Digitaliseeritum

Digitaliseeritum is a term used in discussions of digital transformation to denote the combined process and resulting state in which digital technologies, data infrastructures, and digital practices become pervasive across social, economic, and cultural spheres. It can refer both to the act of digitizing assets and to the emergent digital ecosystem that shapes institutions and workflows.

Etymology and usage: The coinage blends Dutch digitaliseren (to digitize) with the Latin suffix -itum to form an abstract noun. It appears in academic and policy texts in the 2020s as a descriptive shorthand rather than a fixed technical standard, with definitions varying by context.

Scope: Proponents use digitaliseeritum to discuss cross-domain digitization, interoperability, and governance implications of pervasive digital infrastructures, including data governance, platform power, and digital literacy. Critics argue that the term is imprecise and risks conflating separate phenomena such as digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation.

Methods and technologies: While not prescriptive, the concept commonly invokes digitization pipelines, metadata standards, APIs, cloud services, and data governance frameworks, along with AI-assisted data processing and digital heritage preservation.

Implications: The framework highlights benefits such as improved access to information and new value from data, but also raises concerns about privacy, surveillance, digital divides, dependence on platforms, and loss of local control.

See also: digitization, digital transformation, digital humanities, data governance.