From the 18th century onwards, the museum as an institution has seen an upsurge which especially in Europe and in China has led to new creations and to the redesigning of established facilities in recent years. Simultaneously, the scholarly reflection on exhibitions has become an academic discipline in its own right. The term and the phenomenon of cultural heritage, being a seemingly counter-directed movement between local, regional and national reference points on the one hand and global sites representing the entire heritage of humankind on the other, compose the background music to a recent cultural evolution labelled glocalization. The essays shed light on the complex developments by taking different perspectives and elaborating the present situation by means of contemporary examples.

The digital humanities intensify the cooperation between the science disciplines in terms of working tools, working methods, and working organization, and in terms of formulating research strategies and scientific objectives. The design for researching the networking of disciplines, approaches, and objects is reflected in the terms "Document - Object - Genesis". This volume discusses the possibilities and limits in a wider factual and theoretical context using the example of the joint venture project entitled "Weser sandstone as global cultural asset - Innovation in the construction industry and its worldwide spread in the pre-industrial era (16th to 19th century)", in which art and architectural history, economic history, information technology, and architecture are discussed.

In the mid 18th century an important reorientation became discernible in Enlightenment discourse. One-sided rationalism was replaced by a conception of the 'whole person' extending its purview to sensual perception and sensibility as an experiential domain of Reason. Against this background, 13 scholars from various disciplines examine what effects this anthropological turn had on utopian literature and the forms of landscape gardening and architecture influenced by it. A remarkable feature of this joint undertaking is that it is the first of its kind to take an interdisciplinary perspective on this paradigmatic change and its implications.