Visualising urban heritage: Dundee's lost spaces re-imagined
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2018-12-14

In an urban environment, traces of lost built heritage lie among familiar streets and cityscapes. Telling the stories of an ever changing urban fabric while remaining connected to the current day places poses exciting challenges and opportunities for digital visualisation. Dr Alice Watterson and Dr Kieran Baxter report on their experiences of using creative practice to tackle these challenges while developing public outreach visualisations of Dundee's built heritage. Taking a flexible approach that combines digital modelling with methods from visual effects and animation, they respond to three radically different sites within the city limits. An Iron Age hillfort that once overlooked the now urbanised landscape of the Tay Estuary, the 19th century Dundee to Newtyle Railway, and the Royal Arch that once stood at the city docks are visualised using short film and augmented reality formats. Through these examples, the relationship between creative practice and visualisation technology, and the role that these can play in heritage interpretation, will be explored.

Alice Watterson, Kieran Baxter