Advanced Practice & Technique in Conservation

Why heritage is documented — knowledge, management, monitoring and record before loss (the Notre-Dame case); the standards that require it — the Venice Charter (Article 16), the ICOMOS Recording Principles (1996) and CIPA; Indian bodies (ASI, INTACH, the NMMA, 2007); and the methods of inventory, survey questionnaires and data recording.

The crucial difference between DATA and DOCUMENTATION; the spectrum of techniques from hand survey through rectified photography, photogrammetry and laser scanning to drones and HBIM, and what each is good for; Historic England's four levels of survey, chosen to suit purpose and significance; and documenting at the scale of an object, a building, a site or a landscape.

GIS fundamentals — vector (points, lines, polygons + attributes) versus raster (a grid of cells), layers and attribute tables; georeferencing historic maps onto modern coordinates to study change over time; spatial analysis (overlay, buffer, proximity) for heritage listing, risk and zoning; and how GIS differs from CAD.

Deriving 3D measurement from 2D photographs — the principle of parallax and triangulation (like binocular vision), stereo-photogrammetry and modern Structure-from-Motion; scale, control points and camera calibration; key parameters (image overlap and Ground Sample Distance); aerial versus close-range photogrammetry; and the outputs — point cloud, mesh, orthophoto and DEM/DTM/DSM.

Turning data into documentation — measured drawings and orthophotos derived from scans and photogrammetry; the heritage record and its archive with metadata (the Venice Charter's public archive); the process model from capture to archive; HBIM and the digital twin as a queryable database; and the hard problem of digital preservation and obsolescence.