From digitised sources to digital data: Behind the scenes of (critically) enriching a digital heritage collection

Digitally available repositories are becoming not only more and more widespread but also larger and larger. Although there are both digitally-born collections and digitised material, the digital heritage scholar is typically confronted with the latter. This immediately presents new challenges, one of the most urgent being how to find the meaningful elements that are hidden underneath such unprecedented mass of digital data. One way to respond to this challenge is to contextually enrich the digital material, for example through deep learning. Using the enrichment of the digital heritage collection ChroniclItaly 3.0 [10] as a concrete example, this article discusses the complexities of this process. Specifically, combining statistical and critical evaluation, it describes the gains and losses resulting from the decisions made by the researcher at each step and it shows how in the passage from digitised sources to enriched material, most is gained (e.g., preservation, wider and enhanced access, more material) but some is also lost (e.g., original layout and composition, loss of information due to pre-processing steps). The article concludes that it is only through a critical approach that the digital heritage scholar can successfully meet the interpretive challenges presented by the digital and the digital heritage sector fulfil the second most important purpose of digitisation, that is to enhance access.