The ATLAS of Italian Digital Humanities: a knowledge graph of digital scholarly research on Italian Cultural Heritage

ATLAS is a project funded by the Next Generation EU program of the European Commission for 24 months (October 2023 - October 2025) that aims to improve the FAIRness and exploitation of Digital Humanities (DH) projects and scholarly data about Italian cultural heritage (https://dh-atlas.github.io).

DH research outputs are often not easy to discover, and risk obsolescence if not well documented and based on shared guidelines and standards. Moreover, projects are often self-referential, meaning that they may not follow metadata standards and best practices. In addition, users’ experience is limited in exploration, since there is a lack of interlinking across projects with a clear content overlap and explanations of such overlaps - including contradictory statements or disagreement.

The goal of ATLAS is to identify shared metadata standards, protocols, reusable workflows, good practices, guidelines and evaluation frameworks in the Digital Humanities. To tackle the aforementioned problems in real-world scenarios and ensure the representativeness of identified guidelines, a pool of selected sources will be integrated in a knowledge graph, and reengineered with state-of-the-art Semantic Web technologies and Natural Language Processing methods. Pilot projects will help us to define guidelines and create a golden set of reference projects in the Digital Humanities. The aim is to collect sources that are published according to shareable criteria, that can be easily mined to extract research topics, inter and intra-textual relations, as well as bibliographic, literary, and thematic data. This will allow us to define quality criteria for recommending best practices to future projects.

Moreover, the data extracted will be reconciled with international authority records (e.g. VIAF) and open data sources (e.g. Wikidata) to facilitate their reuse and the development of mashup applications. Finally, such enhanced data will be preserved and leveraged in a dedicated platform to support exploration and discovery of the landscape of DH projects, and will provide suggestions on tools and resources to scholars that are planning new projects.

In summary, the ATLAS project will contribute to the Italian DH research community with four main results:

-       A whitebook including results of the analysis of the state of the art and good practices for FAIR scholarly data

-       A knowledge graph on DH projects and scholarly data on Italian Cultural Heritage, accessible online via the ATLAS web application and preserved in CLARIN.

-       The pilots evaluation, highlighting differences and strategies to cope with mapping knowledge, data manipulation, access and persistence of different types of digital artefacts.

-       A search portal dedicated to scholarly literature and data relevant to the pilots and beyond, built on top of the OpenAIRE CONNECT Gateway on Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage.