Digital Technologies and the Role of Data in Cultural Heritage: The Past, the Present, and the Future

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper deals with a fascinating theme: Big Data, and Culture. It provides interesting and well-documented information about this scientific area with relevant scientific references.

I would suggest enriching the fourth section of the paper since it is quite limited (that could include some critique concerning the role that technology can play in culture as well as suggestions for future research) and creating a section with Conclusions at the end of the paper.

Also, the manuscript should be checked by someone with full professional proficiency in English.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

First of all thank you very much for your valuable feedback.

According to your comments we proceeded with major changes to our manuscript. Specifically, we enriched the fourth section with more details deriving from the previous sections and added a paragraph of concluding remarks in it.

The manuscript was checked for syntax and grammar errors.

Best Regards,

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors, thank you for providing opportunity to reviewing your paper.

It is about a very important topic, nicely written, and provides a good overview about EU research in that field and some interesting insights.

Please let me start with a general question: I am wondering what would be the intended main contribution and the “storyline” of the article? Please excuse if playing devils advocate: The article provides a nice overview about the recent EU streams and projects but do not much integrate this list into a comprehensive view (e.g. regarding missing points, upcoming streams etc.). It does name many concepts and a nice historiography of cultural computing but do not very deep dive into a historical analysis. It introduces BigData as a concept but do not much focus on that particular topic. It introduces an information behaviour model but it do not fully come clear to me how this is connected to the mentioned strands as Big Data, user research, visualization and documentation. I am wondering if it may be considerable to strengthen the storyline of the article - e.g. to highlight the evolvement of cultural computing from its origins to Big Data? Another possible focus may be on a classification of current pojects and next steps in Big Data for CH.

It may be worth to also check the following recent publiations:

• Fiorucci, M.; Khoroshiltseva, M.; Pontil, M.; Traviglia, A.; Del Bue, A.; James, S. Machine Learning for Cultural Heritage: A Survey. Pattern Recognition Letters 2020, 133, 102-108, doi:10.1016/j.patrec.2020.02.017.
• Brunet, P.; et al. REPORT ON A EUROPEAN COLLABORATIVE CLOUD FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE: EX-ANTE IMPACT ASSESSMENT PREPARED FOR EUROPEAN COMMISSION DIRECTORATE-GENERAL FOR RESEARCH AND INNOVATION. 2022.
• Muenster, S. Digital 3D Technologies for Humanities Research and Education: An Overview. Applied Sciences 2022, 12, 2426.

Some other specific points by content:

• You may include reference to humanities computing / digital humanities.
• In para 2.2 I am wondering if a short introduction of VR,AR (XR and MR?) may be helpful? Concerning visual access to CH content also rapid prototyping / manufacturing may be worth to be mentioned.
• In 2.6 I am wondering if the mentioned projects may be presented in a table and clustered e.g. with regards to their project foci to enable a better overview?
• Chapter 3 seems to be only losely connected to the previous SOTA in chapter 2. From my view I was wondering if in chapter 3 could also be more substantiated and focussed with regards to the many forecasts by the EC and research institutions? – e.g. how do the virtuous spiral relate to other information behaviour approaches (e.g. research primitives) and/or how does it connect to big data and digital heritage?

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

First, thank you very much for your valuable feedback.

According to your comments we proceeded with major changes to our manuscript.

First of all, we added an introduction to VR/AR/XR/MR and we mentioned the procedures of rapid prototyping.

A table was added to depict the list of projects accompanied with their focus.

Chapter 3 was changed to interconnect with the previous sections. We mentioned that all the processed towards cultural informatics are based on data and rely on the strategic plans of EC and Cultural Institutions. So, we described the strategic plan of the EU on culture and the relevant policies. In parallel, we examined the specific key themes of EU funding on culture to discover the exact thematic fields to be funded. Moreover, we analyzed the strategic plans from cultural institutions and analysis (report) from NMC on museum and technology. From the reports and strategic plans, there is a clear concentration on a holistic approach towards people as well as the sustainability.

The publications mentioned were reviewed and added to our work (2 out of the 3). The “storyline” of the manuscript is clearer as now it is explicitly described that all technologies that will be applied in the future will follow a data driven, universal, user-centric approach.

The manuscript was checked for syntax and grammar errors.

Best Regards,

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper is titled – “Big Data and Culture: the Past, the Present and the Future”. In this paper, the authors examine the role of technology, especially big data, in relation to culture. The work seems novel. However, the presentation of the paper needs major improvement. It is suggested that the authors make the necessary changes/updates to their paper as per the following comments:

1. Revise the Introduction section by providing the supporting references for the fact-based statements. For instance – these statements – “The type of machine that Turing and Von Neumann described, where people provide explicitly or implicitly inputs, a machine processes and outputs results.”, “More than 50 years ago people in humanities, primarily in museums, were searching for technology assistance” should be supported by references.
2. In Figure 1, what does the block "shape" represent? How does it fit into the context of searching and expectations?
3. In Section 2.5, in the context of “people-centric” and “personalized” technologies, the papers the authors have cited are very old. For instance, reference [66] was published 18 years ago, reference [67] was published 12 years ago, and so on. Cite this recent paper on personalized technology - https://doi.org/10.3390/bdcc5030042 and cite at least another recent paper from this field in this section.
4. A review of similar works in this field is missing. There have been several similar works published in this field in the last 5- 7 years. For example https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-014-9216-5. Include a section on literature review and highlight the limitations that exist in similar works in this field.
5. Discussion of results needs improvement. Please compare the contributions of this work with prior works in this field to highlight the significance of the findings.
6. The limitations of the work should be clearly highlighted and the scope for future work should be outlined.
7. English proofreading is recommended as there are multiple sentence construction and grammatical errors in the paper.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

First, thank you very much for your valuable feedback.

According to your comments we proceeded with major changes to our manuscript.

The introduction was revised to include relevant publications to what was mentioned in the text. We furthermore explained clearer the steps described in the virtuous spiral to make it clearer what shape stands for (shaping reflections/emotions).

We added the mentioned publications in section 2.5 while we analyzed a literature review in the field according to the link provided.

The discussion of the manuscript was improved, together with improvements to section 3 where a section including analysis of the strategic plans of EC and Research Institutes on culture and technology.

The discussion includes concluding remarks stating clear what we believe should be the focus of the area of cultural informatics concerning horizontal and vertical spread of culture and the role of technology.

The manuscript was checked for syntax and grammar errors.

Best Regards,

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

thank you for your amendments. From my view, the article improved well, although I would like to share some remarks:

-         The title: From my view the main direction of this article is to showing the developments of a project / funding landscape in the EU related to Digital Heritage with a specific emphasis to museums and XR technologies. I am therefore wondering, if a title could be rather mention about “Digital technologies and Cultural Heritage” or more specifically “Digital technologies and the presentation of culture” instead of "Big Data and Culture“?

-    -         Some minor remarks:

o   „Europeana“ may be not perfectly fit into the list of projects. I am wondering if a specific listing of infrastructures (e.g. the ERICs (CLARIAH, E-RIHS,…), DEP data spaces, ECCCH) may be worth to be added?

o   Line 621: “The role of“ seems to be incomplete.

o   Thank you for mentioning XR, MR in para 2.2 I now. I am wondering if you may consider to use XR as the more wide clamber rather than VR in the following text?

o   I am still wondering how the user centred approaches and the „spiral model“ in chapter 3 seems would connect to the previous high-level SOTA in chapter 2? You may consider to employ this model as a framework to briefly highlighting some recent streams in user engagement as e.g. crowdsourcing & citizen science, the emphasis of storytelling, blockchain technologies (e.g. NFTs), cultural innovation etc.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you once more for your valuable review.

Please find our remarks to your points.

First of all, despite the fact that we needed to emphasize the fact the big data will guide culture to the upcoming years (which is the reason for the title selection) we followed your comment and updated the title of the manuscript to:

"Digital Technologies and the role of Data in Cultural Heritage: the Past, the Present and the Future"

We believe it represents fully the content of our work.

Europeana was removed from the list of projects and information about CLARIAH was added.

Line 621 (The role of), was completed with a missing paragraph - mistake due to versioning of the tex file)

The term XR is used in order to represent the terms VR, AR, ER

A short paragraph is added to explain the data driven approach of the spiral model and our proposition to be under consideration in order to form a universal model for all technology approaches.

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors have revised their paper as per all my comments and feedback. I do not have any additional comments at this point. I recommend the publication of the paper in its current form. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you once more for your valuable comments. Despite the fact that you didn't have any comments for alterations to the manuscript, major changes were needed in order to proceed according to the following:

Minor changes were done to the document according to information from other reviewers.

Though, the important one is the title change which was made in order to proceed. The new title is:

"Digital Technologies and the role of Data in Cultural Heritage: the Past, the Present and the Future"

Best Regards,

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors, thank you for taking my remarks into consideration. Those are well responded - so no further objections by me.