Connected Culture and Natural Heritage in the Northern Environment – an international collaboration project from 2017–2020.

Connected Culture and Natural Heritage in a Northern Environment (CINE) was a collaborative digital heritage project between nine partners and ten associated partners from Norway, Iceland, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland between 2017–2020. Museum Nord was the Lead Partner.
CINE transformed people’s experiences of outdoor heritage sites through technology, building on the idea of “museums without walls”. New digital interfaces such as augmented reality, virtual world technology, and easy to use apps brought the past alive, allowed us to visualise the effects of the changing environment on heritage sites, and helped us to imagine possible futures.
CINE developed content management toolkits – enabling curators, archivists, historians, individuals and communities to make innovative heritage projects to create unique on-site and off-site customer experiences in specific locations.
Our Wayfinder tool helps you find the tools and inspiration for your next digital heritage project. The Wayfinder lets you discover the more than 40 resources we created.
CINE reached out and built partnerships with local, regional and national authorities and policymakers, to steer the protection of natural and cultural heritage.
We have done so through an extensive engagement programme for all our target groups. The impressive result is that the partnership engaged over 6448 organisations/agencies/bodies (target 459) and reached over 1.5 million individuals (target 1 mill).
We can already see that the project is living on in new projects and configurations of our partnership, for example our Gaia Vesterålen project. Also, digital technology is moving on rapidly. When CINE started, ‘digital’ and ‘heritage’ were two separate fields. Now, after three years, digital has become an integral part of the work in the cultural field.
CINE partnership and case study overview
We might look back at CINE in some years and will probably laugh at the small steps we made. Our work will have become part of the professional mainstream.

CINE TALKS

The CINE TALKS were a series of online events hosted in October and November 2020. These talks explore how digital technologies have the potential to transform museums and heritage projects. Our partners from Scotland, Iceland, Ireland and Norway show practical examples from curation, collection care, to co-production and more. Invited international speakers reflect on their projects and share their learning and experience.

CINE TALK – Storytelling and Gamification

We explore the themes of heritage storytelling and gamification in the first in our online CINE TALKS series. Storytelling and gamification are powerful tools, and, twinned with digital technologies, offer exciting possibilities for heritage engagement. We will be hosted by our partners at Skriðuklaustur as we reflect on all we have learnt through the CINE project and invite others to share their experiences.

Speakers include:

Ed Rodley
Games, gamification and museums: What’s changed since 2018?
Games, gamification and museums in the present moment

Maria Economou
Emotion and Storytelling in Museums
Reflections on the learning from the Emotive project

Steinunn Anna GunnlaugsdottirLeifur Björn Björnsson and Skúli Björn Gunnarsson
Storytelling and gamification with precise location technology (UWB)
CINE partners Locatify and Gunnarsstofnun reflect on the opportunities for heritage offered by new location technology.

CINE TALK DIGITAL POSSIBILITIES FOR DATA COLLECTION AND PRESENTATION

We live in a data society. The digital realm offers new opportunities to collect and store data and to make it more accessible to a global and connected audience. In the heritage and museum sector, digitisation, data care and data management are necessary but resource-consuming tasks that require expertise and skill. This talk draws on the experience of the CINE project partners and others to explore the questions: What technologies can help? Where do we need to improve? What are our responsibilities to current and future communities and how can our digital collections be safe?

Speakers include:

Øyvind Steensen and Karin G. Byom
Hidden Norway
The creators of Hidden Norway talk about preserving digital data under the ice.

Catherine Cassidy
Issues in 3D Digitisation for the Promotion and Preservation of Cultural Heritage
Examining the whole lifecycle of 3D scanned objects, drawing on the work of the CINE project.

Rohan Almond 
Project Reveal
The National Trust for Scotland presents the learning from their recent project.

CINE TALK WHAT IS SUCCESSFUL CO-PRODUCTION?

Community co-production is a method that offers cultural organisations and community groups opportunities to work together towards a common goal. This can be both fruitful and challenging, but essential if museums and heritage organisations are to play a useful role in imagining different futures for our communities and societies. This session draws on the experience of the CINE project partners and others to explore the questions: what is good co-production? How do you create roles, manage social relationships and expectations? Does co-production work?

Speakers include:

Judith McCarthy
Cultures of co-production
Initiating co-production projects in Ireland and Iceland within the CINE project

Sarah Smed
Co-producing the Danish Welfare Museum
Reflections on museums and social change

Dominique Bouchard
Transforming the future of the past: re-interpreting Stonehenge
Presenting a film project co-produced with young people who live near one of the most iconic heritage sites in England.

CINE TALK REVIEWING CURATORIAL PRACTICE

Digital technologies are changing our curatorial practices today more than ever. This session draws on the experiences of the CINE project partners and others to explore the questions: how can digital technologies aid and extend our curatorial practices? How can we use technology to better engage our audiences and communities with a view to playing a more active role in the communities of the future? How can curators of heritage become more adaptable, creative and confident in the digital realm?

Speakers include:

Abira Hussein
The Archive and the Community
Exploring the tensions between digitally driven outputs and audiences, the potential role digital technologies can have in pluralising curation, and the potential role of diaspora knowledge in informing museum practice.

Su Basbugu
Thinking Outside the White Cube
Rethinking curatorial practices through the British Council’s online exhibition platform Museum Without Walls.

Jacquie Aitken
Using immersive digital technology to mobilise heritage for social change
A discussion of the ways in which digital heritage can be used as a generative tool which has the potential to democratise cultural production and argues for it going beyond the spectacle.

CINE TALK FUTURE DIGITAL POSSIBILITIES

We believe that museums and heritage organisations can, and should, play a powerful role in imagining different futures for our communities and societies. Digital technologies have the potential to be an important tool in this process. This session draws on the experience of the CINE project partners and others to explore the questions: how can we utilise technological possibilities to be both a preserver of the past and an instigator of new ideas for the future? What digital tools exist to help us? How can we develop new digital tools that meet our particular needs, align with our values, and help us to address the challenging topics of our time in meaningful ways?

Speakers include:

CINE partners
Reflections & Experiences
On community co-production, serious gaming in heritage, managing data, curating digital content, climate change

Katrin Glinka
Imagining the Future: one Project at a time
Using technology and museums to instigate the future

Anjanesh Babu
Machine Learning in the Heritage Sector
A practical example of collaboration to introduce new technology into the museum sector

Marinos Ioannides
Reflections on Digital Cultural Heritage
The director of the Digital Heritage lab of the Cyprus University of Technology and UNESCO Chair on Digital Cultural Heritage reflects on our programme and the future.