Patricia Cohen’s latest Digital Humanities report includes a link to a Hamilton College “virtual re-creation of the South African township of Soweto during the 1976 student uprisings” (http://www.soweto76archive.org/) as a parenthetical example of “a new array of powerful digital tools and vast online archives” available to the new media classroom. Rather than relegate such projects to the sidelines, I hope that at some point the Times might reflect on where online 3-D recreation and the humanities stands in the second decade of the twenty-first century. During my brief foray into the still developing Soweto project, I was struck by how much more one can do with the technology compared to the American Social History Project’s effort some eleven (!) years ago to digitally imagine Barnum’s Museum in 1865 New York City (The Lost Museum: http://bit.ly/pPh4z)–and, yet, also by how the database has triumphed over contending with narrative as part of the digital humanities project (yes, I know that the exploratory/accumulative nature of the virtual experience is proposed to comprise a user-propelled narrative, but that’s true of shopping, too). Moreover, having spent a little time in Soweto a few years after 1976, I must say that while the exploration succeeds in pulling out significant places and structures–and informative contextual information and linked documents–the wire-frame images, visualization of the surrounding cityscape, and experience of moving through the recreated township space in no way capture what the place looked or felt like back then. This, I believe, is not an inherent shortcoming of the 3-D exploratory form but, rather, a limit set on the priorities of what one wishes to convey to users: and, for me, demarcating historical space as an abstraction, the equivalent of a Second Life avatar’s approximate appearance, fails to capture the pastness of the past that is crucial to users’ understanding of history. I know what I am proposing in some ways is to substitute one approach to illusion with another, which we must always be vigilant about signaling, but since we’re dealing with constructions no matter what we need to embrace what we want particular illusions to convey.

Patricia Cohen’s latest Digital Humanities report includes a link to a Hamilton College “virtual re-creation of the South African township of Soweto during the 1976 student uprisings” (http://www.soweto76archive.org/) as a parenthetical example of “a new array of powerful digital tools and vast online archives” available to the new media classroom. Rather than relegate such projects to the sidelines, I hope that at some point the Times might reflect on where online 3-D recreation and the humanities stands in the second decade of the twenty-first century. During my brief foray into the still developing Soweto project, I was struck by how much more one can do with the technology compared to the American Social History Project’s effort some eleven (!) years ago to digitally imagine Barnum’s Museum in 1865 New York City (The Lost Museum: http://bit.ly/pPh4z)–and, yet, also by how the database has triumphed over contending with narrative as part of the digital humanities project (yes, I know that the exploratory/accumulative nature of the virtual experience is proposed to comprise a user-propelled narrative, but that’s true of shopping, too). Moreover, having spent a little time in Soweto a few years after 1976, I must say that while the exploration succeeds in pulling out significant places and structures–and informative contextual information and linked documents–the wire-frame images, visualization of the surrounding cityscape, and experience of moving through the recreated township space in no way capture what the place looked or felt like back then. This, I believe, is not an inherent shortcoming of the 3-D exploratory form but, rather, a limit set on the priorities of what one wishes to convey to users: and, for me, demarcating historical space as an abstraction, the equivalent of a Second Life avatar’s approximate appearance, fails to capture the pastness of the past that is crucial to users’ understanding of history. I know what I am proposing in some ways is to substitute one approach to illusion with another, which we must always be vigilant about signaling, but since we’re dealing with constructions no matter what we need to embrace what we want particular illusions to convey.