Towards Digital Built Environment Studies: An Interface Design for the Study of Medieval Delhi

Computing technologies such as CADD, GIS
or databases, are generally developed with the
aims of the producers of the built environment
(architects, engineers, urban planners etc.)
in mind. These existing technologies tend
to be adapted uncomfortably for pedagogical
and research purposes. The field of built
environment studies, which here refers to
scholarly fields like architectural history and
urban history and not practical fields like
architecture, is just beginning to consider
how computing technologies can be designed
and employed for analytical and scholarly
ends. What would software designed by
practitioners of built environment studies with
their aims in mind look like? Engaging with
this problem is not only an opportunity
to imagine a new practical tool but also
to critically inquire into the aims of built
environment studies and the assumptions
embedded into existing built environment
computing technologies. This paper presents the
Medieval Delhi Humanities Computing
Research Collective
’s proposal for an
interface design concept that is the culmination
of their attempts to analyse both their
own research questions, processes and the
suitability of existing technological strategies
from the perspective of architectural and urban
historians.
1. The Medieval Delhi Humanities
Computing Research Collective
The Collective is a Canadian-led international
team of historians and art and architectural
historians from leading research institutions
in Canada, the United Kingdom, India, and
Japan with expertise in Medieval Delhi and
humanities computing initiatives. Formed in
2008, the Collective is a result of the Medieval
Delhi Humanities Computing Initiative funded
by UBC Martha Piper Research Grant (Jan.
2008 to Sept. 2009). The Collective first
met as a group in a workshop and planning
session on April 2-3, 2009 in Victoria,
established institutional linkages, data sharing
agreements, and a common data repository,
and is working together to attract additional
funding. The Collective is currently completing
its work on conceptualizing researcher oriented
technologies and strategies for architectural and
urban historical research of Medieval Delhi.
2. Imagining Data Collages
Researchers interested in studying the built
environment in a systematic way typically
need to reconcile diverse forms of data –
spatial, textual, and visual – and increasingly
computing technologies are vital not only
for storing and retrieving this information
but for analyzing it as well. To be able to
research built environments effectively then,
a researcher-oriented digital interface and
infrastructure becomes increasingly necessary.
Not only does one need to need to build
an array of databases of historical texts in
multiple languages, chronologically organized
photographs, maps and satellite data and other
forms of information, but one needs to figure out
simple productive ways to connect and interface
with these various databases, integrate them
with large-scale databases and design overlaying
analytical tools that truly facilitate historical
inquiry and collective scholarship. If planning
officials, architects, tourism industries and
others increasingly develop and use computing
technologies with their goals in mind why
should not the built environment scholarly
community?
The Collective’s approach treats architectural
sites and urban form as a collection of visual
and textual representations of varying precision
across time and space each with their own
interpretable contexts. For example, a site is not
viewed as entirely knowable in its moment of
creation but as something that evolves in form
and memory and can be known only through
its various representations whether they be the
textual account of a 12th C court historian,
the textual and pictorial accounts of a 19th C

2
British traveller, the textual and photographic
records of a 20th C Japanese archaeological
team, the oral and videographic account of
an Indian tourist from Mumbai, or a 21st
century satellite image. These representations
amount to a collage of data hence the term
Data Collage. While this approach is familiar to
researchers of architectural and urban history
it is generally not incorporated into existing
technology strategies which tend to favour
virtual reconstructions or presume the stability
of knowledge and a uniform level of precision
for spatial and chronological information.
This representational approach has important
implications for how data should be structured
and engaged with.
Instead of attempting to recreate a historic
architectural site or region as virtual reality,
Data Collages treat an architectural site or
region as a collection of intersecting and
conflicting representations. Ideally, a Data
Collage will allow researchers of an historic site
to access all relevant three-dimensional digital
models, photographs, paintings and historical
textual descriptions in original and translated
texts and be able to see how these various
representations are interrelated chronologically
and spatially and where they conflict.
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