A Blast from the Past

After going about a month without using SketchUp, which I made a not-so-accurate model of my house with, I finally began work on a recreation of the long-gone Dean Lodge, an old women’s house that was burned down more than 70 years ago. Trying to reproduce this building was much tougher than I anticipated, even with a few pictures to work with.

Picture Matching

Luckily for me, SketchUp has a handy dandy picture matching function which makes modeling a building off of pictures–which I retrieved from Carleton’s digital archives–pretty straightforward. Or so I thought. Turns out the picture matching function can be more of a pain than a blessing, at least after it helps you get the general shape and proportions of the building down. Trying to model in 3d on a 2d screen is hard enough; when your ability to rotate is taken away, that becomes so, so much harder. Since the picture you use for your model is 2d, and only accurate from one perspective, rotating away even the slightest bit makes the picture vanish. This makes sense, of course, but it makes it extremely hard to see where exactly your lines are going. At one point, I drew a line from a corner of siding to what I thought was the tip of the roof, only to find, after rotating to a new position to admire my handiwork, that the line I drew was actually going towards the screen instead of away from it. My solution to this problem was to guess on angles and exact locations when drawing most of the roof, and compare that to the picture every once in a while.

3d from 2d

The fact that I was modeling from a picture of a building that no longer exists made me realize how much information is simply… lost. All the pictures I’ve been able to find of Dean Lodge only cover two or three sides of it, combined–the back of the house, aside from hints of a balcony, remains a mystery to all but those who lived in it. Due to the few angles there are of the house, also, I’ve been forced to make assumptions and alter some of the house’s dimensions in order to make sure that others stay true. This has little impact on our project of recreating a past version of Carleton’s campus (after all, who will know?) but it’s less than ideal.

DeanLodge

My model of Dean Lodge so far

Making this model of Dean Lodge has taught me a lot about SketchUp, most notably how useful the arrow keys can be to lock a line to one axis, especially when picture matching. Although it is fun, I don’t feel as though creating this is in any way important when it comes to showing and teaching people about Carleton’s past. The same can be said for nearly any single part of a digital humanities project, though. On its own, this model is only a cool toy to play with; when put into context with all of the other buildings on Carleton’s campus, however, an interactive world is made. Just as looking at a single data point might show you something you didn’t know before, without all the other accompanying data points, the full story is lost.

pallavkumar

3 Comments

  1. It’s looking really good so far, Pallav, despite your frustrations. I would suggest you project the photos onto the model as the next step. Then you can orbit and pan around and the image will stay plastered to the side of the building. Much easier!

  2. Nice post! I really appreciated your hints of humor.

    One thing you said particularity caught my attention: “The fact that I was modeling from a picture of a building that no longer exists made me realize how much information is simply… lost”
    I think it’s pretty fascinating that we’re able to create something that no longer exists.

    Another thing is that when you said: “Although it is fun, I don’t feel as though creating this is in any way important when it comes to showing and teaching people about Carleton’s past”

    Do you mean that this alone does not contribute to Carleton’s past? If not, I would think that although this particularity does not give a complete history of Carleton’s Past, without this building, Carleton’s past can not be complete. I understand that this is a one single data but it’s not just any single data. If one data or information is missing, we’re not completely portraying the history because there will be pieces missing. I think every piece of data is just as important as the final project.

    It’s just like what Maya Angelou said **(I’m taking her quote completely out of context)** about every single thread being equally important in creating a tapestry. If a single thread is displace or missing, the whole tapestry messes up. In this case, individual data and building is the thread and the tapestry is the final Carleton project.

    • Yeah, that’s exactly what I was getting at when I was talking about the contribution to the scholarship. Although I know that this building was an important part of Carleton’s past, it’s really hard to feel like I’m telling an important part of the story by making this model because of how little information I have about the building; right now, all I know is that it housed women, who made a homecoming float in 1926, and it burned down! It definitely is important to our final project though (Pretty apt analogy also! Don’t worry, I won’t tell her).

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