Assembling the Historic Environment: Heritage in the Digital Making

Abstract

The historic environment is a formulation of the cultural past as experienced and documented in space. Traditional approaches to the historic environment tend to favour conservational and preservational paradigms, such as heritage stewardship or the dynamics of cultural resource management in relation to national policies. Alternatively, they often enquire into the entertainment and time travel approaches of contemporary museum and tourism sectors. Instead, this study will focus on digitality, as both an epistemology and as a means of transmission for assemblages and spaces in the historic environment.

This approach is framed around a comparative study between UK and Swedish approaches to virtual heritage, including immersive technologies and XR (extended reality environments), and the digitised approaches to site and monument inventory, borne out the nineteenth century state-led interest in the preservation of cultural traditions within the public sphere. In doing so, I identify the recurring themes enrolled in processes surrounding digital creation and transmission of historic environment material. Often, this is manifested in the politics of representation and identity, as well as the dynamics of accessibility. Audience matters are crucial to both approaches, but in this thesis, I argue that broad understandings of usership are not fully understood and that the benefits of interdisciplinary humanistic approaches to the historic environment are not being sought. The argument being that simply making a tool or product accessible is not the same as making it egalitarian, nor easily useable or meaningful. It is found that the risk is often run of creating products whereby the audience is broadly the same in terms of culture or profession to that of the product creators.

Many of the root issues, in particular those regarding diversity, are established in the current definitions of what the historic environment is as a physical entity embedded in the cultural landscape. These definitions are described within and expanded upon through proliferation of social and spatial theories to proffer a less tangible definition of the historic environment as a social space in its own right. By removing the physical boundaries of landscape, the goal is to re-establish a historic environment without the limitations of authorised vocabularies, narratives, or terms of authenticity, that shackle the historic environment to local or national government institutions. This in turn allows for a more socially defined, participatory, and holistic approach, returning the historic environment to a cultural realm defined by the lived experience of the contemporary public.