Digital technologies and creative practices contribute to heritage conservation professional practices, including interpretation, community engagement and scientific understanding of the physical and environmental dimensions of heritage. Digital and creative methodological approaches support uncovering and reframing tangible and intangible heritage within their original settings. This provides an opportunity to diversify community engagement strategies and engage young generation with heritage in an informing manner, enhancing heritage accessibility and inclusivity by bringing sites to people around the globe via digital technologies. Such approaches are crucial in encouraging creative and digital practices and digital humanities approaches to preserve missing or in-danger heritage and develop curatorial or performance strategies in enclosed and open-air settings. Creative practices and digital technologies are also interpretation tools that are capable to bridge tangible and intangible aspects of heritage and engage communities with their cultural and social attributes.  

The diverse applications stemming from digital and creative approaches are a vehicle to probe the effectiveness of preservation proposals and community consultations by mapping and visualising conservation methodologies. These approaches facilitate community-accepted interpretations and interventions producing less damage to the historic assets and their associated tangible and intangible values. Such knowledge could open new directions for integration in historic strategies and features to contemporary architecture producing culturally and socially rooted regeneration solutions which are environmentally sufficient.  

New technologies and digital tools bring new developments in the explorations the physical and environmental qualities of heritage. These tools enable the understanding of the structural and environmental performance of historic buildings and provide the necessary information for adequate physical consolidation or environmental retrofitting strategies. Therefore, digital technologies and creative practices can establish effective applications in reinterpreting culture and bridging gaps across sciences, humanities and artistic explorations by engaging methods from diverse artistic, design and engineering disciplines. This includes, but not limited to, processes that address inter/multi/trans/cross-disciplinary explorations, tangible-intangible and physical-digital relationships, multiple dimensions including 3D, visual, sonic, audio-visual and physical dimensions as well as applications of Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR), Extended Reality (XR), User Experience (UX). 

Digital and creative heritage is an emerging and fast-growing discipline. Maintaining best practices is key in order to ensure continuous effective contribution of these tools to heritage conservation, preservation and interpretation from different perspectives. The fourth issue of Airea journal “Digital and Creative Heritage: Interdisciplinary Approaches and Best Practices” invites contributions that investigate best practices in engaging digital technologies and creative practices in heritage matters within academic and professional contexts.  

This issue accepts contributions from theoretical, design, practice-led and professional backgrounds (including case studies) on the following themes:  

• Reinterpreting the Past 
• Intangible Heritage 
• Tools and Methodologies 
• Documentation and Preservation 
• Conservation Practices 
• Critical Reimaginations and Intersectional Approaches 
• Community Engagement 
• Evaluation of Heritage  
• Artistic-Scientific Synergies about/for Digital Heritage 

The issue is in collaboration with ICOMOS-UK and its Digital Technologies National Committee, encouraging both academic and professional contributions in heritage.

To be considered for this issue, please submit an abstract of 300 words along with author name(s), institutional affiliations, and contact details by 20 November 2021. 

Submission instructions: 

Register on http://journals.ed.ac.uk/airea and submit abstracts via the Open Journal System (OJS) Journal policies: http://journals.ed.ac.uk/airea/about/policies  

Editorial information: 

Editors:  

Dr Tarek Teba, Senior Lecturer in Architecture, University of Portsmouth 
Dr Eleni-Ira Panourgia, Teaching and Research Fellow in Art/Music, Gustave Eiffel University 
Dr Katerina Talianni, Teaching Fellow in Performative and Digital Arts, University of the Peloponnese
Jack Walker, PhD candidate in Music, University of Edinburgh 

For general enquiries about the call please contact airea@ed.ac.uk  

This call for papers was published on 12 July 2021