EDITORIAL

This is my first issue of JOCCH as Editor-in-Chief. I was appointed on September 1, 2018, after my predecessor Roberto Scopigno ended his second term in the position. During his six-year stewardship, JOCCH achieved excellent results, establishing itself as a point of reference for the digital heritage research community and scoring high in the ranking of scientific journals in the domain. The Editorial Board has also been reorganized, with the inclusion of new Associate Editors covering a wide range of competencies and improving the balance of gender and geographical provenance. The Journal is grateful to the past Editorial Board for bearing the burden of the review work, above all to Roberto for his successful dedication to the editorial activity. His kind acceptance of remaining on the Editorial Board guarantees a smooth transition and the continuing availability of his advice and experience. The Journal’s mission was established when it was founded in 2008, and it is clearly described in David Arnold’s “Editorial for Inaugural Issue of JOCCH” published in Volume 1, Issue 1, of June 2008. Most of the considerations of this 12-year-old manifesto are still valid. But the world has progressed since then, and technology has changed our everyday lives with products that not long ago were still considered research results and that are now available off the shelf on a variety of devices, applications, and online. The digital heritage community is no longer a small patrol of innovators, nor is it a group of early adopters: it now forms a large group, an influential “early majority” within the wider cultural heritage research community. This raises the threshold of what can be considered original research. It also adds new scientific and social responsibilities to researchers: for digital heritage, the rigor of science must match the creativity of culture, respecting its typical values. The new opportunities of communicating heritage to the public and of offering data for reuse to other researchers provided by technological advances must therefore follow precise codes of conduct to ensure the trustworthiness of their outcomes. The risk of distorting the meaning of heritage by abusing the application of technology was already mentioned in Arnold’s editorial. It now assumes wider implications with the current trend toward data-centric research, in which cultural heritage is placed behind other disciplines not only for historical reasons but also for the greater difficulty of combining the scientific method with the critical methodology typical of the humanities. Thus, innovation in digital heritage is not just a more efficient algorithm: as Proust wrote, “the only true voyage of discovery . . . would be not to visit new lands but to possess other eyes.” In sum, the ideal paper for JOCCH is the result of a right and well-balanced mix of innovative technology and importance for cultural heritage comprehension. The above is well exemplified by one of the papers of the present issue, “CHER-Ob: A Tool for Shared Analysis and Video Dissemination,” by Wang et al., selected as “best paper” at GCH2017, the 15th EUROGRAPHICS Workshop on Graphics and Cultural Heritage. Thanks to the work of the previous Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board, other issues are already in the making, with a special issue on “Evaluation of Digital Cultural Resources,” to be published in early 2019. Other themes for special issues have been proposed and the flow of submissions is continuing. In the end, a journal is made by its authors and its readers: also, etymologically, editors have only the task of putting out what others have made so that others may benefit from it. Our commitment is to do this in the best possible way.