Curious Travellers: Repurposing imagery to manage and interpret threatened monuments, sites and landscapes

Abstract

The AHRC-funded Curious Travellers project (www.visualisingheritage.org) is a data-mining and crowd sourced infrastructure to help record, manage and interpret archaeological sites, monuments and heritage at risk. It provides a priority response to the globally important challenge of sites that have been destroyed or are under immediate threat from natural disasters, neglect, conflict and cultural vandalism. The project uses two workflows to scrape web-based imagery and crowd-source imagery to recreate 3D models of sites and monuments at risk. Many threats to heritage are linked to issues of access – impacting conservation and site management as well as the safety of individuals. The project offers sustainable solutions – working with extant imagery that does not place individuals at additional safety risk, whilst helping to contextualise visible archaeology by linking to relevant site and landscape data and integrating this into local historic environment record frameworks that make this data freely accessible to all.