Artificial intelligence (AI) is a game changer in many fields, including cultural heritage. It supports the planning and preservation of heritage sites and cities, enables the creation of virtual experiences to enrich cultural tourism and engagement, supports research, and increases access and understanding of heritage objects. Despite some impressive examples, the full potential of AI for economic, social, and cultural change is not yet fully visible. Against this background, this article aims to (a) highlight the scope of AI in the field of cultural heritage and innovation, (b) highlight the state of the art of AI technologies for cultural heritage, (c) highlight challenges and opportunities, and (d) outline an agenda for AI, cultural heritage, and innovation.

Digital 3D modelling and visualization technologies have been widely applied to support research in the humanities since the 1980s. Since technological backgrounds, project opportunities, and methodological considerations for application are widely discussed in the literature, one of the next tasks is to validate these techniques within a wider scientific community and establish them in the culture of academic disciplines. This article resulted from a postdoctoral thesis and is intended to provide a comprehensive overview on the use of digital 3D technologies in the humanities with regards to (1) scenarios, user communities, and epistemic challenges; (2) technologies, UX design, and workflows; and (3) framework conditions as legislation, infrastructures, and teaching programs. Although the results are of relevance for 3D modelling in all humanities disciplines, the focus of our studies is on modelling of past architectural and cultural landscape objects via interpretative 3D reconstruction methods.

Digital Cultural Heritage and Digital Humanities are, historically seen, in focus of different communities as well as approaching different research topics and - from an organizational point of view - departments. However, are they that different? The idea of this joint article involving digital humanists and heritage researchers is to examine communities, concepts and research applications as well as shared challenges. Beyond a collection of problem-centred essays this is intended to initiate a fruitful discussion about commonalities and differences between both scholarly fields as well as to assess to which extent they are two sides of the same medal.

Urban development that strives to meet democratic ideals and the needs of all stakeholders must incorporate public participation. Contemporary participation processes may employ digital tools that open new possibilities regarding the range of participants and the intensity of participation. In particular, they can uniquely allow for large and diverse groups of participants to be involved in collaborative design processes. Evaluating such processes is important because it allows for the justification of the necessary costs and efforts, as well as continuous improvement. Using the phases specified in the minimal viable process of the U_CODE project as an example, this paper aims at describing criteria for the evaluation of participation processes and propose several possible methods for their assessment. While the majority of these criteria resemble criteria traditionally used to assess public participation in general, this paper proposes an additional criterion, as well as ways of applying all of the criteria to digital participation methods. In addition, the criteria and methods described in this paper not only may be used for evaluative purposes during or after a digital participation process but may also be useful guidelines during the planning stages of participation processes. Hence, it may help to consider these criteria to assess the value of the process during its inception stage to avoid mistakes and to enhance the democratic value of the participation process.

Although the digital humanities have traditionally been conceived as a text-based discipline, both digital visualization techniques as well as visual analysis are increasingly used for research in various humanities disciplines. Since there are several overlaps in epistemic cultures of visually oriented and digitally supported research in art and architectural history studies, museology, and archaeology, as well as cultural heritage, we introduce ‘visual digital humanities’ as novel ‘umbrella’ term to cover research approaches in the digital humanities that are dependent on both consuming and producing pictorial, rather than textual, information to answer their humanities research questions. This article aims to determine this particular field of research in terms of (1) research topics, (2) disciplinary standards, and (3) a scholarly culture as well as (4) researchers’ habits and backgrounds. This study is intended to highlight a scope of phenomena and aspects of relevance. Information is gathered by interviews with researchers at London universities and workshops held in Germany and Sweden.

Historical photographs contain high density of information and are of great importance as sources in humanities research. In addition to the semantic indexing of historical images based on metadata, it is also possible to reconstruct geometric information about the depicted objects or the camera position at the time of the recording by employing photogrammetric methods. The approach presented here is intended to investigate (semi-) automated photogrammetric reconstruction methods for heterogeneous collections of historical (city) photographs and photographic documentation for the use in the humanities, urban research and history sciences. From a photogrammetric point of view, these images are mostly digitized photographs. For a photogrammetric evaluation, therefore, the characteristics of scanned analog images with mostly unknown camera geometry, missing or minimal object information and low radiometric and geometric resolution have to be considered. In addition, these photographs have not been created specifically for documentation purposes and so the focus of these images is often not on the object to be evaluated. The image repositories must therefore be subjected to a preprocessing analysis of their photogrammetric usability. Investigations are carried out on the basis of a repository containing historical images of the Kronentor ("crown gate") of the Dresden Zwinger. The initial step was to assess the quality and condition of available images determining their appropriateness for generating three-dimensional point clouds from historical photos using a structure-from-motion evaluation (SfM). Then, the generated point clouds were assessed by comparing them with current measurement data of the same object.