This introduction paper was mutually agreed on by the editors of magazén with the precious support of the Journal Manager Elisa Corrò, who was instrumental in coordinating the editorial work of this issue.
Reaching our fifth year in a row, we are glad to start a new season in the life of magazén, which we think will help us to develop our journal even more into an open platform for the wide field of inquiry and research that characterises the Digital and Public Humanities. Indeed, after four years of thematic volumes, which offered reflections on stringent methodological topics and helped us reach SCOPUS classification, we resolved to break free from the constraints of a particular topic. Last autumn we thought the time was ripe to embark on our first open call to the scholarly community and it showed us the potential magazén had reached with an impressive response of over fifty quality proposals. This gave us a lot of welcome extra work in trying to cut down this big amount of research trajectories to the most promising ones, though at the same time it also functioned as an accurate seismograph of current inquiries in our broadening field. The tough selection of paper proposals, the subsequent double blind peer review, and the thorough accompaniment of our responsible editors made this first issue possible and will continue over to this year’s second issue. We are glad that what emerged from this process is still a very wide spectrum of interdisciplinary research focusing on most relevant questions for the scholarly community. In fact, this issue spans from history to archaeology through GLAM studies, art history, and architecture, while taking current methodologies, new instruments, developing theories, and promising practices into account.
The present issue starts with a contribution by Alper Metin and Francesca Rognoni presenting the ALOA project which is concerned with the reconfiguration of ministerial records for the architectural heritage of Italy and the alignment of a new lexicon for architecture with other relevant resources. Located in the domain of Digital Cultural Heritage and promoted by the ICCD (Istituto Centrale del Catalogo e della Documentazione), the project aims at a radical reorganisation of the archival material using ontology engineering, controlled vocabularies and interactive interface design.
In the second contribution of this issue, Rossella Catanese and Chiara Petrucci discuss the benefits and challenges of digital technologies for improving accessibility to film archives and for allowing a wider audience to explore audiovisual archival heritage. With the transition to digital curatorship, they argue, new models of content sharing, preserving, and enhancing emerge, but, the curation of digital audiovisual collections requires a conscious approach also in the selection and presentation of materials, and a continuous effort to ensure maintenance and sustainability of the digital resources.
Subsequently, Eleonora Delpozzo, Cecilia Moscardo and Fiorenza Bortolami examine by way of three recent case studies the application of Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology to cultural heritage artefacts and archaeological sites. The first two examples consider the attempt to create BIM models of protohistoric funerary mounds in perishable material while the third discusses the BIM reconstruction of a Roman city gate. The authors underline the challenges and difficulties of the elaboration process, reflecting on the potential advantages and disadvantages of a more extensive use of BIM in the archaeological domain.
The fourth article by Davide Boerio and Antonello Mori provides an overview and critical reflection of The Salvetti Project, which is concerned with the correspondence and information-gathering activities of the Medici diplomats in London during the Stuart and Restoration periods. The authors discuss the project’s impact, method and motivation with a focus on crowdsourcing, storytelling and other public engaging practices.
Chiara Masiero Sgrinzatto and Emanuela Zilio present a comparative study tracing the phenomenology of digital 360º degrees photography. These panoramas embody immersive narratives and interactive environments facilitating access to complex humanities contents and data. Therefore visual tools play a pivotal role in reshaping cultural discourse and fostering deeper interdisciplinary dialogue.
In the last contribution of the present issue, Begoña Farré Torras, Leticia Crespillo Marí and Marta Soares discuss the growing use of the curatorial strategy to include animated mapped projections of analogue works of art, here especially of twentieth-century mural paintings. The authors highlight issues related to the use of digital technologies in cultural ecosystems, calling for their ethical and sustainable deployment in ways that may reclaim the museum as a space for discussion and interaction.
Let us close, as usual, with our heartfelt gratitude to the many experts and scholars involved in the peer review process, which this time have been an incredible amount due to the success of the open call. Our gratitude further goes to our Advisory Board members, the published authors, the steady members of our Editorial Board, as well as to our excellent publisher’s team.