Week 10: Digital material culture

Where to go

Please go to Myles Brand Hall, room E120 (corner of 10th and Forrest, 1 block east of Woodlawn). Head in through the circled doors and turn right immediately.

What we’ll do

“Living history,” like what you might find at a museum or historical landmark, can be a powerful way to communicate history to public audiences. A variety of digital recreation techniques can straddle the line between research and public history, including augmented reality, VR, and 3D recreation of historical artifacts. This week, we’ll read about VR and AR and explore them for lab. Then we’ll experience 3D recreation of historical artifacts in situ, Informatics Protolab I, Myles Brand Hall E120

Reading: Allison, John. 2008. “History Educators and the Challenge of Immersive Pasts: A Critical Review of Virtual Reality ‘Tools’ and History Pedagogy.” Learning, Media and Technology 33 (4): 343–52. doi:10.1080/17439880802497099.

Project examples: Open up all of these briefly. Choose 2 and spend 5-10 minutes exploring them:

• https://yorescape.page.link/rome
• https://artsandculture.google.com/project/3d-models
• https://iu3d.sitehost.iu.edu/iu3d/projects
• https://www.openculture.com/2017/07/the-first-3d-scan-of-the-rosetta-stone-now-online.html
• https://www.myminifactory.com/scantheworld/

Lab:

First, to anchor the Protolab visit, please have a look at the Astrolabe section of this page (and ignore everything else; we’ll look at the pilgrimage in Week 11 or 12): https://booklab.indiana.edu/lab-work/current- projects/astrolabe-2024.html

Then: Download the PolyCam Photogrammetry app (https://poly.cam/tools/photogrammetry) from https://poly.cam/. Bring a small 3D object from home that you would like to screw around with and digitize.

Finally: Consider these questions:

• If you could go back in time and bring back one material-culture artifact from your time period and geographic subfield, what would it be?
• How would you recreate it through hand-crafted terms?
• During class, we’ll think about what it would take to recreate it using the tools we’ll be introduced to in the ProtoLab MakerSpace.