My Lahore Fort digital preservation project is continuing to evolve and spark new results. I am refining my techniques and cementing the method that will serve as the foundation of this project.
When my pilot project, the Shed Game wrapped up, my students coined the phrase “Interactive Digital Preservation” as a way to represent the uniqueness of my proposed method. My second adventure in prototyping spawned the name to “Digital Interactive Preservation”.
This was a humorous nod to our RIT Cultural Heritage Imaging and Preservation Research group, internally referred to as “CHIPR”. It just seemed fitting to have a “DIP” to go with the “CHIP” research group. After all, it’s through this group that I met my architectural collaborator and Co-PI, Dr Alissa De Wit-Paul, and it’s through this group that we have been able to present separately and together on the matter of digital preservation around the world.
As I balance my sheets from my previous grant, I am happy to note my progress. With the site scans, I now have a clear roadmap for steps and resource-management. These tests have also reinforced the need to bring back the original teaching/educational component back into the process. The core goal is and always has been to share this technique with as many people as possible and enable a broad-scale effort to preserve history from all corners of the globe. Making it cost less (than the standard physical and digital methods) and use more accessible skills (art, architecture and analysis) is more impactful in the long run.
The DIP method stands to engage local communities in the process of preserving their own history. It provides smart people with the ability to engage in meaningful work that bolsters their own communities. These people will act as witnesses to the cultural sites of their own ancestors, saving in written and pictorial form key elements and put their knowledge in a place where it can be shared far and wide. This method gives them the agency to control their own cultural narratives, because they’re not relying on others to tell them what their heritage means. Most importantly, it allows them to share their culture with others in a way that takes into account their unique cultural point of view.
As someone who has always balanced multiple identities, I have refined the art of translating values and ideas from one mode to another. Ultimately, all cultures and people start from the same place of idealism. Everyone believes in truth, honesty and goodness; they just have different ways of expressing themselves.
By revisiting our historical narratives, we can remove the barriers to communication and lay the foundations for the rich variety of human creativity that the world has to offer.