All resources aimed at people with User Interest: Visualising the past

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 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.

Join us to explore the themes of heritage storytelling and gamification in this CINE TALK. Storytelling and gamification are powerful tools, and, twinned with digital technologies, offer exciting possibilities for heritage engagement. The digital event is hosted by our partners at Skriðuklaustur as we reflect on all we have learnt through the CINE project and invite others to share their experiences.

Speakers include:

Ed Rodley
Games, gamification and museums: What’s changed since 2018?
Games, gamification and museums in the present moment.

Maria Economou
Emotion and Storytelling in Museums
Reflections on the learning from the Emotive project.

Steinunn Anna Gunnlaugsdottir, Leifur Björn Björnsson and Skúli Björn Gunnarsson
Storytelling and gamification with precise location technology (UWB)
CINE partners Locatify and Gunnarsstofnun reflect on the opportunities for heritage offered by new location technology.

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.

We are all used to creating exhibits using artefacts, text and pictures, but how do we do this using our digital assets? How do we make them available for the public to view, enjoy and learn? This toolkit provides guidelines and templates to make virtual exhibits.

To get the most out of this toolkit you need to be able to use the UNREAL4 game engine – multimedia companies, games designers or your local “techy” person may well have the skills required.

This toolkit is part of a wider time travel theme – once several VR exhibits are made of one location, users can travel between them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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/