3D heritage visualisation and the negotiation of authenticity: the ACCORD project^*

* The data is archived with the Archaeology Data Service, https://doi.org/10.5284/1042733.

Abstract

This article examines the question of authenticity in relation to 3D visualisation of historic objects and monuments. Much of the literature locates their authenticity in the accuracy of the data and/or the realism of the resulting models. Yet critics argue that 3D visualisations undermine the experience of authenticity, disrupting people’s access to the materiality, biography and aura of their historic counterparts. The ACCORD project takes questions of authenticity and 3D visualisation into a new arena – that of community heritage practice – and uses rapid ethnographic methods to examine whether and how such visualisations acquire authenticity. The results demonstrate that subtle forms of migration and borrowing occur between the original and the digital, creating new forms of authenticity associated with the digital object. Likewise, the creation of digital models mediates the authenticity and status of their original counterparts through the networks of relations in which they are embedded. The current pre-occupation with the binary question of whether 3D digital models are authentic or not obscures the wider work that such objects do in respect to the cultural politics of ownership, attachment, place-making and regeneration. The article both advances theoretical debates and has important implications for heritage visualisation practice.

Keywords:

• Authenticity
• 3D modelling
• digital heritage visualisation
• co-production
• community

Acknowledgements

First and foremost we would like to thank all our community participants who made this research possible. Thanks also to the ACCORD project partners: Archaeology Scotland, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland (now part of Historic Environment Scotland) and Glasgow Life. Various colleagues facilitated the project and we are grateful to Gordon Noble and Richard Jones for introducing us to two of the community groups, and in particular Heather James who invited us to carry out ACCORD research during the MacFarlane excavations on Tarbet Isle. Thanks to Sam Alberti and Sally Foster for their insightful comments on a draft version of this paper. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism and suggestions.

Notes

* The data is archived with the Archaeology Data Service, https://doi.org/10.5284/1042733.