People and the Sea

Context

It asked: How can we enhance the significance of submerged and displayed wrecks by using a sample of submerged Protected Wrecks (and nearby unprotected wrecks) in the English Channel (The Needles, Mary Rose and Holland 5) and displayed wrecks (Mary Rose and Holland 1) and by employing new stakeholder processes for elevating the significance of underwater wrecks in relation to displayed wrecks.

To demonstrate the potential of a national collection, People and the Sea

• enhanced audience engagement through presenting shipwrecks through new visual material and data sources.
• tested how to connect collections through surveys, recovered artefacts, images, documents and interactive experiences.
• investigated how to make it easier for people to access wrecks through the application of Artificial Intelligence and Extended/Augmented/Virtual Reality.
• discovered new stories from physical and digital archives.

Aim

People and the Sea aimed to share the exciting stories within submerged and museum-displayed by creating new ways of imagining, understanding and valuing them.

Visual images already convey the other-worldly excitement and mystery of submerged shipwrecks. Being able to see, smell and touch recovered objects and ships helps people to imagine shipwreck worlds and blend the tangible and intangible.

People and the Sea looked at four key areas:

1. How to digitally connect the museum-based Mary Rose and Holland 1 to the underwater Holland 5 and Mary Rose; investigating the Needles Protected Wrecks and nearby non-protected wrecks to link individuals and coastal communities through their investigation, people, rescue, and display.
2. How to connect known digital wreck evidence to new archival discoveries.
3. How to create experimental extended reality (XR) encounters and probe audience connections to wrecks by exploring Holland 1, Holland 5, and Mary Rose through digital scans.
4. Assessing how today’s communities interact with wrecks and how we can work with them to co-design new learning tools. This involves the public, school and university students, volunteers, museums, wreck divers and researchers.

People and the sea sought to present wrecks within their wider social, emotional, geographical, or technological contexts. We also considered methods of recording and recovering them to connect more wrecks to each other and to onshore sites, such as dockyards, shipbuilding yards, and lighthouses.

To assess where the Solent and Channel maritime archives, digital collections, and searchable databases aren’t connected, team members researched known digital data and archival wreck data. They also explored how Solent and Channel collections might be connected digitally, so that the public and researchers can better understand connections between people and the sea.

Building on exploring maritime heritage digital and immersive resources with pre-existing audiences, students became a potential future 'researcher' audience. Immersive technology allowed a wide range of audiences to explore new routes into wreck and maritime stories, following their own interests.

Outputs

People and the Sea achieved a significant number of public engagement outcomes:

• Mary Rose Museum and the University of Portsmouth’s Immersive Co-Creation Subgroup garnered positive visitor feedback about new Extended Reality animations to attract and retain visitors and address misconceptions about Mary Rose. This helped to refine cultural mapping for audience and visitor engagement.

The Royal Archer, Mary Rose

• Through photogrammetry, two early C20 submarines: Holland 1 in a museum and Holland 5 on the seabed, have been united digitally by new Nautical Archaeology Society and University of Southampton scans. The Holland Explorer Prototype that was created has attracted encouraging feedback from adults and schoolchildren.
• Maritime Archaeology Trust (MAT)’s consideration of the Needles wreck sites connects 600 years of vessel, aircraft and cultural heritage with regional, national and international collections. Enhanced by volunteer online database searches, MAT created the online Needles Voyager.
  
  The Voyager links a wide range of digital archive sources, which includes links to resources from local museums and archives as well as the Unpath’d Consortium, such as the National Maritime Museum, Lloyds Register Foundation, and Museum of London (MOLA), which extracted citizen-science collected data from its CITiZAN project. These data enriched the Needles Voyager interactive with wider narratives on connected onshore sites, such as dockyards, shipbuilding yards and lighthouses, providing narrative depth and promoting broader understanding.

• MAT used its Discovery Bus to deliver the mobile national exhibition for the whole Unpath’d consortium taking resources including the Needles Voyager, Doggerland Simulator, Unpath’d Portal, Unpath’d navigator, 3D-wreck maps and models to new audiences outside museums. MAT presented and tested the Needles Voyager with audiences online, at the Isle of Wight Shipwreck Centre and Maritime Museum, and at a range of regional events. 
  
  Voyager feedback verifies that visual material such as photographs and 3D models are more popular than text-based wreck stories. It also demonstrates that viewers are happy to engage digitally with shipwrecks.
  
  MOLA supported work package 4’s Touring Exhibition which allowed People and the Sea outputs to be seen all over the UK. This ensured that the audience for this work package and associated partners/contributors was not restricted to the South Coast.
• The University of Portsmouth’s Analogue Digital Connector (ADC) demonstrated that analogue material is less accessible than digital data. Many years of experience are needed to navigate and interpret maritime archives. The knowledge and experience of curators, creators and volunteers risk being lost as they retire. This creates a barrier to retrieving verifiable data and thus potential shipwreck stories remain hidden without prioritised digitisation of selected datasets.
  
  It identified where online access to digital data ends, how diverse are collections relevant to Solent wrecks, barriers to accessing maritime collections, and what could/should be done to connect maritime collections.
  
  The ADC is adding newly discovered archival data to the MAT Needles Voyager for viewers.
• MOLA collaborated with MAT and Work package 5 in devising participant values and updated its citizen-led dataset on the intertidal zone where volunteers have identified more than 2,000 new features and added 6,000 images to the Unpath’d Waters portal.
• Wessex Archaeology’s 'Archaeology on the Seabed – diversifying our engagement with historic shipwrecks' developed a more inclusive understanding of significance to engage people with physically inaccessible shipwrecks in new ways. For example, 18th and 19th-century ship names and associated named persons, selected for possible connections with Africa or the Caribbean, were checked against the online Slave Voyages and UCL Legacies of British Slavery databases for links with the trade and ownership of enslaved persons. Wessex Archaeology’s work with volunteers has demonstrated the impact of integrating diversity of interest and voice and that ethnicity and national identity are important drivers of interest in maritime heritage for any future national collection.
• People and the Sea did not target visually impaired audiences specifically nor carry out specific activities, but some aspects of the Mary Rose Museum, the Holland 5 Dive trail and the Needles Voyager are suitable for the visually impaired.

People and the Sea outcomes:

• It has provided ways to combat the triple disadvantage of wrecks being understudied, under-disseminated and inaccessible underwater to most people. Connecting collections has shown that they can be made more available to anyone who wishes to learn and experience more, either online or in person as a visitor or volunteer.
• It has demonstrated that many digital models link digital data across collections to make excitement and engagement with wreck stories more accessible, such as Lloyds Register, the National Maritime Museum, The National Archive Discovery catalogue, MAT, MOLA and MAST databases, the Crew List Index Project, The Collections Trust, HERR and many more.
• It has shown that its pioneering approaches to accessing wreck information can be viable and sustainable beyond the confines of this funded research project. The four connected pathways of enhanced and extended public engagement through new immersive technologies, co-creation and verifiable digital and analogue research can be used to enhance existing national collections.

Activity collaborators

• Coastal & Intertidal Zone Archaeological Network (CITiZAN)
• Mary Rose Trust (MRT)
• Maritime Archaeology Trust (MAT)
• Nautical Archaeology Society (NAS)
• Wessex Archaeology (WA)