Concepts, values and authors for the definition of authenticity: International Charters AI analysis.

The debate on the "authenticity" concept has a founding moment in the premises of the Venice Charter, but it is a conceptual instrument with multiple meanings and definitions. At least 34 of the 55 charters that succeeded the Venice Charter, from 1963 to 2023 consider “authenticity” as a notion at the bottom of the idea of transmission of Cultural Heritage “to future generations". Among these, the Nara Charter (1994) in Art. 10 defines, with reference to the Venice Charter, the concept of "authenticity" as an "essential qualifying factor concerning values" that cannot be determined by "fixed criteria" but is based on the "respect due to all cultures", to which are also associated concepts such as "integrity" (1964), "spirit of the place" (1981), "community" (1982) "cultural value", "intervention project" (2019), and -in the most recent charters- "tangible and intangible aspects" (2019) and "reuse" (2021). The evolution of the “authenticity” concept over time is a metaphor for the evolutionary changes in society. For its interpretation, artificial intelligence tools for text coding, such as MAXQDA2022, can help to clarify (and generate) the relationships between concepts and their application (Transformation Maps by Word Economic Forum Strategic Intelligence) over time and in the cultural context. The research aims to interpret the path of the International Charters (starting from the codification of the term authenticity of the Venice Charter) to grab their evolution and transformation with the historical-cultural contexts from which the charters originated. The paper proposes in parallel a reading of the main theoretical positions of the actors that contributed to the drafting of the Maps. The parallelism between the evolutionary matrix of the concepts generated by the IA and the critical interpretation of the theoretical positions will offer an evolutionary conceptual history of the authenticity-integrity binomial.