All resources aimed at people with User Interest: Using digital technology to interpret outdoor heritage sites

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

CINE GATE is a repository of digital data and in its cumulation of different content a ‘virtual museum’ in its own right. It has served the CINE project well as a place to gather data and re-use it in different contexts, such as social media, online exhibitions or events.

This virtual museum system can be setup for other projects too. It uses a LAMP stack.

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.

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.

We live in a data society. The digital realm offers new opportunities to collect and store data and to make it more accessible to a global and connected audience. In the heritage and museum sector, digitisation, data care and data management are necessary but resource-consuming tasks that require expertise and skill. This session draws on the experience of the CINE project partners and others to explore the questions: What technologies can help? Where do we need to improve? What are our responsibilities to current and future communities and how can our digital collections be safe?

Speakers include:

Øyvind Steensen and Karin G Byom
Hidden Norway
The creators of Hidden Norway talk about preserving digital data under the ice.

Catherine Cassidy
Issues in 3D Digitisation for the Promotion and Preservation of Cultural Heritage
Examining the whole lifecycle of 3D scanned objects, drawing on the work of the CINE project.

Rohan Almond 
Project Reveal
The National Trust for Scotland presents the learning from their recent project.

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.

The idea with the Muninn app was to crowdsource cultural remains in landscaped with help of the public. The information gathered via the app goes into a special database where it is certified and then made visible on a map

In CINE this app was developed as part of Advanced Mapping, a method to gather information of landscapes and to present this in layers on maps.

Muninn was made for the associated partner The Cultural Heritage Agency of Iceland, which is an administrative institution responsible for archiving information about archaeological and built heritage. They run a geo-located database for protected and listed archaeological sites. In Iceland, each municipality is obliged to register cultural heritage within their territory as a part of their land-use and master plans. Only a part of cultural heritage in the country has been located and listed.

Muninn is currently being tested.

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.

Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. It can also be defined as a set of activities and processes to solve problems by using or applying the characteristics of game elements.

Gamification is a broad term but simply put, we are adding elements of game-related fun to a traditionally non-game activity.

In this handbook you can find out about techniques of gamification, elements of gamification design and gamification in heritage. These topics are illustrated with examples from the CINE project.

Timespan’s online Real Rights exhibition maps the history of the parish of Kildonan in East Sutherland, Scotland, looking at the intersection of colonialism and climate change.

Alongside more conventional objects, images and documents, the exhibition presents three digital reconstructions of archaeological sites from the parish – an Iron Age roundhouse settlement (500BC-500AD); a Highland Clearances longhouse settlement in 1813 and Helmsdale fishing village c.1890.

In addition to the rich historical content, the exhibition presents a way in which digital models of the past can be curated and interpreted alongside other types of historical documents.

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

We used the latest technology and digitisation methods to tell the story of St. Catherine’s Church and graveyard in Killybegs, County Donegal, Ireland.

Killybegs History and Heritage Society collaborated with Donegal County Museum and Ulster University’s Intelligent Systems Research Centre to create a virtual reconstruction, virtual tour, and a series of 3D scans of artefacts from the site.

Virtual St. Catherine’s shows what can be achieved when heritage organisations and “techie” people collaborate on digital projects.

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. 

What new knowledge can be generated when archaeologists, historians, community members and virtual modellers get together to recreate a landscape? These three guidelines pull together the possibilities and set out some pointers communicating this understanding to others.

The Digitourist toolkit helps heritage organisations to promote and manage tourist access to natural and cultural heritage – either through creating trails or by bringing digital heritage content into peoples’ homes.

The toolkit supports three specific types of applications that can create exciting online visitor experiences and help direct access to heritage sites.

1. Digitourist Virtual Time Travel service provides immersive simulations which support guided collective exploration to audiences in their home,  
2. Digitoursit Mobile Smart Spheres framework, supports creating packages for cross reality apps that enhance visits to locations by providing mobile immersive experiences,
3. Digitourist Questit framework supports creating trail packages for apps that provide directed location-based interpretation.

Digital technology has changed how we view and present our natural and cultural heritage.

Communities have access to digital multimedia tools and platforms that can be utilised to help preserve their natural and cultural heritage.

In the era of smart phones and mobile technology people have access to devices capture content that ranges from photography, high definition video to 3D artefact scanning and share their content to a global audience. This technology can empower communities to take ownership of their history, heritage and stories.

Through the development of digital tools and promotion of accessible platforms museums and heritage organisations can support communities in the creation of heritage content.

This website provides a series of ‘getting started’, guides for a range of digital tools we believe can provide value to community heritage projects.

The Vágar model is a situated simulation of an archaeological site of international relevance. The medieval fishing town of Vágar was the most populated urban center in Northern Norway at the time. It is here that the organised trade with stockfish to different European countries started. To better understand this landscape and its human footprint, Oslo University, Aurora Borealis Multimedia and Museum Nord have created a digital model with different layers that users can move through:

• History layer: ice age
• History layer: 15 century with animations
• History layer: 19 century with animations
• Future layer: scenario 3 degrees increase in temperature – humid version (part of OT1.3.1)
• Future layer: scenario 3 degrees increase in temperature – dry version (part of OT1.3.1)

Part of this app is also a game where historical photographs can be placed digitally in the physical landscape.

Several tests have been conducted with members of the local community as well as pupils and students. The new model was presented and discussed at the online event “Nye løsninger for digital formidling av Storvågans historie” on the 12 November 2020.

The app is currently being tested and will be publicly available soon.

Have you ever wished you could take everyone to an archaeological site that is just so inaccessible?

360 degree digital tours can help solve the barriers of time and access limitations by allowing virtual visits to such sites. This tool lets you create digital tours through a simple process using spherical media, photos and audio that you may already have.

When people create digital resources they produce a set of information that sits behind the media. This enables digital things to be categorisable, connected and searchable.

Our guidelines enable users to understand what good metadata is, how to create metadata, to link it with digital resources and to enable these resources to be stored in the CINE GATE digital archive system.

What is a Sitsim?

“Sitsim” is short for “Situated Simulation” a term that describes an experience in which viewers use a smartphone or tablet to see a reconstruction of the past – or a vision of the future – at the precise place in which they stand in the present.

Sitsims allow users to immediately understand and connect the landscape around them with the landscape and activities of the past or future reconstructed in the Sitsim. Historical objects or photographs can be easily taken back to their former locations, or museum objects can be re-inserted into their previous surroundings. Pop-up balloons allow users to find out more information about the scenes.

How are Sitsims made?

Creating a Sitsim requires 3 things: some historical information about the scene to be reconstructed; information about the terrain to be reconstructed; and the Sitsim AR Editor package for the Unity game engine.

The Sitsim AR Editor package for Unity and its guidelines can be downloaded from the bottom of this page.

Our collaborators at the University of Oslo have published a number of academic papers describing the development of the Sitsim AR Editor – find them all at http://www.sitsim.no/