<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Digital Cultural Heritage and Digital Humanities are, historically seen, in focus of different communities as well as approaching different research topics and - from an organizational point of view - departments. However, are they that different? The idea of this joint article involving digital humanists and heritage researchers is to examine communities, concepts and research applications as well as shared challenges. Beyond a collection of problem-centred essays this is intended to initiate a fruitful discussion about commonalities and differences between both scholarly fields as well as to assess to which extent they are two sides of the same medal.</p>

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The paper focuses on digital environments conceived by historical research on urban history dealt with a multidisciplinary approach. It presents the first outcomes of a research in progress by the authors (the one urban historian and the other geomatics) on the digitalization and interpretation of the affair of "via Roma" in Turin. This central street was demolished and rebuilt in the Thirties of 20th to be enlarged and designed with new fronts in order to introduce the image of the modern city, and by this way new investors in the city Centre. The research aims to a digital organization of data and their reading by 3D modelling and GIS tools stressing the richness and the variety of the cultural assets (material and immaterial) coming out from the urban space. The paper discusses as these tools could help in the understanding the relationships of the cultural assets within urban history and in re-thinking cities as part of the Cultural Heritage.

Introduction The reorganization of city museums and the plan for new museum spaces dedicated to telling a city's urban history should be considered in the light of the consolidation of a new generation of 'spaces of memory'. The most recent embrace hybrid functions which combine different techniques, such as conserving and cataloguing a wide variety of documentation, as well as studying and developing interpretative hypotheses and, last but not least, showing collections and the results of research to the public. These changes in the conception of museums are often linked to projects for the transformation of big cities and a new focus on the works of famous architects. 1 A broad public, increasingly interested in these large-scale and dramatic urban phenomena, is attracted by and becomes involved in, discussions about the city, its image and its history, to the extent that groups emerge for and against change. Very few of these interventions are included in the town planning documents drawn up by the authorities; they are more like city marketing endeavours. In this context, museums, and the city museum in particular, become a strategic element in the construction and promotion of the city's image to attract tourists, investors, students and those big cultural events that seem to have become the real driving force behind the contemporary city. 2 Another important part of the reason for shifting emphasis to museums relates to changes in museology; new museum layouts have identified materials and forms of display that enrich the interpretation of traditional documents, allowing a more articulate and somewhat more appealing portrayal. 3 Recent developments are far removed from the nineteenth century ideas which created many museums and archives; they pay specific attention to the present-day city and even to the city of the future. The reorganization of the Museum of London is one example. Another is the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine which opened in Paris in 2007. The more traditional Musée Carnavalet, steeped in its nineteenth century origins still survives but the Cité is a new exhibition space which considers national developments, focusing mainly on Paris, the cradle of new architecture (Figure 1). 4 In order to convey the last two centuries of the city's history, the new Parisian museum includes the antique collections of the Musée des Monuments Français, and the drawings and models of the archive of the Institut Français de l'Architecture.

ABSTRACT:The documentation of Cultural Heritage asset is the basis for all the interventions and policies on Cultural heritage conservation and management. The documentation is mainly based on historic knowledge and metric survey. As far as historic knowledge is concerned many information are still recorded and preserved inside written documents that are usually not easy to reach and correctly understandable by all the experts that have specific responsibilities on Cultural Heritage. The digitalization of documents (hardly faced in the last years) is not sufficient to guarantee the effective access to the historical information useful inside a documentation process. The documentation always needs an historical interpretation based on a critical reading produced by linking heterogeneous materials. Iconography also is an important source when it is correctly interpreted and linked to other sources. IT development and digital technology diffusion allowed offering new way to record, organize and share historical information: GIS and 3D modeling can be used as standard approaches to transfer the historical knowledge in a proper way to specialists involved in Cultural Heritage conservation and management. They have been generally used as tool to represent information for different targets, the ones mostly for specialized users, the others for edutainment. GIS are largely diffused yet in the Cultural Heritage management, and 3D modeling is wide spread used in museums communication. Nevertheless, both of them have more potential. They could be integrated in order to manage different data set related with the same matter. They could be used to make new research by surveying and improving interpretation in a way ready to transmit the outcomes. To produce a new generation of affordable digital historical products is necessary that the GIS and 3D modeling design and realization would be developed in a multidisciplinary approach that must be explained and demonstrated to the people that in the future will offer to the community this expertise. The paper describes a teaching and research training experience started two years ago at the Politecnico di Torino in the master course on Architecture (Conservation).