3D floor plan of a double-pen slave cabin
This week I had the chance to puzzle through my first big project. I decided to task myself with building a “3D Floor plan” of the double-pen slave cabin. It was my first time making…
Grinnell College Immersive Experiences Lab (GCIEL)
This week I had the chance to puzzle through my first big project. I decided to task myself with building a “3D Floor plan” of the double-pen slave cabin. It was my first time making…
There are a lot of components that go into developing a VR experience in Unity. A VR project uses most of the same elements as a 3D project, which are already work intensive, with the…
When the Uncle Sam Plantation project team headed to Baton Rouge and the Louisiana River Road plantations to do site-based research, the last thing we expected to contend with was severe winter weather. I viewed…
Continue Reading Understanding agricultural history through site-based research
I feel so lucky to have been given the opportunity to travel to Louisiana over winter break. This was my first time in the state, and we saw and did so much. I learned a…
Continue Reading Depicting the past and challenging identities
During our research trip to Louisiana, I was struck by the differences in narratives we heard at our tours to various sugar plantations. One tour was from the perspective of slaves. A different tour centered…
Continue Reading Constructing history and interdisciplinary work
Much like the first half of the semester, the second half of the semester did not go as I planned. I had intended to focus on building a tutorial space, with a particular focus on…
Continue Reading End of semester retrospective: Using Unity for digital humanities projects
After carefully thinking about what we would like to do with the Uncle Sam Plantation simulation, the types of open educational resources that we would like to develop, and the manner in which these resources…
After looking through our secondary and primary sources, our team has decided to create a virtual reality experience of sugar production on the Uncle Sam Plantation, possibly during the 1860s or 1870s. I began research…
The Uncle Sam plantation project is beginning to gear up and, with the return of Sam Nakahira from archival research in the Louisiana State University special collections, we are presented with a mountain of archival…
Continue Reading Defining instructional goals in virtual reality
Last week, I travelled to Louisiana State University from Grinnell to study the Uncle Sam Plantation Papers from their special collections library. It was first time in Louisiana and I was not expecting the humid…