The University of Malta HERITAGE Research Cluster is an interdisciplinary initiative that fosters cutting-edge research on, and sharing of, existing and future heritage data, making the best use of interdisciplinary expertise and modern technological tools. It brings together 24 academics and researchers from eight different University Faculties, which include thirteen Departments, and also one Institute. This wide network brings together  academics from a wide variety of  fields, including  archaeology, church history and patrology, history, conservation, conservation science, materials science, environmental science, chemistry, geosciences, engineering, computer information systems, artificial intelligence, and library and archival sciences, bringing together different knowledge and backgrounds to work together on researching, preserving, and remaking the past in new and cross-disciplinary ways, collating and presenting heritage data to make it findable and thus easily accessible, as well as seeking out new knowledge in areas of direct relevance to the 6 Pillars which make up the HERITAGE Research Cluster.

The Leader of the Cluster is Professor JoAnn Cassar, Department of Conservation and Built Heritage. The Cluster is championed by the Faculty for the Built Environment.

The Research Cluster aims to foster collaboration on cutting-edge heritage research by sharing existing and future data, leveraging interdisciplinary expertise, and using modern technological tools. Its goal is to pass on knowledge about our heritage, its contexts, and environments to future generations, while laying the foundation for sustainable preservation and the development of new directions in heritage research.

The Heritage Research Cluster promotes interdisciplinary collaboration in heritage research, presentation and interpretation. It develops heritage databases to facilitate access to relevant heritage data from archives, publications and unpublished theses and dissertations, making them more easily searchable, enhancing accessibility to researchers as well as public engagement with cultural heritage. It also seeks to create new knowledge and data, and to make this widely and easily available in easily searchable databases. The Cluster is also focused on developing tools to engage with big data with the help of AI to develop new insights and new research questions, with the goal that heritage is understood, documented and continually reimagined for future generations.

The Cluster makes heritage data and knowledge more accessible, creating searchable databases of knowledge unearthed in archives and publications, while also linking this to new laboratory and monitoring data, also using data modelling, information systems and artificial intelligence (large language models - LLMs) to enhance accessibility and engagement with cultural heritage information. These advanced technologies can help researchers by sorting and analyzing big data to reveal correlations that might not be otherwise obvious or accessible. The Heritage Research Cluster places great importance on PhD research to generate new ideas, and to ask new research questions. These efforts contribute to the creation of new knowledge using existing and emerging cutting-edge research tools, ensuring lasting impact across heritage-related disciplines.

For further information, kindly email us at heritage.cluster@um.edu.mt