Digital Heritage Malawi provides a gateway to accessing Malawi’s cultural treasures. The pilot project aims to produce a pathway site for everyone from local to international explorers, from professional practitioners to government managers, and is designed to provide an experience of the vast diversity of both tangible and intangible heritage in Malawi. The site provides a means to permanently record and digitally preserve all aspects of cultural heritage including fragile sites, objects, stories, and songs. The site has been constructed as a collaboration between the University of St Andrews, Scotland, Chancellor College, University of Malawi, the Scottish Malawi Foundation, and the Department of Antiquities, Ministry of Tourism and Culture, Malawi.
This project is a collaboration between the University of St Andrews, Scotland, Chancellor College, University of Malawi, the Scottish Malawi Foundation and Department of Antiquities, Ministry of Tourism and Culture, Malawi.
This project aims to develop a digital heritage database for Malawi that will allow national recording of heritage assets, their state of preservation, and specific impacts that are affecting each site and thus provide for their management. Further, it provides for tourist marketing of sites internationally. Management is fundamental to providing development and economic benefit to local people at the sites. This is especially the case for rural sites that currently lack the infrastructure for preservation but often have an internationally significant cultural heritage.
The project combines the arts, social sciences, and sciences. Scientific methods are used to record the historical and archaeological tangible heritage and social sciences to record the intangible heritage in the appropriate sensitive manner. Technology is used to preserve and present both in a form that transcends society and age groups using modern methods that are globally relevant. Interpretation and understanding of the heritage are achieved through immersive experiences.
