The ReInHerit Digital Hub: #makeityourown
Creators: name: Krottmaier, Sina
name: Frasson, Pamela
name: Zuanni, Chiara
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: The H2020 ReInHerit project is a 3-years project (2021-2024), funded under the EU Horizon programme (grant agreement no 101004545). ReInHerit aims to innovate the possibilities for communication, collaboration, and innovation exchange between museums and cultural heritage sites. The project addresses both heritage stakeholders (museums, cultural tourism, policy makers) and their audiences, with the aim of developing a sustainable model for cultural heritage management. This poster aims to present the project and its results, introducing the resources and possibilities for collaboration offered by the ReInHerit Digital Hub.
The project consortium includes partners from seven different countries, belonging to museums, cultural associations, policy networks, and universities. These diversity and far-encompassing experiences are also enhanced by the different fields of the involved researchers - including departments of computer science, digital humanities, ethnography, geography, and law - and by the types of museums - a private foundation with collections ranging from antiquity to the modern period; a museum of archaic Greek art; and an Austrian city museum. By bringing together this heterogeneous group of stakeholders, the project has developed a comprehensive examination of the multi-faceted and complex challenges cutting across the sector; it has developed a series of resources for supporting small and medium-size museums and heritage sites; and it has explored different approaches to interdisciplinary collaboration.
To foster this collaboration, a digital platform was created, presenting resources and results of the project - the Reinherit Digital Hub (https://reinherit-hub.eu/). In this digital ecosystem, all stakeholders are able to experiment and share their experiences. Developed by the team at the Centre for Information Modelling, University of Graz, the Hub was launched in late summer 2022 and, as of autumn 2023, it has been enriched with a variety of content by all consortium partners.
This content includes thematic factsheets and webinars addressing current challenges and needs in cultural heritage management, especially in relation to the adoption of new technologies, and a toolkit consisting of a set of AI-driven apps – which enhances the museum-experience for visitors with applications drawing on a gamification approach and offering additional information on the objects, while the Toolkit also supports professionals with image retrieval and video restoration applications. Furthermore, Hub visitors can discover the documentation and the necessary applications of the two immersive performances developed in the project, using haptic and proximity-reactive audio installations to inform sounds and experiences during the events, as well as a videogame, in which players take on the role of a museum manager. Crucially, the applications are not only presented and promoted through the Hub – but they are also documented in detail so to enable further reuse and development.
Moreover, the model proposed by ReInHerit for collaboration in the cultural heritage sector has been piloted through an e-Shop, an online collection and three digital and travelling exhibitions on the themes of identities, craftmanship, and conflicts – developed by the three partnering Museums. The choice of themes aimed to address contemporary social challenges, fostering reflection on visitors' attitudes and values in relation to questions of gender, immigration, traditions, local crafts, and conflicts. An interactive quiz – present both in the digital and in the travelling exhibitions – bridges physical and online visitors, showing their responses to provocations on these themes in a common map. Other museums are invited to contribute to the debate on these themes by adding their objects to an online collection, which also serves to encourage digitization of the collections.
In short, the Hub's information architecture addresses the needs of both professionals and visitors, presenting them with a broad range of content, all clearly documented so to enable other organisations to adopt and experiment with it. In this poster we will present the ReInHerit Digital Hub, its resources, and the possibilities for further collaboration. At the same time, we aim to contribute to the themes of the CaTCH conference with our experience in working on approaches to engagement with cultural heritage through new technologies – in particular artificial intelligence applications and their potential for the inclusion in the digital transformation of small and medium-size museums and their audiences.