Shaping the memory of the built heritage. The digital record as new historical source

Over the past century, historiography has witnessed an exponential expansion in the notion of sources. From the historiographical revolution of the Nouvelle histoire in the 1920s to the advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, not only has the concept of a source evolved, but so too have the typologies and abundance of sources, their relationship with historical method, and the ways in which they can be accessed. Today, this transformation is being further accelerated - often vertiginously - by artificial intelligence, which generates and analyses data on an unprecedented scale. In the field of built heritage history, the proliferation of digital resources - including three-dimensional virtual models, digital images, and maps - raises pressing questions about authenticity, evidential value, as well as their selection and long-term preservation. With the awareness that the data we produce and preserve today, whether consciously or not, will shape the history of tomorrow, several key questions emerge: how can digitized and born-digital materials effectively convey historical knowledge over time, and how can their accessibility and long-term preservation be ensured? Moreover, do all outputs of contemporary architectural, engineering, and design (AEG) practice, as well as the digital resources related to built heritage available online, hold potential value as historical sources? And is it conceivable to standardize a process for creating digital resources with recognized source value? This thesis addresses these questions through an integrated approach that combines theoretical reflection, methodological investigation, and applied experimentation. It is structured into three interrelated sections. The first section offers a theoretical reflection on the new meanings and instruments of memory emerging from the transition from analogue to digital, clarifying the challenges, opportunities, and risks that this shift entails for archives, researchers, and all those engaged with the memory of built heritage. At the heart of the inquiry lies the process through which a physical object or a born-digital file becomes a digital record, understood as a digital resource equipped with structured descriptions, capable of generating meaning and participating in processes of access, interpretation, and valorisation, thereby becoming part of digital cultural heritage (DCH). The second section, divided into two stages, investigates this process from a methodological perspective. The first stage focuses on the acquisition of geometric and qualitative data on built heritage and on the creation of digital resources through both traditional and digital survey methods. The second stage addresses the transformation of these digital resources into fully documented digital records, informed by a critical review of national and European guidelines and support tools for cultural heritage digitization and archiving. In the final section of the thesis, this theoretical and methodological framework is applied through the practical development of a web platform designed to support historical research on the built heritage of Trento during the nineteenth century. In contrast to the current overwhelming proliferation of unstructured digitization projects and digital repositories on the web, this platform does not simply add isolated resources; rather, it aggregates, contextualizes, and connects existing digital records already available online with new born-digital outputs - such as the results of a geometric survey - within a coherent, interlinked, and semantically enriched framework. This integration is achieved through the application of the FAIR principles in the structuring of the records and the LOD principles in their publication.