The two case studies above demonstrate how the motivations of a more traditional heritage community group (the formal being the constituted CGDT group who wanted to legitimise their heritage for tourism aims) differed from those of a non-traditional community of interest (the feminist Rhynie Woman group who were motivated by a desire to creatively and emotionally connect to the past), thereby changing the very use of the technology - a simple reminder that whoever operates the technology will dictate the results. Yet, as it stands in the field of digital heritage, this authorship is not generally recognised, and it remains that the creative is generally underplayed by heritage professionals and also by communities of interest (the Rhynie Woman are unusual in this regard). Indeed, importantly the connection between the CGDT and Rhynie Woman groups in their approach was their value of process over product. By revelling in the participatory and creative process of 3D visualisation engaged with by ACCORD project communities, the power of these technologies for engagement, exploration and inclusion has been brought to the fore.
The above discussion has illustrated how there are indeed limitations in the designed affordances of the processing software, but that intimate relationships are formed with the monuments and other participants involved in the process of data capture. This process is potentially open ended and exploratory, certainly not fixed (contra Huggett 2015; see section 2).
As also illustrated above, objectivity overshadows our engagement with these technologies. This is down to:
Unless we address all three of these, acknowledging its exploratory and expressive power, the full potential of 3D visualisation for community heritage will not be realised. All results from the ACCORD project are archived under a creative commons license for free and unlimited re-use, but it remains to be seen how the community groups will engage and re-engage with the records created as part of ACCORD (Jeffrey 2017).
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