Digitising the Cultural Landscape of North Uist

Abstract

North Uist lies in the Western Isles, at the heart of the vernacular Gaelic community. The area is rich in heritage, with unique archaeological sites accompanied by artefacts, stories, poems, and songs about local legends or contemporary accounts of past events. Many are available in English, but are at their most expressive and authentic in the original Gaelic. Currently, there is a crisis in the vernacular community; decade-on-decade reductions in the numbers of people using Gaelic in their day-to-day lives presents an urgent problem for the community. The recent revolution in the way that digital technologies are being used offers innovative opportunities to preserve the ‘Cultural Landscape’, to make it more widely available, and indeed to contribute to its development. Capturing this requires the representation of the landscape that provides the setting for North Uist’s heritage. Emergent immersive and mobile technologies offer the possibility of integrating digital representations of these elements into the Gaelic medium, with the goal of capturing vernacular interpretation of Uist heritage, ensuring that Gaelic expression is part of emergent media and that the transmission of heritage and language is authentic.