Safeguarding the world’s cultural heritage

The project called “Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land” (DAAHL), which can be regarded as a pilot project for World Heritage Media. Foto: Nils Anfinset

Objects and stories from previous ages are about to be made available to everyone with the aid of modern information technology, thanks to international university cooperation.

When academics in information technology and the humanities cooperate, the result can involve completely new ways of collecting, archiving, analysing and presenting historical material, ways that can be used by both experts and the general public.

This is the aim of the new WUN project known as “World Heritage Media”.
World Heritage Media is a new cooperative project launched by WUN, that aims to preserve and improve our knowledge of our cultural heritage by means of multimedia and technology. The project is being led by the University of California in San Diego in collaboration with the universities of Bergen and Sheffield, and it is aimed at both researchers and other interested parties. Archaeologists have always drawn up detailed descriptions of the sites of archaeological excavations, so that when the excavation is complete and any objects recovered have been stored, we still know where individual objects were found, how they were located relative to each other and what the whole site looked like. This is vital if we are to place finds in
their correct context.

Thanks to three-dimensional imaging technology, researchers can now go one step further and produce a virtual recreation of an excavation site. Virtual reality spectacles and three-dimensional imaging techniques enable us to “visit” a site without actually having to travel to it. At the same time, technological aids can be
used to register excavation data and coordinates, upload old maps, produce models of finds and enter other cultural information. In this way, large amounts of various types of data can be rapidly shared, both with other researchers and with the general public.

Such a global research gateway has already been trialled in the project called “Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land” (DAAHL), which can be regarded as a pilot project for World Heritage Media. DAAHL utilises imaging tools such as Google Earth and virtual space to present historical data in several dimensions, and several thousand archaeological excavation sites have already been registered in connection with the project. WUN will enable World Heritage Media to develop the
platform and infrastructure used by DAAHL in collaboration with research groups, the
authorities and industry all over the world.

Another way of using information about the world’s cultural heritage is to make use of mobile technology to make information available to tourists.
World Heritage Media was launched with a workshop in San Diego in November 2008. The WUN collaboration will allow research resources and infrastructure at different universities to be coordinated, and the collaborative effort may also make it easier to obtain funding and enable cooperation with the authorities and industrial
partners.

One important aim of World Heritage Media is to ensure that the digital research
gateway functions so well that both academics and laymen will wish to both contribute information and help to organise it. The project may also help not only to conserve the world’s cultural heritage as it exists today, but also lead to new questions being asked and encourage us to interpret history in new ways.

The article is published in Features 2009/2010