All resources aimed at people with User Role: Curating heritage content

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Inch Heritage website is the result of a community co-production project between the people of Inch Island, County Donegal, Donegal County Museum and Ulster University.

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 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.

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.