2015 International Conference on Culture and Computing

Preserving Heritage Through Technology

in a City Undergoing Change
Mathias Lyneborg Damgaard ∗ , Seth Van Heijster † , Emil Byskov Nielsen ‡ , Kasper Rodil§ Matthias Rehm¶
Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology
Aalborg University, Denmark
∗ Email: [email protected], † Email: [email protected], ‡ Email: [email protected]
§ Email: [email protected], ¶ Email: [email protected]

Abstract—Recent developments in information and communi- William Logan [5] defines intangible heritage as “heritage that
cation technology have advanced the connectivity of cities, both in is embodied in people rather than in inanimate objects.” This
terms of scope and efficiency. The connected nature of a city is one includes stories, dance, rituals, and other human behaviour.
of the key characteristics of the concept of a smart city; a modern
city whose urban growth is fuelled by technology, infrastructure,
and an emphasis on social and educational capital. Such growth We are of the mind that cultures change for a reason, and
affects the physical and social landscape of a city, and both the if certain groups of people discard or alter their practices it
tangible and intangible heritage of a city is threatened by these should not be prevented. Yet, we are largely unaware of the
changing landscapes. At the same time, new technology brings
consequences for heritage when we are busy with rapidly
potential new methods for the preservation of a city’s threatened
heritage. The present paper aims to place a city’s heritage in the changing the urban spaces into smart and optimised spaces.
context of a smart city, and how it is affected by such urban
development. Using the preservation of World War II heritage This paper explores the concept of smart cities and the
in Aalborg, Denmark as a case study, this paper presents a way impact they have on the preservation of a city’s tangible
to use recent advancements in mobile technology to allow users
and intangible heritage. Several examples of preservation are
experience stories that comprise a city’s heritage at the locations
in the urban environment where they took place. detailed before another possible solution to the problem at
hand is outlined, which takes the form of a location-based
I. I NTRODUCTION smartphone application. This application guides the user to
Historical and cultural artefacts are often prioritised and points of interest in the urban space, where the user can then
preserved in contemporary communities; city archives, experience audio stories related to the historical and cultural
museums, and libraries that keep and maintain records, heritage of that particular location. The methods and results
history, artwork and other artefacts exist in most large explained before the paper concludes. The first test is con-
population centres. Individual buildings such as churches or cerned with how best to present the stories that comprise the
very old structures may not only house such aforementioned heritage in the urban environment. From the results of this test,
artefacts, but are artefacts in and of themselves. However, audio was chosen as the preferred method of presentation. In
as Giovannella et al. [4] point out, these specific locations order to measure the experience of being presented the stories
in a city that comprise its heritage are often isolated from in the urban space, the second test compares the emergence
the rest of the city. Not necessarily physically, but they exist of spatial presence between users who experienced the audio
as separate places that dictate specific behaviours, such as stories in a museum context and those who experienced the
a museum tour or a visit to the interior of an old church. same stories at the locations where they took place. The results
Moreover, the heritage preserved is often taken out of context, of this test were ultimately insignificant.
placed inside a building, often behind an entry fee, in an
arbitrary collection where meaning may be lost. It is clear II. S MART C ITIES
that the technology dictates not only how tangible heritage The concept of a smart city has emerged in recent years,
is traditionally preserved, but also how humans interact with especially with advances in information and communication
it. This is an example of McLuhan’s [6] theory that the technology (ICT) and the rise of urban digital media. It
technology that humans create in turn affects our behaviour. is a concept that brings both challenges and opportunities
In this case the technology dictates specific behaviour for for a city’s urban space. We encourage both a discourse
interacting with cultural heritage, such as the viewing of on preserving and presenting a city’s heritage based on the
artefacts in a museum. As technology rapidly advances, infrastructure and connectivity of the smart city. Smart cities
opportunities for new methods of preserving tangible heritage encompass many aspects of the modern city, and the concept
arise. is used to describe modern urban growth. In particular
smart cities emphasise urban development in the areas of
It is not only the preservation of tangible heritage that can economics, politics, culture, and society. This development
benefit from new technology, but also the intangible heritage. is spurred on by ICT and infrastructure such as housing,

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DOI 10.1109/Culture.and.Computing.2015.34
business, and leisure sites which together create a connected
city. This connected nature of a city has been identified as
the main source of urban growth [3].

III. C ONSEQUENCES OF S MART C ITIES FOR H ERITAGE

With the smart city concept so heavily focused on
development through new technology, connectivity, and new
infrastructure for business, housing, and education, it is hard
to imagine that some aspects of a city do not suffer as it
moves toward a so-called smarter future. Caragliu et al. [3] Fig. 1. Flowchart showing the graphics and how the application moves
between activities. 1 shows the menu screen. 2 shows the list of stories
also mention the fact that possible alternatives to urban available for the user to choose. 3 shows the application’s unique navigation
development may be obscured by the long shadow of new system. 4 shows the media player where the user can control the playblack
ICT and the opportunities it brings. Batty et al. [2] warn of of the story.
the potential complications the new technology itself brings
to a city. They cite Marshall McLuhan [6], who describes
the way in which new media always carries a message that Currently a two-stage research project where the first ambi-
comes to define certain aspects of human behaviour. One of tion is to investigate technical approaches to presenting stories
the key features of smart cities is the constant and widespread in connection with the tangible and intangible heritage of a
connectivity that is facilitated through computer networks city. This is to ensure that the heritage is presented in such
and smartphones. Through McLuhan’s theories of media it a way that it complements the context in which it is being
is clear that this connectivity has drastically changed human presented, in this case, the urban environment. The second
behaviour in the urban setting. ambition is to use mobile technology to provide a platform for
transferring a city’s heritage from museums to the urban space,
One area that does not get as much attention as new that could be used in conjunction with many different heritage
technology in the smart city concept, is a city’s tangible and themes. It is the hope of this second stage of the project that
intangible heritage. New ways of using the urban space will by making the historical and cultural heritage more accessible
unavoidably have an impact on a city’s heritage. However, the and more in line with recent advancements with ICT, more
opportunities offered to a city’s heritage by the infrastructure people will be aware of the stories of a place that comprise its
of a smart city can also provide new opportunities for citizens intangible heritage. Findings from the first stage are presented
to interact with this heritage. ICT can connect citizens to in subsection VI-A, and findings from a preliminary test for
spaces in the city with both tangible, and intangible heritage the second stage are presented in subsection VI-C.
and construct digital representations of structures which are
V. A L OCATION BASED A PPLICATION
gone. Thus with novel technologies and initiatives come
possibilities to reinvigorate a city’s heritage and project the The history of the Churchill-club forms the basis of the
cultural heritage into new spaces, destined for interaction. smartphone application. A Danish resistance force comprised
of school boys from Aalborg during WWII. However, in theory
it could be any part of a city’s historical heritage that has a
IV. A PPROACHES TO P RESERVATION narrative. Through the use of the built-in gyroscope and GPS
Various organisations and individuals have embraced this of smartphones, the application takes the stories of Churchill-
new dimension of preservation offered by smart cities to create Klubben out of museums and books and transfers them back
new methods of connecting heritage content to their audience. into the context where they happened. The user is able to
One such example is the Port Arthur application [1], which listen to these stories after having found their locations in the
allows users to experience audio stories from Tasmania’s rich city. Figure 1, activity three shows an image of the screen of
convict heritage amongst the old and ruined buildings at the the smartphone that the users see when they are navigating to
Port Arthur Historic Site in Tasmania’s south-east. a new story location. The application enables this through a
Another approach can be AR (Augmented reality). An meter with a moving needle that indicates to the user through
example of this is the project called LifePlus: Revival of audio cues and visuals if they are heading in the wrong
life in ancient Pompeii, where 3D reconstructions of ancient direction or right direction. The fourth activity on figure 1
fresco-paintings have been made and can be viewed through shows the buttons used to control the audio.
the use of AR [7]. The opportunities provided by a connected city and
smartphone technology are what sets this application apart
Finally, there are numerous examples of smartphone ap- from the old audio guides one can find at many museums
plications that come up with new ways of using smartphone and historic sites. The amount of potential users one could
technology to preserve and present heritage while interacting reach is enough to justify switching from old audio guides to
with the urban environment. smartphones. Institutions are embracing online platforms in

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order to keep pace with advancements in ICT. The application were asked to complete a recognition memory test for each of
this paper presents also differs from new museum or city the stories. The results of the memory test were then grouped
tours in that it uses a GPS system along with the gyroscope to by presentation method and compared to each other in order
place the preservation of the heritage in a new context. This to find out if there was a significant difference between the
method of navigation in turn promotes exploration of a city, presentation methods.
a method of urban interaction which could potentially expose
B. Findings from the Presentation of Media Test
users to previously unexplored spaces and places, which may
hold tangible and intangible heritage of their own. The findings from the quantitative analysis indicated that
there were no significant difference between the methods.
Table I shows the final aggregate scores from the recognition
VI. I MPLEMENTATION AND T ESTING memory test, revealing no immediately obvious differences.
Two tests were conducted during the creation of the While AR (method D) is a good way to visualise the stories
application. The first test involved 32 participants and in a complementary fashion, audio was found to serve just
investigated different media presentation methods in the as well. An audio approach was chosen as the medium for
urban context. The second test was a preliminary test to presenting the stories and the prototype redesigned according
measure the emergence of spatial presence in 20 participants, to these findings.
who were either exposed to the media in a museum context,
sum mean variance sd
or in the urban context. Both test presented the media to A 114 3.56 5.16 2.27
participants through an Android application. B 115 3.59 3.41 1.85
C 110 3.44 3.16 1.78
D 94 2.94 3.29 1.81
TABLE I
A. Presentation of Media T OTAL SCORE OF MEMORY TEST BY METHOD .
The first stage of the process was to investigate the technical
approaches to the presentation of the media in the urban
context. The test was conducted in order to discover which C. Presence
was the most viable method of preservation of the heritage
The second test investigated if there was a significant
content (WWII stories) at the location where they took place.
difference in the emergence of spatial presence between two
The test investigated four different methods, comparing them
groups of participants listening to four WWII related stories.
to each other through results from a recognition memory test,
Each group consisted of 10 participants. The first group of
and through observations. The four methods were as follows:
participants (Group 1) was presented the application with
• Text only (A)
the stories in a museum context, and the second group of
• Audio only (B)
participants (Group 2) was presented with the application in
• Still images and Audio (C)
the city, where they had to navigate to the right location in
• Augmented reality and Audio (see figure 2) (D)
order to hear the stories. Spatial presence is, of course, but
32 participants were involved in this within-subjects study. one way to measure the effect of transferring the preserved
Each of the participants experienced each of the four methods heritage from a museum setting to the urban environment.
with one of four stories related to WWII. In order to coun- A spatial presence questionnaire was created specifically for
terbalance the experiment, Graeco-Latin squares were used so this between-subjects study, which measures the emergence of
that each possible pairing of presentation method and story spatial presence among the participants. After the participants
was used an equal number of times during the test. After being had experienced all four stories, they were asked to fill out
presented with all the stories at their locations, the participants the questionnaire. The questionnaire consists of statements,
with the participants indicating how much they agreed with
the statements on a scale from 1 to 5. Results of 4 and above
were considered as an indication of the emergence of spatial
presence. The results from the questionnaire were compared
between the two groups.
D. Findings from the Presence Test
The results of the quantitative analysis showed that there
were no significant differences in the emergence of spatial
presence between the two groups. Table VI-D shows the
scores of the presence questionnaire for each individual
participant in both groups, with a higher score indication
Fig. 2. An example of AR showing a door which is no longer a part of the
greater emergence of spatial presence. It can be seen from the
building. The door is a prop in the story that was presented to the user at this table that both groups are almost equal. Observations during
particular site during testing. the test included: Participants looked at the phone the majority

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of the time while navigating while the opposite was true used by more than one participant at a time. Participants
while listening to the stories. Higher amount of enthusiasm unexpectedly seemed to become more engrossed in the task
and collaboration in the cases where such collaboration was of navigating, as well as in the content. They often discussed
possible. which way to go and what they knew of Churchill-Klubben.
An interesting approach to a redesign of the application could
Group 1 Group 2
be to cater more towards a social experience.
Participant No. Score Participant No. Score
1 2 1 3
2 4 2 6 VIII. C ONCLUSION
3 2 3 4
4 5 4 4
In conclusion, the application is a promising start in the
5 4 5 4 development of a new method which transfers the preservation
6 1 6 3 of a city’s heritage from relative isolation in museums and
7 6 7 4
8 3 8 4
archives to the more accessible, wider urban environment.
9 4 9 2 The method is achieved through the connected nature and
10 6 10 4 new technology and infrastructure of the smart city, a concept
Total Score 37 Total Score 38 that at once rapidly reconfigures the physical space of the
TABLE II
TABLES DETAILING THE SCORES SHOWING THE EMERGENCE OF S PATIAL city, while at the same time providing possibilities for new
P RESENCE ATTRIBUTED TO EACH PARTICIPANT FOR EACH GROUP approaches to the preservation of heritage. While the early
prototype test shows promise, the challenge that awaits is to
more effectively layer the new media of the smart city on
VII. D ISCUSSION top of what already exists in the urban environment and to
find ways to incorporate content that are not already found in
The findings from the first test showed minimal difference books.
between the presentation methods. It could be argued that the
novelty of AR would attract a larger audience than an audio
presentation method. However, AR is more resource-intensive ACKNOWLEDGMENT
than audio, which could be authored by people other than The authors would like to express their gratitude to the
the developer. AR requires markers throughout the city. They people who agreed to participate in the tests and to those who
require a certain kind of lighting, and this limits the time of provided feedback for the prototypes. We also wish to thank
day the AR is usable. AR can still be a useful method of Visit Aalborg and Nordkraft Event for their cooperation.
presentation of heritage in some cases. A historical site may
have been completely obliterated by urban development, and R EFERENCES
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Fig. 3. Examples of participant looking down at the smartphone. The

smartphone appeared to take the users’ attention away from their surroundings.

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