Digital hybridity and relics in cultural heritage: using corpus linguistics to inform design in emerging technologies from AI to VR

Hybrid technologies enable the blending of physical and digital elements, creating new ways to experience and interact with the world. Such technologies can transform engagement with relics—both secular and sacred—but they present challenges for capturing faith, belief, and representation responsibly. Given the complexities of digital representation and the ethical challenges inherent in digitising culturally significant objects, a transdisciplinary understanding of these issues is needed. To inform this discussion from a linguistic perspective, we examined the representation of relics in historical and contemporary texts. Using a corpus linguistic approach to extract modifiers of the word ‘relic’ in corpora of Early Modern English books and contemporary web-sourced texts from 2021, we examined the multifaceted ways in which relics have been perceived and evaluated over time. Early texts consider relics as both objects of moral and spiritual significance, and tools of religious and political control, while they are more often framed as heritage symbols, reflecting past events, places, and traditions in contemporary texts. We discuss how hybrid, sometimes AI-based technologies can enhance accessibility and engagement, whilst also challenging traditional sensitivities around authenticity and sensory experience, which are integral to the meaning and significance of relics.