M. Thaller
"Cultural Heritage" is currently a buzzword in many national funding programs;
as such it sounds and reads immediately attractive for planners of projects.
One must not overlook, however, that the funding paradigm, particularly as
promoted by the European Commission, comes not so much from research, but from a
general assumption, that "cultural heritage" is an industrial raw material, out
of which systems may be built, which ultimately may create job opportunities in
the neo-liberal / neo-conservative "service society".
The current drive for the digitization of cultural heritage material has met
opposition, therefore, from a pretty conservative fraction of the old-style
editorial / curatorial community, which sees it as a distraction from the
methodologically proper ways to make historical sources available. It has met
opposition, furthermore, from some of the more methodologically oriented
supporters of IT methods within the Humanities, as a substitution of
"reproduction for analysis". And a not dissimilar conflict rages within the
information retrieval community, which claims, that the current tendency to
make material available "as it is", distracts from the need to provide it in
such a way, as is necessary to support classical information retrieval
paradigms.
The presentation briefly explains the background of these three arguments and
presents a technical / conceptual architecture, which claims to make cultural
heritage projects possible, which can convincingly answer these challenges.
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