Virtual Reality and Digital Storytelling with Dr. Courtney Luckhardt
This Spring 2023, I am teaching Humanities 402/502, the Digital Humanities Practicum, focused this semester on "Digital Narratives and Virtual Reality Worlds." In the first half of the class, we explored digital forms of humanistic and historical research, synthesis, and creation, exploring and mastering digital narratives and storytelling tools, as well as being introduced to data-driven tools, including data visualizations and documentary editing.
In the second half of the course, we are focusing on the professor’s research project, in this case my own project, which is part of the NEH Immersive Global Middle Ages Project . The Middle Ages were not only a Western European and Christian experience, but one that was global, interconnected, culturally diverse, and with many centers of cultural and political authority. Emperor Charlemagne’s most famous military involvement in Spain was a failed attempt to take on the Muslim caliphs of al-Andalus at the Battle of Roncesvalles (ca. 778), a battle which saw the deaths of the entire rear guard of the emperor’s army, immortalized in the famous poem, the Song of Roland, written much later during the 11th century. Students will explore the complex cultural history of the region that encompasses what is now southern France (medieval Septimania) and northern Spain (medieval Catalonia), particularly the way that local inhabitants interacted with new migrants who settled there. Studying a cultural history of contact, migration, and assimilation will demonstrate the global connections of these regions in the period.
VR and other immersive reality technologies can help scholars ask and answer new questions about materiality, place, and space. VR can reconstruct vanished places from archaeological evidence, as well as using allowing us to think about the way medieval people themselves thought about space. Combining VR technology with medieval ideas about space will allow us to make arguments about medieval mentalities and mindsets.
Courtney Luckhardt is an associate professor of history in the School of Humanities at USM. She received her Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on the religious and cultural history of the early Middle Ages (ca. 400 – 1000 AD), seeking to understand ideas about power, holiness, identity, and mobility during the transformation of the Roman world in the global Middle Ages. Her first book, The Charisma of Distant Places: Travel and Religion in the Early Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 2019), explored migration through an examination of religious movement. Her current project focuses on the complex cultural history of the region that encompasses what is now southern France (medieval Septimania) and northern Spain (medieval Catalonia) using Digital Humanities tools, from social network analysis to virtual and immersive reality. She is a current fellow of the NEH-funded Immersive Global Middle Ages Project.
Students in Hum 402/502 are addressing fundamental questions about why and how virtual worlds, digital storytelling, and Internet-accessible historical data change our perceptions of the past. Through their individual and team efforts, students investigate, synthesize, and generate digital history projects in the form of virtual and immersive reality, GIS mapping, digital storytelling, and website design. As a group "design team", they are creating a geographically accurate, 3D cityscapes of the medieval monastery of Aniane in southern France. They do this by using digital-layering of qualitative and quantitative data gathered from primary sources (medieval documents), maps and plans (Google Earth/ LIDAR scans), and secondary studies (monographs, journal articles). The students themselves will receive credit for this work as "co-authors" of the digital design of Aniane on the GIS StoryMap, which will disseminate the final product of both 3D model and contextual historical information. The students’ final product will demonstrate a proof-of-concept for the submission of an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant proposal to be completed by the instructor/ PI in Fall 2023.
VR can increase the accessibility of both places (and times) very distant from our own. By using immersive reality technology in research and in the classroom, the course shows the importance of skills-based learning in history and the humanities. Many of the students in it are working towards the completion of their Digital Humanities Proficiency Badge, documenting their mastery of fundamental DH skills and their scholarly contribution to a major faculty research project.
