Heritage from Home
When I started my Master of Architecture degree in September of 2019 and found out that I was accepted into the NSERC CREATE Heritage Engineering program I very much looked forward to the summer internship opportunity, which often provided opportunities for students to travel and learn about heritage conservation from other perspectives. By March 2020 it was clear that travel would not be possible and so we set out to find a summer internship that could happen remotely in the middle of a pandemic. With a grand vision and uncertainty about the weeks to come, the National Trust for Canada (NTC) provided a timely opportunity with a goal to offer some help to the smaller historic sites across Canada and to their site custodians who would soon be heavily impacted by the closure of their doors to visitors.
One of the early questions I had about this internship was how can I be useful, particularly during these strange times? And how can I be useful remotely? The NTC is a charitable not-for-profit organization that exists to help places that matter to communities. Many historic sites had to close their doors and found themselves needing to increase or create their online, digital presence. Many initiatives also went online and that is where we found ourselves as well, navigating existing digital platforms to find our purpose – and finding a purpose came quicker than expected.
My first task was to collaborate with a team of emerging professionals from CIPA Heritage Documentation, of which I am an active member, and the vice president of the International Committee of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS). It was the start of what would become a webinar series called Accessing Heritage places from Home The first webinar discussed the need for heritage sites to adapt to not having any in-person visitors, to talk about how they might tell their stories digitally and gain an online following, and to show existing platforms that heritage sites could tap into to stay relevant. We brought together several emerging professionals and experts from North America and Europe. On behalf of the NTC, we opened up the webinar by talking about why heritage places are going digital, showing some examples of current practices, suggesting barriers that users might face with online content and things to consider when creating such content. Finally, we urged historic places to see the opportunities in going digital now in order to entice visitors later.
Ethics Webinar Panelists on Zoom platform
The webinar series continued through the summer, as we brought together panelists and guest moderators to discuss other platforms or considerations to accessing heritage sites, including virtual reality, information systems, and ethics of heritage recording. We expanded our global representation to include panelists from Australia and Asia. Webinar participants came from almost 80 different countries. One of our goals was to ensure that while panelists covered a wide range of content within each topic, they would maintain a vocabulary that was accessible to beginners and experts alike. For the NTC, site custodians and the public make up a large part of their audience base. Again, the question of how we might be useful during a pandemic was always at the forefront.
Accessing Heritage Places from Home webinar series follow up poster
The other part to my internship was to research low-cost options for using various digital storytelling tools and platforms to help site custodians navigate the digital realm. We hosted another webinar as part of NTC’s Regeneration Works initiative, Digital Platforms for Heritage Places 101, that hopefully familiarized site custodians with some of the language and options available to help them tell their stories online. We invited a site custodian to speak who had already dived into the world of virtual tours, and a documentation expert who covered the basics of photography and photogrammetry, to show other site custodians that having a solid digital presence is not as daunting as it may seem. This initiative led to further research that I was able to use in coaching other site custodians who wanted to do more to engage their online audience and increase their following.
Digital Platforms for Heritage Places Webinar slides
The demand for the work we did this summer doesn’t stop with the changing of seasons and I hope doesn’t end with my internship. Although many historic sites are now open again, with necessary safety measures put in place, the potential for another surge in COVID-19 infections might mean another closure of heritage sites. I am currently working on a document that can help site custodians who I didn’t have a chance to meet this summer and be a resource for those whom I had the pleasure of getting to know. The webinars by CIPA Emerging Professionals and the NTC will continue with their respective audience bases. I also hope to see future collaborations. The work we do as heritage recording specialists and digital storytellers isn’t solely academic or institutional. We work to ensure the dissemination of cultural heritage and I hope we can be of help to those who wish to do the same.
National Trust for Canada’s Historic Places Day campaign - digital selfies to promote virtual visits of historic sites across Canada