3D visualisation, communities and the production of significance

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss how community co-production of heritage records facilitates the production and negotiation of new forms of value and significance. We draw on case studies from the ACCORD project, which used 3D digital technologies for community engagement through co-creation, to explore how a site’s significance can be affected and challenged through community recording. Whilst multiple modes of recording operate in this way, digital 3D recording, long held as the sole domain of the technical expert, is often deployed by heritage professionals as a means of enhancing authorised historic and scientific values through the sophisticated and precise recording of a site’s physical structure. Here we argue that these recording techniques can also offer a means of exploring and challenging existing authorised regimes of significance and insignificance, giving voice to alternative and richer perspectives through the recording process itself, as much as through the resultant record. This challenges orthodox thinking about both the primary purpose and effects of digital recording and opens up new directions for their use in heritage practice.