Digital humanities and cultural heritage preservation: The case of the BYZART (byzantine art and archaeology on europeana) project

Abstract

The development of Information Technology and Digital Humanities has brought numerous significant changes to the Cultural Heritage domain. The Digital Humanities has become a dynamic and fertile research field, and new projects and opportunities are constantly flourishing. The BYZART project perfectly fits this context. This project was coordinated by the Department of History and Cultures of the University of Bologna, embracing a wide consortium of partners from Bulgaria, Greece and Italy. It aimed at enhancing Byzantine and Post-Byzantine artistic and cultural heritage within the Europeana platform. This project enriched the existing Europeana collections with about 75,000 new cultural and artistic multimedia objects relevant to Byzantine history and culture, including collections of digitized photos, video and audio content. We also established a liaison between the new materials and Byzantine-related content already existing on Europeana. The archival material collected and digitized by the BYZART consortium is of the greatest cultural and art-historical importance, but it had not been properly evaluated or published before. For this reason, BYZART aimed to guarantee the preservation and evaluation of significant cultural heritage objects from a wide range of contexts, while also making them accessible to scholarly and general audiences alike.