SNIP: Spatial Narratives Integration Protocol

Heritage documentation can record extraordinary amounts of physical information. Photogrammetry, measured survey and 3D modelling can preserve geometry, material condition and spatial relationships with increasing precision. Yet the meanings through which people know and inhabit a place do not become legible simply because its fabric has been documented.

This problem became central to my research during the 2025 UNESCO WHIPIC Fellowship in South Korea. Across Catholic gongso sites, I encountered places whose architectural fabric could be documented in detail while the memories, attachments and histories associated with them depended on people, relationships and forms of knowledge that the model alone could not recover.

SNIP emerged from that tension. It was developed and pilot-tested as a way of linking participant accounts to digitally documented places while keeping their sources attributable and allowing different accounts to remain distinct rather than resolving them into a single authorised narrative.

The pilot also revealed an important limit. Participants could review and correct the accounts attributed to them, but the research questions, sequence of inquiry and overall framework remained researcher-defined. SNIP should therefore be understood not as a completed solution to community authority in heritage interpretation, but as an experimental methodology that made both the possibilities and the unresolved problems of such work more visible.

The larger question that follows is no longer only how digital documentation can accommodate multiple accounts. It is how knowledge of place becomes knowable, who retains authority over its representation, and what happens when such knowledge enters the institutional forms through which heritage is interpreted and evaluated.