Rethinking Scholarly Digital Objects as Cultural Heritage: The KNOT Project

This paper presents the KNOT project, a three-year pilot tasked with investigating ways to integrate the digital cultural heritage of Italian universities within the national infrastructure being developed by the Ministry of Culture, and its central argument for rethinking the digital objects produced by academic research projects as interesting and, so far, unexplored examples of this digital cultural heritage. The paper discusses the key steps in the development of a conceptual framework for rethinking scholarly digital objects as cultural heritage starting with the definition of these objects and identification of the potential heritage values they hold, the selection of the humanities, and in particular the digital humanities, as the academic field from which to select these objects, the use of a census to evaluate the validity of these choices, and some of the issues that arose during this work around the classification, documentation, and visibility of these objects.