Living in the clouds: conceptual reconstructions of harbour structures

Abstract

ABSTRACT:The harbours of Ireland, which evolved over centuries to serve local communities, are under threat from deterioration and rising sea levels. This project is documenting these structures using terrestrial LiDAR augmented by archival research to develop comprehensive histories and a comparative analysis of the evolution of maritime construction. Part of the mandate is to make the research, including timeline models illustrating the evolution of each harbour, available to future researchers and the public. The use of scanning or photogrammetry to record tangible cultural heritage is an established field and has sponsored considerable development in methods to extract legible three-dimensional models from the more amorphous point cloud data to facilitate the active management of buildings and for interpretive visualisations. Though operational formats are imperative for the management of buildings and sites, the premise of this paper is that it is accuracy that is paramount to archaeological hypotheses or architectural digital reconstructions and the need for an operational format should be reconsidered. The rationale is that these reconstructions are forms of history making where fragments of factual evidence are drawn together and upon which a conjectural reconstruction of a plausible account of events developed. The necessity to differentiate the difference between fact and conjecture is key to the intellectual transparency of the resulting representation, particularly in the case of timeline models where conjectural elements are to be modelled. The paper presents a procedure for superimposing conjectural reconstructions in point cloud format on scan data and the advantages over other forms of representations.

Effective Building Surveying Using Laser Scanning for Heritage Building Documentation

“…Shih et al (2019) highlighted the colour accuracy and how 3D imaging helps with the fullscale experience of the building, along with the structural and visual information that can assist in remote cultural exploration and learning on-site by merging stereographic point-cloud data. The exceptional accuracy of LiDAR and its incorporated geolocation in 3D space allow for capturing heritage sites with colour accuracy (Shotton, 2018). Such accuracy also facilitates the capturing of minute details of stonework at a historical location with very steep elevation changes, which would be challenging for conventional surveying techniques (ibid).…”