From a heritage management perspective, the digitisation process has many potential benefits. First, using a digital twin instead of an original artefact in various forms of dissemination may serve to protect the original better and preserve it for the future. Also, the digitalised versions of heritage assets are accessible at a whole different scale compared to the original, which is most often stored or, at best, displayed at a museum. In some cases, the original might not even exist anymore.

Digitising heritage assets may also allow simultaneous visualising of different chronological sequences at a site. Fort Lillo is a 16th-century fort located outside Antwerp in Belgium. Due to threats from flooding, substantial remodelling around the site was required, and in the process, parts of the fortification structure were subjected to reconstruction. The project VirtuaFort Lillo used digitisation methods to visualise the past (the 1640s), the present (2022) and the future (2028) for the site, providing an interesting temporal perspective on the heritage of a specific place. The project utilised 3D virtual reconstructions of the historical fortress and its immediate surroundings, a panoramic visualisation of the current situation and a 3D visualisation of a future vision, all presented in a Time Machine Europe application, allowing users to interactively explore these three time periods and switching interactively from one period to another.

In a European context, the availability of digitised cultural heritage from different parts of the continent allows for exploration by common people of cultural diversity in a way previously not possible. In the present course, we illustrate this through our two case studies. AR applications based on prehistoric sites from Sweden and Cyprus address cultural similarities and differences between cultures and across distances in the past.

Although digital heritage assets have many qualities and are useful in various contexts, digitising heritage does not come without the need for careful thought and reflection (Manžuch, 2017). In specific cases, digitisation of cultural heritage can create serious ethical dilemmas, as seen, for example, in the case of Palmyra:

The post-destruction creation of a 3D-printed version of the Palmyra Arch of Triumph described in the video above has been described as "opening Pandora's box of ethical issues relating to the use of digital technology to preserve heritage", failing to address aspects such as human losses, archaeological accuracy, ownership and respect to people culturally connected to the heritage in question (Khunti, 2018, see also Stobiecka, 2020). 

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References:

1. Khunti, R. 2018. The problem with printing Palmyra: Exploring the ethics of using 3D printing technology to reconstruct heritage. Studies in Digital Heritage, 2(1), 1–12.
2. Manžuch, Z. (2017) Ethical Issues In Digitization Of Cultural Heritage. Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies: Vol. 4, Article 4. Available at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol4/iss2/4
3. Stobiecka, M. (2020). Archaeological heritage in the age of digital colonialism. Archaeological Dialogues, 27, 113–125. doi:10.1017/S1380203820000239