Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) as a field of research and site for digital efforts has grown significantly since the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage. In contrast to tangible heritage, where cultural identities are manifested through physical objects, intangible cultural expressions are defined through tacit reliances and embodied practices. Such practices are usually bodily communicated, enacted, socially transmitted, and constantly evolving. Burgeoning trends in computational heritage and ICT applications have played a crucial role in safeguarding ICH as they produce versatile resources while making them accessible to the public. Nevertheless, most of the inventions are object-centric and cater to conserving material-based knowledge bases. Few endeavors thus far have fully supported the recording, representing, and reviving of the living nature of ICH. One of the challenges now faced is to find appropriate forms, together with efficient methods, to document the ephemeral aspects of intangible heritage. Another barrier is to find effective ways to communicate the knowledge inextricably linked to people. In response, recent efforts have embarked on capturing the “live” and “active” facets of the embodied cultures, which entails addressing technological and curatorial complexity to communicate the material and immaterial aspects within a meaningful context. Meanwhile, advancements in experimental museology have opened up new modes of experiential narratives, particularly through visualization, augmentation, participation, and immersive embodiment. Novel practices of cultural data computation and data sculpting have also emerged toward the ideal of knowledge reconstruction. This article outlines state-of-the-art models, projects, and technical practices that have advanced the digitization lifecycle for ICH resources. The review focuses on several critical but less studied tasks within digital archiving, computational encoding, conceptual representation, and interactive engagement with the intangible cultural elements. We aim to identify the advancements and gaps in the existing conventions, and to envision opportunities for transmitting embodied knowledge in intangible heritage.

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In the past decade, thanks to abundant data and adequate software tools, complex networks have been thoroughly investigated in many disciplines. Most of this work has dealt with networks in which distances do not have physical meaning and are just dimensionless quantities measured in terms of edge hops. However, in many cases the physical space in which networks are embedded and the actual distances between nodes are important, such as in geographical and transportation networks. The Random Geometric Graph (RGG) is a standard spatial network model that plays a role for spatial networks similar to the one played by the Erdös-Rényi random graph for relational ones. In this work we present an extension of the RGG construction to define a new model to build bi-dimensional spatial networks based on energy as realistic constraint to create the links. The constructed networks have several properties in common with those of actual social networks.

We propose and illustrate an approach of Soft Textual Cartography consisting in the clustering of regions by taking into account both their spatial relationships and their textual description within a corpus. We reduce large geo-referenced textual content into topics and merge them with their spatial configuration to reveal spatial patterns. The strategy consists in constructing a complex weighted network, reflecting the geographical layout, and whose nodes are further characterised by their thematic dissimilarity, extracted form topic modelling. A soft k-means procedure, taking into account both aspects through expectation maximisation on Gaussian mixture models and label propagation, converges towards a soft membership, to be further compared with expert knowledge on regions. Application on the Wikipedia pages of Swiss municipalities demonstrate the potential of the approach, revealing textual autocorrelation and associations with official classifications. The synergy of the spatial and textual aspects appears promising in topic interpretation and geographical information retrieval, and able to incorporate expert knowledge through the choice of the initial membership.

Soft textual cartography is an original approach aimed to study communities on spatially embedded and textually defined complex weighted networks. The present approach relies on the integration of topic modeling and soft clustering procedures. These two aspects can be combined using topic distances, and weighted unoriented networks representing the spatial configuration; their synergy is promising in topic interpretation and geographical information retrieval. This paper proposes an unified formalism, underlining the compatibility of the two aspects, as illustrated on the textual descriptions of the municipalities of the canton of Vaud, Switzerland. It also points to possible extensions and applications of the method, potentially useful for dealing with the ever growing amount of georeferenced textual content.