Rethinking Scholarly Digital Objects as Cultural Heritage: the KNOT Project
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/21188Keywords:
Digital Humanities, Digital Cultural Heritage, Italian Universities, Documentation, AIUCD2024Abstract
The KNOT project is a three-year pilot tasked with investigating ways to integrate the digital cultural heritage (DCH) of Italian universities within the national infrastructure being developed by the Ministry of Culture. To do this, KNOT argues for rethinking the digital objects produced by academic research projects as interesting and, so far, unexplored examples of this DCH deserving of more attention and worthy of integration into the national infrastructure. This article discusses the key steps in the development of a conceptual framework in support of this argument starting with 1) the definition of these objects and identification of the potential heritage values they hold, 2) the selection of the humanities, and in particular the digital humanities, as the academic field from which to select them, 3) the development and publication of a data model and catalogue, and 4) some of the key issues that arose during this work around the classification, documentation, and visibility of these objects.
References
Borek, Luise, Quinn Dombrowski, Jody Perkins, and Christof Schöch. 2014. “Scholarly Primitives Revisited: Towards A Practical Taxonomy of Digital Humanities Research Activities and Objects.” Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.10866.
Borek, Luise, Quinn Dombrowski, Jody Perkins, and Christof Schöch. 2016. “TaDiRAH: A Case Study in Pragmatic Classification.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 10 (1). https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/1/000235/000235.html.
Borgman, Christine L. 1999. “What Are Digital Libraries? Competing Visions.” Information Processing & Management 35 (3): 227–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0306-4573(98)00059-4.
Bruseker, George, Nicola Carboni, and Anaïs Guillem. 2017. “Cultural Heritage Data Management: The Role of Formal Ontology and CIDOC CRM.” In Heritage and Archaeology in the DigitalAge, 93–131. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65370-9_6
Cameron, Fiona R. 2021. The Future of Digital Data, Heritage and Curation: In a More-than-Human World. London, England: Routledge.
Carriero, Valentina Anita, Aldo Gangemi, Maria Letizia Mancinelli, Ludovica Marinucci, Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese, Valentina Presutti, and Chiara Veninata. 2019. “ArCo: The Italian Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph.” In Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 36–52. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30796-7_3
Ciula, Arianna, Øyvind Eide, Cristina Marras, and Patrick Sahle. 2018. “Models and Modelling between Digital and Humanities. Remarks from a Multidisciplinary Perspective.” GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. https://doi.org/10.12759/HSR.43.2018.4.343-361.
Cox, Simon J. D., Alejandra N. Gonzalez-Beltran, Barbara Magagna, and Maria-Cristina Marinescu. 2021. “Ten Simple Rules for Making a Vocabulary FAIR.” PLoS Computational Biology 17 (6): e1009041. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009041.
Daquino, Marilena, Mari Wigham, Enrico Daga, Lucia Giagnolini, and Francesca Tomasi. 2023. “CLEF. A Linked Open Data Native System for Crowdsourcing.” Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). https://doi.org/10.1145/3594721.
Donato, Fabio, and Enrica Gilli. 2011. “Un Approccio ‘Multi-Scala’ per La Gestione Del Patrimonio Culturale Italiano.” https://doi.org/10.13138/2039-2362/118.
Fafinski, Mateusz. 2022. “Facsimile Narratives: Researching the Past in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 37 (1): 94–108. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab017.
Franzini, Greta, Melissa Terras, and Simon Mahony. 2019. “Digital Editions of Text: Surveying User Requirements in the Digital Humanities.” Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 12 (1): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3230671.
Frosini, Luca, Alessia Bardi, Paolo Manghi and Pasquale Pagano. 2018. “An Aggregation Framework for Digital Humanities Infrastructures: The PARTHENOS Experience.” SCIRES-IT 8 (1). https://doi.org/10.2423/i22394303v8n1p33.
Giacomini, Sebastiano, Marilena Daquino, Francesca Tomasi, and Laurent Antoine Fintoni. 2025. “CLEF 2.0. Solutions for Native Linked Data Cataloguing of Italian Digital Cultural Heritage.” JLIS.It 16 (1): 108–26. https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-611.
Gibbs, Fred, and Trevor Owens. 2012. “Building Better Digital Humanities Tools: Toward Broader Audiences and User-Centered Designs.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 6 (2). https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/2/000136/000136.html.
Grant, Kaitlyn, Quinn Dombrowski, Kamal Ranaweera, Omar Rodriguez-Arenas, Stéfan Sinclair, and Geoffrey Rockwell. 2020. “Absorbing DiRT: Tool Directories in the Digital Age.” Digital Studies 10 (1). https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.325.
Guccio, Calogero, Marco Ferdinando Martorana, Isidoro Mazza, and Ilde Rizzo. 2016. “Technology and Public Access to Cultural Heritage: The Italian Experience on ICT for Public Historical Archives.” In Cultural Heritage in a Changing World, 55–75. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Guiliano, Jennifer, and Laura Estill. 2023. “What Gets Categorized Counts: Controlled Vocabularies, Digital Affordances, and the International Digital Humanities Conference.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac091.
Hall, Crystal. 2019. “Digital Humanities and Italian Studies: Intersections and Oppositions.” Italian Culture 37 (2): 97–115. https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2019.1717754.
Harping, Patricia. 2010. Introduction to Controlled Vocabularies: Terminology for Art, Architecture and Other Cultural Works. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Research Institute.
Istituto centrale per la digitalizzazione del patrimonio culturale – Digital Library. 2023. “Piano nazionale di digitalizzazione del patrimonio culturale - Parole Chiave.” Docs Italia. 2023. https://docs.italia.it/italia/icdp/icdp-pnd-docs/it/v1.1-febbraio-2023/parole-chiave.html.
Jansen, Ludger. 2019. “Ontologies for the Digital Humanities: Learning from the Life Sciences?” Joint Ontology Workshops. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2518/paper-WODHSA5.pdf.
Middle, Sarah. 2023. “A Documentation Checklist for (Linked) Humanities Data.” International Journal of Digital Humanities. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-023-00072-z.
Moraitou, Efthymia, John Aliprantis, Yannis Christodoulou, Alexandros Teneketzis, and George Caridakis. 2019. “Semantic Bridging of Cultural Heritage Disciplines and Tasks.” Heritage 2 (1): 611–30. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage2010040.
Mozzoni, Isabella, Simone Fanelli, and Chiara Carolina Donelli. 2018. “Italian University Collections: Managing the Artistic Heritage of the University’s Ivory Tower.” European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2023.v8iss1-article-3.
Perkins, Jody, Quinn Dombrowski, Luise Borek, and Christof Schöch. 2014. “Project Report: Building Bridges to the Future of a Distributed Network: From DiRT Categories to TaDiRAH, a Methods Taxonomy for Digital Humanities,” 181–83. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2771234.2771256.
Peroni, Silvio. n.d. “A Simplified Agile Methodology for Ontology Development.” W3id.org. Accessed January 16, 2025. https://w3id.org/people/essepuntato/papers/samod-owled2016.html.
Sabba, Fiammetta, Francesca Tomasi, Silvia Tripodi, and Laurent Antoine Fintoni. 2023. “L’Università Di Bologna a Supporto Dell’ecosistema Digitale Della Cultura Presso Il Ministero Della Cultura.” In Visioni Future: Next Generation Library - Vol.1, 45–50. Editrice Bibliografica.
Salvatori, Enrica. 2020. “Digital Public History inside and Outside the Box.” Magazén, no. 2. https://doi.org/10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2020/02/003.
Tammaro, Anna Maria. 2014. “Evaluation of Digital Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Approach.” In Communications in Computer and Information Science, 136–46. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54347-0_15.
Tomasi, Francesca. 2018. “Modelling in the Digital Humanities: Conceptual Data Models and Knowledge Organization in the Cultural Heritage Domain.” https://doi.org/10.12759/HSR.SUPPL.31.2018.170-179.
“UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage.” 2003. In Intergovernmental Council for the Information for All Programme, 2nd, Paris, 2003. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000229034.
Unsworth, John. 2000. “Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common, and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?” https://people.brandeis.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/primitives.html.
Vlase, Ionela, and Tuuli Lähdesmäki. 2023. “A Bibliometric Analysis of Cultural Heritage Research in the Humanities: The Web of Science as a Tool of Knowledge Management.” Humanities & Social Sciences Communications 10 (1): 84. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01582-5.
Warwick, C., M. Terras, P. Huntington, and N. Pappa. 2007. “If You Build It Will They Come? The LAIRAH Study: Quantifying the Use of Online Resources in the Arts and Humanities through Statistical Analysis of User Log Data.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 23 (1): 85–102. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqm045.
Wilkinson, Mark D., Michel Dumontier, I. Jsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Gabrielle Appleton, Myles Axton, Arie Baak, Niklas Blomberg, et al. 2016. “The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship.” Scientific Data 3: 160018. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Laurent Fintoni, Marilena Daquino, Francesca Tomasi
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
