Today we are reflecting on one of our older heritage visualisation projects - a project that explored digital documentation of heritage and community co-production: ACCORD

ACCORD: Archaeology Community Co-production of Research Data

The ACCORD project, was partnership between the Digital Design Studio (now SIT) at the Glasgow School of Art, Archaeology Scotland, the University of Manchester and the RCAHMS. Starting in 2013, the ACCORD project examined the opportunities and implications of digital visualisation technologies for community engagement and research through the co-creation of3D models of historic monuments and places. Despite their increasing accessibility, techniques such as laser scanning, 3D modelling and 3D printing have remained firmly in the domain of heritage specialists. Expert forms of knowledge and/or professional priorities frame the use of digital visualisation technologies and forms of community-based social value are rarely addressed. Consequently, the resulting digital objects may fail to engage communities as a means of researching and representing their heritage. The ACCORD project ran between 2013 and 2015 and was a partnership between the Glasgow School of Art, Archaeology Scotland, the University of Manchester’s Archaeology Department and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. ACCORD was one of eleven projects across the UK to be awarded funding from theArts and Humanities Research Council’s Digital Transformations ConnectedCommunities programme (AH/L007533/1).

In the summer of 2014 the ACCORD team worked together with 10 community groups across Scotland. The project team worked together with groups who had pre-existing relationships to heritage places, to create digital records, including 3D models, of those places. The heritage selected for recording was entirely community defined, and ranged from Rock-Art to Rock-climbing venues. With the support of visualisation technologists, researchers and practitioners in community engagement, community groups designed and produced their own records which are archived here with theArchaeology Data Service.

ACCORD brought accessible and easy to use digital technologies such as photogrammetry and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), to community work. In the process, the project sought to understand how relationships with heritage places and notions of value and authenticity are transformed and addressed through the co-production of digital records. Crucially, the resulting outputs have been integrated with expressions of community-based contemporary social value and additional contextual information such as photographs, stories and memories to create a richer record of the site in question and of the recording process. The ACCORD project has demonstrated that its co-production methodology can enhance a site’s existing value and significance and generate distinctive new types of value associated with both the site in question and its digital record.

The outputs of the research programme of the ACCORD project are listed below - and you can find more of our research outputs on the GSA research repository, RADAR - https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/.

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Associated papers:

Jeffrey, Stuart, Jones, Sian, Maxwell, Mhairi, Hale,Alex and Jones, Cara (2020) 3D visualisation, communities and theproduction of significance. International Journal of HeritageStudies, 26 (9). pp. 885-900. ISSN 1352-7258: https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2020.1731703

Jones, Sian, Jeffrey, Stuart, Maxwell, Mhairi, Hale,Alex and Jones, Cara (2017) 3D heritage visualisation and the negotiationof authenticity: the ACCORD project. International Journal ofHeritage Studies, 24 (4). pp. 333-353. ISSN 1352-7258: https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1378905

Hale, Alex, Fisher, Alison, Hutchinson, John,Jeffrey, Stuart, Jones, Sian, Maxwell, Mhairi and Stuart-Watson, John (2017) Disruptingthe heritage of place: how counter archaeologies were practiced by the ACCORDproject at Dumby, Scotland. World Archaeology, 49 (3). pp. 372-387.ISSN 0043-8243: https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2017.1333923

Jeffrey, Stuart, Hale, A., Jones, C., Jones, S. and Maxwell, Mhairi (2015) The ACCORD project: Archaeological CommunityCo-Production of Research Resources. In: Proceedings of the 42ndInternational Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods inArchaeology. Archaeopress, pp. 289-295. ISBN 9781784911003: https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.15135883.37

Associated Archive:

Stuart Jeffrey, Alex Hale, CaraJones, Mhairi Maxwell, Siân Jones (2017) ACCORD: Archaeology CommunityCo-production of Research Data [data-set]. York: Archaeology Data Service[distributor] https://doi.org/10.5284/1042733

Associated Blog:

https://accordproject.wordpress.com/

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