Digital Heritage

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) defines digital heritage as follows:

“Digital heritage is made up of computer-based materials of enduring value that should be kept for future generations. Digital heritage emanates from different communities, industries, sectors and regions. Not all digital materials are of enduring value, but those that are require active preservation approaches if continuity of digital heritage is to be maintained ”.

UNESCO further explains the concept of cultural heritage as follows:

“The idea of cultural heritage is a familiar one: those sites, objects and intangible things that have cultural, historical, aesthetic, archaeological, scientific, ethnological or anthropological value to groups and individuals. The concept of natural heritage is also very familiar: physical, biological, and geological features; habitats of plants or animal species and areas of value on scientific or aesthetic grounds or from the point of view of conservation”.

Digital preservation and archiving of these cultural resources and enhancing their accessibility through digital tools and techniques are key concerns of digital cultural heritage.  Particularly in this field, interactive, experiential digital methods, such as virtual reality (computer-simulated reality), augmented reality (combining virtual reality with physical, material reality), and immersive digital technology, which involves multiple human sensory perceptions, are key factors in the development of the field (Szabo, 2021).

 

Digital heritage and cultural heritage, and, to some degree, digital archaeology, are distinct from, but related to museum studies.

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Contemporary Digital Humanities Copyright © 2022 by Mark P. Wachowiak is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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