Picture This! Community-Led Production of Alternative Views of the Heritage of Gwynedd

The digital camera has become ubiquitous. Every mobile phone has one built in, almost everyone has a mobile phone, and people use them constantly for all kinds of things, including taking pictures. In a new collaborative project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Bangor, Aberystwyth and Manchester Metropolitan Universities have teamed up with Gwynedd Archaeological Trust to develop tools to allow communities to picture their heritage and upload the images to an automated photogrammetry server to create metrical 3D models of the sites and objects they are recording. The data created will then feed into the local Historic Environment Record, providing a valuable tool for monitoring changes to heritage sites, while providing communities with added information and alternative views of their heritage. This paper is not intended to provide a formal research design or a fully developed prototype. Rather, it is intended to outline an experimental and collaborative approach that is situated as both practice and research, with neither enterprise being privileged over the other. The activities outlined here will be developed and evaluated over the next year and a half, after which we will report on whether or how the contingent aims and outcomes expressed were realized.