Digital Heritage as Pedagogy: Fostering Cultural Identity through the Preservation of Guizhou Dong and African Vernacular Architecture

Abstract

This paper undertakes a comparative examination of two geographically distant but conceptually convergent traditions of vernacular building: the timber architecture of the Dong ethnic minority in Guizhou, China — epitomised by the drum tower (gulou) and wind-and-rain bridge — and the earthen and painted vernacular forms of sub-Saharan Africa, exemplified by Dogon settlement architecture in Mali and Ndebele mural-house traditions in southern Africa. Both traditions encode cosmology, kinship, and social order into built form through non-textual, highly structured sign systems that are transmitted primarily through oral instruction and communal practice rather than written codification. Framing architecture as a semiotic artefact, the study draws on Peircean and structuralist theories of the sign, together with anthropological readings of vernacular form, to compare how spatial layout, ornament, colour, and structural grammar function as culturally specific languages. The paper then evaluates how digital preservation technologies — including UAV and terrestrial photogrammetry, LiDAR scanning, Historic Building Information Modelling (HBIM), and community-based digital archiving — have been deployed to document these traditions, using the Decoding Dong project in Guizhou and comparable African heritagedocumentation initiatives as illustrative cases. The analysis argues that digital preservation of vernacular heritage cannot be reduced to geometric capture alone; it must also register the semiotic and performative dimensions of these architectures, or risk producing accurate but meaningless digital shells. The paper proposes an integrated framework combining reality-capture technologies with ethnographic and oral-history documentation, and concludes with recommendations for community-engaged, semiotically literate digital heritage practice applicable across both regional contexts.