Re-thinking and re-imagining the value of the built heritage in a digital age

Recent years have seen rapid and significant development of techniques and equipment which enable the rapid and highly accurate collection of information about physical cultural assets. When applied to aspects of the built heritage, whether through entire buildings or concerning components or features, this has led to changed ways of working (in a professional sense), and more recently has seen a democratisation of sorts, as equipment becomes cheaper, and methods become more accessible (to the layperson).

This chapter first concerns an exploration of how the widespread availability and use of digital data capture has in turn led to a reassessment and reappraisal of the value to society of everyday objects, vernacular architecture, and those parts of the built environment that may hold significant meaning at the individual or community level, but this being quite separate to moving over formal assessments of heritage value or cultural worth.

It then considers how we can understand the theoretical and practical connections between abstracted versions of the built heritage, generated as visually highly realistic digital representations, which are nevertheless significantly and demonstrably different to real objects and contexts that may have been captured in digital form.