Digital Curation for Cultural Heritage

This research explores immersive experiences in the context of cultural heritage exhibitions with an interdisciplinary approach through design, curation, and digital sciences. We have a twofold goal: on the one hand, we examine digital interpretive tools of cultural heritage exhibits that realize an effective communication and multisensory experience through narration, on the other, we explore what kind of strategies and technical approaches can be used in design, implementation and evaluation of such productions in order to establish effective methods for the interaction of the audience with cultural heritage exhibits. Furthermore, it addresses the impact of digital technologies on the realization of interpretive tools of cultural heritage, especially for multisensory visitor experiences; in this respect, it also investigates the origins and interpretations of the term 'immersive experience'. The specific research goal is the development of a framework for studying how digitised (meta)data that contain valuable information about some cultural heritage exhibit can be best exploited and possibly directly integrated for the realization of some immersive interpretive tool. It focuses on the intersection of design, science, technology and cultural heritage studies with a view to not only identifying the role of each paradigmatic area and the methods of implementation but also aiming to create a framework to help to understand the opportunities for collaboration in the creation of successful outcomes for exhibits, both in-situ and online.

Cultural heritage management is a multiple-perspective enterprise where several disciplines and practices contribute to successful dissemination and communication. Digital data in support of cultural heritage management are addressed by the digital curation process, which has been emerging to account for the diversity of disciplinary communities and cultural heritage organizations. Digital curation addresses the diversity of participating skills and practices by working on the relationship between the cultural heritage objects and their digital counterparts. In particular, the innumerable initiatives for providing access to cultural heritage data are ideally coordinated by digital curation and are part of the process since the beginning. However, some thorough reflections on its role and implementation in cultural heritage institutions yet lack. In this paper, we provide a survey of the digital curation process, by unpacking the component curatorial tasks, with the solutions that have been proposed in the literature and in the application projects to account for the multiple perspectives at hand.