Seeing Things: Heritage Computing, Visualisation and the Arts and Humanities

Digital technology and visualisation play an increasingly large role within the strategic framework of the Arts and Humanities. This is not in itself unexpected given the nature of research in these disciplines but the need to obtain and process large amounts of data, to gather this from disparate locations and then to link and disseminate this information in a manner that challenges researchers and informs the wider public which is both a challenge and an opportunity. Digital technology in Heritage is at the forefront of such a development through its relationship with large scale or pervasive visualisation and emerging human–computer interfaces with efficient algorithms for the processing, analysis and access of linked large-scale datasets. The “Big Data” worlds created by Arts and Humanities and Heritage research are proxies through which we may access the past and also make sense of the world in which we live. In this context therefore, the state-of-the-art applications presented in this volume provide a snapshot of our current position in this exciting new research landscape. The collection of chapters presents digital technology as part of an iterative process of investigation within Arts and Humanities, encompassing data capture, processing, analysis, interpretation and dissemination via interactive visualisation. The content of this book is inspired by the themes—objects, monuments, landscapes and behaviours and each chapter presents original research associated with the exploration and application of digital visual technologies within these research domains within. As a whole, the chapters demonstrate the diversity and scale of research in the discipline, and the utilisation of a wide range of digital technology to facilitate research on the frontiers of digital heritage.