Connecting Digital Humanities Data with the Scholarly 3D Toolkit

Abstract

New advances in online game engines have made it possible to easily view 3D virtual environments from any web browser, but the full potential of 3D humanities research has gone unrealized because of the difficulty in connecting important 3D findings to the work of traditional scholars grounded in texts. This presentation will discuss the current development and show demonstrations of the Scholarly 3D Toolkit, (S3DT) a plug-in for the Unity game engine designed to help better interface 3D historical reconstructions with other data. The work of a team lead by James Coltrain, S3DT will provide simple interfaces that allow creators to link their 3D scenes to sources and documents, and to dynamically import and view traditionally indexed digital humanities data from databases, spreadsheets, or GIS programs. The result will allow users to view multiple layers of data plotted within a single online 3D environment, showing markers for events, personal connections, documents, images, and annotations from multiple users, all in time and space. S3TD will allow for greater and more sophisticated interdisciplinary analysis, helping scholars studying three dimensional spaces to contextualize models of architecture, urban structures, and natural topography using texts and other spatial data. By comparing existing digital humanities findings with 3D scenes that show scale, light, and texture, the platform will allow for more complex and nuanced investigations of past spaces. Along with a discussion of the project’s progress and the theoretical questions at play, this presentation will show early demos of a test case for the platform. These will include a richly annotated high quality 3D reconstruction of Fort Stanwix, an 18th-century historic site and National Monument, with an existing database constructed by Nebraska undergraduates of over 400 letters, maps, and plans.