• DARIAH EU
• Publicationsclose
• 2014-2023close
• Part of book or chapter of book close
• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage close

This book is a collection of seventeen papers which describe the impact that the ARIADNE project and its successor, ARIADNEplus (2019-2022) have had on the archaeological community, both in Europe and further afield. Each case study has been contributed by organisations involved in the ARIADNE Infrastructure who cover many countries from across Europe as well as Argentina and Japan. These papers were originally presented at the CAA Conference in Krakow, April 2019 and cover aspects such as data management, application of standards and guidelines, the use of CIDOC-CRM and Open Data to name but a few.

Within the EU funded project “INCEPTION – Inclusive Cultural Heritage in Europe through 3D semantic modelling”, the use and application of H-BIM data is focused at. The project realizes innovation in 3D modelling of cultural heritage through an inclusive approach for time-dynamic 3D reconstruction of built and social environments.

In this chapter I will describe what the CLARIN infrastructure is and how it can be used, with a focus on the Low Countries (and especially the Netherlands) part of the CLARIN infrastructure. I aim to explain how a Humanities researcher can use the CLARIN infrastructure. I describe the basic functionality that CLARIN aims to offer, including searching for data and software, applying software to data, and storing data and software resulting from research.

Oral archives and digital technologies have gone hand-in-hand for a very long time. Both sides benefit from this interdisciplinary junction: technology enhances the preservation and diffusion of oral materials, while exploiting them to develop cutting-edge tools for their treatment. This chapter deals with an Italian instantiation of this mutual relationship: the Archivio Vi.Vo. project. Offering innovative solutions concerning metadata, audio restoration, description, and access, Archivio Vi.Vo. aims to build an online platform to host the oral archives from Tuscany. The project is powered by CLARIN-IT, which guarantees its compliance with standards and offers resources for data access and discoverability. Archivio Vi.Vo. has not been built from scratch: it is instead a cross-fertilization of previous initiatives and research projects (e.g., the Gra.fo project). Moreover, the chapter presents the related, contemporary work of a multidisciplinary group striving to synthesize a Vademecum for future generations of oral archive researchers. Lastly, a brief list of tentative ideas for future developments of the Archivio Vi.Vo. platform will be presented.

Introduction to the Conference.

The paper is about recent national and European legislation on data re-use. It argues that the time has come to realize that Open Access and copyright ought not to oppose each other. They should instead find ways to balance each other. Open Access is necessary for government-sponsored data. The industrial and creative industry cannot simply give up copyright; it must keep it in order to survive on the market. On the other hand, the industrial and creative industry ought to be allowed to make use of government-sponsored data. Legislation is on the way.

The ongoing EU funded INCEPTION project proposes a significant improvement in the 3D modelling for the enhancement of Cultural Heritage knowledge by the use of a BIM approach for the semantic enrichment and management of models. Indeed, when used in the CH field, semantic BIM will be able to connect different users (e.g. scholars, technicians, citizens, governments), supporting the need for interpretation of the cultural heritage model.

The co-operative model is a key concept of ICCU’s cultural policy. The Institute is responsible for some of the most important national infrastructures for accessing heritage and documentation of the Italian libraries, and over the years it has adopted an increasingly open data policy to facilitate the use and reuse of digital cultural heritage on an international scale. ICCU has a profound expertise in digitisation standards and guidelines; it manages the National Library Service, the union catalogue of over 6,000 Italian libraries and it coordinates, on behalf of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage Activities and Tourism, major digital cultural heritage projects at a national level such as Internet Culturale, the portal of the digital resources of Italy’s libraries, and CulturaItalia, the national aggregator for Europeana. ICCU also manages MuseiD-Italia, the digital library of the Italian museums, integrated in CulturaItalia portal. ICCU participates in many international initiatives for strengthening the cohesion of research and technical and semantic interoperability in the sector of cultural heritage, humanities, history and linguistic studies in order to create a digital ecosystem and effective e-infrastructures that can offer innovative tools and services able to exploit synergies and cooperative workflows in these related domains. The paper presents the main projects and activities carried out by ICCU at national and international levels that are investigating political and technical issues of the relation between the DCH sector and research infrastructures.

The ongoing EU funded project “INCEPTION – Inclusive Cultural Heritage in Europe through 3D semantic modelling” proposes a workflow aimed at the achievements of efficient 3D digitization methods, post-processing tools for an enriched semantic modelling, web-based solutions and applications to ensure a wide access to experts and non-experts. Nevertheless, the generation of high quality 3D models can still be very time-consuming and expensive, and the outcome of digital reconstructions is frequently provided in formats that are not interoperable, and therefore cannot be easily accessed. This challenge is even more crucial for complex architectures and large heritage sites, which involve a large amount of data to be acquired, managed and enriched by metadata. In order to face these challenges and to start solving the issues of the large amount of captured data and time-consuming processes in the production of 3D digital models, an Optimized Data Acquisition Protocol (DAP) has been set up. The purpose is to guide the processes of digitization of Cultural Heritage, respecting needs, requirements and specificities of cultural assets, by dealing with issues such as time-consuming processes and limited budget available for 3D documentation, accuracy of 3D models, integration of metadata and semantics into the 3D model and links with multimedia information. The DAP can be followed during the planning and performing of a 3D laser scanner survey of Cultural Heritage, and it is referred to architectural, archaeological, urban and site scales.

Digital history has spawned many great individual projects, and proven its value as both a methodology for the interrogation of sources and as a medium for the presentation and communication of research results. But the experiences of projects building research infrastructure for historical research raise the question of whether these methods can scale toward the realisation of historical ‘big data,’ or whether there are hindrances to this goal inherent in our current conceptualisation of the intersection between historical methods and computational ones. This paper discusses a number of the current barriers discovered by large-scale historical research infrastructure projects, including heterogeneous conceptions of what data is, hidden elements of data and the epistemics of humanities research. At the project level, these issues can be managed, but if digital history is to scale and grow to fit the infrastructural capability available to it, then a revisiting of some of the conceptual underpinnings of digital historical studies will be required.