Digital Heritage as a Scholarly Field—Topics, Researchers, and Perspectives from a Bibliometric Point of View

Abstract

Digital heritage comprises a broad variety of approaches and topics and involves researchers from multiple disciplines. Against this background, this article presents a four-stage investigation on standards, publications, disciplinary cultures, as well as scholars in the field of digital heritage and particularly tangible objects as monuments and sites, carried out in 2016 and 2017. It includes results of (1) the inquiry of nearly 4,000 publications from major conferences, (2) a workshop-based survey involving 44 researchers, (3) 15 qualitative interviews, as well as (4) two online surveys with 1,000 and 700 participants, respectively. As an overall finding, the community is driven by researchers from European countries, especially Italy, with a background in humanities. Cross-national co-authorships are promoted by cultural and spatial closeness and-probably due to funding policy-EU membership. A discourse is primarily driven by technologies, and the most common keywords refer to the technologies used. Most prominent research areas are data acquisition and management, visualization, and analysis. Recent topics are, for instance, unmanned airborne vehicle (UAV)-based 3D surveying technologies, augmented and virtual reality visualization, metadata and paradata standards for documentation, and virtual museums. Since a lack of money is named as the biggest obstacle nowadays, competency and human resources are most frequently named as demand. An epistemic culture in the scholarly field of digital heritage is closer to engineering than to humanities. Moreover, conference series are most relevant for a scientific discourse, and especially EU projects set pace as most important research endeavors.

Digital topics on cultural heritage investigated: how can data-driven and data-guided methods support to identify current topics and trends in digital heritage?

“…It also seems interesting to examine the topics that were mentioned only occasionally. Data acquisition and digitisation technologies such as laser scanning, photogrammetry or light detection and ranging (LiDAR) are only occasionally noted as promising technologies, although—as discussed in the following paragraph—they were the most prominent topics at conferences during recent decades and even at conferences currently taking place (Münster 2019 ). In addition to specific technological strands, various overarching and non-technical concepts were named, among them open data, crowdsourcing and (massive) digitisation.…”

“…For digital heritage studies, Spugnoli investigated the topics in Italian conference series (Sprugnoli et al 2019 ). We studied these aspects by analysing 4500 publications stemming from six major conferences in digital heritage studies and dating from 1973 to 2015 (Münster 2019 ).…”

Teaching Digital Cultural Heritage and Digital Humanities the Current State and Prospects

“…A spectrum of DCH competencies comprises digital data curation, communication, and tool skills (Van Lakerveld et al, 2017). Although digital competencies are essential for heritage professionals at all career stages (Münster, 2019), training in digital heritage is still mostly provided through academic courses and curricula.…”

“…Digital literacy and technologies are becoming increasingly important for researchers in humanities and heritage related disciplines. Scholars have identified the development of combined digital and humanities skills as a critical challenge (Münster, 2019) for the cultural heritage sector, and this is a key issue in the European Commission's Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) priorities for the 2020s (European Commission, 2017, 2019b.…”

Some Aspects of 3D-objects Presentation in a Common Digital Space of Scientific Knowledge

“…The virtual exhibitions, as an information resource that provides users with heterogeneous information (digital copies of printed materials, archival documents, multimedia materials, etc. ), integrated according to certain criteria, allows you to effectively solve the problems of presenting information resources, including digital museum collections, integrated by means of the CDSSK [4,5]. Despite the fact that each virtual exhibition is unique in its content, the following main sections can be distinguished in the formation of such exhibitions in the CDSSK environment:…”