Preserving Place: A Cultural Mapping Exercise

The project focuses on evaluating processes involved in community choice, use and attitude towards place. What places are community groups interested in preserving? What places do they use to preserve their stories? But locale is not the whole story, this project is interested in the narratives behind these choices. To that end, what this project aims to visualise are the methods, techniques, environments, personalities and perceptions that help and hinder these preservation processes.

The aim is to provide an innovative resource that will preserve and visualise the range of responses that can be given to the above questions. A conceptual map will be designed of the opportunities and difficulties faced by Connected Community projects in the telling of their stories. The aim is to create a website with an immediately understandable visual map of the directions involved in the decisions, activities, negotiations, obstacles and outputs of the community groups. Hypermedia enhances the legacy and sustainability of this story of cultural mapping. Concept maps are graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge, allowing for hierarchial constructs moving from most benefical to least popular options, cross links that can specify relationships between 2 or more parts, and specific examples to clarify meanings of given concepts or processes.

The intention is that this conceptual map will be a one-stop, innovative reference point, of benefit to future planning processes of heritage community activists. In addition, the map offers groups already funded in previous phases of the programme an opportunity to share and reflect on approaches that other groups have taken, offering further opportunities for ensuring and safe-guarding legacy impact of current projects. Expertise developed within individual community projects rarely gets shared with other groups: any voluntary group has participants with specific skill sets, but also with missing project management or implementation skills. The map will act as a learning aid to fill any knowledge gaps, illustrating choices and processes involved, taken, adapted, and rejected by Connected Community groups.

In addition, engagement with community groups in the design of the mapping tool will provide a hitherto neglected scholarly narrative of twenty-first century heritage reception processes. The design of the visual map that charts these processes will also offer advances in the academic study of cultural interaction, cultural mapping and digital humanities. The project will therefore
capitalise on the rationale and legacy of the Connected Communities programme by exploring connections between hitherto unconnected research and communal perspectives: by bringing visual diagrammatic mapping methods, that are gaining ever more currency within humanities projects, into dialogue with effective and ineffective research routes pertaining to the preservation of place by heritage community groups.

More detailed training material will also be available on the website. Case studies of 3 community groups' usage of the tool, will be hosted. The intention is that these studies will act as a web training guide that can be used by community groups. Central involvement of the community partner, the Norfolk Rural Community Council, throughout all stages of the project will ensure the training material is effectively co-produced, with community and academic interests fully synthesised. Each case study will draw on the specialist interests of the academic co-investigators (of reception stories, landscape history and human geography). Each case study will have a primary lead but will be co-designed and evaluated by all members of the research team. This collaborative work will enable cross-disciplinary investigations and co-produced evaluations with the community partner. The cultural mapping case-studies are designed to represent (in easily digestible forms) impact of the mapping tool.

The extensive engagement experience of the PI and the academic and community CIs will inform the impact strategy of the project. The main beneficiaries of the Preserving Place project will include the following:
i) The AHRC as stakeholder, due to the evaluations of methodologies in preserving and sustaining legacies of the Connected Community programme. The project will also involve innovative research design into cultural interaction, culturally mapping community processes and advances in digital humanities that will be of relevance and transferable to future AHRC co-production and Humanities programmes.
ii) Charitable organisations, such as the Norfolk Rural Community Council and public sector organisations, such as Natural England; which will use the evaluations of this project and the mapping tool for future project planning.
iii) Future community groups and societies within all of the Connected Communities projects and beyond the programme across the country. Projects already completed will have the opportunity to assess if all steps in preserving legacies have been considered or whether they can learn from others.
v) The mapping tool will also be offered to organisations that we have pre-exisiting engagement relationships with, thereby sustaining and strengthening these partnerships, such as the Centre for East Anglian studies and the Norwich Heritage, Economic and Arts Regeneration Trust, and to national forums such as the HLF and the NCCPE.

The mapping tool will be designed to act as a visual community planning aid for future projects, thereby preserving the lessons that can be learnt (the good and the bad) across three large-scale Connected Communities projects. Website analytics will allow us to record the traffic to this site. The tool will also have an immediate impact for the exisiting 28 community groups, as it will clearly visualise potential preservation routes that they may not yet have engaged for the heritage stories told by the groups to date. The research team will actively encourage these groups to report any such benefits of the tool. The website will host a blog, where the 28 groups who will be engaged during the evaluation process will be invited to interact with the project outputs and share their experiences. This will provide a record of how the various groups can learn from each others' experiences. Analysis of the discussions will inform the case study narratives of the 3 groups' applications of the tool. Case studies will demonstrate the cultural mapping tool in practice. These detailed studies, with evaluative data, will be publicly shared on the web site and thereby create a lasting legacy.

In addition, interactive sessions with a total of 13 community groups will act as a form of impact. The 10 face-to-face interviews and 3 focus groups will have beneficial impact for these specific groups, as they will be encouraged to critically reflect on their experiences to date and explore future plans and strategies.

The impact activities described above will be undertaken by the PI and CIs. They will play a fundamental role in the delivery of the impact strategy by working directly with communities to help co-evaluate their activities and legacies. The PI, CIs and researchers all have considerable experience of engaging with community organisations, although further specific training is available at the University through the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Graduate School and the Centre for Staff Education and Development. In addition, training offered by the University of Oxford in 'Digital Humanities' will be undertaken, with a specific focus on digital visualisation techniques. The co-evaluation processes with the Norfolk Rural Community Council throughout all stages of the project, will have a lasting impact on the growing relationship between the HEI and community partner in sustaining rural communities, providing community groups with a voice, and designing solutions.