Digital humanities and digitised cultural heritage

The Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum sector have been involved in a concerted - if not evenly distributed - effort to mass-digitise collections for over thirty years. Over this period, digitisation processes and best practices have been established, and there have been various phases and mechanisms of delivery which now see a vast, if patchy, digital cultural heritage landscape. Throughout, the Digital Humanities (DH) community has engaged with digitised primary historical sources, using the products of the digitisation process for research, teaching, and engagement. The DH community has built corpora, infrastructure, tools, and experimental interventions upon digitised cultural material, while also computationally mining and examining content. This chapter will analyse and synthesise the different activities those in DH undertake with digitised cultural heritage, stressing that those wishing to utilise it in research and teaching must engage with digitisation processes as well as the product to best understand the data’s epistemic foundations. Developing a holistic understanding of the digitisation environment that provides the data DH activities are built upon can allow DH to contribute to it in return, influencing and impacting future digitisation activities. This chapter sketches out an agenda for the Digital Humanities in considering digitised content, while also reflecting on how best to create a feedback loop to undertake activities and produce research that will be of interest to digitisation providers. By working together with collections and their owners, DH activities can help construct a roadmap towards building inclusive digital heritage datasets that are useful, reusable, and point to the benefits of user engagement with our digitised past, while also more fully understanding and influencing the processes which create digital resources, and the wider Digital Scholarship landscape.