Bridging Technology and Tradition Through Collaboration

Canterbury Christ Church University pioneers digital heritage collaboration

Deal coastline 

Standing on the Kent coastline, it’s easy to imagine the centuries of stories carried through towns like Broadstairs, Ramsgate, Deal and Sandwich. Fishermen, smugglers, sailors, artists and visitors have all shaped these communities. Yet many of these stories remain hidden in archives, local memories, and museum collections.

Canterbury Christ Church University is changing that. With support from the National Heritage Lottery Fund, the university launched an ambitious community heritage project that blends local storytelling with immersive digital technology. Using NCUB’s konfer platform that helps connect universities with businesses to collaborate, the team has brought together historians, artists, technologists and creative companies to develop new ways for people to experience East Kent’s past through this digital heritage project.

The Challenge: Preserving Hidden Heritage

While the Kent coastline is rich in untold stories and local history, traditional archives can be difficult to access and engage with, particularly for younger audiences or those who are neurodivergent. As a result, valuable cultural heritage risks being overlooked.

The university set out to explore whether digital technology could help unlock these stories, making them interactive, accessible and meaningful for a wider public.

Innovative Solutions: A Digital Leap Forward

To address this challenge, Canterbury Christ Church University called for historians, artists, filmmakers, technologists, tourism companies and creative agencies, through a targeted collaboration call on konfer. The goal was to co-create accessible digital archives and storytelling platforms that would allow visitors to experience history in new ways.

Local museum volunteers and community members are directly involved in co-designing the digital experiences, ensuring the stories remain authentic and rooted in the communities they represent.

Partnerships in Action

Although there were initial concerns that commercial partners might approach heritage work from a different perspective, the university quickly found strong interest from companies connected through konfer.

Many organisations saw the project as an opportunity to explore how their expertise could contribute to the heritage sector. Several offered their skills and technology, often on a pro bono basis, allowing the project to test ideas that might otherwise have been out of reach.

Examples of these developing collaborations include:

• fireFLY aerial innovation using drone technology to capture aerial footage that contrasts historic landscapes with the towns as they appear today

• An AI firm experimenting with gamification to make museum artefacts more interactive and engaging

• Digital developer Gazooky contributing to a new Dickens trail in Broadstairs

  
  

Carolyn Oulton, the lead academic on the project, explains:

“NCUB's konfer platform pushed the boundaries of the possible. Through the connections we made we are now able to do things we thought out of scope and simply couldn’t afford. It has genuinely changed the way I see collaboration. The conversations went beyond the transactional and show how ideas are shaped between disciplines to create something greater than the sum of their parts.”

Mutual Benefits and Next Steps

The project demonstrates a partnership model where everyone benefits. Commercial partners gain experience and insight into the heritage sector, while the university and its museum collaborators access advanced creative and technological expertise.

Participants also benefit from access to the university’s Creative Innovation Hub, a state-of-the-art facility that supports experimentation with virtual and augmented reality, performance capture and digital storytelling.

As the UK’s creative industries continue to evolve, Canterbury Christ Church University’s initiative shows how collaboration can make heritage more accessible, engaging and sustainable.

By bringing together academic expertise, community knowledge and commercial innovation, the project is safeguarding local history while creating new ways for audiences to experience the past: online, on site, and for generations to come.

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