Dal Digital Cultural Heritage Alla Digital Culture. Evoluzioni Nelle Digital Humanities. In: Digital Humanities 2018, Puentes-Bridges. Book of Abstracts
Digital has transformed the way to produce, transmit and share knowledge. The increasingly widespread diffusion of digital methods and techniques in all the social and cultural levels of the communities, in fact, brings an unheard democratization of knowledge and culture, making the citizen a privileged and intelligent actor in the sustainable development of the new smart societies which are based on the process of digitization, digital co-creation and digital design. The art. 2 of the UE "Council conclusions of 21 May 2014 on cultural heritage as a strategic resource for a sustainable Europe" (2014/C 183/08) states: "Cultural heritage consists of the resources inherited from the past in all forms and aspects - tangible, intangible and digital (born digital and digitized), including monuments, sites, landscapes, skills, practices, knowledge and expressions of human creativity, as well as collections conserved and managed by public and private bodies such as museums, libraries and archives. It originates from the interaction between people and places through time and it is constantly evolving. These resources are of great value to society from a cultural, environmental, social and economic point of view and thus their sustainable management constitutes a strategic choice for the 21st century". It is therefore inevitable to rethink digital and digitization as social and cultural expressions of the contemporary age. This implies the need to rethink data as cultural entities and no longer as mere tools for simplifying administration management, or as extemporary surrogates for enhancing the fruition of tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The current process for archiving and storing data, although they generate from the awareness of the need to preserve them, don't solve the problem of their both current and historical reuse, because they are still strongly conditioned by the instrumental function that presides over their production and use.