Cynefin Is An Innovative Project To Digitise All The Tithe Maps Of Wales

Cynefin is an innovative project to digitise all the tithe maps of Wales. It is funded mainly by the Heritage Lottery Fund, and is run by Archives Wales. Most of the work is done at the National Library of Wales (NLW) using their near complete collection of tithe maps, and involves a considerable conservation effort.

The digitisation is carried out using a special technique whereby the large maps are mounted on a magnetic curved wall and photographed in high resolution. This brings excellent results in terms of image quality, 800 maps have already been digitised out of an estimated total of 1200.

The map images produced are all online on the cynefin.wales website, alongside images of all the tithe apportionment documents. To obtain full value from this resource the website includes functions to crowdsource the transcription of the maps and documents, with the aim of making all the data searchable.

 
This complete collection of digitised tithe maps provides a great opportunity to look at Wales in the 1840s in a more holistic way than was previously practical. It is not just noticing some railways on a map, you can see exactly the pattern of railway development. You can visually see that the Taff Merthyr railway was already built, and the others, going east-west, were in progress. There were some other very old railways in Llanelli, Swansea and other industrial areas, which have since disappeared. There was also a canal network and roads controlled by tollgates. This can all now be examined fluently using the digital tithe map of Wales.

The wealth of information already transcribed has huge potential for research and connections to other archival material. The nature of society is revealed, the way it was assumed most people didn’t own the land where they lived. These landowners, few in number, were the people who mattered, for example they were virtually the only people allowed to vote. It was the time of the Chartist and Rebecca risings.

The project focuses on usability and feedback from users, and has strong volunteering and marketing aspects, which aim for attractive and sustainable solution bringing long-term benefits.

The project includes partners in archives across Wales and will be providing output to People's Collection.

The final website at NLW is a geographic interface, which will be flexible enough to display other parts of the Library's collection, transforming access and research opportunities.

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Booking closes today!

Registration for Digital Past will close at the end of today, so make sure that you go to Eventbrite and register before 5pm. 

There is a fantastic line-up of speakers and workshops on our programme, as well as a range of exhibition stands and lots of opportunity for discussion and networking. 

The St George's Hotel has been voted AA's Hotel of the Year for Wales 2015-2016, so take a look at the menu for our conference dinner which will take place on the evening of the 10th. 

We very much look forward to welcoming you to beautiful Llandudno and Digital Past 2016!

The Digital Mapping of Edinburgh's Literary Heritage: James Loxley (University of Edinburgh)

Edinburgh is a singularly literary place – indeed, it was the first city to be designated a UNESCO World City of Literature, a network that now includes Prague, Heidelberg, Dublin and Melbourne (and Norwich. Don’t forget Norwich.). It has a lengthy heritage as the birthplace and residence of writers including Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson, Muriel Spark and J. K. Rowling. Visitors to the city can wander through ‘Makars’ Court’, and drop into the Writers’ Museum.

More than this, Edinburgh is a city which has frequently been used as the setting for compelling and popular works, from Scott’s Heart of Midlothian down to Irvine Welsh’s novels and short stories or Ian Rankin’s Rebus books. It is a city that is built out of writing as well as of stone.

The Palimpsest project is a collaboration between literary scholars, computer scientists specialising in text-mining, and information visualisation specialists. It set out to find a new way of accessing and interacting with this rich heritage. Using text-mining and geolocation on large collections of digitised works, and focusing on place names as markers of a book’s engagement with place, the project team created a database of 46,000 extracts from more than 500 works which variously use Edinburgh as their setting. Meanwhile, the team also created innovative visualisation tools, which offered users the opportunity to interact with the data in different ways. Although the project was academic in inception, with a number of technical challenges to overcome, the resources have been intended for much wider use.

At this year’s Digital Past conference, James Loxley will describe the challenges faced by the project, and the insights gained from the building and use of the online resources it created. He will also focus on future developments, as they look to add functionality to the resources and respond to user feedback.

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3D Cultural Heritage Data: Improving access and exploitation

For over a decade the Discovery Programme has been capturing and modelling 3D data for a range of archaeological and cultural heritage sites including lidar, terrestrial laser scanning and close range documentation.  One of the issues in sharing this data with the wider community was the requirement of expensive IT equipment and software and the challenge in delivering large complex geometries which do not conform easily to primitive modelling.  Over the past four years the Discovery Programme has participated in several European projects including 3D-ICONS and ARIADNE which aim to open up access to this and other research data.

 3D model of Poulnabrone Portal Tomb, Ireland delivered online utilising SketchFab

Discovery Programme Technology Manager, Anthony Corns, will explore the processing pipeline developed by the Discovery Programme in making complex 3D structure available to the public using a combination of gaming modelling and online WebGL 3D viewers. An alternative pipeline will also be outlined which utilised the 3D media service developed by CNR-ISTI as part of the ARIADNE project which is more focussed upon reuse of 3D data by researchers.

                                                Internal view of Knowth passage tomb utilising Unity gaming development tools

The 3D-Icons project officially ended as an EU funded project in March 2015. However, the Discovery Programme has since taken the content produced as part of this project and looked to exploit it with several sectors, including:

Research:  How do we ensure that 3D data is utilised for scholarly research by a profession which may be averse to utilising new technologies?

Tourism:  Development of content to improve the tourist experience at cultural heritage sites, including the Brú na Bóinne world heritage site where the Discovery programme is currently developing an immersive experience for the Neolithic passage tomb at Knowth.

Education: Utilising 3D models as a teaching resources in secondary schools both in History but also across the curriculum

Creative Industries: Developing links and relationships with organisations that can utilise cultural heritage datasets using innovative and state of the art methods.

This paper will also comment on some of the challenges and opportunities that exist when working with this diverse range of sectors.

RCAHMW Guidelines for Digital Archaeological Archives – A Sustainable Approach to Digital Preservation

The RCAHMW’s National Monuments Record (NMR) is Wales’ public archive of records relating to the historic environment, and is the national home for digital archaeological archives. Accordingly, it is developing its digital archiving facilities and procedures to comply with international standards, namely the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model – OAIS (ISO 14721). To make compliance effective and viable, it intends to adopt an industry standard digital archive package, produced by Preservica, as part of its current data platform. This will allow OAIS compliant workflows, active preservation of digital content, and public access to digital records.

In order to ensure that the reception and ingest of digital accessions into this system is as efficient as possible, and sustainable with a limited staff capacity, RCAHMW has created digital archive guidelines. These set out the organisation, description and format of digital archaeological archives required from data producers in the sector who intend to deposit records with the NMR. The guidelines are intended to be used from a project’s inception and are included as an appendix to the forthcoming National Standards for Wales for Collecting and Depositing Archaeological Archives. They will also be promulgated through the planning consent regime.

The talk will give an overview of the requirements of the OAIS reference model and how RCAHMW undertakes to comply with this. It will explain the general requirements in the guidelines in this context, with emphasis on the need for well-structured data, with adequate descriptive metadata to allow for digital preservation and, most importantly, continued access and use of the archive by data consumers.

By Gareth Edwards, Head of Knowledge and Understanding, RCAHMW

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Digital Interpretation - Good, Bad, Indifferent

Andrew Lloyd Hughes is a digital tourism expert who has become a familiar face on the conference circuit over the years and specialises in the digital delivery of tourism related content.

At Digital Past 2016, Andrew will be sharing some best practice observed throughout the world from his travels, and will be discussing some of the techniques and channels that are available at low cost to distribute heritage related information to visitors on location. He will outline some recent trends in digital information, discuss the needs of contemporary consumers, and suggest how we can capitalise on a number of opportunities that exist for the curation and distribution of content.

However, this talk will not only focus on the positive, it will also explore the drawbacks of digital, and how these techniques must sit alongside traditional interpretive methods and be part of a carefully devised and well thought out interpretive strategy for it to be successful.

Andrew currently works for the renowned international tourism consultancy TEAM Tourism, and continues to advise the Oman Ministry of Tourism on the digital interpretation of some of their heritage assets, and how it can be put to maximum effect to educate and inform their desired audiences. Some of the key inferences from this interesting and relevant piece of work will undoubtedly be shared during his talk at this year’s Digital Past.

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Digital Past 2016: Digital Marketing Strategies for Heritage Tourism

Visit Wales is in the business of destination and place marketing. Promoting and selling places is a content led business and, if you think about it, they have a whole country creating, curating and sharing some great content about Wales.

But how do you leverage what is potentially a hugely powerful content ecosystem to help achieve specific marketing objectives?

Jon Monroe, Head of Digital Leadership at Visit Wakes, brings experience and expertise from the competitive world of travel and tourism, and also from heading up the Visit Wales digital team. Using interesting case studies he will outline their approach to content led digital marketing, demonstrate the results of those efforts, discuss some of the practical lessons learnt and outline how this might be applied to heritage sites and heritage tourism.

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