Rethinking Scholarly Digital Objects as Cultural Heritage: the KNOT Project

The KNOT project is a three-year pilot tasked with investigating ways to integrate the digital cultural heritage (DCH) of Italian universities within the national infrastructure being developed by the Ministry of Culture. To do this, KNOT argues for rethinking the digital objects produced by academic research projects as interesting and, so far, unexplored examples of this DCH deserving of more attention and worthy of integration into the national infrastructure. This article discusses the key steps in the development of a conceptual framework in support of this argument starting with 1) the definition of these objects and identification of the potential heritage values they hold, 2) the selection of the humanities, and in particular the digital humanities, as the academic field from which to select them, 3) the development and publication of a data model and catalogue, and 4) some of the key issues that arose during this work around the classification, documentation, and visibility of these objects.