Digital heritage futures - Editorial

Digital heritage is no longer a niche at the edge of cultural heritage practice. It has become a central arena where preservation, interpretation, and public engagement are negotiated through computation, interfaces, and media. As digital tools mature, the challenge shifts from adopting technology to shaping how technology mediates cultural meaning, whose perspectives are prioritized, and what kinds of futures these systems enable. This Research Topic, Digital heritage futures, called for work at the intersection of cultural heritage, architecture, new media, archaeology, museology, and computer science, with a specific focus on human media interaction and methodological innovation. The four contributions in this Research Topic, three original research articles and one perspective, reflect that ambition and show a field moving from tool-centered development toward questions of experience, interpretation, and accountability.

A strong current across the Research Topic is the renewed attention to intangible cultural heritage and the risks that accompany its digitization. Prandi et al. examined the “umarell” phenomenon in Emilia-Romagna in “Augmenting the intangible: an intervention through an AR mobile app and an installation to foster a local cultural phenomenon,” a hybrid intervention that combines a physical installation with a mobile augmented reality experience. Their work demonstrates the value of participatory design and evaluation when the aim is intergenerational transmission rather than novelty. One key outcome is a divergence in what different audiences value: adults more readily recognize territorial and cultural significance, while younger participants respond first to digital affordances such as AR interaction and 3D content. The contribution is not simply an argument for AR, but a reminder that digital heritage must be designed to support cultural meaning rather than displace it, and that hybrid strategies can reduce the tendency toward cultural flattening and commodification.

A second thread is the role of immersive media in revitalizing endangered cultural practices and languages, where the goal is not archiving but sustaining cultural continuity. Galeazzi et al. compare the impact of a VR experience and a companion 2D film on engagement, emotional connection, and learning in their contribution “Exploring the revitalisation of endangered intangible heritage and languages through multimedia storytelling and immersive technologies: a case study of virtual reality and 2D film with the Kusunda community in Nepal.” Their results argue against a single format solution. Group viewing of film supports shared reflection, identity formation, and wider access, while VR strengthens presence, spatial understanding, and emotional immersion. The message is pragmatic and important for heritage practitioners: effective revitalization is more likely to emerge from designed media ecologies than from choosing one “best” technology. In this sense, immersive heritage futures are as much about distribution, audience context, and viewing conditions as they are about device capabilities.

The Research Topic also engages AI at a conceptual level, extending beyond application-driven experimentation. In Neumann and Dirksen's perspective, “Symbol grounding for generative AI: lessons learned from interpretive ABM,” the authors argue that the humanities offer more than content for AI systems and can contribute methodologies that improve AI itself. By reframing symbol grounding as a triadic negotiation among objects, symbols, and human practices, they challenge assumptions that meaning can be reduced to representation and pattern matching. Their proposal to embed generative methods within interpretive social research, illustrated through interpretive agent-based modeling (iABM), points toward AI systems that generate counterfactual narratives while remaining anchored in ethnographic evidence and hermeneutic interpretation. For digital heritage, the value of this argument is direct: interpretability, human agency, and auditability are not add-ons but conditions for responsible computational mediation, particularly when cultural narratives are sensitive, contested, or politically consequential.

Jamil and Brennan offer a complementary challenge to disciplinary assumptions in “Immersive heritage through Gaussian Splatting: a new visual aesthetic for reality capture.” This article addresses a persistent bias in digital heritage toward accuracy and precision as dominant measures of success. By examining Gaussian Splatting as an emergent 3D generative AI approach to reality capture, the authors propose that immersive heritage should also be evaluated through aesthetic experience, atmosphere, and narrative capacity. Their phenomenological methodology and engagement with architectural and media theory reposition capture not only as replication but as a mode of image-making that can reveal qualities of heritage environments that conventional metrics may overlook. The contribution is timely, particularly as AI-enabled capture tools become widely accessible and begin to shape what counts as “heritage visualization” in both professional and public contexts.

Taken together, these articles point to several shared directions for digital heritage futures.

First, methodological pluralism is becoming a defining condition of the field. Each contribution shows that heritage outcomes improve when methods are composed rather than treated as competing replacements, whether through AR combined with tangible installations, VR combined with film, interpretive research combined with generative simulation, or capture combined with aesthetic and narrative analysis.

Second, human-centered design and interpretation sit at the core of the most persuasive work. Across participatory design, focus groups, interpretive methodologies, and phenomenological inquiry, the Research Topic converges on a simple claim: digital heritage succeeds when it strengthens meaningful human relationships with cultural content, not when it maximizes technological spectacle.

Third, heritage is approached as activated and living, not as static documentation. The emphasis shifts toward transmission, revitalization, engagement, and the cultivation of cultural futures, aligning closely with the Research Topic's call to explore alternative knowledge creation and evolving narratives.

Finally, the Research Topic shows that evaluation frameworks must expand. Accuracy and fidelity remain essential in many contexts, but these articles argue for equal attention to accessibility, cultural responsibility, transparency, emotional resonance, and the ethics of computational mediation.

Digital heritage futures was established to surface uncharted territories where cultural heritage practice meets emerging computational and media systems. The contributions show that the most important innovations are not always technical. They are often methodological and ethical, shaping how digital tools are integrated, how meaning is negotiated, and how communities are positioned within the systems designed to represent them. As immersive media and generative AI become increasingly embedded in heritage work, the critical question shifts from what these technologies can do to how they should be designed and governed to support cultural complexity, interpretive responsibility, and long-term vitality.