Memories, History and Digital Cultural Heritage
MeMo and MAGIC at AIUCD 2026
How can manuscript heritage be made not only accessible, but also reusable, interoperable, and open to the participation of diverse audiences? This question was at the heart of the poster presented by Giuseppina Civitillo, Ylenia Nardone and Elvira Zambardi at the 15th Annual Conference of the Italian Association for Digital Humanities and Digital Culture (AIUCD 2026), held in Cagliari from 3rd to 5th June 2026 and dedicated to the theme Digitale e Public Engagement: pratiche e prospettive nelle Digital Humanities (the full conference programme is available here https://aiucd2026.unica.it/)
Presented within the poster session Memorie, storia e patrimoni culturali digitali, the contribution showcased some of the activities developed through the collaboration between the projects MeMo – Memory of Montecassino and MAGIC, highlighting the role of digital technologies in the preservation, enhancement, and dissemination of manuscript heritage.
Partendo dai principi dell’Open Access e dei FAIR Data, il poster ha mostrato come la costruzione di ecosistemi digitali aperti possa favorire nuove forme di accesso e riuso delle risorse culturali, promuovendo una più ampia partecipazione alla conoscenza e alla ricerca.
Through concrete case studies, including the Compactiones project and the Glossed Bibles, the contribution highlighted the opportunities offered by the integration of humanities expertise and advanced technological tools. Particular attention was devoted to the possibility of making data not only available, but also interoperable and reusable across different contexts.
The collaboration between MeMo and MAGIC, previously presented in an earlier story published on the MeMo website, represents a significant example of an integrated approach to the enhancement of manuscript heritage. While MeMo contributes through activities of research, cataloguing, digitisation, and scholarly description of sources, MAGIC expands these perspectives by providing technological infrastructures and advanced methodologies for data acquisition, analysis, and preservation. The convergence of these complementary areas of expertise supports the creation of open and interoperable digital ecosystems aimed at shared goals of preservation, knowledge production, and cultural heritage enhancement.
The results presented in Cagliari are already publicly accessible through both the poster and the conference proceedings, which are freely available online.
The poster can be consulted in AIUCD 2026’s Coference Companion (Marras, C. – Pergola, A. – Salice, G. (a cura di), Digitale e Public Engagement: pratiche e prospettive nelle Digital Humanities, Atti del XV Convegno Annuale AIUCD, AIUCD, Cagliari 2026. ISBN 979-12-986188-1-7. DOI 10.6092/unibo/amsacta/8980 in «Quaderni di Umanistica Digitale»), published in Open Access. The full conference proceedings also offers an up-to-date overview of current research directions in Digital Humanities and related fields.