integrating and running on top of existing primary information systems and leveraging integration and synergies with DARIAH- EU and other related infrastructures and aggregators (e.g. ARIADNE 5 , CARARE 6 , LoCloud 7 ). In its first stage of development, the DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ Research Infrastructure has offered the following groups of services: 3 http://www.dyas-net.gr/ 4 http://www.dariah.eu/ 5 http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/ 6 http://www.carare.eu/ 7 http://www.locloud.eu/ 40 • Data sharing : comprehensive registries of digital resources; • Supporting the development of digital resources : tools and best practice guidelines for the development of digital resources; • Capacity building: workshops and training activities; and • Digital Humanities Observatory : evidence-based research on digital humanities, monitoring, outreach and dissemination activities. Key factor in the development of DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ, ARIADNE, CARARE and LoCloud resources alike has been a curation-oriented aggregator, the Metadata and Object Repository - MORe 8 (Gavrilis, Angelis & Dallas 2013; Gavrilis et al. 2013). This system supports the aggregation of metadata from multiple sources (OAI-PMH, Archive, SIP, Omeka, MINT) and heterogeneous systems in a single repository, the creation of unified indexes of normalized and enriched metadata, the creation of RDF databases, and the publication of aggregated records to multiple recipients (OAI- PMH, Archive, Elastic Search, RDF Stores). It enables the dynamic definition of validation and enrichment plans, supported by a number of micro-services, as well as the measurement of metadata quality. MORe can incorporate any XML/RDF metadata schema and can support several intermediate schemas in parallel. Its architecture is based on micro-services, a software development model according to which a complex application is composed of small, independent services communicating via a language-agnostic API, thus being highly reusable. MORe currently maintains access to 30 SKOS-encoded thesauri, totaling several hundred thousands of terms, as well as to copies of the Geo-names and Perio.do services, thus offering information enrichment on the basis of a wide array of sources. Metadata enrichment is a process of automatic generation of metadata through the linking of metadata elements with data sources and/or vocabularies. The enrichment process increases the volume of metadata, but it also considerably enhances their precision, therefore their quality. Performing metadata aggregation and enrichment carries several benefits: increase of repository / site traffic, better retrieval precision, concentration of indexes in one system, better performance of user services. To date MORe is used by 110 content provider institutions, and accommodates 23 different metadata schemas and about 20,800,000 records. The advent of digital infrastructures for arts and humanities research calls for a deeper understanding of how humanists work with digital resources, tools and services as they engage with different aspects of research activity: from capturing, encoding, and publishing scholarly data to analyzing, visualizing, interpreting and communicating data and research argumentation to co-workers and readers. Digitally enabled scholarly work and the integration of digital content, tools and methods present not only commonalities but also differences across disciplines, methodological traditions, and communities of researchers. A significant challenge in providing integrated access to disparate digital humanities resources and, more broadly, in supporting digitally-enabled humanities research, lies in empirically capturing the context of use of digital content, methods and tools. 8 http://more.dcu.gr/ 41 Several attempts have been made to develop a conceptual framework for DH in practice. In 2008, the AHRC ICT Methods Network 9 developed a taxonomy of digital methods in the arts and humanities. This was the basis for the classification of over 200 digital humanities projects funded by the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Council in the online resource arts-humanities.net, as well as for the subsequent Digital Humanities at Oxford 10 taxonomy. Other initiatives to build a taxonomy of Digital Humanities include TADIRAH 11 and DH Commons 12 . From 2011 to 2015 the Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities 13 (NeDiMAH) ran over 40 activities structured around key methodological areas in the humanities (digital representations of space and time; visualisation; linked data; creating and using large scale corpora; and creating editions). Through these activities, NeDiMAH gathered a snapshot of the practice of digital humanities in Europe, and the impact of digital methods on research. A key output of NeDiMAH is NeMO 14 : the NeDiMAH Ontology of Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities . This ontology of digital methods in the humanities has been built as a framework for understanding not just the use of digital methods, but also their relationship to digital content and tools. The development of an ontology, rather than a taxonomy, stands in recognition of the complexity of the digital humanities landscape, the interdisciplinarity of the field, and the dependencies that impact the use of digital methods in research. NeMO provides a conceptual framework capable of representing scholarly work in the humanities, addressing aspects of intentionality and capturing the diverse associations between research actors and their goals, activities undertaken, methods employed, resources and tools used, and outputs produced, with the aim of obtaining semantically rich structured representations of scholarly work (Angelis et al 2015; Hughes, Constantopoulos & Dallas 2016). It is grounded on earlier empirical research through semi-structured interviews with scholars from across Europe, which focused on analysing their research practices and capturing the resulting information requirements for research infrastructures (Benardou, Constantopoulos & Dallas 2013). The relevance of NeMO to the DH community was validated in a series of workshops through use cases contributed by researchers. A variety of complex associative queries articulated by researchers and encoded in SPARQL, demonstrated the potential of NeMO as an effective mechanism for information extraction and reasoning with regard to the use of digital resources in scholarly work and as a knowledge base schema for documenting scholarly practices. In a recent workshop in DH2016, researchers created their own NeMO-based descriptions of projects with an easy to use tool (Constantopoulos et al 2016). 9 http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/index.html 10 https://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/people-projects 11 http://tadirah.dariah.eu/vocab/index.php 12 http://dhcommons.org/ 13 http://nedimah.eu/ 14 http://nemo.dcu.gr/ 42 Knowledge bases documenting scholarly practice through NeMO can be useful to researchers by (a) helping them find information on earlier work relevant for their own research; (b) supporting goal-oriented organization of research work; (c) facilitating the discovery of new paths with regard to resources, tools and methods; and, (d) promoting networking among researchers with common interests. In addition research groups can get support for better project planning by explicitly exposing links between goals, actors, activities, methods, resources and tools, as well as assistance for discovering methodological trends, future directions and promising research ideas. Funding agencies, on the other hand, could benefit from the kind of systematic documentation and comparative overview of project work enabled by the ontology.

This article explores the potential that community-led digital engagement with heritage holds for stimulating active citizenship through taking responsibility for shared cultural heritage and for fostering long-lasting relationships between local community heritage groups and national museums. Through the lens of a pilot project titled Science Museum: Community-in-Residence, we discovered that – despite working with community groups that were already loyal to and enjoyed existing working ties with the Science Museum in London, United Kingdom – this undertaking proved challenging owing to a range of structural and logistical issues even before the application of digital devices and tools had been considered. These challenges notwithstanding, the pilot found that the creation of time and space for face-to-face dialogue and interactions between the Science Museum and the participating community heritage groups helped to establish the parameters within which digital co-curation can effectively occur. This, in turn, informed the development of a digital prototype with huge potential to enable remote, virtual connectivity to, and interactivity with, conversations about shared heritage. The ultimate goal was twofold: (a) to help facilitate collaborative sense-making of our shared past and (b) to aid the building of sustainable institutional and community/public working ties around emerging affinities, agendas and research questions in relation to public history and heritage.

This article focuses on the 2013–2016 exhibitions in Moscow Manege which were later transformed into a network of entertainment centres (“historical parks”) Russia––my (hi)story. The exhibitions are built on multimedia technologies and include no authentic artefacts/museum objects. There is a growing network of such centres all over Russia, all organized in a similar manner, appealing to the visitor’s emotions and creating a relation of affect through the unravelling of a nationalistic historical narrative. Claimed to present “the objective picture of the Russian history” the exhibitions are following the recent developments in Russian cultural policies and history curricula. By analysing narratives presented at the “historical park” exhibitions, in policy documents and in media, this article follows the changes in public attitude towards history, which heritage is perceived as ‘difficult’ and ‘contested’ and how the digital representations influence these perceptions. Based on this analysis I argue that the reduction of the museum mechanism to only digital and multimedia form can bring along very serious issues in different political contexts. Russian historical parks enterprise, which combines the methods of fostering patriotism by the means of historical narrative templates both from the 19th and the 20th centuries, enhanced with the 21st-century technology in a form of “multimedia museums,” is only one of such examples.

Moriori culture is one of the most researched in the Pacific, and yet perhaps one of the least well understood. Until the last 30 or so years, history had consigned the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands near New Zealand to being defined as extinct and almost landless. Today Moriori are in a spirit of revival and reconnection with their identity and culture. Through the gift of the Traditional Knowledge Revival Pathways (TKRP) software system, laser scanning of rākau momori (tree carvings), and involvement in the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage (IPinCH) Project, Moriori are developing an extensive database of cultural landscapes, elder stories, traditional practices and digital records of taonga. The next stage of this research will involve development of an intranet guide to taonga Moriori (ancestral artefacts) in overseas collections. Here we explore the methods and technology that Moriori have been using to assist in the process of preserving taonga for present and future generations to enjoy.

The Geography of Art International Scientific Conference has a long history. Geography of Art began in 1994 and was originally conceived as a purely publishing project. In 2009, the first conference was held under the auspices of the Likhachev Russian Research Institute for Cultural and Natural Heritage and its director Yuri A. Vedenin. The topics at the conferences are traditionally very diverse, but the “protagonist” of all discussions, debates, and subsequent collections is invariably space, in all its guises, and its interaction with culture. The original subjects such as the geography of art schools and traditions and the placement of artifacts on the earth’s surface have over time been supplemented by conceptual questions of the construction of spatial images in painting, literature, and cinema. Over the past few years, the conference has been organized by the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of RAS, the Russian Academy of Arts, GITR Film and Television School, and the Russian State University for the Humanities. In 2021, for the first time, the conference was arranged in a hybrid format: some sessions were held in person at the Russian Academy of Arts and GITR, while some discussions were convened online. This made it possible to significantly expand the geography of our participants. An important topic was brought up—the possibility of generating images of space and transforming the spatial picture of the world by different types of art, including screen art, creating new meanings of places and regions. A separate section was devoted to the concepts of space and the corresponding images in digital media, cinematography and photography. The section discussed the peculiarities of national cinematography from the point of view of forming the country’s image, which can play a significant role in intercultural communication, and regional images created with the help of photography and IT-technology as an attractor in the formation of recreational flows. Among other things, the conference covered the specifics of space perception in the era of digitalization, the creation of representations, and spectacularity. A separate topic was the construction of narrative topoi within the framework of different versions of screen adaptations of the same work. All discussions complemented each other in creating a three-dimensional picture of spatial images by means of digital and screen arts, generating a modified reality supplemented by photo and film visualizations.

This article offers a historical analysis of 21st-century American engagements with 19th-century ornamented typography, demonstrating how this form of historicist practice constructs purposeful continuities between past and present by aligning 19th- and 21st-century modes of production. These alignments, balanced on fraught cultural divisions between handmade/machine-made and authentic/artificial, are resolutely ahistorical yet speak volumes about the dynamics of information capitalism, deindustrialization, and recession in recent US history. The analysis focuses upon two genres of neo-19th-century typographic revivals: heritage letterpress fetishism, which invokes an imagined return to authentic handcraft, and revivalist authentications of digital design practice, in which designers use the old to confer legitimacy upon the new.

In the cultural heritage digital archive, descriptive metadata makes images (re)searchable. Text-based searches seek terms that match metadata terms or terms referring to aspects of images that have previously been considered essential to select and describe in metadata terms. Such considerations are bound up with historically changing institutional agendas, ideas about user preferences, and implementation of metadata standards. This study approaches image accessibility from a different perspective. It aims to investigate how the infrastructure of the digital archive, comprising metadata and interface, intervenes with, circumscribes as well as enables, the images’ visibility and knowledge-producing capacity. The starting points are: first, that images in digital archives, exemplified by the online image collections in Alvin and DigitaltMuseum, are mediated, mediating, and “mixed” media objects that simultaneously represent the past and the present; second, that the digital archive in a media history of images functions as both a tool and an object of research. Using the platforms as tools of research, this study is based on test searches that aim to find viable search strategies for mixed media objects. The chosen search terms represent media-historically significant and common traits such as images that are combined with text and images that represent and/or mediate other images. The study discloses that the platforms give both false negatives and false positives. They do not support searches that focus media terms and relations between media elements. These problems are further related both to heterogenous metadata practices and to the simultaneously restricted and broad image concept behind them. As objects of research, both platforms are considered in relation to a future construction of a media history of images, where the digital archive is a particular node. The study demonstrates how the “hypermedial” environment associated with new media is prefigured by media interrelations in analog images – or images that are accessible as mediated through the archive’s interface and as policed by the archive’s metadata structure.

Place is central to the identity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The Narrabeen Camp Project explores the use of immersive technologies to offer opportunities to engage with Indigenous histories, Storytelling and cultural heritage in ways that privilege place. While nothing can replace being ‘on Country’, the XR technologies of AR and VR support different modalities of engagement with real, and virtual, place. The project documents the Stories, Language and Lore associated with the Gai-mariagal clan and, in particular, with the Aboriginal Camp that existed on the north-western shore of Narrabeen Lakes from the end of the last ice age to 1959 when it was demolished to make way for the Sydney Academy of Sports and Recreation. The project will investigate evolving Aboriginal Storytelling dynamics when using immersive digital media to teach culture and to document a historically important site that existed for thousands of years prior to its demolition in the mid-twentieth century. It expects to generate new knowledge about Aboriginal Storytelling and about the history of urban Aboriginals. Expected outcomes include a schema connecting Aboriginal Storytelling with immersive digital technologies, and truth-telling that advances understanding of modern Australia and urban Aboriginal people. The research should promote better mental, social and emotional health and wellbeing for Indigenous Australians and benefit all Australians culturally, socially and economically.

Libraries are more important, not less so, in a digitally networked era. Despite the fact that today's mobile devices feature Google's search box and Apple's Siri to help us find a quick answer to just about any question, we ought to be investing more capital than ever in our public libraries. We need libraries in the digital era to provide a public option to ensure sustained, free, equitable access to knowledge and preservation of our cultural and scientific heritage. In a period when both the analog and digital are useful, the design choices for those building, and reimagining, libraries are many and complex. We ought to design our libraries to meet the near-term possibilities of a networked environment, as well as the long-term requirements of democratic societies and the practice of scholarship. These design choices involve trade-offs and new commitments that may pit future activities against entrenched present-day interests. The essential design choice is between reliance on ever-more efficient interfaces, often developed by commercial outfits, and interfaces that are developed by the library community, engaging the public in coproduction and extending outward via the networked public sphere. The fate of libraries as vibrant institutions with broad public support could turn on the outcome of these design decisions. The challenges facing libraries also inform conversations about the future of other public-facing institutions, such as schools and newspapers, which are important contributors to an informed citizenry and a vital republic.

The aim of the article is to present the method of sharing and promoting the manuscript collections on the example of the 18th-century manuscript of Christian Gabriel Fischer available in the Pomeranian Digital Library (PDL). This manuscript inspired the Library of the Gdańsk University of Technology and the Institute of City Culture in Gdańsk to cooperate on a project promoting. Thanks to the joint initiative, work on the transcription of the German text written in „Kurrent” script was started and a number of events were organized to popularize both the manuscript’s content and the 18th-century calligraphy among contemporary audience. The authors used statistical information on the number of pageviews of the manuscript and the number of visits in the period from the launch of the PDL platform until May 31, 2021. In order to illustrate how popular and useful the organized events were, the authors presented the data collected by the Institute of City Culture monitoring the number of the participants of the events. The statistical data was supplemented with an analysis of the literature on the promotion of cultural heritage collections.

Malaysia and Indonesia are well known as prolific producers of batik in Southeast Asia. The history of batik in both countries is deeply intertwined for more than a century. Most available published works related to batik production, challenges, and innovations were discussed within the local batik context of each country. This study aims to identify collectively how far batik, as a creative industry in these countries has progressed since its establishment until the present 21st century. It was notable that batik craftsmanships have been mostly maintained as similar tools and techniques are persistently being used until today in both countries. Significant progress was observed in the design and stylization of the batik design with the use of digital approaches such as fractal geometry. Similar challenging problems faced by both nations were highlighted and clustered into internal and external issues. It was concluded that assimilations of Third Industrial Revolution technology (IR3.0) primarily centered on the use of computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing to improve existing batik production. Emerging studies have shown the positive impact of integrating Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4.0) technology such as augmented reality (AR) in promoting batik knowledge and transmitting batik as an intangible cultural heritage. The transmission of batik skills to the young generation has been a persistent problem. Thus, a brief framework was proposed to exemplify how IR4.0 technology can innovatively be used to transmit the batik skills via education platform.

Since 2013, the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin and the German Archeological Institute (DAI) have hosted a digital archive documenting Syrian heritage and built environment. This project was developed in the face of a war that would destroy places of cultural heritage on a large scale. The archive consists of photos, plans, and documents and includes more than 200,000 items. For long-term storage and attainability they are integrated into the digital world of the DAI. In order to raise awareness and to present the data to a wider audience, selected photos and drawings are bundled into stories on a new website with text in English, Arabic, and German. The project exhibits Syrian cultural heritage in both its tangible and nontangible aspects.

How are we to tackle digital heritage? The fact that its code can be copied, combined with a strong reliance on user interaction, is a distinguishing characteristic of digital art, one which also complicates framing it with the traditional categories of art history. Therefore, in my search for the new ways to preserve heritage, appropriate for digital objects, I will use a case study where technical and social elements play an important role and where we can already speak of a partly institutionalized network aimed at preservation, even if its identification within the field of art, or heritage, is not exactly obvious. I propose an analysis based on the research of the Polish community of pinball machine collectors. My case study will also address the question of the category of locality with regard to projects featuring seemingly universal digital elements. Reflecting on the strategies that the pinball community uses to preserve its artifacts and to animate social activity centered upon those artifacts, can help facilitate modeling at least some practices needed to preserve digital art, practices more inclusive than the traditional approaches, and uniting, even if imperfectly, rather than dividing various social groups.

Cultural heritage has a central role in sustainable development, and it has the potential to re-imagine more democratic cities. Yet, critical theory has framed cultural heritage not only as the material remains of the past, but also as a dynamic interaction of humans with their past that encompasses tangible and intangible entities. Thus, it is necessary to research these dynamics to understand the role of cultural heritage as a resource for sustainable development. In this context, the main research question of this article is: “How does heritage is shaped and managed by the ‘present’? Can we understand this process through the opportunities of digital humanities?”. To confront this question, the research adapts the counter-mapping methodology with the digital humanities perspective focusing on the urban protest movements that took place in the historic areas of Istanbul throughout the 1960s. It is seen that the spatial pattern of these movements was the result of the urban operations of the 1950s. In the 1950s, an autocratic government shaped the urban space and redefined the urban heritage to concentrate more power. However, in the 1960s, workers and students used the very same spaces and again redefined the urban heritage by exercising their social rights. Based on these results, the main conclusion is that for revealing the full potential of cultural heritage in sustainable development, it is necessary to deepen our knowledge on how heritage operates in a society, considering that heritage changes meaning depending on the socio-political context of the period.

The purpose of the article is to study the existing scientific views on the concept of “culture” in the context of the terminology “digital culture”, “cultural heritage”, “digital cultural heritage” and “cultural heritage”, their similarity and difference, which is important in the activity of archives, libraries, and museums. The methodology consists in the use of general scientific methods: analysis, synthesis, logical method, method of visualisation of research results. The methodological basis of the article is the analysis of concepts used in various spheres of humanities and in the activities of archives, libraries, and museums. The scientific novelty of the work is to expand ideas about the development of culture in a digital society. It is noted that the concept of culture is closely related to the national cultural heritage, there is considered the content of these concepts used in international law and Ukrainian law, as well as it is focused on the issues of preservation, access and promotion of cultural heritage in digital form. Conclusions. The modern cultural concept reflects the situation that has changed in the world due to the development of information technology, telecommunications, mobile communications, the global Internet, which have shaped a world of virtual reality, enabling the development of a new format of culture. There is a factor of the virtual communication cultural environment, which has incorporated the objects of digital culture, digital heritage, which are classified as “virtual heritage”. With the help of remote access, a democratisation of cultural heritage occurs, which is determined by a new format of culture, where digital culture becomes both its component and at the same time a part of the world cultural heritage. The majority of countries have changed their view of culture in recent decades. The broader, modernised vision of culture is in line with their national cultural traditions and includes areas such as the creative industries, leisure, youth culture, television, video and digital art, design and fashion, virtual museums, club culture, and more. At the current stage of development of our state, these changes are primarily due to European integration processes and the desire to represent Ukrainian culture adequately in the global information space.

Vitterhetsakademiens Library (The Library of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities) at the Swedish National Heritage Board is a partner in the development of new services in Sweden, both physically at the Library and digitally on the internet. An agreement signed by four partners in September 2007 aimed to strengthen and develop the Library’s services to the research community. In 2005 seven libraries in Stockholm formed a network with the specific aim of improving the quality of library services for research in the humanities. And in 2007 a new internet search service was launched which enables cross searching of major databases that cover various aspects of the Swedish cultural heritage; this includes two databases hosted by the Library. This process of cutting across institutional and sectoral borders has been facilitated by modern technology.

ABSTRACT The Time Trails project is a collaboration between the Centre for Intermedia at the University of Exeter, Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, 1010 Media, and Exeter City Football Club Supporters Trust (2013). It is a mobile web app to allow users to follow, annotate and create trails using text, images and videos, and to respond to them via social media. Two trails narrating the history of Exeter City Football Club and its Supporters Trust, used for mobile learning and as part of sport and cultural tourism experiences are presented. We show how Time Trails can be used as a presencing tool to establish new ways of encountering and learning on digital heritage within our daily lives.

Currently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, cultural actors are faced with the urgent problem of preserving humanitarian values using digital tools. The countries of Central Asia are laggingbehind the global process, which has introduced an imbalance in the digital presentation of world artistic heritage. The aim of this study and project is to organize an online art history of post-Soviet Asia in the complex context of human destinies, stories and facts, through the creation of an interactive book and website. During the research process, the author followed the cross-methodologies of critical analysis and digital archiving. That is, analytical constructs were founded and documented by archival materials and scientific sources through a hypertext system. In turn, the hypertext system has something in common with the philosophical concept of the "rhizome" – one of the key concepts of the philosophy of post-structuralism and post-modernism, introduced by J. Deleuze and F. Guattari. In the course of this research, materials of contemporary art from Central Asia were collected from the studios of artists, and an archiving system was developed in accordance with international standards. In 2013, the online resource astralnomads.net was developed and launched, which took its name from the unfinished novel by the artist Sergei Maslov Astral Nomads. The novel described the adventures of Kazakhstani artists on a spaceship in the future. The study asks questions about the timeliness and necessity of digital archiving of art collections. These processes are not just technical innovations here, but an indicator of the compliance of the country's cultural policy with the new humanitarian challenges of the era. Based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that, despite lagging behind global trends in archiving, the processes of digitalization of archives and art collections are gradually building up in the region. The study proposes a model of the Astral Nomads resource as a pilot project for the preservation of the heritage of art of the 20th-21st centuries.

Art history research examines objects as embedded in a web of relationships, including multiple spatial dimensions (e.g. of the materials, of the artist, of the cultural influences, of the museum collection, and of the temporary exhibitions). However, this richness of nuances is not yet fully encompassed in Linked Open Data standards. This paper aims to examine how the multiplicity of places entangled in art objects can be represented within existing vocabularies (Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, Geonames, Pleiades, Trismegistos), ontologies ( CIDOC CRM, Europeana Data Model, Linked Ancient World Data, Wikidata, LIDO) and interconnection formats (Pelagios, World Historical Gazetteer, SENESCHAL, Linked Art). In doing so, this article raises a series of questions concerning the potential and limitation of current solutions for representing geographical information. It highlights the needs for inclusive, interoperable, open and accessible features in LOD systems in spatial humanities and it traces possible areas of inquiry for further research. The article argues that there is the need to develop more granular and comprehensive solutions for encompassing the multiplicity of places that can be enclosed in an art object, and its itineraries across time and space.

The practice of digitizing cultural heritage sites is gaining ground among conservation scientists and scholars in architecture, art history, computer science, and related fields. Recently, the location of such sites in areas of intense conflict has highlighted the urgent need for documenting cultural heritage for the purposes of preservation and posterity. The complex histories of such sites requires more than just their digitization, and should also include the meaningful interpretation of buildings and their surroundings with respect to context and intangible values. Project Anqa is an interdisciplinary and multi-partner effort that goes beyond simple digitization to record at-risk heritage sites throughout the Middle East and Saharan Africa, most notably in Syria and Iraq, before they are altered or destroyed. Through a collaborative process, Anqa assembles documentation, historically contextualizes it, and makes data accessible and useful for scholars, peers, and the wider public through state-of-the-art tools. The aim of the project is to engage in capacity-building on the ground in Syria and Iraq, as well as to create an educational web platform that informs viewers about cultural heritage in the region through research, digital storytelling, and the experience of virtual environments.

ABSTRACT This article briefly considers the question of how the status of archival artifacts as objects of cultural memory and heritage is affected by the transformations of digitization, digital manipulation, and analysis. It considers the role of the scholar, teacher, and student in the ethical employment of the methods of digital humanities when working with archival materials.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the need for developing an Indian cultural heritage information system (CHIS) where the cultural heritages can efficiently document, manage and preserve and integrate with a searchable user interface mechanism. Further, the study scopes out the feasibility of developing single-window comprehensive national CHIS for all the cultural heritage properties of India enlisted in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO’s) World Heritage list. Design/methodology/approach Conservation efforts and their sustenance require the support of a knowledge base cum digital archiving and information retrieval tool. The present study identifies the basic requirements, strategies and the execution of designing a reliable information system for cultural heritage inheritances to safeguard them to facilitate access to the current and future resilient communities. Approach on issues and challenges associated while developing such an information system has also been addressed with possible recommendations. Findings In India, even though regional level conservation efforts are occurring, no comprehensive information system, which gives the whole perspective of the item or environment of heritage site, has been developed for the heritage sites recognized by UNESCO in its World Heritage list from India. Developing such a comprehensive digital archive for cultural heritage helps to showcase its assets and ensures its visibility globally without hampering the physical form. Application Information and Communication Technology and digital technologies can extensively be used coupled with mechanisms such as mobile devices, digital systems and content visualization techniques to support the efficient and effective management in a systemized way. Research limitations/implications As a pilot study, this paper examined the cultural heritage properties incorporated in the UNESCO World list. There are many lesser-known and unprotected cultural heritages in different parts of the country having artistic value and the unique characteristics, and the possibility of building the similar kind of information system for them with innovative technological solutions are not covered under this study. Practical implications Access to such an exclusive digital archive in a single-window platform would greatly support administrators, tourist departments, culture departments, development administration and conservation activists. The digital version of cultural inheritances created under the cultural heritage of India must have relevance to different subject fields such as history, archeology, manuscript logy, art, administration, knowledge management, computer science and library science. Also, it ensures that the resources remain accessible to the public without any restrictions provided with a comprehensive recapitulation. Originality/value To the authors’ best knowledge, no such comprehensive system envisages or is practiced in the country. Developing such a system with technological and data infrastructure also helps to understand the value, support the activities related to cultural heritage and bring the local community to support and initiate such heritage conservation activities.

This paper responds to a need to address the colonial history of collections of Egyptian archaeology and to find new ways in which Egyptian audiences can assume greater agency in such a process. The ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’ project presents a model of engagement whereby foreign museum collections become the inspiration for Egyptians to express their own feelings about the removal of their heritage abroad using idioms and traditional storytelling of cultural relevance to them. A series of online comics confronting contentious heritage issues, including the display of mummified human remains, eugenics, looting and destruction, is discussed. It is argued that this approach is not only more relatable for Egyptian communities, but moreover provides space for the development of grass-roots critique of heritage practices, both in the UK and in Egypt. Museums have a responsibility to take on board these critiques, curating not just objects but relationships forged amongst them in historical and contemporary society.

Throughout history, libraries and archives have been the guardians of the documentary heritage of mankind. Given the rapid evolution of the new technologies, safeguarding the cultural heritage becomes more and more the concern of specialists. One of the essential goals of archival and library services is to facilitate access to the documents or materials in their care, thus ensuring that that cultural heritage is kept alive and can be an object of research and enrichment. Their other important mission is to preserve the materials in their care so that cultural heritage may be passed on intact to future generations, since the future of a nation, a people, or a community is unthinkable without knowledge of its past. Preservation and access to the collection are the main objectives of the digitization project that was implemented recently in our museum with the help of international organizations and collaborators.One of the main goals of the Gramophone Records Museum and Research Centre of Ghana (GRMRC) is the preservation and the promotion of the nation's musical patrimony. The museum is located in Cape Coast. It is presently situated inside the building of the Centre for National Culture (CNC) just opposite the main gate of the University of Cape Coast. The museum was founded by Kwame Sarpong on the basis of his private collection, spanning over 40 years of music. From the modest beginnings in one small room inside the CNC building, it has grown to occupy an exhibition room, the archives and documentation rooms, and an office.

The research paper deals with innovations brought about in educational programs bythe national strategic program "Cultural Heritage" (2004-2011), developed for studying, restoring and keeping the historical and cultural heritage of the country; reviving historical and cultural traditions; propaganda of material and spiritual heritage of the Republic of Kazakhstan abroad. The program’s contribution to the development of secondary and higher education in the country is estimated on the basis of comprehensive analysis of the results of various studies which have contributed to the formation of innovation in educational processes of Kazakhstan in the context of Eurasia. All this is made through identification of common trends in various scientific studies on humanitarian grounds, review of similar research in the world. The main chronological range of historical processes reconstructed for implementation into educational programs, is determined from the Paleolithic era to the ethnographic present. Keywords: Humanities, innovations in education, archeology, culture and art, ancient and medieval history of Eurasia, national program "Cultural Heritage".

In the world of digital technology, overwhelmed with information and content, digitalization is often perceived as a process of alienation. This article will challenge that perception and demonstrate that digital museums actually present a unique opportunity to develop interest in art and attracting people not only to art in general but to on-site cultural institutions as well. Digital museums can, among other roles, assume the role of interpreting cultural heritage, but are also the best way to attract a young au-dience to art. This article examines the opportunities provided by digital technology for museums in terms of communication and dissemination of knowledge. The particular emphasis will be on the use of digital collections as well as on connecting and interacting with the public, particularly with a young au-dience. If there was any doubt about the importance and influence of digital museums, the COVID-19 pandemic was a final proof that digital museums have a much greater value than is generally admitted, and that they have become an indispensable part of the overall museum experience in all museums that have been able to develop them as a part of overall museum strategy.

The article deals with the transformation of cultural diplomacy in the context of modern international relations. Based on the analysis of scientific works, the proposed study understands cultural diplomacy as a foreign policy activity aimed at the development of intercultural and intercivilizational dialogue, which makes it possible to broadcast their own cultural codes at the world level: lifestyle, history, traditions, art and even worldview. However, taking into account the ongoing geopolitical changes and the transition to a “new” normality, it makes sense to study what metamorphoses are introduced by external circumstances in the implementation of cultural diplomacy. Starting in 2021, international and regional organizations are increasingly holding studies and conferences on the impact of the pandemic on culture, as well as the need to include culture in the sustainable development agenda. Based on theoretical studies in the field of digitalization of cultural diplomacy, as well as reports from UNESCO and the EU, such as, for example, “UNESCO. Culture Shock: COVID-19 and the Cultural and Creative Sectors” “Increasing the resilience of cultural heritage to climate change: where the European Green Deal meets cultural heritage”, the author draws attention to the changes in the discourse of cultural diplomacy, namely: the inclusion of culture in the international agenda for climate, achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals and digitalization. At the same time, the understanding of culture in world politics as an instrument of intercultural dialogue is gradually being eroded and replaced by its acceptance as a common good within the framework of the "green" concept.

Museums need an interactive data collection and visualisation tool for their artefacts. This paper describes a study in which we enable access to Chinese and Japanese cultural heritage information from two history museums, the National Palace Museum in Taiwan and the Tokugawa Art Museum in Japan. Results from these museum databases were used to develop a prototype system to demonstrate advanced cultural learning and historical timeline functionalities for foreigners. This system is based on temporal data from the museums’ databases, and provided the user with powerful data manipulation and graphical visualisation tools. It might become a basis of an interactive digital museum system for Chinese and Japanese heritages especially for foreign users.

Digital objects and documentation of intangible cultural heritage pose new challenges for most museums, which have a long history in preserving tangible objects. Art museums, however, have been working with digital objects for some decades, as they have been collecting media art. Yet, performance art as an ephemeral art form has been a challenge for art museums’ collection work. This article presents a method for archiving digital and audiovisual performance documentation. D-ark (digital performance art archive) is based on a joint effort by the artist community T.E.H.D.A.S., which has created the archive, and Pori Art Museum, which is committed to preserving the archive for the future. The aim is to produce sufficient standardized metadata to support this objective. This article addresses the problems of documenting an ephemeral art form and copyright issues pertaining to both the artist and the videographer. The concept of D-ark includes a modular metadata schema that makes a distinction between descriptive, administrative, and technical metadata. The model is designed to be flexible—new modules of objects or technical metadata can be added in the future, if necessary. D-ark metadata schema deploys the FRBRoo, Premis, VideoMD, and AudioMD standards. Administrative and technical metadata modules abide by Finnish digital preservation specifications.

The articles in the present volume are the result of two workshops held at the Norwegian Institute in Rome that are both robustly disciplinary, but simultaneously raise issues beyond the disciplinary bounds of art history (into philosophy, history of ideas and history) and archaeology (into criminology, heritage studies and contemporary sociology and politics). The first was organised by DniR-researcher Mattia Biffis in October 2019, The Art of Truth: Providing Evidence in Early Modern Bologna. The second section is based on a digital workshop organised by DniR-researcher Samuel Hardy in collaboration with the Heritage Experience Initiative project at the University of Oslo in October 2020, Handling of Cultural Goods and Financing of Political Violence. On cover:ANNIBALE CARRACCI (BOLOGNA 1560 - ROME 1609), An Allegory of Truth and Time c. 1584-1585. Oil on canvas | 130,0 x 169,6 cm. (support, canvas/panel/str external) | RCIN 404770Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021.

Highlights: Despite being a transcendental cultural manifestation in the history of humanity, there are hardly any open-access virtual repertoires of Palaeolithic art. The numerous photogrammetric studies carried out in successive archaeological campaigns to answer scientific questions can be used in educational and dissemination projects. In the framework of the authors’ outreach project called "PaleoArt-3D: regreso al pasado" a virtual museum has been created to make Palaeolithic art a more accessible and democratic heritage. Abstract: Palaeolithic art is a cultural manifestation of great importance to understanding the early history of our species. Through this artistic phenomenon, one can study aspects such as long-distance contacts, evidence of learning or the perception with which Palaeolithic humans were able to execute and memorise such precise details. However, there are few virtual repertoires that offer collections of Palaeolithic art. Accessibility to this type of archaeological remains is even more difficult considering conservation is prioritised over tourist visits. For these reasons, Palaeolithic art is today a type of cultural asset that is largely unknown to the population. The project "PaleoArt-3D: regreso al pasado" was created with the aim of democratising this heritage and making it more accessible. To this end, a virtual museum has been developed to exhibit digital models of parietal and portable art with complementary annotations for each one. The methodology includes a first stage dedicated to digitising examples of Palaeolithic art in caves or open-air stations and exhibited in Spanish and French museums. Next, the necessary infrastructure was designed to house the exhibition using specific software such as Blender. Post-processing tasks were carried out to reducing the number of polygons without losing quality. Finally, the museum has been uploaded to the Sketchfab platform to make it freely available online. It is hoped that this virtual museum will contribute to promoting and creating a more significant number of digital resources related to Palaeolithic art that are easily accessible to the public.

It is interesting to consider the evolution of jewelry status in the history of culture and its role in intercultural interactions in the correlation of periods of conceptual social transformations. The purpose of the study is to examine the main cultural approaches to the development process, to identify current trends in the study of cultural diffusions in the context of jewelry art. The motives and functions of jewelry are analyzed, the systematization carried out allows us to determine the place of jewelry in intercultural interactions on the example of ancient Asian cultures (Tibet, Mongolia, small peoples of China), which have significant both material and spiritual heritage and show signs of cultural diffusion, permeability. This civilizational community is imbued with a large amount of influences that have their own patterns: directions and rhythms. The traditional jewelry art of this region demonstrates a variety of technologies and materials with their stylistic continuity, common cultural roots. The study considers a question of the origin of jewelry, which most likely arose simultaneously with the appearance of clothing, costume complex, is an integral part of human civilization, and undoubtedly had a huge impact on its evolution. Conclusion: the identification of markers of cultural diffusion through a comprehensive comparative-typological analysis of genres, materials, and artistic style in the traditional jewelry art of Central Asia, including the small peoples of southern China, Mongolia and Tibet in the modern author’s jewelry art of the Stroganov school through the prism of innovations of the shaping of the Russian avant-garde of 1910–1920 just define the main culturological approaches.

In the context of digital humanities and access to cultural heritage online, this paper explores the discoverability of Late Antique material in some searchable museum collections and in some major archaeological and art historical image and object databases. It follows an exploratory approach by using simple keyword searches, such as ‘late antique’ or ‘byzantine’, and comparing the results with chronological searches when a date or period filter is available. Although Late Antique material often comprises a smaller number of objects compared to more popular periods like the Roman and the Renaissance, these are difficult to research due to inconsistent labelling practices and the frequent lack of a customizable date range filter. The ongoing debates on proper periodization and nomenclature also need to be taken into consideration.

AbstractThis article reports on survey work carried out in December and January 2004/5 to identify and record rock engravings in the Wadi al-Hayat (previously called the Wadi al-Ajal). This work builds on previous surveys carried out under the aegis of the Fezzan Archaeological Project (FAP) (Barnett 2002; Barnett and Roberts 2003; Mattingly et al. 2003).During this season, systematic survey identified over 300 engraved panels which included all stylistic ‘phases’ known to be present in the wadi (Barnett in Mattingly et al. 2003). When these engravings are incorporated into the spatial distribution model derived from previous field seasons, the preliminary patterns this model describes are no longer wholly applicable. Instead, a more complex and subtle spatial distribution is indicated, in which there appears to be the interplay of several separate relationships between die engravings and die cultural landscape. To avoid misleading interpretation, detailed analysis of die rock art and integration with cultural and environmental data will be attempted only once a full dataset has been gathered on completion of the fieldwork. In the meantime, this paper describes what has been achieved this season. It presents a broad overview of the patterns of rock art distribution as they appear so far with an incomplete dataset and points die way to future fieldwork.One of the key additional aims of the fieldwork this season was to develop an appropriate recording ʿtoolkitʾ. This included piloting state-of-the-art digital technology to establish its accessibility and value in this environment. Working in collaboration with a team from the University of Bristol, die project applied surface laser scanning to capture 3-dimensional digital data from 14 separate engraved panels. This is die first time this technique has been used to record rock art in North Africa and this provided an unprecedented opportunity to explore its potential for future heritage applications.

Rock art is one of the most fragile and relevant cultural phenomena in world history, carried out in shelters or the walls and ceilings of caves with mineral and organic substances. The fact it has been preserved until now can be considered as fortunate since both anthropogenic and natural factors can cause its disappearance or deterioration. This is the reason why rock art needs special conservation and protection measures. The emergence of digital technologies has made a wide range of tools and programs available to the community for a more comprehensive documentation of rock art in both 2D and 3D. This paper shows a workflow that makes use of visible and near-infrared hyperspectral technology to manage, monitor and preserve this appreciated cultural heritage. Hyperspectral imaging is proven to be an efficient tool for the recognition of figures, coloring matter, and state of conservation of such valuable art.

This article explores the work of the artist Lorna Selim in the context of a period of modernization and urbanization in Baghdad, the city she moved to in 1950 with her husband, fellow artist Jewad Selim. Following the neglect and destruction of thousands of traditional houses in Baghdad, the landscape of the city was changing rapidly over time. Modernist architects and planners fuelled these changes, with little consideration for issues of conservation. I aim to show the impact of a variety of policies, historical events and new architectural trends on the Iraqi environment, and show how Lorna captured a snapshot of Iraqi cultural and architectural history which has since been lost.

The article deals with the methodological foundations of the biographical method in the context of digital humanities. The bidirectional character of biography leads us to the problem’s methodological level: social predicament of the individual world and reciprocal determinability of the social world by the individual world. The biographical method is closely linked to thematization of subjectivity. The biographical method’ s methodological problems are connected with context, reference, authenticity, and reflexivity. The authors link the biographical method with memory studies and emphasize that the turn to memory is associated with many theoretical questions and controversies related to the status of history as a science and its relation to the field of human memory. The multidirectional biography studies reveal the lack of a conceptual apparatus, common for the interdisciplinary space of humanities, which allows to develop the criteria for comparability of scientific research results. The authors associate the further development of the biographical method with the development of the modern information society. They note the prospects of using the methods of digital humanities associated with the search, selection and analysis of texts presented in digital form. The rationale for this thesis is that at present there is a constant increase of electronic texts that can be used both for the development of the biographical method and serve as its empirical base. The article demonstrates the possibility of applying the biographical method using the tools of digital humanities on the examples of research on the history of science, which are part of the world’s cultural heritage.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to situate the activity of digitisation to increase access to cultural and heritage content alongside the objectives of the Open Access Movement (OAM). It demonstrates that increasingly open licensing of digital cultural heritage content is creating opportunities for researchers in the arts and humanities for both access to and analysis of cultural heritage materials. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is primarily a literature and scoping review of the current digitisation licensing climate, using and embedding examples from ongoing research projects and recent writings on Open Access (OA) and digitisation to highlight both opportunities and barriers to the creation and use of digital heritage content from galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM). Findings – The digital information environment in which digitised content is created and delivered has changed phenomenally, allowing the sharing and reuse of digital data and encouraging new advances in research across the sector, although issues of licensing persist. There remain further opportunities for understanding how to: study use and users of openly available cultural and heritage content; disseminate and encourage the uptake of open cultural data; persuade other institutions to contribute their data into the commons in an open and accessible manner; build aggregation and search facilities to link across information sources to allow resource discovery; and how best to use high-performance computing facilities to analyse and process the large amounts of data the author is now seeing being made available throughout the sector. Research limitations/implications – It is hoped that by pulling together this discussion, the benefits to making material openly available have been made clear, encouraging others in the GLAM sector to consider making their collections openly available for reuse and repurposing. Practical implications – This paper will encourage others in the GLAM sector to consider licensing their collections in an open and reusable fashion. By spelling out the range of opportunities for researchers in using open cultural and heritage materials it makes a contribution to the discussion in this area. Social implications – Increasing the quantity of high-quality OA resources in the cultural heritage sector will lead to a richer research environment which will increase the understanding of history, culture and society. Originality/value – This paper has pulled together, for the first time, an overview of the current state of affairs of digitisation in the cultural and heritage sector seen through the context of the OAM. It has highlighted opportunities for researchers in the arts, humanities and social and historical sciences in the embedding of open cultural data into both their research and teaching, whilst scoping the wave of cultural heritage content which is being created from institutional repositories which are now available for research and use. As such, it is a position paper that encourages the open data agenda within the cultural and heritage sector, showing the potentials that exists for the study of culture and society when data are made open.

The H2020 project rurAllure, “Promotion of rural museums and heritage sites in the vicinity of European pilgrimage routes” (2021-2023) aims to enrich pilgrims’ experiences with the creation of meaningful cultural products focused on the lesser-known heritage sites of rural areas that are not found on pilgrimage routes, but in their surroundings. One of the project goals is to create contents and narratives to be offered to pilgrims over successive days with the integration of state-of-the-art technology. This way, hidden rural heritage will be discoverable and pilgrims will have the opportunity to actively engage with rural places nearby, their local communities, identity, and culture. The latter will no longer be passive witnesses, but active participants in transnational networks of shared history and living heritage. The rurAllure project aims to develop a new concept of mobile guide for pilgrims that will present rural heritage sites and activities of interest along with information of transportation and accommodation to help movement from and back to pilgrimage routes, as well as cohesive narratives to be consumed along the way, focused on four pilots: literary heritage on the ways to Santiago de Compostela, thermal heritage and others on the ways to Rome, ethnographic heritage on the ways to Trondheim, and natural heritage on the ways to Csíksomlyó. To facilitate the pilots’ brainstorming in the creation of multimedia contents, we developed a review of narrative models on cultural heritage storytelling. In this paper, we present the results, a collection of 22 case studies we analyzed with a common structure, from which six distinctive groups of narrative practices emerge: sound-walks, wearable guides, context-aware games, simulations, digital exhibitions, and cultural wayfinding. All cases studies disrupt traditional notions of storytelling consumption and foster new relationships between people and places of interest that may lead to advancements in the pilgrimage context.

The Bentham Papers Transcription Initiative 2 (Transcribe Bentham for short) is an award-winning crowdsourced manuscript transcription initiative which engages students, researchers, and the general public with the thought and life of the philosopher and reformer, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), by making available digital images of his manuscripts for anyone, anywhere in the world, to transcribe. Since its launch in September 2010, over 2.6 million words have been transcribed by volunteers. This paper will examine Transcribe Bentham's contribution to humanities research and the burgeoning field of digital humanities. It will then discuss the potential for the project's volunteers to make significant new discoveries among the vast Bentham Papers collection, and examine several examples of interesting material transcribed by volunteers thus far. We demonstrate here that a crowd-sourced initiative such as Transcribe Bentham can open up activities that were traditionally viewed as academic endeavors to a wider audience interested in history, whilst uncovering new, important historical primary source material. In addition, we see this as a switch in focus for those involved in digital humanities, highlighting the possibilities in using online and social media technologies for user engagement and participation in cultural heritage.

Recent advances in semantic web and deep learning technologies enable new means for the computational analysis of vast amounts of information from the field of digital humanities. We discuss how some of the techniques can be used to identify historical and cultural symmetries between different characters, locations, events or venues, and how these can be harnessed to develop new strategies to promote intercultural and cross-border aspects that support the teaching and learning of history and heritage. The strategies have been put to the test in the context of the European project CrossCult, revealing enormous potential to encourage curiosity to discover new information and increase retention of learned information.

The work is devoted to the substantiation of new research methods used to examine the writer's creative heritage and the concept of Dostoevsky's digital archive. The first part of the article provides examples of the use of online information technologies to create electronic archives of literary and historical texts from different eras, highlight the distinct and common features of the created archival collections, and analyze the principles of material presentation. The material for this part of the research was obtained from the most respectable foreign and Russian Internet portals, which display historical and literary collections and funds associated with various cultural traditions and personas. Each such electronic collection was created on the basis of extensive, sometimes decades-long, scientific work aimed at collecting handwritten and printed sources, restoring handwritten materials, their textual research, studying their creative and non-creative history, determining the methodology of working with them and the concept of their textual and digital reproduction, as well as extensive preparatory work on the selection of technical equipment and digitization of texts. In most cases, such digital archives are not only a place to store sources; they continue to serve research purposes and contain the results and examples of scientific research. In the second part of the article, the tasks of the Dostoevsky digital archive as a collection of texts and a scientific laboratory for the study of the writer's handwritten and printed heritage are formulated. The article substantiates the first stage of research work on the creation of a catalog of Dostoevsky's verbal and non-verbal graphics, based on the combination of modern software methods and textual analysis.

The 19th-century Italian art critic Giovanni Morelli contributed significantly to the theory and practice of attribution of paintings by prominent Renaissance masters. His methods, based on the profound knowledge of human anatomy and the analysis of artists’ professional skills, influenced not only the history of visual arts but also the development of forensic science, forensic medicine, the theory of psychoanalysis, and the practice of psychotherapy. The article provides the analysis of Giovanni Morelli’s scientific heritage for the identification and attribution of the works of fine art and for solving forensic tasks requiring the investigation of human skills and habits.Morelli’s methods and the capabilities of a comprehensive forensic study of artistic and cultural values with the involvement of the appropriate instrumental base and specialized knowledge in the field of art history, forensic traceology, and materials science, as well as digital technologies, can significantly increase the reliability of the results of attribution activities of museums, art scientists, experts of world auction houses and amateur collectors.

The article considers the need to republish the texts of classical Russian literature in general, as well as the creative heritage of F. M. Dostoevsky in particular, in the author's orthography. The author analyzes the key cultural and technological obstacles on the path to drawing the attention of the public and the scientific community to the problem of insufficient number of books published in traditional orthography. A set of practices and solutions that contribute to changing the current situation in the long and short term is proposed. Based on historical experience, as well as the work of modern researchers in the field of textual studies, the socio-cultural functioning of traditional spelling in Russia at the present time is highlighted. This is the language in which the Russian classics were created. Rehabilitation and functioning of traditional spelling involves the capacity to write and publish your texts in scientific and business communication. It is necessary to encourage the use of traditional orthography in professional literary-critical and linguistic activities. Technical issues need to be addressed, in particular, the introduction of a new standard for the Russian keyboard layout, the development of information and reference services on the history of the Russian language, tools and technologies for creating electronic texts. Creating the digital Dostoevsky can help solve the problems of the variable use of traditional Russian writing.