Research Notes: Digital Documentation in Vernacular Architecture Studies

Introduction

The methodical investigation and documentation of buildings is at the heart of vernacular architecture fieldwork, providing intimate encounters with historic building fabric and deeper understandings of the past. From our field's inception, practitioners have painstakingly recorded buildings to preserve and interpret the historic built environment. Indeed, it is the rigors of fieldwork that distinguish our discipline's scholarship. By taking an "archaeological" or "forensic" approach to the study of buildings, we seek to chronicle how form, construction, and finish can provide insights into the dynamics of social change.¹ Recognizing that architecture is a powerful medium to explore culture, we are obliged in our scholarship to carefully read the meaning of these complex objects.² Investigation and documentation shape the construction of interpretive narratives, and yet they are not objective acts but rather processes of subjective translation. The way we examine and record buildings directly impacts the manner in which we construct meanings, ranging from establishing the age and alterations of individual structures to establishing more complex narratives concerning their social, economic, and cultural implications. Traditional recording methods like pulling tapes to produce measured field notes are foundational components of our work. But as we move further into the twenty-first century, architectural research, like many other sectors of the humanities and social sciences, faces resource scarcity and pressures in the academy and professional fields. We are asked to record, process, and interpret more information faster and with fewer resources—we no longer have the luxury of slow, measured research.³ Pragmatically, digital documentation technology offers the opportunity to collect more field data faster and with more accuracy, optimizing time on-site. These optimizations are crucial as the field continues to mature.

Digital technology provides new means to record historic buildings through mass data collection and translation. However, these techniques interrupt our traditional interpretive processes and will potentially alter the way we understand the historic built environment. Compared to archaeologists and preservationists, vernacular architecture scholars have been slow to adopt these new tools, and questions remain as to whether we should embrace these technologies at all. And if we do embrace them, how should they be deployed both pragmatically, appropriately, and perhaps ethically in our work? What are the potential changes digital technology may make in our research methodologies as we begin to integrate them into our fieldwork? Recent projects that have incorporated digital recording suggest that it can enhance our investigation, documentation, and interpretive methodologies, and reveal how these technologies might impact our field.

After defining and discussing the benefits and limitations of these technologies, I describe the application of these tools on the Murphy's Island storm tower in the South Carolina Santee Delta as a case study. For this project, I tested the use of photogrammetry and terrestrial laser scanning to enhance analog recording techniques. The implications of the use of digital technologies highlight the interpretive and educational advantages and the epistemological challenges they pose to the ways we construct meaning in the historic built environment.

Why Document? The Interpretive Process

Scholars have formulated five parameters for the fieldwork interpretive process that frames their approach to understanding everyday buildings. (1) Investigation: Derived from both archaeological and anthropological approaches to understanding buildings.⁴ (2) Documentation: The detailed recording of those components that comprise a building, space, or landscape. (3) Analysis: The synthesis of investigation and documentation data. (4) Interpretation: The manner in which meaning and understanding are constructed for an individual building, landscape ensemble, or the wider built environment. (5) Archiving and Curation: Making that material durable and accessible in an archive.⁵ Investigation and documentation are the key components for translating surviving architectural data for interpretation—the process through which we construct meaning, moving our understanding of buildings from objective, static remnants of the past to dynamic and contextualized artifacts. Documentation is one of the primary ways we convey our findings to various audiences. Representational documentation (e.g., photographs, sketches, and measured drawings) is inextricably linked to the interpretation process. Time and available resources are the major factors that weigh on documentation fieldwork. How many hands, how much time, but...