September – December 2025 | Sejong, South Korea

What happens when a heritage researcher from South Asia encounters Korean heritage not simply as a visitor, but through sustained fieldwork, conversation and methodological reflection?

This visual narrative traces three months at the UNESCO World Heritage Interpretation and Presentation Information Centre, where the questions that would later shape SNIP developed through a combination of reading, field visits, documentation, discussion and repeated encounters with places whose meanings could not be understood through physical evidence alone.

The work began with documents: reviewing WHIPIC publications, examining approaches to heritage interpretation and values, and speaking with researchers and practitioners. But the fellowship quickly pushed those questions beyond the page. Across Korean heritage sites, I became increasingly aware that architectural fabric and documentary records could tell me a great deal about a place while still leaving much of its social life inaccessible.

That became especially apparent at abandoned Catholic gongso. Their buildings could still be measured, modelled and closely observed. Their thresholds, devotional objects, material changes and traces of earlier use remained visible. What was much harder to access were the relationships through which those places had once been understood: memories, attachments, routines and associations carried through community life.

Later visits to Yeosaul and Yangchon presented a different condition. There, community members could speak about particular spaces, objects and remembered events. Conversations could be returned to specific locations within the documented environment, and differences between accounts could remain visible rather than being absorbed into a single narrative.

Some of the most important moments of the fellowship were therefore not formal research milestones at all. They came through conversations over meals, unexpected questions during field visits, problems in translating a remembered event into a spatial record, and moments when the limits of my own method became clearer than its possibilities.

SNIP, the Spatial Narratives Integration Protocol, emerged from those encounters as a pilot methodology for keeping participant accounts attributable, spatially situated and open to disagreement within digitally documented heritage environments.

The fellowship did not resolve the problem. It sharpened it!

Participants could review and correct what was attributed to them, but the sequence of inquiry and the methodological framework remained researcher-defined. What began as a question about how to bring multiple narratives into digital heritage therefore became a larger question about relationships, research authority and what happens when situated knowledge enters institutional systems of heritage interpretation and evaluation.

The work continues!

감사합니다.