Digitisation of cultural heritage of minority communities for equity and renewed engagement DIGICHer

‘Digitisation of cultural heritage of minority communities for equity and renewed engagement’ (DIGICHer) aims to re-visit and provide new understandings of the key legal and policy, socio-economic and technological factors that drive the digitisation of minorities’ cultural heritage (CH) in order to develop a novel validated scalable framework, designed via user-centric approaches, to promote equitable, diverse and inclusive practices. Building on such a framework, the project provides research and knowledge-based recommendations for policy and decision-makers and CH institutions for mainstreaming equity, diversity and inclusiveness of minority groups through participation and engagement in CH digitisation processes. It also delivers methodologies for decision support to enable decision-makers to monitor the field of digital heritage with specific regard to its long-term diversity.

Our ambition will be elaborated through pilots from three representative minority groups in Europe, namely the Sámi, the Jewish people and the Ladin people. In addition, we will engage in co-creation activities with representatives of other minorities in the EU. Through this conceptually novel validated user-centric framework and related evidence-based recommendations, DIGICHer seeks to support the European CH sector to become more digitally adept, capable to reap the benefits and capitalise fully on the opportunities of digital CH by fostering practices for production, management, sharing, and (re-)use of digital CH of minorities in a manner that is value and context respectful, and ethically-empowered.

Long-term, this will enable the preservation, maintenance and renewal of digital CH in a way that appropriately reflects its intended content and promotes digital practices in accordance with European values, decreasing the risk of content misuse, increasing re-use opportunities, and promoting equity, diversity and inclusion in European digital CH, contributing to a more responsive and democratic cultural sector, whose digital activities reflect the plurality of European worldviews.