WOrlding thRough Technologies and Heritage

Objective

WORTH adopts an interdisciplinary approach to advance understanding of how the entanglement of digital technologies and heritage configures multiple worlds, proposing a novel conceptualisation of heritage digitisation as a worlding practice. Heritage has long played a key role in assembling worlds, yet contemporary global challenges increasingly question its integrity and agency. At the same time, digitisation provides opportunities to preserve and enhance heritage, but it can also constraint value plurality and foster uniform perspectives, making it essential to interrogate its less visible effects. Rooted in Science and Technology Studies and drawing on diverse theoretical frames, WORTH investigates: i) how heritage digitisation shapes worlds by embedding and transforming values; ii) how the entanglement of humans, heritage artefacts and digital technologies enacts worlds; and iii) how it opens onto future worlds. To achieve this breakthrough, WORTH compares two leading institutions engaged in heritage digitisation, one in Italy and one in Denmark. Methods include historical investigations, interviews, and ethnographic work, enabling analytical connections across the sites. By addressing these timely issues, WORTH has the potential to impact both the scientific and societal levels, providing new, high-quality knowledge on the transformative and generative agency of heritage digitisation. WORTH will also raise awareness of the digital dimension of European cultural diversity and heritage, offering insights on how to recognise and integrate this pluralism into both practice and policy. Results will be widely disseminated through open-access publications, conferences, and practice-oriented workshops. WORTH will leverage the researcher’s expertise and, with the support of the host institution, enhance her theoretical and methodological skills in new empirical contexts, while further strengthening her interdisciplinary and international profile.