The Immersive Global Middle Ages
Description
This book demonstrates how virtual reality (VR) can be used to bring our modern, embodied selves to other places and times, real and imagined, in the Global Middle Ages, approximately 500-1500 CE. The culmination of a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded program, this volume argues that collaboration, in both theory and praxis, is key to how we research and study the global digital past.
Crucial to this study of the medieval globe is the "digital turn" in scholarship and application of digital humanities. These approaches implement immersive experiences, which are digitally constructed virtual reality worlds where a user can explore, evaluate, and contemplate the nature of life in places and times across the medieval world. Moreover, this book's contributors discuss the ways in which we can both create narratives and make arguments in a non-textual medium, which are nonetheless grounded in evidence from texts, from material culture, and from geography and environmental data.
Reviews / Votes
"
The Immersive Global Middle Ages
offers a bold vision for medieval studies in the digital age. Grounded in rigorous scholarship and shaped by remarkable collaborative energy, the collection shows how immersive technologies can illuminate the diversity, complexity, and connectedness of the medieval world. These essays do more than reconstruct past spaces; they open new avenues for interpretation, teaching, and engagement. This volume will be essential reading for scholars interested in the Middle Ages and digital methods." (Lynn Ramey, Professor, French and Cinema and Media Arts, Vanderbilt University, USA)
"This volume is an innovative contribution to the practice and conceptualization of the Global Middle Ages. Focused on sites, objects and texts from a wide variety of world regions, the individual chapters show how immersive technologies can be harnessed for teaching, original research and public outreach purposes. This collaborative venture demonstrates that a serious commitment to the digital can illuminate and deepen our understanding of the astonishing richness and complexity of the medieval world." (Catherine Holmes, Professor of Medieval History, University College, University of Oxford, UK)
More details
Persons
Courtney Luckhardt is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi, USA.
Edward L. Holt holds the Benjamin A. Quarles Endowed Professorship at Grambling State University, USA.
Content
Ch 1: Imagining Immersive Environments: Medieval Spaces and Digital Twins.- Ch 2: Virtual Immersion: Bringing Classical Chinese Poetry into the Classroom.- Ch 3: Reconstructing and Repositioning Byzantine Architecture: Empress Juliana's Matronage in the Church of St. Polyeuktos, Constantinople.- Ch 4: Employing a 3D Model of The House of Wisdom to Create Student Learning Experiences.- Ch 5: Recreating Lost Early Medieval Spaces in Virtual Reality.- Ch 6: Visualizing literary analysis in the Global North Atlantic: The case of Arthuriana.- Ch 7: Digital Resurrections via VR Modeling: Medieval Pilgrimage Sites in Virtual Reality.- Ch 8: Digitizing Cordoba: Virtually Reconstructing Sites of Medieval Encounter.- Ch 9: Reconstructing the Synagogue of Plasencia: Western Iberian Jewish Vernacular Architecture and the Possibilities of Digital Humanities.- Ch 10: Imagining a Fifteenth-Century Temne Village through 3D Virtual Simulation.- Ch 11: Mogadishu's (Neo)Medieval Heritage across Physical and Digital Realms.- Ch 12: Medieval New York: Immersion, Situated Learning, and the Global Middle Ages.