Future literacy, patrimonio documentario e intelligenza artificiale: Verso una pedagogia civica dei dati culturali nel contesto territoriale italiano

In the Italian context, characterized by a wide and highly articulated distribution of cultural heritage, museums, archaeological sites and historic landscapes tend to appear less and less as autonomous entities and increasingly as complex, stratified territorial configurations generated by long‑term historical, social and cultural processes. In this perspective, the concept of Futures Literacy, as developed by UNESCO and reworked in European and Italian debates, offers a useful interpretive framework for critically rethinking the practices of managing, conserving and enhancing cultural data, moving beyond a purely archival or inventory‑based conception of heritage. The article aims to explore the intersections between futures literacy and data management in Italian territorial heritage, taking the cultural landscapes of Campania as a privileged observatory. Within this framework, the integration between artificial intelligence and computational palaeography, with particular reference to Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technologies and tools for assisted collaborative transcription, is taken as a significant exemplary case. This integration is not analysed solely on a technical level, but examined in its pedagogical, ethical and civic implications: it raises unavoidable questions concerning equity in access to documentary corpora, the transparency and biases of recognition algorithms, cultural sovereignty over digitized historical sources, as well as the interpretive responsibilities that arise from the automation of processes traditionally entrusted to specialist expertise. The argument develops along three converging axes. The first concerns heritage data understood as territorial commons, whose production, maintenance and interpretation involve a plurality of actors and imply anticipatory choices about which futures are to be rendered thinkable and negotiable. The second axis concerns practices of stratified digital documentation, from H‑GIS to H‑BIM and up to computational models for historical scripts, considered not only as tools of representation but as devices that structure the possibilities of imagining and designing futures for heritage. The third axis, finally, pertains to the educational and civic dimension: the integration of Futures Literacy into heritage education pathways that include computational palaeography can be configured as an opportunity to promote forms of active citizenship, foster cultural cooperation, including in post‑conflict and diasporic contexts, and ultimately contribute to improving living environments and to building conditions of peace. The working hypothesis running through the entire contribution is that cultural heritage, and documentary heritage in particular, should not be understood as a static legacy but rather as an open process in which conservation, critical interpretation and the imagination of the future are deeply intertwined and oriented towards pedagogical, ethical and transformative aims.