If digital cultural heritage is a subset of digital humanities, why do conferences, books and projects on digital heritage focus on preserving and conveying digital simulations, data, and records of heritage? Why don’t they provide platforms that support and preserve cultural interactions as part of a dynamic, human-focused cultural ecosystem? AI offers some answers to this problem but raises other questions. In this presentation I will propose steps to help foster richer social and cultural aspects of human interaction with AI-assisted and augmented 3D digital cultural environments.

The transformation in the built environment not only shaped the urban identity of the UAE but also documented the cultural, political, and socio-economic aspirations of a nation in formation. However, several of these modern heritage buildings, that were constructed between 1950s and 1980s, have been demolished, significantly altered or left undocumented. Leading to a critical gap in knowledge and a loss in the cultural memory of the UAE's urban development.
This research aims to document, digitize and visually reconstruct the lost modern heritage of the UAE. It explores how digital technologies can be employed to rigorously reconstruct lost architectural heritage and generate a wider communication for the general public focusing on architectural works from the mid-20th century that played a pivotal role in shaping the nation's cultural identity.

Digital representation often reduces cultural objects from rich, multifaceted artifacts to inert images, stripped of context and significance. In this process, the material, visual, historical, anthropological, and linguistic dimensions that define their identity are lost. But what if digitization could achieve the opposite? This contribution presents knowledge graphs as a methodology for digital recontextualization, capable of reconstructing and interlinking the multiple layers of knowledge that surround an object and reconnecting what digitization separates. Through a series of case studies, it demonstrates how this approach enables the representation of the digitized object not as a static record but as a map of interconnections that encapsulates our knowledge and interpretation of it, a map that integrates multiple perspectives, accommodates different readings, and grows as our knowledge evolves.

In disaster studies, attachment to place helps understand people’s behaviours and promotes preparedness. Anthropologists and sociologists view place as an anchor and source of identity for disaster-impacted people. This is particularly true when linked to heritage places. However, this unidirectional interpretation of the people-place relationship overlooks the cultural and social effects of the loss of familiar places. Grounded in Scannell and Gifford's framework, this interdisciplinary study examines how disasters affect communities' ties to heritage sites, focusing on the cities of L’Aquila (Italy) and Bungamati (Nepal) in the post-earthquake period. Despite shared roots in heritage, their recovery approaches differ: top-down in L’Aquila and owner-driven in Bungamati. This interdisciplinary study examines how the people-place relationship transforms after a disaster, based on analyses of interviews and ethnographic and desk-based research. Its significance lies in the theoretical and methodological approach, as the multidimensional interpretation of place attachment is seldom used in disaster studies.