This paper presents a pioneering attempt in digital humanities to create a digital archive entirely dedicated to Chinese calligraphy and contemporary arts, making WenDAng – WRITE Digital Archive¹ among the first of its kind worldwide, the first in Europe of Chinese contemporary art, and the first in Italy dedicated to Chinese studies. One of its core responsibilities lies in assuring ethical and accurate representation and dissemination of data. By designing an open-source infrastructure, the project seeks to acquaint global audiences with this specific part of Chinese cultural heritage.

The archive is being constructed using a dedicated ontology² and thesaurus³, developed in close collaboration with the domain experts. Their expertise has been invaluable in ensuring that the archive reflects cultural authenticity and scholarly precision. This collaborative process exemplifies engaged scholarship: knowledge is co-created through dialogue and collaboration between experts in Chinese culture, language, arts, calligraphy, digital humanities, and information technologies. Such infrastructures, grounded in engagement, can greatly enhance the quality of research while opening it to wider publics.

Other than safeguarding cultural heritage, this project addresses the broader role of digital infrastructures as tools that can support education, research, and the representation of less familiar cultural practices within intercultural dialogue. In fact, digital archives are not neutral repositories, but rather narrators of culture. The WenDAng archive will be a place where Chinese contemporary calligraphy can be engaged with, studied, and valued, hence adding up to diversity and fostering inclusion.

Digital archives built on Linked Open Data and Semantic Web principles can sometimes face the challenge of translating technical complexity into accessible user experiences. The WenDang archive addresses this by designing an interface that is both semantically rigorous and intuitive, enabling engagement not only from digital humanities experts, but from diverse publics as well. This will ensure that the results of research are not confined to academic circles but shared widely.

Moreover, this project addresses the challenge of resilience in digital semantic infrastructures. Cultural heritage must be preserved not only for current audiences but also for future generations, and the role of semantic technologies, interoperable standards, and adherence to FAIR principles is key to ensure long-term preservation.

In sum, the WenDAng archive exemplifies how digital archives can serve as infrastructures of engagement. It preserves cultural heritage, empowers domain experts, and opens new perspectives on less known practices. By situating Chinese contemporary calligraphy in dialogue with digital humanities, the project demonstrates how these infrastructures can generate public value and foster intercultural understanding.

1) https://wendang-project.github.io/documentation/

2) https://w3id.org/write/ontology

3) https://w3id.org/write/thesaurus