News and Updates

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

So now that we’ve gotten through two presentations, it’s time for some screenshots. The team presented at the Association for the Computers and the Humanities last week. Today we gave a presentation for folks at Northeastern. I am biased, but I think the students on the team are doing an incredible job navigating issues related to research and the technology, as well as presenting their experiences in clear and compelling ways. For the latter presentation, I turned VR on for a build-in-progress, and we pushed the Oculus view to Microsoft Teams. Trying to get VR headsets to play nice with various remote/pandemic contingencies has a particularly tricky part of this project. We’ve been building the project since March (including training!) and I think this aspect has slowed us down a little. I nonetheless think we’ve gotten a lot done despite the circumstances.

Anyway, it’s always weird showing a historical 3D reconstruction in progress, because the decisions we make today might not be the decisions we make tomorrow. We conducted an initial survey of source material at the beginning of the project, but it’s almost impossible to anticipate all the little details up front — sometimes we realize we have to go back to the archives when we’re building a texture or trying to figure out what is typical or appropriate at 8 Belknap Street.

For example, none of us are satisfied with the wallpaper in this render despite extensive wallpaper research. We know that David Walker was renting a house erected in the mid 1820s, and we all think that wallpaper was probably up in the parlor, if up at all, and would probably date to that time period. We’ve been scouring digitized databases for examples and some archivists and librarians have been sending us samples of books bound in wallpaper to understand the range of what was available. So the students are still thinking about what this should look like — but what to do in the meantime? Not assigning wallpaper to the walls is also an interpretive choice. I think we opted for period-inspired paper as a placeholder to communicate that wallpaper should go here. This is why we think it’s so important to make our decisions public-facing. We’ll have some student-written blogs up soon that explain choices specific to certain objects. By the time the project is ready for public consumption, we hope to have a permanent feature on the site that links individual objects to the sources that underpinned their creation.

Anyway, we have several more rooms to populate with objects that need to be revised in small ways. There are wonky reflection probes that are driving me bonkers even after spending hours trying to sort them out for these presentations. But most importantly we have to work through what sets of objects and spaces are going to tell the most meaningful stories about David Walker within the 8 Belknap Street build. This curatorial work is crucial for making this more than just a lovely model of a nineteenth-century home.

We’ve been busy working on the project these last few weeks — mostly with an eye to presenting at the Association for the Computers and the Humanities Conference, which will be held virtually, July 21-23. The conference program looks very exciting, and we encourage you to check out our panel presentation, hear about progress to date, and to meet our student team members.

For more information about how to register and access the program, please head over to https://ach2021.ach.org/.