Digital reviews

Historic monuments are so much more than their material fabric: it’s the stories – both proven or dubious – that we tell about them that bring them to life in our imaginations. What would Stonehenge be without its mythical druids, the Guildhall in London without Gog and Magog, or historic Coventry minus Lady Godiva?

English Heritage’s Map of Myth, Legend and Folklore populates the country with the stories that haunt it. Against the background of an animated map of England and Wales, beautifully illustrated by Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins, purple castles and blue feathers invite you to click and explore historic myths.

You will find the creepy: like the drumming from the well that haunts the deaths of Yorkshire’s St Quintin family, and the seemingly indestructible screaming skull of Wardley Hall in Salford. But you’ll also find the comical, such as the story of the villagers of Shapwick in Dorset, who believed that a crab dropped by a passing fisherman was an unearthly demon and attempted to drive it from the town with pitchforks. From neolithic ritual to Victorian ghosts, beasts and heroes rub shoulders across the landscape.

The content has been done by English Heritage, but this is a contributory project and you are invited to pass on your own retelling of myths and legends by dropping blue feathers on the map. 

The interface is a little on the clunky side: you can’t zoom in or out, which makes it hard to navigate, and there are few contemporary landmarks to find your way by. Nevertheless, the charm of the illustrations and tales will have you whiling away a lunchtime in the land of legends. 

Some of us will cross continents for the opportunity to immerse ourselves in a unique historic building or landscape. But what happens when war or natural disaster take that opportunity away from us?

This online exhibition, with Europeana’s tried and tested scrolling images, interactive maps and other widgets, showcases how digital technology can help us experience what’s been lost for ever. It highlights digital restorative efforts, such as the Warsaw Uprising Museum’s recreation of the Polish city before its destruction in the second world war. 

The final chapter of the exhibition considers the case of the recent fire that devastated Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral. 3D laser scans of the cathedral made with drones by the art professor Andrew Tallon could prove invaluable in the cathedral’s physical reconstruction. 

The idea of a virtual gallery, a point-of-view recreation of the physical experience of wandering hallowed museum halls alone, to the sound of your own footsteps, is a cliche that belongs to the era of Microsoft’s Encarta CD-Rom encyclopedia.

Nevertheless, sometimes you just have to put a new spin on an old horror, and the map geeks at Ordnance Survey Labs have come up with this virtual gallery of OS map visualisations, built in the Unity video game engine.

On display are experimental cartography and data visualisations in the form of maps. A collaboration with the composer Ewan Campbell uses contour lines as a stave for musical notation, there are visualisations of the countryside walks taken by users of the OS map app and a visual breakdown of the UK’s islands. 

There’s a pleasingly bonkers element: get up close to the music maps and you can hear the accompanying soundtrack; a football lurks near a visualisation of all 92 English Football League stadiums ready to be kicked across the gallery floor; and if you get the angle right you can walk all over a map of Mars.

The downside is that it is hard to look at any of the maps in much detail as the Unity software doesn’t allow a great deal of zooming in or close-ups. But it’s a nice experiment. The luxury of having digital labs in a cultural organisation is that you get to try out new ideas, see how people respond and then either adapt or discard your experiment.

“Innovation” can be a dirty word when we focus on value for money in our digital interactions with audiences. But this innovation is just so retro that it might be worth another look.