Overview
Heritage Lab is the museum and digital laboratory of Italgas, founded and shaped in the company’s redesigned headquarters in Turin. The lab’s mission is to organise and digitise Italgas’ cultural heritage using the leonardesque machines of Fondazione Cini’s digital humanities centre, ARCHiVe, and the unique Replica scanner by Factum Arte.
Once recorded, organised and marked by the archivists, the material arrives at the laboratories, where it is inspected by the digitisers and allocated to the different digitisation lines. The digital acquisitions are then collected and migrated to Time Machine Box, which undertakes the automatic post-production of the documents and their publication. A huge pool of big data from the past is ready to be made available to historians and researchers all over the world.
Due to its core business, Italgas is in constant contact with the Italian archaeological heritage authorities to protect the finds unearthed during excavations carried out for the maintenance and construction of its distribution network. With Lidar, Leica’s 3D scanner, Heritage Lab is able to acquire digital reproductions of entire areas and individual objects to be made available to universities and heritage protection agencies.
Italgas is aware of its social impact in producing and transferring knowledge, and interacting with the context in which it operates. Heritage Lab is therefore a space for professional growth, where interrupted work paths are reactivated and new professionals are trained: the digital humanists.
Heritage Lab envisages itself cooperating with archival entities internationally and continuing its ongoing experimentation and innovation in software, algorithms and machinery.
Project lead
Dr. Katya Corvino
