Defining Heritage Science: A Consilience Pathway to Treasuring the Complexity of Inheritable Human Experiences through Historical Method, AI, and ML

Abstract

Societies have always used their heritage to remain resilient and to express their cultural identities. Today, all the still-available experiences accrued by human societies over time and across space are, in principle, essential in coping with the twenty-first century grand challenges of humanity (refer to the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals). Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms can assist the next generation of historians, heritage stakeholders, and decision-makers in (1) decoding unstructured knowledge and wisdom embedded in selected cultural artefacts and social rituals, (2) encoding data in machine-readable systems, (3) aggregating information according to the user’s needs in real time, and (4) simulating the consequences of either erasing, neglecting, putting in latency, or preserving and sharing specific human experiences. What our global society needs is a multilingual and transcultural approach to decode-encode the treasure of human experience and transmit it to the next generation of world citizens. This approach can be the pathway to work on a new science of heritage, its ethics, and empathy.

The Resilient Tradition: Exploring the Cultural Significance of Javanese Wayang Kulit in Heritage Preservation

“…Cultural heritage preservation can be likened to a time capsule, an archive of human achievement, resilience, and creativity (Nanetti, 2021). It encompasses tangible artifacts, such as historic buildings, artworks, and archaeological sites, as well as intangible elements like music, language, folklore, and traditional practices.…”

Information sensorium as a framework to read images: an interdisciplinary investigation on "reading images" using the Wayfarer Triptych by Jheronimus Bosch as a case study

“…Thoughts are treated as the product of the viewer's perception of images. They are assumptions at this stage, which are "statements accepted as true without proof in a disciplinary context" (Nanetti, 2021), hence prompt further evaluation. Thoughts, including opinions, are gathered based on priori experience and knowledge that aligns with "Iconographical description", contributing to the formulation of the theme or subject of the image.…”

“…When we say something is informative, it implies a certain level of understanding evaluated and selected from an aggregated pool of relevant sources or references instead of thoughts and opinions. In the same way, notions and conceptions of themes and subjects will require some justification and evidence of belief or truth without attempting to discover a deeper meaning, as in van Straten's Iconographical description (Nanetti, 2021;van Straten, 1985van Straten, /2012.…”