Approaching Historical Spaces in Summer 2023

An understanding of space is an important component of understanding human development. To address that, scholars in the 1960s turned toward spatial analysis in order to understand societal and cultural development alongside environmental and more. Those studies, however, were focused on description and 2-dimensional still as well as graphs in order to attempt to give an impression of the spaces under examination. Expanding access to cameras and film assisted scholars in exploring and disseminating that information while mainstream movies provided people with something of a–if irreall–sense of the spatial past. Recently, changes in technology for 3d and virtual reality development have inspired a resurgence of spatial studies as they allow scholars and readers to create and study increasingly complex, multi-dimensional replicas.

This 2023 summer Boston College DH project aims–with funding from the ILA–to provide a space to explore new opportunities for researching historical spaces. Toward that end, this project has three goals:

  • To capture two historical spaces using photogrammetry.
  • Recreate a historical space in a virtual environment using blueprints from the Boston City Archive.
  • Create a small collection of soundscapes capturing a diverse range of environmental sources.

Those processes will provide exploratory spaces for the project team to work with different programs designed for work with 3d objects (the Adobe Suite; Blender; and Unity Engine). The team will capture the physical dimensions of the spaces they work with alongside a variety of audio components.

The end products will be hosted for public access on BC’s server space Visiodrome. Material about the processes and recommendations on how to use the material will be available on dhprojects.bc.edu.

Team

Project Participants:

  • Dr. Bee Lehman (PI)
  • Sam Hurwitz
  • Emily Dupuis
  • Jo Mikula
  • Kelly Gray
  • Alexia Pritchard (media advisor)

Spaces / Collaborators:

  • Connolly House, Boston College
  • Old North Church, Boston
  • Blueprints from the Boston City Archives
  • Went End Museum, Boston

Tools:

  • Two laptops with Adobe Illustrator (BCL Circulation)
  • Unity Engine (OA)
  • Blender (OA)
  • Agisoft Metashape (DS Studio)
  • Laser printers (Hatchery)
  • 3d Printers (Hatchery)
  • 360 camera (DS Studio)

Rights and Reproduction:

The BC team will be making replica digital 3D models of art and other objects already in the public domain. For the purposes of this project, anything created before 1928 will be assumed to be in the public domain. All replica digital 3D models created by the BC Team will be placed under CC0 or CC3 licenses and made available to the public free of charge.

 

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