All resources aimed at people with User IT Literacy: High

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.

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.

Community co-production is a method that offers cultural organisations and community groups opportunities to work together towards a common goal. This can be both fruitful and challenging, but essential if museums and heritage organisations are to play a useful role in imagining different futures for our communities and societies. This online event draws on the experience of the CINE project partners and others to explore the questions: what is good co-production? How do you create roles, manage social relationships and expectations? Does co-production work?

Speakers include:

Judith McCarthy
Cultures of co-production
Initiating co-production projects in Ireland and Iceland within the CINE project.

Sarah Smed
Co-producing the Danish Welfare Museum
Reflections on museums and social change.

Dominique Bouchard
Transforming the future of the past: re-interpreting Stonehenge
Presenting a film project co-produced with young people who live near one of the most iconic heritage sites in England.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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/