Student-developed tools to bring historic landscapes assessment into the digital age

By Jeff Guin

If you haven’t heard it already, the future is mobile. I never really understood that until I got an iPhone. Now–anytime and anywhere–I can do things like e-mail, take photos, record podcasts, read a book, watch a movie, calculate tips and even blog. Everything but reliably make a phone call it seems, but that’s another story.

Mobility is even extending to heritage preservation these days. The National Center for Preservation Technology and Training is developing software to inventory and assess historic landscapes. NCPTT web developer Sean Clifford is working with Joe Evans, an incoming grad student in NSU’s Master of Arts in Heritage Resources program, to create versions of the software for Windows tablet PC and the iPhone.

If you want to read more about the technical details of the project, check out Joe’s blog on the topic. So why does the world need an application to inventory and assess historic landscapes? And what makes a landscape historic anyway?

Of all the fields dealing in cultural heritage, landscapes is perhaps the toughest to get one’s mind around. Unlike a building or an archaeological artifact, a landscape is not meant to exist unchanged as a monument to another time. Landscapes grow, change and adapt to the environment every hour of every day. Humans can intervene to preserve structures, but we can’t keep vegetation alive indefinitely.

In fact, this is one area of preservation in which human interaction is an essential part of its historic value. Would we value the Grand Canyon as much if none of us were allowed near it? What about Gettysburg, or even American Cemetery on Second Street? By walking in those places and experiencing them with all of our senses, we connect with their significance. And we want to protect them for others to enjoy.

Last year, I had the opportunity to go to London for a conference and was thrilled a the prospect of seeing the British Museum. Yet, in glass cases, thousands of miles out of context, the artifacts from every major civilization in the history of humankind didn’t inspire the kind of awe I expected. What did? Scenes like a Peruvian immigrant railing against unfair wages at Hyde Park’s famed Speakers’ Corner. Or recognizing Gracechurch Street from its mention in Pride and Prejudice (which I was reading at the time).

Historical events play a role in adding value to such a landscape, but so does one’s experience. Mobile documentation methods will ensure that landscapes are preserved with their context.