Invisible Worlds: Place-Making, Augmented Reality, and Alderley Edge

Invisible Worlds brings together digital and creative responses to explore contemporary and historical place-making strategies, drawing on the opportunities offered by Augmented Reality (AR). An academic collaboration with the National Trust, it takes as its focus Alderley Edge, an outdoor (non-built) heritage site in North-East Cheshire, above a network of Bronze and Roman Age mines. Alderley Edge has a long and rich legendary history, which is, however, largely invisible to the majority of visitors to the site today.

The project is led by an interdisciplinary team of researchers in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, the Institute of Historical Research, London, and the Department of Media Studies at the University of Lincoln; as well as creative practitioners working with visual media, soundscapes and storytelling. It has been developed through a series of scoping meetings from May 2018 to April 2019 with the National Trust, in direct response to urgent challenges identified by the Trust. It also builds on established relationships with key stakeholders in the Edge and its legend, including the author Alan Garner, the Cheshire educational and heritage charity, the Blacken Trust (founded by Alan and Griselda Garner), and Derbyshire Caving Club, who manage the mines at Alderley Edge under license from the National Trust.

A digital humanities project engaged with the relationship between contemporary experiences of place and medieval legendary narratives, Invisible Worlds charts a new course in Medieval Studies, the Digital Humanities, and Heritage. It offers a new model for the study of trans-historical place-making, approaching the ways in which long histories of place interact with contemporary experiences of lived space.

Invisible Worlds takes as its focus the legend of Alderley Edge: a subterranean chamber of sleeping heroes, beneath the site, who will awaken at a time of national crisis. In long-lived regional circulation, the modern legend has affinities to medieval sources which have informed later medievalist practices associated with the site, including its treatment in the novels of Alan Garner. Garner has advised on the development of the project, and is a key member of the project's advisory board.

The project will make the subterranean legend of the Edge accessible through an AR resource, using immersive 3D software, Unity 3D (accessed via smart phone or tablet). The resource localises commissioned artistic responses to long historical and contemporary versions of the legend in 3D representations of the mines beneath the site, viewed from above ground. It will also be accessible remotely, through the project website, hosted at the University of Birmingham.

The experience of the Edge as lived place, as much as a site of historical importance, is fundamental to Invisible Worlds. A public survey, inviting new responses to the legend of the Edge, will be integrated within the AR resource and website. This is positioned within the project as the latest chapter in the long history of legendary place-making, and forms the grounds of a new public history of the Edge, written by users of the resource rather than for them.

Invisible Worlds has been developed as a case study, with extensible potential across heritage sites and organisations. It engages with the capacity of AR for the representation and analysis of imagined worlds, overlaid upon the geographical real, as a vital component in communicating new dynamic histories of non-built heritage, or sites with invisible, legendary or difficult histories. At Alderley Edge, the project will facilitate a new type of visitor experience and engagement, centring its legendary position and its cultural significance.

The impact of Invisible Worlds is understood in relation to the following beneficiaries:

1. The National Trust
Invisible Worlds responds to urgent challenges identified by the National Trust at Alderley Edge. It has been developed closely with the National Trust as a case study for the North Outdoors Programming and Interpretation steering group, in terms of the use of digital technology to enhance interpretation in LON (Land, Outdoors and Nature; i.e. non-built) spaces. A SWOT analysis has been undertaken in support of the project, which confirms the findings of an earlier independent SWOT analysis carried out in 2016 (Prag 2016).

The project models the uses of AR, and artistic and academic partnerships, to:
(1) actively change visitor understanding and behaviour;
(2) support conservation policies (the AR trail will direct footfall away from the most eroded areas of the site);
(3) represent histories which fall outside familiar interpretative models.
(4) measure public engagement, via the survey integrated into the resource and website. This will allow the National Trust, and investigators, to trace shifts in the nature of public engagement with, and understanding of, the site, from the start to the end of the project. This will be in addition to evaluation activity supported by the National Trust, detailed further in the Pathways to Impact document.

2. Visitors to Alderley Edge
The project is designed to deepen and enrich public understanding of the cultural relevance of Alderley Edge, and its historic importance, tracked through public engagement and evaluative activities, outlined in Pathways to Impact. The AR resource and project website will continue to be accessible to visitors to the site beyond the duration of the project. In addition to changing visitor behaviours, the project has the potential to extend Heritage participation through a cultural partnership with the Blackden Trust, who will integrate the AR resource within their existing schools programme. The project will also draw on the recommendations of the Blackden Trust in the inclusion of schools' groups in the testing and development of the AR resource, ensuring that the educational utility of the resource is a significant component of its design.

3. Additional cultural partners
The project has significant implications, and applications, for our project partners beyond the National Trust: for the Blackden Trust, who will be able to draw on the AR resource for their educational programme, as part of their broader commitment to preserving and articulating the legend of the Edge as a vital part of Cheshire's cultural heritage; and for the Derbyshire Caving Club, who will be able to utilise the 3D imaging of the mines captured for the AR resource, with the potential for further reaching public interest in the organisation.

4. Heritage professionals
Invisible Worlds has the potential to inform broader practice across the heritage sector in the interpretation of non-built heritage and the uses of AR as an interactive interpretive, and publicly engaged, mode of representation and analysis. Invisible Worlds has been identified as a National Trust case study, with potential for broader impact not only across the Trust but the Heritage sector. The transferrable methodologies pursued here are applicable to other sites, and the current project is a pilot study for further collaborations with historic trusts and sites of legendary-historical importance. Although the interests of the project are explicitly medieval and medievalist, the methodologies employed are applicable to sites at which we find obscured or erased histories from other periods. Dialogue with heritage professionals beyond the National Trust will be facilitated through a symposium held at the Institute of Historical Research at the conclusion of the project, drawing on the established relationships of project Co-Is with English Heritage and Cadw.