About
This site was created as a collaborative effort by the students of "Hacking the Humanities," IDSC 130, Fall 2015 at Carleton College, taught by Austin Mason.
The aim of the project was to simulate the campus as it would have appeared between 1916 and 1966 by modeling the buildings built during those years in 3D and placing them in their landscape context.
Process
The project involved each student choosing a building and searching the college archives for as much information and historical imagery as they could find.
Omeka
The resources and metadata were first collected on a Google Sheet and then brought into Omeka via the CSV Import plugin. Each student created an exhibit on this site, coolecting the sources for their building.
SketchUp
They then used the photo match or extruded footprint techniques in SketchUp to model the buildings as accurately as possible. The process was frustrating, at times, but ultimately rewarding, as the students blog posts on their progress make clear.
ArcScene to CityEngine
The fruits of their labors were compiled by the professor into a unified 3d CityEngine webscene using primarily ESRI's ArcScene for desktop application.
Results
The results are far from perfect, but do provide some sense of how the built environment of Carleton's campus has changed over the years. The interactive model of campus is still a work in progress, and would be greatly enhance by trees, paths, and other features, as well as by the addition of a time slider or animation that builds the buildings in over time.