Placing Intangible Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Over the last decades, the concept of Cultural Heritage has included Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), mainly due to UNESCO's initiatives. ICH is in danger of disappearance or degradation due to globalization, immigration, urbanization etc. On the other hand, ICH is strongly related to the features of space. It is formed and developed in a specific location, which is influenced by the vicinity with other civilizations. Its topographic features (altitude, inclination, distance from sea or freshwater, climate etc.), their influence in everyday life and the natural raw materials present are determinant in the process of the ICH formation. It is very important to capture and analyze the various forms of ICH, in order to extract the latent human creativity hidden in them, while at the same time studying the influence of space on their evolution. Their capture should be done by implementing appropriate equipment, methods and archival formats in order to fully describe them and to ensure the preservation of the resulting digital archives. Nowadays, the evolution of technology provides flexible means towards this aim. Furthermore, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are a tool to disseminate and manage spatial data and their relations to attributes, like the forms of ICH They allow the correlation of data, the response to spatial queries and they can lucidly visualize the data. On one hand, a web GIS system, can designate and preserve ICH by presenting the digital records of its forms and by focusing on its relations to place. On the other hand, such a system can be implemented on a research level, by introducing the analysis of the ICH forms, in order to study the influence of the geographic and topographic features of space on their evolution and formation and to study similarities and relationships between ICH of different communities and cultures. This paper describes an integrated approach to the issues of digitization of ICH and the implementation of the analysis- within a GIS environment. Its practical application requires large effort by a multidisciplinary scientific team.