Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) as a medium for representing cultural heritage (CH) seldomly uses
ethnographic sources as data for the representation of CH in VR. This has contributed
to a geographic bias favouring the creation of CH in VR projects in the West and
People’s Republic of China, where CH sites tend to be protected and physically intact
more often. The preference for physical sources over non-physical data sources, such
as ethnographic sources, also contributes to a bias towards the representation of
tangible CH over intangible CH (ICH). This results in CH in VR representations that
focus on the visual appearance of objects and sites. This focus overlooks the
practices, representations, expressions and knowledge inherent in the CH. This
research uses constructivist grounded theory to analyse and extract data from
ethnographic sources for the representation of CH in VR. Sophiatown in
Johannesburg, South Africa, is used as a case study to demonstrate the extraction
and use of data from ethnographic sources, specifically interviews, for use in the
representation of CH in VR. Since the physical CH site of Sophiatown has almost
entirely been destroyed by the apartheid regime, any representation of it in VR cannot
rely on physical sources alone and ethnographic sources become essential to its
representation. In the prevailing paradigm, favouring the physical aspects of CH and
objective sources, a site such as Sophiatown is essentially unrepresentable. By laying
out a technique for the extraction of data from ethnographic sources, CH in VR
representations may be constructed with more data potentially at their disposal. This
may enable the representation of CH that has been difficult to represent from tangible
sources alone, with such CH often being found in the Global South. By practically
demonstrating how data can be extracted from ethnographic sources, this research
may also enable richer representations of CH in VR as ethnographic data and the
intangible CH often inherent in ethnographic accounts may be considered and
included into CH in VR representations using the framework laid out by this research.
There is no CH that does not also have intangible aspects to it. Ethnographic data can
be a rich window into the intangible aspects of CH; their use in the representation of
CH in VR may lead to richer and more multi-dimensional representations of CH.