Special Session ETech-CH

VIPERC 2025 Special Session ETech-CH:

Emerging Technologies for History and Memory. Cultural and Industrial Heritage Between Complexity and Digital Transformation

Chairs: 

• Jacopo Bassetta, Telematic University "Leonardo da Vinci" (Unidav)

• Christian Morbidoni, University "G. d'Annunzio" Chieti-Pescara & Research Laboratory "Hugo Gernsback" Unidav

Abstract
In the context of digital innovation, historical, cultural, and industrial heritage represents a privileged field for questioning the role of technologies in the construction of contemporary, open, and accessible collective memory.
Increasingly, the management and enhancement of cultural heritage involve a network of heterogeneous actors: researchers, historians, engineers, IT system developers, and public entities such as museum and archival institutions.
This special session aims to explore, from a transdisciplinary perspective, the practices of digital transition and the use of emerging technologies—such as artificial intelligence, generative AI, digitization processes, information systems, and digital infrastructures—that are transforming the ways in which material, documentary, historical, and industrial heritage is preserved, accessed, and enhanced.
The session also intends to analyze the variety of innovative approaches to integrating new technologies into historical research processes and heritage digitization.
The goal is to foster disciplinary exchange that connects the functionalities of emerging technologies with the purposes of conservation, historical research, and documentation, promoting forms of conscious integration among historical, engineering, computer science, and ethical perspectives.
Special attention will be given to both the potential and the vulnerabilities of such integrations, in the awareness that every technology entails a specific interpretative posture and profoundly influences the construction of historical meaning.

The topics of the Special Session include, but are not limited to:

a) Digital technologies for the modeling and analysis of cultural and industrial landscapes
(Digital mapping and surveying, 3D modeling, augmented reality, virtual reconstructions)

b) Innovative approaches to digitization and heritage research
(Use of technologies for source analysis, metadata, interoperability, advanced digitization, archiving and access tools)

c) Tools and methodologies for the documentation, protection, and enhancement of industrial heritage
(Surveying technologies, diagnostics, historical recording, technical preservation, cultural and narrative valorization of productive spaces and objects)

d) Generative AI and Collective Memory: Potential, Limitations, and Ethical Implications
(Use of artificial intelligence for automated content generation and historiographical analysis, digital simulations, computational narratives; analysis of cognitive and symbolic distortions such as interpretative bias, informational hallucinations; critical reflection on algorithmic transparency, ethical implications, and AI usage benchmarks)