Emily Wight and I are teaming up to create a digital humanities project, “the campus that might have been.” Our goal is to explore abandoned architectural plans from Carleton’s history and recreate them in the context of today’s campus.
Sources: Our plan is to look through the college’s archives for alternative architectural plans and photos to eventually create a 3D model of campus. From there, we intend to search the city of Northfield’s databases for more forgotten architectural plans from Carleton’s history.
Processes: When compiling a dataset, we plan to use Zotero to keep good track of metadata for building plans we might use. Next, we plan to model an alternate version of Carleton’s campus by using SketchUp and photos retrieved from our data sources. From there, we’ll export our models from SketchUp to Unity, where we’ll create an interactive 3D web app that includes our model of Carleton’s alternative campus.
Presentation: Our final product will be an interactive virtual tour of Carleton’s alternate campus. We also plan to include an interactive map with ArcGIS to compare forgotten architectural plans to Carleton’s campus today.
Deliverable timeline:
- A list of buildings to be modeled, along with metadata – February 20th
- modeling selected buildings/ basic game design – March 1st
- Deploy website/ Interactive map- March 9th
Cole and Emily, your plan seems like a good one! I like the idea of the “campus that could have been” and creating an alternate present to explore in 3D. A few notes and suggestions below:
1) Your group and the “Lost to Progress” group seem to be doing similar things. You might want to have a chat to make sure you don’t duplicate effort.
2) It seems that you have a couple of different elements at play here: a map, 3D models, and a potential Unity game. That’s a lot of pieces to bring together. Will the map and game be separately embedded on the website, or will you try to integrate the former into the latter? Have you considered publishing a CityEngine web scene as a possible way to explore in 3D?
3) As for sources, a number of older campus maps have been digitized and rectified by students in this class before. Searching MapWarper for “Carleton College” will bring up a list of possibilities that might help you get set up faster.
4) Using Zotero to track your sources is a great idea. There is a great Zotero plugin for WordPress called ZotPress, which can help you publish those sources more effectively in your final site, if you use WP.
Let me know if you have any further questions or need more help at this stage.