Community-driven Digitisation for Heritage at Risk.

The preservation of Cultural Heritage (CH) at risk should represent more than the protection of the tangible matter of the objects.

To document and safeguard the experiences that the assets raise in their communities is fundamental for achieving truly comprehensive representations of CH.

Otherwise, preservation activities limited to the physical matter of the objects may lead to musealised environments that are no longer the core of identity and social encounters, most frecuently after the interruption of social dynamics due to war, displacements or other perturbations.

Despite the fact that present-day technologies permit achieving very accurate models of the objects (e.g., 3D models), the phenomenological experience associated with CH (its genius loci) is not often considered part of digitisation processes.

Cordhist addresses this gap by questioning the role of the community towards the pre- and post-disaster digitisations of CH.

Implemented at TU Delft and supervised by Dr Giorgia Giardina, Cordisk will allow me to acquire and implement new skills and training to develop a novel experimental framework (based on Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality) that can demonstrate that comprehensive phenomenological models of CH can be assembled from and for communities.

The models will also represent a living document for tracking the changes in CH over time.

These digital replicas are meant to become a critical resource for reacting towards CH involuntarily damaged or lost (e.g., during emergency surveying and rescue).

Furthermore, the models can become a vehicle for safeguarding what a community desires to preserve for the future, even after the physical destruction of CH.

Altogether, this experimental approach based on novel technologies will represent a mechanism for transferring knowledge from and to the communities for achieving more democratic, resilient and sustainable actions towards the preservation of CH by taking a proactive part in this digital transition.