All resources aimed at people with User Profile: A school teacher

A comprehensive toolbox of digital heritage tools and guidelines. The resource contains guidelines, best practice examples and digital tools created by all CINE partners.

As a partnership, we have produced a peer-reviewed edition of the Journal of Media Innovations. The journal has been edited by Professor Joan Condell from Ulster University and Curator Judith McCarthy from Donegal County Museum. They state in the foreword:

“Digital technologies provide huge opportunities for improving public access to different forms of cultural assets. One of the main benefits of the digital revolution is that cultural heritage becomes more accessible to people notwithstanding their location or their financial resources. Digital technology can also revolutionise the way we travel and enjoy our cultural heritage. It can provide quality information about heritage sites and enhance visitors’ experience. In addition, harnessing innovation and digital solutions contributes to a more sustainable and responsible tourism sector.”

It consists of

• Foreword by the editors
• Virtual Community Heritage – An Immersive Approach to Community Heritage by Niall Mc Shane, Joan Condell, Jorge Alvarez, Alan Miller
• Museums, Artefacts and Cultural Heritage Sites by Gunnar Liestøl
• Remediation of Historical Photographs in Mobile Augmented Reality by Espen Johnsen Bøe
• The Acropolis on the Immersive Web by Jay David Bolter, Maria Engberg, Colin Freeman, Gunnar Liestøl and Blair MacIntyre
• The use of digital solutions in museums today and in the future by Anna Insa Vermehren, Johanna Clements, Ida Fossli, Jaroslav Bogomolov

A sequence of live stream videos exploring the virtual reconstructions that we have created. They were done during during covid19 lockdowns when it was not possible for people to go to sites and museums to experience such digital reconstructions on site. The videos were streamed live on facebook and recorded.

The series includes

• Highland Clearances Longhouse Settlement
• Real Rights Launch
• A Virtual Tour of Helmsdale Castle
• Helmsdale Fishing Village 1890
• Ironage Kildonan: Roundhouse Farming Settlement
• Vikings Live
• The Lord of the Isles

A multiplayer smart phone game where you take an interactive heritage hunt through Letterkenny’s historic centre, discovering the town’s history from a different perspective. Using the latest location-based gaming technology the useres will join a team of explorers tasked with discovering historic locations to complete interactive challenges. Who will discover the most treasure along the trail?

The heritage walk was created by Donegal county museum, Ireland using Locatify’s content management system for making tours and games. No coding or advanced IT skills required!

The gamified tour encourages groups and families to walk the historic centre of Letterkenny with their smartphones. As players visit the town’s locations they complete mini, interactive challenges for points and treasures. The player or team with the most points at the end is the winner.

We believe that museums and heritage organisations can, and should, play a powerful role in imagining different futures for our communities and societies. Digital technologies have the potential to be an important tool in this process. This session draws on the experience of the CINE project partners and others to explore the questions: how can we utilise technological possibilities to be both a preserver of the past and an instigator of new ideas for the future? What digital tools exist to help us? How can we develop new digital tools that meet our particular needs, align with our values, and help us to address the challenging topics of our time in meaningful ways?

Speakers include:

CINE partners
Reflections & Experiences
On community co-production, serious gaming in heritage, managing data, curating digital content, climate change.

Katrin Glinka
Imagining the Future: one Project at a time
Using technology and museums to instigate the future.

Anjanesh Babu
Machine Learning in the Heritage Sector
A practical example of collaboration to introduce new technology into the museum sector.

Marinos Ioannides
Reflections on Digital Cultural Heritage
The director of the Digital Heritage lab of the Cyprus University of Technology and UNESCO Chair on Digital Cultural Heritage reflects on our programme and the future.

Digital technologies are changing our curatorial practices today more than ever. This session draws on the experiences of the CINE project partners and others to explore the questions: how can digital technologies aid and extend our curatorial practices? How can we use technology to better engage our audiences and communities with a view to playing a more active role in the communities of the future? How can curators of heritage become more adaptable, creative and confident in the digital realm?

Speakers include:

Abira Hussein
The Archive and the Community
Exploring the tensions between digitally driven outputs and audiences, the potential role digital technologies can have in pluralising curation, and the potential role of diaspora knowledge in informing museum practice.

Su Basbugu
Thinking Outside the White Cube
Rethinking curatorial practices through the British Council’s online exhibition platform Museum Without Walls.

Jacquie Aitken
Using immersive digital technology to mobilise heritage for social change
A discussion of the ways in which digital heritage can be used as a generative tool which has the potential to democratise cultural production and argues for it going beyond the spectacle.

The two digital reconstructions present sites in the Strath of Kildonan, the pre-clearances longhouse settlement of Caen, and an Iron Age settlement close by the same site. Both models have been used to enrich heritage dissemination online, through digital events, as part of the Real Rights exhibition and as an outdoor touring app, the Timespan Landscape Explorer.

Caen, pre-clearance township 1813

Iron Age Kildonan

This digital reconstruction has been made using archaeological and archaeobotany evidence. It includes roundhouses, agricultural field systems, 3D objects from the Timespan Museum collection and animated characters. It demonstrates life in the Iron Age and the effects of changing climates on farming communities.

The village of Helmsdale in the north of Scotland was once a major fishing port. Located in Sutherland, the local community caught and cured herring on a vast scale. This reconstruction is part of our case study and shows how the harbour and fish curing facilities at Helmsdale may have looked in the 1890s, near the height of the herring trade.

It is one of the CINE case studies.

Guidelines for mapping and digital documentation.

We are all familiar with interactive maps for navigation and most people have experience finding their way using technologies such as Google Maps.

Interactive mapping is a vital tool in digital heritage. Maps can tell stories of natural and cultural heritage. They can be used to present narratives of changing landscapes through history and time. They can be used to document names and locations in local culture or track where artifacts originated from and where they ended up. The migration of people and cultures can be tracked and viewed via interactive maps leading to a greater understanding through visualisation.

This mobile app is part of an exhibition of the medieval monastery at Skriðu í Fljótsdalur, Iceland.

Players learn about the history of the monastery through treasure hunt style and quiz games, as players search for clues and treasures using the camera and sensors of the phone. The game involves customisation of your character and a scoreboard of game progress as users navigate their way through the site and exhibition.

A spherical image is an image you can take of any location by photographing everything around you, 360°. You capture every single point around you, in every possible viewing direction. The final product can then be projected on the inside of a sphere without leaving anything blank.

This toolkit contains resources and guides for creating and working with spherical media. It starts with the basics – how to create spherical images to more advanced possibilities, like creating a tour of spherical images that can be used on the web, on handhelds or in installations.

What is TurfHunt?

TurfHunt is a scavenger hunt game app designed to bring the traditional scavenger hunt game into the 21st century. The TurfHunt app has been used across the world and has many features including multiple game play modes and challenge types. The games are great for encouraging on location engagement and learning with games available both indoor or outdoor using GPS or BLE beacons to trigger game challenges.

Games can be played offline without an internet connection or online competitively with a scoreboard. Choose from various challenge types such as photo challenges (photo, sticker or drawing), multiple choice or single answer text questions and mini games like memory cards. All challenges can be linked together to play in a specific order or played at random.

TurfHunt is perfect for events, tourism and education purposes. The app can be used by anyone who wants to bring people together to explore on location, engaging with heritage and the environment in a fun and innovative way.

Getting started with TurfHunt

The app is a field guide and trail of places in the Kildonan case study area, which provides a portrait of the parish of Kildonan, Highlands, Scotland.

The interactive maps lead users to information on climate impact, land use and stories, as well as 360 images, audio recordings and relevant archive material from Timespan’s collection. It’s beautifully packaged in eye-popping designs and the intuitive functionality will appeal to app users and those less familiar with virtual mobile trails. 

Co-production is the process by which we facilitate and empower the community, both individually and collectively, to become the curators, makers and performers of their own stories.

In CINE we have used co-production methods in some of our case studies. This guide is a record of how we used co-production and what we have learned.

You will find information about the benefits and the challenges of co-production and key points to consider. This leads you then to the detailed co-production guide and the co-production field manual.

The heritage site Skriðuklaustur contains the ruins of a 16th century Augustinian monastery which provided the testing ground for a variety of technologies during the CINE project.

Here we created a digital model, digitised hundreds of artefacts from the excavation, mapped the historical travel routes around the monastery, made a treasure hunt game and tested ultra-wideband (UWB) for accurate positioning of 3D models outdoors.

The monastery was founded around 1493 but came to an end during the Reformation in 1550. In the following centuries, the history of the monastery was almost forgotten, but was revealed in an archaeological research project from 2000-2012.

Museums and heritage organisations often care for collections of intriguing and amazing objects, kept safe in their buildings. But imagine what more we could do if we could take these objects out of the museum back to the places where they were made and used, or share them with more people than could visit in person, or re-imagine their original surroundings: 3D digitisation of objects opens up all of these possibilities.

This toolkit contains guidelines on photogrammetry – a process of making 3D digital models by taking many photos with a conventional camera and then feeding those photos through some specific software. You can also see some of the 3D models we made of artefacts relating to our case study sites and explore links to other information and guides.