Sharon Pisani, Maria Andrei, Junyu Zhang and Alan Miller travelled to Siene for Digital Heritage 2025. Four paper presentations, project workshops and much networking later we reflect on a successful conference.
We are proud to announce that Sharon Pisani from Open Virtual Worlds has received the Best Paper Award for her wonderful work “Introducing Sociodata in Virtual Museums: A Holistic Approach for Sustainable Development in Cultural Landscapes”, at the leading international conference of Digital Heritage Congress 2025! The conference was inspiringly hosted in the beautiful medieval city of Siena. Congratulations to Sharon on her well-deserved achievement!
The papers presented included:
Remaking Lost Communities in Virtual Cultural Landscapes
Junyu Zhang, Miriam Sturdee, Perin Westerhof Nyman, Iain Oliver, Jacquie Aitken , Alan Miller
Designing a Virtual Museum Ecosystem for the Cloud
Alan Miller , Catherine. Cassidy Sharon. Pisani , Maria. Andrei Junyu. Zhang , Sarah. Kennedy , Iain. Oliver , Jacquie. Aitken, Raymond . Williams,, and Vanessa. Martin,
Introducing Sociodata in Virtual Museums: A Holistic Approach for Sustainable Development in Cultural Landscapes
Sharon Pisani , Alan Miller , Catherine Cassidy , Loraine Clarke , Iain Oliver , and Gonçalo Gomes
Bridging Psychological Distance from Climate Change through Experiential Learning with Heritage Organisations
Maria Andrei, Sonja Heinrich, Jason Jacques, Iain Oliver, Sharon Pisani, Alan Miller, Richard Bates
We also participated in a workshop lead by HERITALISE Horizon Europe project developing tools for the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage.
Thank you to the Timespan Museum and West Highland Museum for their support and participation as well as the Schools of Earth and Environmental Sciences, History and Biology for contributions.
Thanks also to the School of Computer Science, and Innovate UK for funding the presentations and to the HERITALISE project https://heritalise-eccch.eu/ and the CULTURALTY project https://culturality.museum/, for supporting work reported in two of the papers.



