Digital Heritage Futures: Volume II

The Research Topic marks the second volume of “Digital Heritage Futures,” building on the interdisciplinary dialogue established in the first volume, available here: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/63354/digital-heritage-futures

Digital heritage is entering a new and decisive phase. As computational systems, immersive media, artificial intelligence, and networked platforms increasingly mediate how the past is documented, interpreted, reconstructed, and experienced, the field is shifting beyond preservation and representation alone toward broader questions of anticipation, adaptation, and future-making. Heritage is no longer simply inherited from the past — it is also actively projected, simulated, negotiated, and reimagined through digital means.

Emerging technologies are transforming both the methods and epistemic foundations of heritage practice across architecture, archaeology, museology, media studies, and computer science. Machine learning, generative systems, digital twins, and immersive environments are expanding the ways in which cultural value can be recorded, interpreted, and communicated. Yet these developments raise profound questions concerning authenticity, authorship, sustainability, accessibility, bias, and the politics of cultural memory — and how heritage may respond to planetary instability, ecological transition, and rapidly changing technological conditions.

Much of the field remains oriented toward technical application rather than the critical exploration of possible heritage futures. Speculative, anticipatory, and experimental modes of inquiry remain comparatively underdeveloped, despite their growing importance in addressing uncertainty, plural knowledge systems, and emerging cultural realities. There is therefore a pressing need for scholarship that not only advances technique, but also rethinks the conceptual, cultural, and ethical horizons of digital heritage.

This Research Topic invites contributions that move beyond incremental innovation to address the future conditions, trajectories, and imaginaries of heritage in a digital age. We are particularly interested in work that is critically reflective, methodologically adventurous, and future-oriented — exploring how digital heritage practices may anticipate change, enable new forms of participation, and contribute to more adaptive, inclusive, and sustainable heritage ecologies. We welcome submissions that examine how digital tools reshape what heritage is, who it serves, and what futures it makes possible.

Key questions include: How might digital heritage evolve under conditions of climate crisis, social transformation, and technological acceleration? How do immersive, intelligent, and generative systems alter the production of cultural knowledge and memory? What ethical and environmental responsibilities emerge when heritage is increasingly simulated, automated, and co-created through digital systems?