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CADW

3 Projects, page 1 of 1
  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: AH/W004844/1
    Funder Contribution: 80,647 GBP

    In a modern consumer-led culture, obtaining and responding to qualitative feedback (i.e. often free-text comments/written feedback) is embedded in the professional practice of many walks of life. Surveys are used, for example, in staff development, professional training, product design and testing, and in various forms of service provision across the public and private sector. Surveys and questionnaires often produce a combination of quantitative and qualitative forms of data. Quantitative forms, such as rating scales (e.g. likert scale responses), multiple choice questions and rank order questions can be numerated (i.e. quantified) with ease, the analysis of which can be conducted in a systematic and often automated way. By contrast, more qualitative questions, which prompt open ended, free-text comment responses, or, in the context of the tourism and heritage sector, written feedback from exhibitions, events and/or historical sites on social media channels or websites including Trip Advisor and Trust Pilot, pose a more difficult challenge for the analyst. Tackling written, text-based feedback often requires a more labour-intensive and manual approach to analysis. Compounding this challenge is where feedback is presented in both English and Welsh, as is often the case in Wales, with Wales representing the largest bilingual community in the UK. The successful analysis of bilingual data relies on the workforce having the appropriate linguistic expertise to process it. While a range of sophisticated digital tools for the analysis of text-based data are available, particularly for researchers working in academia, in marketing and public relations contexts etc., many of the digital resources used are not necessarily affordable, quick and easy to use, and/or accessible to non-expert users. Specifically, these tools currently do not fully support the task of systematically processing free-text responses in Welsh. This project aims to bridge this gap by building the novel 'FreeTxt' toolkit which is designed to support the analysis and visualisation of multiple forms of open-ended, free-text data in both English and Welsh. FreeTxt will draw on existing open-source bilingual corpus-based utilities and methodologies, repackaging these and taking them in a new direction so that they are relevant to new audiences/user-groups. We will work closely with project partners Cadw and National Trust Wales to co-design, co-construct and test FreeTxt to ensure that the resource is fit-for-purpose and fairly and consistently meets the needs of Welsh and English-language responses. Existing tools that we will draw on include those developed as part of the CorCenCC project (Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes - The National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh). This includes CorCenCC's semantic (i.e. meaning based categorisations of individual words and phrases) and part of speech (POS - i.e. grammar-based categorisations of individual words and phrases - e.g. nouns, verbs) taggers and tagsets for Welsh language, and corpus functionalities for the querying of language, amongst others. These tools will be integrated into a user-friendly, online interface that users can paste/upload their texts into, to search for patterns of meaning that emerge in survey responses and feedback; to see which words are most often used in relation to a given theme, place, topic; to understand what visitors particularly enjoyed about a service or attraction, and what they think could be improved. The final version of the tool will be made freely-available and will be adaptable in terms of who can use it and when. It will contain generic analysis features that enable it to be used by any public and/or professional company and institution dealing with varying datasets of qualitative survey data and will be of relevance to academic researchers analysing and visualising survey data. The accessibility and usability of this tool will help provide a direct route to potential impact.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: AH/R009198/1
    Funder Contribution: 57,641 GBP

    This project will use innovative and disruptive augmented reality (AR) to immerse members of the public in their prehistoric heritage. This proof-of-concept project will deliver an immersive audio-visual experience allowing visitors to encounter the hidden history at one of the most important prehistoric sites in Britain. We will combine innovative approaches to archaeological narratives and artistic representation, enabling people to walk back through time at Bryn Celli Ddu Neolithic chambered tomb. Visitors will use their smart phones or tablets to experience the site over the course of its history, peeling back the layers to discover the history of the place and landscape, through which they can move, stop and engage with digital archaeology. Bryn Celli Ddu is a late Neolithic passage tomb, excavated in 1929, now partially and perhaps unsatisfactorily, reconstructed. It is one of the most important prehistoric monuments in northwest Europe, and attracts c.10 000 visitors annually, with considerable implications for the quality of archaeological interpretation provided to members of the public, and significant economic value to Anglesey. The monument and its landscape - the subject of this AR representation - is unique in the complexity of its archaeological remains. The landscape has over 10,000 years of human activity: ranging from Mesolithic hunter gatherers; a causewayed enclosure raised by the earliest Neolithic farmers; a later Neolithic henge, stone circle and passage tomb; associated ceremonial deposition of pottery and polished stone axes; a series of burial cairns; and a landscape of at least 12 prehistoric rock art panels. The complexity of the Bryn Celli Ddu landscape has rightly led to comparisons with Stonehenge. AR, creative visual reconstruction, and sound-art will allow visitors to experience the changing development of this important monument from the deep time of prehistory to the present. It will allow them to interact with three-dimensional textured models of the artefacts from the site whilst standing in the burial chamber, and pull back layers of soil to reveal the buried archaeology. This project will develop and refine the digital technologies and data to provide a rich, textured, immersive experience, within which members of the public can encounter a prehistoric monument in the full complexity of its time-depth and landscape connections. This project will place Bryn Celli Ddu at the centre of the circle of place-memory-performance: the physical remains of the past in its landscape; the cultural memory of artefacts now in museums; and the experience of multi-sensory immersion in the environment. Heritage is often presented to a non-specialist audience as static: the protected site, the conserved object, or the listed building. As a result, both the time-depth of physical heritage, and the connections between artefacts, monuments, places and landscapes are made invisible. Digital technologies allow us to re-immerse monuments and artefacts in their past contexts, and to do so in a manner that provides maximum accessibility to public stakeholders - the very people on whose behalf this heritage is preserved. The project will be delivered bilingually in English and Welsh, targeting one of the Welsh Governments areas of exclusion, and will emphasise visual narratives and audio representations, as ways of telling that move beyond simple dialectic forms of public engagement. By developing the necessary technology and connections between specialists, this project will serve as a proof-of-concept that will be scaled to an appreciation of prehistory nationwide in phase 2 of the call. We will produce a prototype app-based AR system and online VR version to allow access for those who cannot physically visit the site. Evaluation and testing of the system will provide essential information on the challenges and rewards of scaling up the technology to wider applications.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: AH/W003384/1
    Funder Contribution: 2,908,920 GBP

    The UK Marine Area extends over some 867,400 km2, an area equivalent to around 3.5 times the UK terrestrial extent. The UK's marine heritage is extraordinarily rich and exciting. Wrecks on the sea bed range in date from the Bronze Age to the World Wars and bear testimony to Britain as an island nation, a destination for trade and conquest, and in past times, the heart of a global empire. Communities along the coast have been shaped by their maritime heritage and monuments and stories recall losses and heroes. Much further back in time, before the Bronze Age, a great deal of what is now the North Sea was dry land, peopled by prehistoric communities who lived in lowland landscapes, some on very different coastlines. The British Isles would have been distant uplands above hills and plains and rivers. This arc of heritage, stretching over 23,000 years, is represented by an abundance of collections. Charts and maps, documents, images, film, oral histories, sonar surveys, seismic data, bathymetry, archaeological investigations, artefacts and objects, artworks and palaeoenvironmental cores all tell us different things about our marine legacy. But they can't easily be brought together. They are dispersed, held in archives, unconnected and inaccessible. This matters because it is clear that the story of our seas is of huge interest to the UK public. In 2019 alone, there were 2.9m visits to Royal Museums Greenwich, home of the National Maritime Museum; 1.1m visits to National Museum Royal Navy; 837,000 visits to Merseyside Maritime Museum, and 327,000 visits to HMS Belfast. It is also clear that our exploitation of our seas is increasing dramatically. Windfarms, mining, dredging for aggregates, port expansions, leisure and fishing are all placing tensions on the survival of our heritage. If we are to unlock new stories and manage our past effectively and sustainably, we need to join up all our marine collections and get the most of them. UNPATH will bring together first class universities, heritage agencies, museums, charitable trusts and marine experts to work out how to join these collections up. It will use Artificial Intelligence to devise new ways of searching across newly linked collections, simulations to help visualise the wrecks and landscapes, and science to help identify wrecks and find out more about the artefacts and objects from them. It will deliver integrated management tools to help protect our most significant heritage. And it will invite the public to help co-design new ways of interacting with the collections and to help enhance them from their own private collections. The methods, code and resources created will be published openly so they can used to shape the future of UK marine heritage.

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