Visualising History: New Media & Historiography

Visualising History explores and contextualises the results of practice-led research into interactive media undertaken as part of a FUSION knowledge transfer project. The University of Ulster collaborated with the internet company, MOR Solutions, Drogheda in a cross-border creative and digital media economic development project as part of the Northern Ireland Peace Process. The project has produced two prototype pilot demonstrators providing interactive mobile heritage guides to the Drogheda Viaduct (built in 1855) and the site of the Battle of the Boyne (BOTB) of 1690: each demonstrator possessing individual and unique characteristics. For the Viaduct production the research team was able resort to a wealth of visual material (photographs, railway timetables, museum artefacts etc.) as well as interviews with local inhabitants. In contrast the battle-site research, although involving extant paintings and engravings, is primarily concerned with written accounts, yet these have been visualised with the aid of Irish Arms, a professional historical re-enactment group; Millmount Museum, Drogheda and with the co-operation and permission of the Republic of Ireland’s Office of Public Works (responsible for the BOTB site). The overall aim of the productions is to enable visitors to historical sites to access multi-perspective, contested or contradictory histories and conjecture: from points of view of bridge designers and railway workers or generals, foot-soldiers or “camp followers”; from the wider strategic, domestic and Europe-wide political perspectives to everyday practicalities. Using the prototype Irish heritage guides as case studies, the paper explores of the wider theoretical, methodological and empirical aspects of the re-presentation of contested histories, identity and their contemporary political ramifications.