KNOT Catalogue
Scholarly Digital Objects and Activity

... By rethinking scholarly digital objects as cultural heritage.

The KNOT catalogue is part of the KNOT pilot, a three-year project (2023-2025) tasked with investigating ways to integrate the Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) of Italian universities into I.PaC, the national infrastructure being built by the Central Institute for the Digitization of Cultural Heritage (ICDP) - Digital Library.

For years now academic research has operated in a primarily digital space, with digital tools playing an increasingly important role in both the activity of research and the production of results as digital-born and/or digitized objects. As a result of this, universities find themselves already in possession of a multifaceted and interesting, and so far unexplored, example of DCH in the form of digital objects created by academic research projects.

These scholarly digital objects are the focus of investigation of the KNOT project with the goal to explore ways to describe and valorize them within the context of I.PaC. Our investigation starts from the field of the Humanities, and in particular the Digital Humanities (DH), where a project-oriented and multidisciplinary approach often results in the creation of digital objects that recontextualise existing cultural heritage — such as digital editions, corpora, visualization tools, collections — and thus offer a particularly interesting example of the scholarly digital object as DCH. More information on the pilot and its activities can be found on our website.

The KNOT catalogue features research projects and the digital scholarly objects they’ve produced based on a census of Italian humanities research conducted in the first year of the pilot, and updated throughout its duration. The projects and objects catalogued are described using the KNOT Data Model, developed as a guideline for the description of digital scholarly activity and objects as cultural heritage using a common vocabulary and facilitating the dissemination of good practices.