JCL Note: Victoria was hired to work on the project in the Spring ’23 semester — we’re very excited that she’s part of the team! We asked her to tell you all a little bit about herself.
My name is Victoria Dey and I am a second year Ph.D. student in the Northeastern University World History program. I specialize in Black France and comparative experiences of racial consciousness in the Black Diaspora. Although my research typically has a global lens, I am working on a certificate in Public History which has involved work with local Boston historical projects.
My coursework and research assistant positions have been centered around communities of color and digital archiving. In the Spring of 2022, I took a course called Documenting Field Narratives, where I recorded the oral history of a Black artist in Boston and completed a digital archive project of his works on Omeka S. In the Fall of 2022, I took a course called Topics in Public History, where students were tasked with re-evaluating the inclusivity of walking tours for The West End Museum in Boston. I was responsible for finding new ways to include underrepresented groups such as African Americans and women within the tour which I accomplished through visuals, thematic grouping, and the use of StoryMapsJS.
Since the summer of 2022, I have also served as a research assistant for the Reckonings Project, a local history platform for the community archivist. Its goal is to co-create physical and digital archives in partnership with underrepresented communities, to deinstitutionalize archiving practices by working with groups like Black Artists of Boston and the Haitian Women’s Association. The digital component of these projects proved to be very effective in the accessibility, distribution, and preservation of these community stories. I used platforms such as Omeka S, an open-publishing platform for digital collections, Northeastern’s Digital Repository Service which provides faculty and staff to securely store and share administrative and faculty materials and StoryMaps. In my new role as head research manager for the 3D Black Boston project, I hope to bring to life the narrative of David Walker in the years leading up to the writing of The Appeal as we reimagine what the objects in his home can tell us about his life.
L to R: Kesia Davies, Ananya Dhandapani, Victoria Dey, and Liam MacLean.
At the end of the year, I like to take students to dinner. We also pay students to work on this project — and that involves time they may need to learn technologies and skills related to the digital humanities and history. But I think hard work and milestones both deserve celebration. Several members of the current project team are graduating and moving on; Victoria Dey joined us this year. There was a lot to fête. College and graduate school is a journey and I like to remind students that I appreciate them.
So (yet again), we are not a food blog, but this was a very delicious way of celebrating our labor. And no, we did not sit on the cheese.
Over the past month, I’ve been developing the project UI/UX (navigation, captions) within Unity’s XR system. My final goal is to create controls that allow the user to move around the house, traverse between floors and gather information about different objects. To enable locomotion, the navigable portions of the floors are made into teleportation areas that allow for free movement throughout the scene. Free movement is more immersive than a teleportation anchor system consisting of fixed points. For computational efficiency, we want to have each floor of the house be contained in a different “scene” in Unity, with users interacting with the staircase (for example) as a way of moving between spaces. For object interactions, I want users to be able to hover over an object to see if it is interactive, displaying an icon in front of it, along with maybe a sound effect. Once an object is selected, curatorial captions will appear as if someone is “typing” across the screen. If the object is selected once the captions have triggered, the text disappears. Any subsequent time the same caption is activated, the user will not have to wait for the text to type, and will instead see the description in full. In a test scene, I have been able to get the teleportation area and hover icon working.
Screenshot of the test scene showing the placeholder icon appearing on hover.
I’ve also gotten the text to appear letter by letter on the screen when objects are selected, but the user has to hold the button down for the duration of the display.
Screenshot of info text displaying.
In the next few weeks I will improve the design of these UX elements by using better graphics and typefaces. I also plan to add a teleportation reticle and the aforementioned sound effects. I hope to find a way to have the information text be triggered on selection and then disappear on the next selection which is a more intuitive progression.
Through this process, I’ve had to write a few scripts which have been a challenge as someone with minimal coding experience. As I refine the UX more, I want to learn to create more complex scripts to achieve the best end result.
I wanted to give a quick update on the status of the 3D Black Boston project. Things have been moving slowly during the summer, but we aim to have the majority if not all of the objects modeled for David Walker’s home at 8 Belknap Street completed by the end of August. Right now I’m working on a some smaller models that will fill out the rowhouse so it feels more like a lived-in space. These include like a kettle, and furniture items such as a small bed for short-term boarders in the house.
As I’m working on making models, Liam, our project manager, is assembling a house space with objects created by the team in Unity. The resulting resulting environment will be able to be explored through both a computer screen and virtual reality headset.
Screenshot of the dining room build in progress from the 8 Belknap Model.
[Dr. Linker’s note: The students, led by Project Manager Liam MacLean, have been working admirably on the project through various contingencies posed by life and coronavirus in the spring and summer.A build may be ready for local demonstration in the near future, pending a historical and technical review of the space. Meanwhile, research continues. We’re sorry to have gone so long without any kind of substantive update, but mostly we’ve been modeling and adjusting to contingencies.]
By: Jenia Browne, Kesia Davies, Ananya Dhandapani, Jessica Luo, and Kira Torrieri
In late July, the 3D Black Boston team had the opportunity to present our progress thus far at the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) 2021 Virtual Conference. As the undergraduate members of the team, many of us had not presented at a professional conference before, and certainly not in a virtual setting. The process taught us what putting a professional research presentation together involves, exposed us to similar projects, and allowed us to reflect on and present our work. It was a great way to bring the past four to five months of research together.
We mainly presented on the research process to find the objects we were going to model and find clues about Walker’s life and home. We also walked through the modeling process for some of these objects, from the initial SketchUp models to the final textured and post-processed ones in the VR demo. Our presentation included how we found sample objects and the difficulties we had modeling furniture using online sources (like images, illustrations, and videos). Since surviving records about Walker told us relatively little about Walker’s home and everyday life, we had to make design decisions about the type of furniture he had in his home. Although we used the probate record to determine the general objects inside the residence, it was up to us to find examples of objects that were accurate to his time period as well as to his status in society.
For example, Kesia’s slides focused on the decisions she took in respect to texturing an object, deciding the style of a chair, or even the type of object. Objects like sewing boxes, chairs, writing desks were important parts of Walker’s life. Objects represent plenty of information regarding a person’s life; for instance, a sewing box shows someone is skilled in the craft of clothing repair and needs their materials to be in a single container so transporting them is easier. That is why such a big focus was put on the choice of objects, textures, styles, and positioning in Walker’s home. She also described the collaborative effort that was required for one of the final empire chairs.
We also took time to elaborate on the actual modeling process and how that was challenging since many of us did not have prior 3D modeling experience. In many instances, our furniture references were not photographed from all angles, so it was hard to tell how all their features looked in real life. One of the problems we faced while trying to do this work during the pandemic was that we couldn’t examine objects in person. Photographs and videos are sometimes difficult to interpret when modeling 3D objects. Talking about the challenges we had with 3D modeling was helpful in communicating our process and progress on the project so far; we felt this was important to share with the audience because it allowed us to show how our research and technical skills were combined into an interdisciplinary project.
Being able to reflect on the work we accomplished was one of the most rewarding parts of ACH. As an undergraduate team, we all came in with different perspectives and levels of experience with research and modeling. All of us had times when we felt a bit stuck, and sometimes the learning curve was more extreme than we anticipated. Putting together the presentation for ACH was a great way to accumulate all of our work, and even gain insight into each other’s experiences. Since we’re a remote team working everywhere from Texas to Massachusetts to Florida, we don’t get to interact as much as we may have outside of the pandemic’s limitations. Because of this, the presentation was a learning experience for us too, and a chance to appreciate each other’s contributions. We achieved a lot over the past five months, both in terms of personal growth and putting together Walker’s space. As undergraduate students, we don’t always get the chance to present our own work. Being acknowledged by a professional research community, receiving questions and comments on our work, and looking back on our work revealed how much we progressed throughout our research.
The Q&A session was interesting because it offered a chance for us to consider aspects of the project that hadn’t been at the forefront of our minds. It also gave us an idea of what people with no relation to the project made of our work. The audience’s questions were very stimulating and struck a lot of self-reflection on the project’s development and future. We learned a lot about other team members when they expressed themselves in response to very interesting questions. Some answers were very inspiring and insightful. The Q&A section can help us figure out which parts of it were communicated clearly and which could be expanded upon in the future. As it was our first conference we felt like we learned a lot from the Q&A experience and are all excited to present more on this project in the future.
Overall, ACH was an illuminating experience, and we’re all extremely grateful that we got to participate. We’re also very grateful for the mentoring and support we received throughout the project from Professor Linker, Professor Nieves, and Liam. Without their assistance, and our collaborations with each other, the project would not have developed this fast and the process would be far less enjoyable than it has been. Learning has always been prioritized in the project, which gave us all the space we needed to grow independently and make mistakes freely. Being able to share that experience with others was an incredible end to the summer!
For the past few months, I’ve been working on the 3D Black Boston project team researching David Walker’s life and home with the end goal of creating an immersive 3D reconstruction of his residence on 8 Belknap Street. The project requires a combination of research and reconstruction techniques that, for the most part, were new to me. My background as an architecture student gave me prerequisite knowledge regarding how to construct a building digitally but I’d never done research for a historic preservation project. Additionally, the immersive VR aspects of the project means I’ve had to learn new software including Unity in order to render SketchUp models and eventually create the simulation.
The research methods we used were novel to me as well. The research material we were searching (sources that provided information about Walker and his residence) were especially difficult to find because the project is centered around a Black male abolitionist in the 1800s. Writings and records from that time, such as census data and newspapers, are heavily biased towards white perspectives; thus, finding accurate information on David Walker’s life and home has proven difficult. There are inconsistencies regarding things such as the time and place of Walker’s birth, as well as when exactly he arrived at Boston. We’ve had to fill in the gaps of Walker’s life to try to create a narrative that is as coherent as possible for the purposes of this project; for example, looking at sources such as his famous appeal and the Freedom’s Journal newspaper which he worked on for a short time. We’ve encountered similar difficulties with his residence on Beacon Hill. Documents from the NPS cite tax records that approximate the date the house was built and surviving 1800’s buildings on Beacon Hill can give an insight into the architectural styles and layout of Walker residence. However, since the residence was rebuilt, it is challenging to make decisions in model reconstruction with any degree of certainty. Photographs or floorplans of Belknap Street in general are all but nonexistent before the home was rebuilt in the early 1900s.
Newspapers and illustrations as well as objects in various archives helped identify what kinds of models we needed to make, and I will admit I was initially surprised by the amount of detailed research each object required. Trying to recreate a simple object such as a pen means that I am required to know how pens were made and how far pen technology had advanced by 1820, as well as how expensive the different types of pens were and what materials would serve afterwards as examples for texturing in Unity. Finding references for these models in various archives has also been extremely helpful, but due to COVID, we’ve been unable to visit archives in person and are restricted to what has been recorded digitally. I’ve modeled and textured a variety of objects including several of Walker’s appeals with different forms of pamphlet stitching and several writing tools which would be necessary given one of Walker’s occupations as an author.
Textured lap desk model by Ananya Dhandapani19th Century folding lap desk reference from https://www.pamono.com/19th-century-burl-campaign-lap-desk
Digital reconstruction as a way to explore history interests me on multiple levels. Architecture, in a sense, is a cultural record; the buildings people make and how they used them are intrinsically tied to a time and place in history. So, by researching Walker’s residence in detail and attempting to recreate it, we can gain valuable insight into his life and the culture of the time. Working on this project recontextualized my understanding of historical research; without substantial information about Walker himself and what belongings he might have owned made the process more concrete and approachable. This method continues to open up new avenues of research that I wouldn’t have considered had we just been looking at David Walker outside of his home, and I think it will ultimately lead to a more holistic understanding of the historic figure.
I’m also excited about using the reconstructed product in a virtual reality environment that people can explore. Not only will it take advantage of new technologies and hopefully lead to more projects of its kind being completed, it will also make this repository of detailed information about David Walker more accessible to people outside strictly academic circles. It will present information that would take up several pages in a densely written paper as a visual, interactive experience, making it easier for people to learn about historic communities such as Beacon Hill.
I admit I knew nothing of Boston, let alone its history, when I began this project. As a team, we were required to try to conceptualize and research how the interior of David Walker’s house looked. An African American abolitionist, David Walker lived on the Northern Slope of Beacon Hill in the 1820s, and is best known for writing his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. In his influential Appeal, he addresses American hypocrisies in the context of freedom and Christianity. I have learned a large amount about Boston’s history throughout this project, finding it especially interesting to learn as I attempt to employ the perspectives used by David Walker himself.
Image showing the first chair I created on SketchUp alongside an image a revised model inspired by a Windsor-styled chair.
The challenging research process has also been a conducive one. Information is hard to come across regarding the dwellings that were present in 1820s Boston, specifically on Belknap Street or the Northern Slope of Beacon Hill. In addition, with respect to the life of David Walker from birth to death, some inconsistencies were found on the internet. Through research and team discussions we were able to form an understanding of Walker’s work and part of his home life in Boston. We know he worked as a clothes dealer based on advertisements and records of the time, and that he most likely wrote some of his Appeal pamphlets at home. We also know that he was a kind man who offered help and shelter to many African American fugitives and slaves. Significantly, some two hundred years later, we do not know what the inside of his home looked like. It goes without saying that one’s dwelling can say a lot about you, and may reveal both obvious and subtle traits about your character. An attempt to virtually reconstruct the interior of this very influential person’s home will bring greater awareness of the history of African Americans in Boston. Thus, the research process was more an investigation into who David Walker was, and how connecting dots about his surroundings could help us form a visual understanding of his and his family’s home on Belknap Street (now Joy Street).
Image showing my reference picture for an Empire-style chair and a SketchUp tab showing some process on modeling the back support.
Thanks to the tutorials given by Professor Linker and Liam, learning to model in SketchUp revealed new perspectives in considering the art and design of furniture/objects. I was surprised at how much more demanding digitally constructing a rather simple-looking chair was. It forced me to decompose and recompose elements of the chair, giving me a newfound appreciation for furniture makers. I modeled two Empire-styled chairs (which was in fashion in Boston at the time Walker was living there), a pitcher with the help of a teammate, and a Windsor chair. Some challenging aspects of digitally modeling objects in SketchUp proved to teach me more rather than take away from the experience. The online SketchUp glitches often, while at other times my brain is the one glitching where I find myself overcomplicating simple design. I’ve learned to look at my reference more often, drawing it out in a simplified manner to helped me uncomplicate a seemingly complicated object.
Here is an image of the two Empire-style chairs I modeled in SketchUp.
Digitally modeling antique objects, such as Empire-style chairs has caused me to first, research the chair style, the time period when it was most popular, materials used in making the chair, who made it, who owned it, and more. Although some of the information used when digitally modeling the chair – especially when the information is more specific and arcane and more than likely cannot be found – helps create a spatial sense of the chair’s home and use, the research and digital modeling assists in forming a well-rounded image of the time period. Retracing the history of a chair, or type of furniture style, then breaking it down to digitally remodel it unlocks interesting things one may have missed when researching earlier. For instance, what is the curvature of the wood? Or what is the placement of the chair? Is it placed in the living room? Bedroom? Kitchen? This chair has a cushion, and so I wonder if the cushion pattern matched other aspects of the room such as the curtains or wallpaper? All these questions about a specific chair may not be found necessarily on the internet, but they still help generate a spatial concept of where the chair lived in my mind.
Here is a version of a pitcher that I made in SketchUp with the help of a team member.
Another surprising aspect of the project was learning about Unity, how powerful of a tool it is for creating virtual spaces. Thanks to the previous team’s work, I learned the tool of color mapping an object before bringing it into Unity to be textured and playing with different finishes to make the object look more realistic was very entertaining. I look forward to learning more about the program and bringing my rather flat-looking furniture to life in Unity.
A close-up of a chair as I was applying wood textures to it.
So far, this project has been both very interesting and very challenging. I didn’t know anything about 3D modeling going into it, and I only had a basic understanding of David Walker and Boston’s abolitionist history. Prior to beginning this project, I had been working with the National Park Service in Boston on a digital project for the African Meeting House, so I did have a general background on the Boston abolitionist movement, but I was still missing a lot of information. Thus, this project began with a lot of research. I learned about David Walker’s life and legacy, about his home on Beacon Hill, and about his used clothing shop. Mostly, though, I learned that there is so much that we don’t know and so much information missing.
As frustrating as it was, I found it exciting to have to think creatively about new resources to investigate and to try to puzzle together Walker’s life. Before this, I hadn’t thought much about how a person’s gender, race, and social class could impact how well (or if at all) their life events were recorded. Looking back, it makes a lot of sense, but when I began my work I was surprised to find this.
Later in the project, I began trying to help research Walker’s house: the history of the property, the floorplan, and what the views out of his windows might have been. This was especially challenging because, in addition to the fact that government sources did not always record the possessions and movements of Black people at this time, the land around Belknap Street (now Joy Street) had undergone many property rearrangements and many street name changes. Some of the most exciting resources I found came from this search. For me, finding and looking through the Taking Books (essentially old tax records listing names and possessions, but not always addresses) from the late 1700s and early 1800s was really fascinating. At some point, I started recognizing names of people in different tax books and started to piece some stories together. That was especially rewarding and I felt like I was finally beginning to get a grasp on the information.
Kira Torrieri, Drawing of Beacon Hill Streets Past & Present
In addition to research, I also spent a lot of my time working on 3D modeling. The first thing we learned how to model in Google SketchUp was a simple chair. I had used Google SketchUp as a child, but not at all since then, so it was both exciting and difficult to dive back in after so long. After making some practice models and trying to figure out the different tools at my disposal, I began my first real SketchUp model: a hearth. I had decided I wanted to learn about kitchens and model items that might have been in Walker’s kitchen, so this seemed a good place to start. I had found an interesting resource called The House Servant’s Directory by Robert Roberts, which details recipes, etiquette procedures, and cleaning tips for the maintenance of large households. Combining information from this book with my other kitchen research, I also modeled a cooking pot and fireplace tools. The cooking pot was really challenging for me because of all of the different curves and I went through several drafts of it before I was satisfied, but when it was completed I felt very accomplished.
Kira Torrieri, Cooking Pot Model Progress in Google SketchUp
Once models had been created in SketchUp, the next step was to import them into Unity and add them to our full model of Walker’s house. I admittedly have not done as much work in Unity thus far, although learning about texturing and lighting and seeing how much more realistic it can make our models look is very intriguing!
I had already been excited about the possibilities of combining technology and history because of my work with the National Park Service, and this project really emphasized the potential of this type of collaboration. Technology gives us another way to interact with historical information.
It has the potential to be more immersive, more expansive, and more accessible than other sources of information such as reading a scholarly paper or visiting a historic site in person. Engaging with an interactive and historically accurate model is the next best thing to an actual visit to the historical site – something ideal but often not possible. Technology can also contain more information simply because it lacks the physical constraints of a real space and can, unlike a book, directly link to other resources for further learning. Furthermore, technology can enable people who may not be able to digest dense scholarly writing or may not have the means to travel to a historic site to engage with the information and hopefully connect to it. 3D modeling is especially powerful because of its immersiveness. In my opinion, the thing that makes using technologies such as 3D modeling in historical scholarship so powerful is the ability to help a wider audience connect more intimately with historical material. I have personally felt more connected to Walker’s life after trying to physically reconstruct his home, and I hope that this project will help others engage with Walker in a more personal way.
For this past semester, I have been working on a research project with a team of students and professors to reconstruct David Walker’s home on Belknap Street in Boston using 3D modeling software. The process has involved an investigative research process into the life of David Walker since there are not many records of his life or home. As a computer science student, I had little experience with 3D modeling or historical research processes coming into this endeavor, but the team and the project have allowed me to learn a lot about the abolitionist community in Boston, as well as the 3D modeling and historical research processes.
One of my main struggles coming into this project was the challenging research process. I assumed that we would be able to find a great deal of information about David Walker. In reality, not very much is known about him; we know that he published a passionate appeal that caused him to top the most wanted list in many Southern states, and that he later moved to Boston, where he lived on Belknap Street and ran a used clothing store with his wife, Eliza Butler. The process of finding information about his life and home involved digging through maps, newspapers (he wrote for the abolitionist newspaper, Freedom’s Journal), census records, letters, billheads, and more. Often, the information in these records was not much use in putting together Walker’s life. This might be partially attributed to the fact that he was a Black man living in Boston in the 19th century, and records about Black people were not as well collected or maintained at the time (see: the census), and also because he was in Boston for such a short time leading up to his death. I found that researching Walker directly might not yield too much information in terms of our goals in furniture or household modeling, so I focused instead on researching the maps of the street, the style of buildings in Boston at the time, as well as the household items Black families might have bought and other items Walker may have possessed based on his profession (used clothing retailer, writer).
In order to piece together the items that might have been found in his home, I organized a spreadsheet of furniture advertisements and billheads that I found in databases and newspapers in Boston around the 1820s. After organizing these ads and billheads, I found photos of the furniture to use as a basis for my own 3D models. Some of the ads had illustrations of the items for sale which helped in getting a general idea of the style of the pieces, but not much more. One of my peers on this project showed us the Boston furniture archive, organized by Winterthur, which was helpful with bigger furniture items such as tables and chairs. But, as noted by a professor, this archive might only contain photos of higher-priced, better-conserved furniture owned by white families. For other references, I browsed auction sites for Federal-style furniture from Boston in the early 1800s. I also watched videos on auction retailers’ YouTube channels to get a better understanding of the moving parts of the furniture. I modeled two tables: one tilt-top table and one card table. Both tables were challenging in that they had moveable parts. To understand how the card table unfolded, I browsed through a few woodworking manuals but didn’t find much confirmation. Instead, I opted to look at auction videos and photos and created a model that I felt was close enough to how the card table should unfold.
Although I haven’t mentioned it yet, the 3D modeling process was something completely new to me, and probably took up more time than the research into Walker’s life. Many of the processes in 3D modeling involved self-learning and research through YouTube tutorials. I found it helpful to talk to my project peers to understand how to render some parts of my models. I worked together with Kesia, my teammate, to create a washing pitcher after we both attempted to model one without much success. Kesia also helped me figure out the tapered design of the legs on the card table. I would say my peers are the most useful tool in this project: we all came into the project with different skill sets, so working together to complete interdisciplinary challenges such as 3D modeling is made considerably easier with their help. To date, I’ve been able to finish models of a card table, a tilt-top table, a washing pitcher and bowl, a stack of firewood, and a storage trunk, and I still have many other furniture items on my list to research and model.
I found that 3D modeling as a methodology was helpful in the research process because there are few physical records to find about David Walker. Instead, by looking at old newspaper ads for furniture and billheads for purchased items, we were able to model through his surroundings and his community rather than through census records or deeds. We investigated him at his shop by looking at laundry materials, older clothing, and fabrics, and then at his work as a writer through our 3D models of pens, quills, paper, and inkpots. Our model of the house isn’t going to have his bed frame in the exact location where it was when he lived on Belknap Street 200 years ago, but I believe putting together this model of the objects that made up his community, his work, and his surroundings is less about complete accuracy and more about experiencing Walker’s work, how he lived, and his purpose in life. I think that through 3D modeling, I was able to get a better sense of how he lived through the items he used every day, rather than if I had only found research through his census records or housing deeds. I was also able to learn a lot about Boston and the abolitionist community in Boston during Walker’s time, through Freedom’s Journal and letters regarding Walker’s Appeal. This project has taught me a lot about the research process, especially regarding alternatives when there aren’t many records available. I’m excited to see where else it leads us.
For the past semester, we’ve been working on recreating the home and surroundings of David Walker, a prominent Black abolitionist based in Boston in the late 1820s. This project initially caught my interest because it was a focused study of Black history in Boston, specifically about a prominent Black historical figure that I wasn’t previously aware of. Furthermore, the 3D aspect of the project wasn’t something I had done and knew nothing about. I have always been interested in how urban landscapes affect history and policy, so I was excited to learn more about 3D modeling and how it can add to our understanding of historical events. As a Black student, I was anxious to know about the Black community around me. Helping to visually represent part of its history was a great place to start. Reading David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, appreciating what an important role it played in Black liberation (amongst his other contributions), and then attempting to get to know Walker himself has been an illuminating process thus far.
What surprised me most about this project was how much historical and archival research differs from most of that done in the social sciences. As a social science student I went in with the expectation that the research work would be easier, or at least different, from what it turned out to be. I had never looked through anything similar to city directories, censuses, tax and land records, or birth and death certificates. At first, it was admittedly frustrating how long it could take to scour through sources like this and usually reach a dead end. It was also harder to find sources; Since I started college in the pandemic, I had never even taken a book out of the library, let alone requested access to digital resources from archives, collections, and libraries across the US. As the project went on, I got better at knowing what to look for in historical documents and how to access what I needed. More importantly, I became more patient! The research aspect of the project is now my favorite, and easily the most rewarding. On a surface level, it feels good to make a breakthrough or find the perfect document, but on a deeper level, it is rewarding to uncover more about David Walker, Eliza Butler, and the Black community of the 1820s. There is so much I didn’t know about this moment in time. Even more surprisingly, a lot about the early 1800s is hard to pin down. Even the most basic details of a figure like David Walker’s life, like his birth date and town, are cloudy. Obviously, Walker’s race contributes to this. For me, it really puts into perspective how record keeping has changed overtime and how difficult it is to understand a person of the past.
An advertisementfor David Walker’s used clothing store, from the Freedom’s Journal issue published on March 28, 1829.
I also realized how much technology can help people understand different periods of time. As the majority of the project focuses on 8 Belknap St. (now 81 Joy St), Walker’s personal home, we’ve had to spend a lot of time considering what Walker may even own. With no pictures or detailed writings about the house, a lot of the information has to come from community members, newspapers, ads, tax/legal records, or other similar sources. While Walker’s writing, city and state records, historical documents, and research papers can help someone understand what Walker contributed to his community and Black liberation, understanding the physical space Walker operated in helps to understand David Walker himself. Not only as an accomplished Black author and passionate abolitionist, but as a father, a husband, a store owner, a newspaper contributor, and person. 3D modeling adds a depth of understanding to historical scholarship that more “traditional” research methods cannot as easily capture. Recreating communities like that of 1820s Beacon Hill allows us to understand what living in these spaces was really like, going beyond what they contributed to history or what patterns can be observed in them. It’s exciting to know that projects like these are becoming more and more common so that historical scholarship can create increasingly human understandings of the past.
That being said, 3D Modeling was another personal learning curve. I have never worked with any sort of 3D technology prior to this project. But once again, I gained an appreciation for the 3D modeling process, both in Unity and Google SketchUp, two of the programs we are using to recreate Walker’s space. I’m not a particularly math or computer-minded person, so this part of the project is still the hardest for me. Because of that, I’m very happy to be learning these skills early on, and in a group setting. Watching how Professor Linker, Liam, and my peers approach 3D spaces and geometry has been invaluable. In most cases, they see patterns that I don’t while creating a 3D object. Over time, this has helped me improve my modeling skills, but also how I visualize 3D objects and spaces. I’m looking forward to modeling more objects on my own, even though I still think it’s a weak spot for me. Practice makes perfect!
The first object I made is a sad iron, pictured below. The object was more difficult than I thought it would be to make. The curvature of the handle was the most difficult part to visualize. I still want to go back and try to smooth the edges of the iron a bit. The scale was also difficult, since I had to make the object at a 10x scale to be able to work at the detail level I needed. Still, it was my first digital project on my own, and I was able to get a pretty close replica to a Sad Iron of the time.
Model of a Sad Iron, by Jenia Browne
I look forward to texturing the model later on to add age and wear. I am now working on a rocking chair, which is a lot more complicated, but I have a better grasp on how geometry and 3D space work and I’m more comfortable experimenting with SketchUp. It took a lot more research to figure out the dimensions of the rocking chair, since it is a complex piece of furniture in real life as well, so it’s taking more time on both ends. That model as of today is pictured below. Other than that, we’ve been working on trying to piece together Eliza Walker’s life, as she’s an important part of Beacon Hill as well.
Unfinished Model of a Windsor Rocking Chair, by Jenia Browne
Over the past semester, I’ve learned a lot more about academic research and how technology and the humanities can intersect. I’m excited to see the rest of the project develop and keep working on research and modeling skills.
