ABSTRACT

The cultural heritage sector and the humanities have a rich and long symbiotic relationship. Many changes are taking place in the cultural heritage sector just as there are advances in digital humanities. This chapter focuses on the broadness of the humanities and the diverse nature of the cultural heritage sector. The cultural heritage, from a simplistic perspective, is characterized by tangible and intangible outputs of individuals, co-operative entities, and societal institutions and processes associated with them. Most users adopt the stance that if the material was digitized by a cultural heritage institution they can assume that it is authentic. Advances in machine learning, facilitated by new methods and the remarkable developments that have taken place in computational capacity and nature, is changing all that. Continued research by humanists and the cultural sector into methods of digitization and representation is essential if we are to enable scholars and students to explore the multimodality and multivocality of the cultural heritage.