Digital Innovation for Sustainable Heritage (DISH)

Zahra Mohamadi

The ongoing digital transformation offers unparalleled potential to safeguard cultural heritage against threats like climate change, structural decay, and geopolitical instability. However, the sector faces significant challenges in sustainably managing complex digital data and creating accessible public experiences.

My PhD project addresses this gap by developing an open-source digital toolkit. Built on game engine technologies, this toolkit is designed to empower heritage professionals to create immersive virtual museums and exhibitions and generate precise digital twins of historical sites and artifacts within a user-friendly environment. A core innovative dimension involves integrating artificial intelligence—specifically, large language models (LLMs)—to automate the analysis of scholarly texts and aid in the AI-assisted reconstruction of historical environments. Using the rich medieval heritage of Visby as a living laboratory, the research will formulate new, scalable protocols for digital conservation, data management, and public engagement.

About me

This research is driven by my commitment to developing practical digital solutions for today’s complex cultural and preservation challenges. The project is inherently interdisciplinary, sitting at the intersection of game design, software development, archaeological method, and artificial intelligence.

I hold a Bachelor's Degree in Architecture from Tehran University, Faculty of Fine Arts, and a Master’s Degree in Conservation and Restoration of Historical Buildings and Urban Fabrics from Shahid Beheshti University. With a background in 3D visualization methods and programming, I am now pursuing a PhD at the Department of Archaeology, Ancient History and Conservation at Uppsala University - Campus Gotland.

Olivia Bellis

I am part of the Digital Innovations for Sustainable Heritage (DISH) project on the archaeology side. For my PhD research, I am primarily focusing on making a digital twin of the Visby city wall, with a focus on heritage monitoring and management. The goal moves beyond simply monitoring concerns regarding the walls’ stability and the effects of long-term climate change, but also to develop new approaches for heritage monitoring, urban planning, and digital documentation within a comprehensive framework. This task will be accomplished by incorporating a multi-disciplinary research approach utilizing both archaeological and game design perspectives.

Leaning towards archaeology for the heritage management side of managing a digital twin and how long-term monitoring of such resources fits into a world heritage site, and integrating this with archaeological research questions, and to game design for the technological side of the visualization techniques and related methods. This will be achieved through fieldwork and traditional research to collect and record a digital twin of the wall via modern technology and standards. I will also explore new ways these collected assets can be utilized, preserved, and shared. The idea is to create a resource that is not just utilized for a single project or research goal, but as a persistent digital resource that is usable by a variety of stakeholders for years to come.

About me

I’m an archaeologist with a specialization in digital tools and technologies in archaeology. I hold a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Northern Kentucky University, USA, and a Master’s degree in Archaeology from Lund University, Sweden. My academic experience in archaeology includes conducting excavations, performing geographic information systems (GIS) analysis, utilizing 3D modeling via photogrammetry and laser scanning, as well as conducting drone photography and survey. I also focused my master’s thesis on the long-term preservation of 3D data in archaeology. Beyond academia, most of my career has been outside the field of archaeology in the private sector. I have had a variety of roles in GIS and software development, most recently working as a GIS Developer. During my tenure as a GIS developer, I primarily worked as a JavaScript software developer specializing in using a variety of web mapping software packages (Mapbox, Maplibre, OpenLayers) to build custom web applications.