Brainstorming Interactive Exhibits

It has been a while since my last post but since I am now embarking on a new project for my Interactive Exhibit Design Class, it is time to start blogging again. In this class, we have to create an interactive exhibit for which I have a number of ideas. I hope to use the model I built last semester and put it to good use. Here are some pictures of the final result.

Building on my last post and the SketchUp model of Pinhey's Point I made last semester, I would like to make a video game level, such as Left 4 Dead. I mentioned in my last post that I hoped to achieve this during the Christmas break. Unfortunately, that did not happen as I was rendered computerless over the holidays and the process seems to be more trouble than I originally thought. Hopefully, my model is compatible with Valve Hammer Editor (the program used to create custom level maps), but this will require some testing. My goal when making the model originally was to have a digital version of the house that people could explore when the museum is closed or when accessibility is an issue. Making the house into a Left 4 Dead map seems to be the easiest was to make the model fully explorable in first-person view. Shooting zombies is just a bonus and might be an interesting Halloween activity.

My next idea for an interactive exhibit is taking historypin and geocaching and combining them. Geocaching is an activity where participants find caches using a GPS or mobile device to help them navigate. There are geocaches all over the world and it is easy to start hiding and seeking by downloading a geocaching app onto your phone. Historypin is a website that allows users to pin historic photographs to their modern locations. Images are pinned to their Streetview equivalent and a fade filter is used to toggle between modern Streetview and the historic image. They also have an app that allows people to explore the area themselves (although it didn't work for me when I downloaded it) and hold the historic picture up to the actual building.

By combining these two activities, I hope to develop a fun game that visitors to museums, especially historic houses, can do while they visit the museum. The activity would start with a hunt for the exact location the historic picture was taken. It is fairly easy to upload geocaches to the geocache website for others to find. Once the location is found, the cache would include a reproduction of the historic picture or a QR code that could lead them to a website with the historic picture. The cache/website would also contain some interpretive material about the history of the house and metadata about the image.

Unfortunately, this might be difficult to demonstrate at the end of the term since it is an activity that requires space. I would probably have to confine myself to Lawson Hall and may need to use pictures that are less than historical to prove the concept.

Finally, my last interactive exhibit design idea is to incorporate QR codes into the exhibit that the Museology class is developing. These QR codes would lead to supplementary information such as a YouTube video demonstration of how a pill cutter (which we intend to exhibit) was used (see here). It is a simple idea but it will hopefully enhance our exhibit and make it more engaging for viewers.

"A Nice Tasty Cottage" and Zombies

When I started using SketchUp to do my Digital History project, I didn't realize how time-consuming the process would be. Because this museum is very dear to me, I want to do it justice, and because the Pinhey's Point Foundation has provided me with a set of architectural drawings, I am able to be very precise in my measurements.

However, I ran into many difficulties while working in Sketchup as I believe anyone who has used Sketchup has. But you work through them, and with the help of the internet and a little patience and perseverance, you start to feel like you can do anything.

In the end, the model I created of Horaceville sits nicely into its Google Earth environment, but the job is not done! In exchange for the wonderful pictures and architectural plans of the house, the model has been promised to the Pinhey's Point Foundation. I hope they will be able to put it to good use somehow. I think it can be used to entice people into visiting the museum. It would be nice to be able to offer virtual tours of the museum available on the internet, especially since the museum is only open for about 4 months of the year. It might also be used to allow disabled visitors to experience the second floor in some capacity, if not in person.

The model is still under construction though. Here are some cross sections (thanks Nick C. for showing us how to do this!) of the house so far.

One of my goals in making the model was to gain an appreciation of what the house looked and felt like in its prime before it started to fall into ruin. I want to communicate this to museum patrons so that they can get a deeper appreciation for the history of the house, and I would like to make it interactive and engaging for anyone who visits my model.

I am still exploring ways to do this. We could just take pictures or a video tour of the completed model, narrate it, and either integrate it into the Pinhey's Point Foundation website or into the exhibits themselves, but I think we can do more. Interactivity is the way of the future and I want to future-proof my model as much as possible.

I want people to be able to walk through the model virtually and experience what the house might have been like in the past. A virtual living museum of sorts. So what are my options for making my vision into a reality?

Once I have uploaded the model to the SketchUp Warehouse, I will in theory be able to embed it into a website or blog post. Let's give it a try with an existing model in the Warehouse. Here is attempt #1.



This is a model of another museum in Ottawa: the Bytown Museum. Situated next to the Ottawa Locks, this museum interprets the history of the development of Bytown. The building is of about the same age as Horaceville. As you can (hopefully) see, you can zoom in and out of the model and rotate it. Unfortunately, you can't  view the inside of the building and the backdrop is static and boring. I would prefer my model to be geolocated and integrated into its virtual surroundings.

Another way to make a model available to the internet is to get it published in Google Earth, which makes it visible to people who search the address in Google Earth and Google Maps. But once again, you can't really view the inside with this option.

Right now, my best option seems to be LightUp for Sketchup, which allows you to save a number of scenes as .luca files and play them on the LightUp player that can be imbeded into a website. This would allow visitors to explore the model for themselves; unfortunately you still have to move from scene to scene to explore.

The option I am most excited about is that you can use SketchUp models as levels in open source video games, such as Left 4 Dead (learn how here). Although this may not be the best option for the historical visualization project, it is on my list of things to do over Christmas! I look forward to shooting zombies in the virtual 180 year old house.

The Hope of History Gaming

In a very recent post, I was critical of "Computerized History Games: Narrative Options" by Kevin Kee. I found his take on the history video game to be too academic. But there is still hope for history gaming! One big problem that historians often see when looking at a historical game, book, or movie, is the plethora of historical inaccuracies. This is a fact of life. It is, in fact, impossible to create an accurate representation of the past because history itself is an interpretation of biased sources years after the fact by biased historians, and leads to much controversy and debate.

Nevertheless, it is through these media that many of us first fall in love with history. (Let us know how you came to love history! Take the survey on the right!) Furthermore as Nicolas Trépanier points out in his article "The Assassin’s Perspective: Teaching History with Video Games" (Perspectives on history, 2014) these inaccuracies can be harnessed to teach historical method by using the video games and their inaccuracies as a starting point for discussion on sources and historiography. This is exactly what Trépanier does in his seminar on video games at the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at the ­University of Mississippi. He enumerates a number of benefits that result from this kind of teaching including student motivation and engagement with the subject matter, as well as the development of critical thinking abilities. Trépanier's approach is quite beneficial to the study of history and more should be done regarding integrating video games and history in this way.

However, the course described by Trépanier is a university level seminar. Can we integrate video games into history teaching in the lower levels of education? I believe so, but I do not believe that they should have a central place in the classroom. In primary and secondary school, students are often learning the established historical narratives from books, projects and teachers. This is when students get a grasp on what happened in the past and contextualize it with what is happening today. Unfortunately, this kind of teaching can be dull. Incorporating a video game such as CivCity: Rome, Sid Meier's Civilization V, or any other age-appropriate history video game into free time at school, or as a reward, could help positively prime kids for later history learning.

In this scenario, it would not matter that the game was riddled with inaccuracies because the purpose would be to get kids familiar with the concept of history and to instill in them a love of history. Later on, as they are formally learning history in the classroom, they will be able to relate it back to their in-game experiences and learn to recognize the inaccuracies for themselves.  After all, where would we be without these historical inaccuracies? What would historians talk about in their spare time?

The Misplaced Hope of History Gaming

History gaming is a topic I have always found very interesting and I must admit that before I started reading "Computerized History Games: Narrative Options" by Kevin Kee I was all for using video games to help students learn and engage with history. This is because history video games are one of the ways I engaged with history when I was young and they helped spark my interest. One of my favorites is CivCity: Rome (2006). This City building game places you at the very beginnings of Roman history and tasks you with building cities for the budding population while defending it from hostiles.

The game allowed me to learn about Roman daily life and customs, social hierarchy, myths, religion, military, architecture, agriculture, and geography while keeping me engaged for hours on end. One of my favorite features is the ability to zoom in on the people in the game and see what they are up to and to follow them around while they get on with their day. This game also gave me some context and visuals to refer back to when I was learning about the Romans in school. Of course, it is riddled with historical inaccuracies, which are now plain to me as a classist, but none of those problems detracted from the immersive experience, even when I went back recently to play the game through again.

 

     

However, since reading the article by Kee, I question whether historical games are a good idea at all. To be clear, I question if the type of game Kee is describing, which is one that puts the student in the place of the historian to examine a certain event or product of history with the goal of teaching them how to think like a historian, is a good idea. I still strongly believe that historical games are awesome.

In his article, Kee describes a game that is designed to teach high school students how to engage with history. He intends to accomplish this by presenting them with scenarios that require them to question historical events and sources and to collaborate with a global and/or the local community of the classroom. He is operating on the principle that history learning should not be so concerned with presenting the "correct" version of history but should allow the student to question history's interpretation.

This is where my first bone of contention lies. I agree that there is objectively no correct version of history and that we should not push established convention as truth onto students but instead encourage them to think critically. However, this is not how history is presently being taught in the classroom before university. Teachers, in general, still teach students about dates and events more then they teach them to engage with sources. This leads to problems in university when students don't know how to think, but it is a wider problem in education that we must address and it cannot be solved by good educational video games. Once we as a society have tackled this problem, we can begin to develop games to help support the classroom teaching. I fear that if we neglect to establish proper history education standards in the classroom and use video games as the way to teach these skills, it will be a lesson lost once the course material moves onto other more traditional ways of engaging with history. Furthermore, it should be the responsibility of the teacher to teach these skills in an engaging way, not that of a video game.

My next issue is that I am skeptical that scholars can produce a game designed to teach students to engage with history while still ensuring that it is fun. Can they compete with the game companies in attracting attention to their games? Where are they getting their money and is it enough to produce a good game? I don't think this type of game will have a large appeal outside of the classroom especially to teenagers who have games like Assasin's Creed and Halo at their fingertips.

I think the purpose of history games should be to help people imagine what the past might have felt like. It is also useful for teaching universals, such as what elements a civilization needs to develop, or how ancient economies worked. It is not as good for particulars because it can never be entirely faithful and can never accurately depict the world as it was. A video game is akin to a historical novel. It is immersive and incorporates many historical elements but somewhere along the line, creative liberties will be taken. This is not a bad thing, but we have to keep it in mind. And this in itself can be an important lesson that students have to learn. Educational historical games are fun, but they should definitely not replace classroom learning and I feel that Kee's article is going to far in trying to understand and create the perfect video game to teach history. Let us not forget that we have to keep the fun in the history game, and perhaps making it too realistic will detract from that fun.

"A Nice Tasty Cottage"

Horaceville. Hal Miller for the Ottawa Journal, May 31, 1941,
Taken from the Pinhey's Point Foundation website

For those who do not know, our first project for our digital history class is a digital landscape project which requires us to choose an area or a building and demonstrate how it changed over time using the digital tools of our choice. For my project, I have chosen Horaceville at Pinhey's Point in Ottawa. The site is part of the City of Ottawa Museum Network and is located at 270 Pinhey’s Point Road, Dunrobin, Ontario.

This house was built by Hamnett Kirkes Pinhey, an English immigrant who arrived in 1820. He was one of the first settlers in March Township. He designed his Georgian style stone manor to be an imposing figure on the Ottawa River riverbank, but it was only in 1849 that the house was completed.

The first part of the house was a two storey log cabin covered in clapboard.This is where the Pinhey family settled. When the Earl of Dalhousie came to visit in 1821, he referred to this house as a "nice tasty cottage with veranda".

Soon after the visit, Hamnett built a large stone attachment onto his wood house. Completed in 1822, this was primarily a ballroom/parlour on the first floor and bedrooms or servant's quarters on the second floor.

Sketch of Horaceville by Marry Anne Pinhey ca. 1830

The next two additions were not added until the 1840s. The central part of the house was added in 1841 and includes the hall, complete with grand staircase, the dining room, a second kitchen and a master bedroom. The house was finally completed in 1849 with the addition of a drawing room and a study on the first floor and bedrooms on the second floor.

Upon his death, Hamnett left the house to his children and it remained in the family until the death of the last occupant, Ruth Pinhey (Hammett's great-granddaughter), in 1971. Ruth had been living there alone for the latter part of her life and when she passed, the house went to her nephew who sold it to the Township of March.

Because of the declining fortunes of the family, the house had fallen into disrepair and eventually the original wooden section of the house was dismantled.The remainder of the house had major restoration work done during the' 80s and '90s and the property is now maintained by the City of Ottawa.

Ruins of the original kitchen

I intend to bring the former glory of this house back to life by making a 3D model of it in Sketchup. Using floorplans and pictures, I will attempt to recreate all the stages of construction and the building's interior and exterior as faithfully as possible. To showcase my work, I will make a video tour of the house which chronicles the different stages of construction and deterioration.

My first step is to familiarize myself with Sketchup. Afterwards, I will make a preliminary model based on floor plans of the house. I will continue to model each stage of the building of the house so that they can be seen separately from the whole. When the 3D modeling is complete, I will attempt to furnish the interior and add colour and texture to the house to make it more realistic and visually interesting. When this is done, I will shoot a video tour of the inside and outside of the house and of the different stages of construction and then edit it to make a short movie.

Pinhey's Point Spring 2013

The results of this project are geared towards museum visitors and anyone who is interested in the site. I intend to upload the video to YouTube so that everyone can have access to it and I hope to publish the 3D reconstruction of the modern house on Google earth for people to enjoy.








Works consulted:
Pinhey's Point Foundation website, http://www.pinheyspoint.ca/

An Interactive Digital World

This morning as I was getting ready for the day ahead, I was listening to the CBC Radio show Fresh Air with Mary Ito. One interview in particular caught my attention. Mary was talking with director Katerina Cizek who has just received an Emmy award for her documentary series "A Short History of the Highrise". I love documentaries in general, but this one was particularly intriguing because it is an interactive documentary. I had never heard of such a thing though it did not surprise me since other traditional media such as books and cards are making their way into the interactive world of digital.

In the interview, Katerina Cizek talked about how the content was presented like a children's pop-up book. This is definitely the feeling I got when I checked it out. The documentary which presents 2,500 years of history of the highrise has many features that brought me back to my childhood, but it also has elements my popup books could never do. The images are brought to life with animation and some of the extra content is presented as a game or with a tab that you have to pull to make the text appear.

The narration is in prose and often uses familiar language, a strange combination to my mind but a highly effective one. The prose gently guides you through the subject matter and the language is accessible to most, but perhaps less to an older demographic.

The extra content is the interesting feature of this documentary. In each subsection of the documentary, you have the option to investigate more content. Pictures, audio from specialists, mini games and interactives bring the subject matter to life.

The pictures are interesting because you can click to see the back of them which contains information about the image, locations, dates and history, as well as accession numbers and collection information. It is a nice way to present this information because it does not detract from the picture by being placed right next to it. You also have the option to view the information or not.

Some of the backs are also the actual reverse of the picture so you can see any information that it contains. This information would often not be digitized at all and if it were, it would not appear in a documentary film. Many of the pictures are from the Times' photography archive and they appear with all the original marks on them and the accession numbers. It gives a real sense that these are real pictures and it connects the audience with the archives and the process of research which is often lacking in other documentaries.

The choice to present this documentary as a short is also highly effective. It takes into account the short attention spans of digital users and does not overwhelm the viewer with information. It is also well structures as each topic is divided into a different part in the series which makes it is easy to understand and follow.

I was highly impressed with this documentary. It gives a good overview of the subject while providing more depth than a normal short documentary might provide. The concept of interactive documentaries is intriguing. It gives the viewer more power over what they are watching and transforms the passive experience of watching a documentary into an active and engaging process. I hope to see more in this medium in the future and I think the museum would be a great place to apply it.

Is Good Enough?

We often hear the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but this is exactly what we do (if we didn't, we wouldn't need a saying to remind us not to). And though it is great to open a book and take a look inside, if we did this for every book in the library we’d never get our essays written.

This week, there was no cover to judge as I read a couple of blog posts by Dan Cohen. “Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values” talked about how open access is important for scholarly discourse but, despite the ease of publishing openly, scholars often still prefer to publish in well-read and well-regarded journals. This is natural; they (we) seek recognition.

However, it becomes contradictory when said journal does not allow open, online access to its content. In this instance, the author is actually damning himself to obscurity. The published article may reach a number of scholars, but it will not be widely available or easy to find.

One point Dan Cohen made struck home with me. He says that “Writing is writing and good is good.” I agree entirely. Quality is intrinsic and cannot be bought. However, our ability to recognize quality is often hindered.

This reminded me of an experiment conducted by the Washington Post in 2007 (find “Pearls Before Breakfast” here). You should watch the video before you read on.


If you watched all the way to the end, you noticed the one woman standing and watching the violinist. She alone recognized Joshua Bell, one of the most acclaimed violinists in the world. Bell is used to playing to packed houses at respectable venues all over the world, but for this experiment, he played in a Washington subway station to about 1,000 commuters on their way to work. The goal of the experiment was to see if people would recognize the beauty of the music and stop to listen or to tip. Few did. They were all too caught up in their commute to spare the time and effort for music.[1]

This experiment demonstrates that although something might be the best in the world, we might not recognize it as such because we are lazy creatures. We have many demands on our time and attention and we often do not open our minds to content that requires too much thought. Unfortunate but true.

If we want to appeal to a wider audience, we have to make the package attractive. For scholars, it is important to publish in a recognized journal but there is no reason not to publish in one with an online version. If you only blog your research, it is less likely to get you recognition because it has not gone through the vetting process of peer-reviewed publishing. This important step gives legitimacy to an author’s work and tells the reader that the contents are worth a look. Dan Cohen examines this idea in his post “The Social Contract of Scholarly Publishing.”

To summarize thus far, the content is very important but the package is what will draw people in to take a look. We can apply this concept to museums.

The museum itself lends legitimacy and authority to its content, but if that content is not presented in an appealing way, it will not resonate as deeply, or at all, with the audience. I raise this concern because I have seen many exhibits, online and offline, that present artifacts and history in a bland, unengaging, or amateurish way. If we want people to come visit our museums and heritage sites, we have to hook them with interesting and varied activities, engaging exhibits and tours, and good promotional material.

Dinosaur Exhibit at the ROM

Here is a picture of the dinosaur exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto that I took a couple of years ago, shortly after they finished their renovations. When I arrived in this area, I was entirely unimpressed because it was literally bare bones. I seem to remember that this exhibit was much more interesting when I was a kid, but this may be a fabricated memory (more on that in a later post). On the other hand, the new dinosaur exhibit at the Nature Museum in Ottawa was much more striking. It had life-sized replicas of what dinosaurs might have looked like and interactive elements you could engage with, such as a parasaurolophus call station. If I had to choose, I would go back to the Nature Museum before I would go back to the ROM.

Dinosaur Exhibit at the Nature Museum sourced from tripadvisor.ca

Unfortunately, money is often lacking in heritage these days, especially for small heritage sites. This means that we have to be creative. Digital tools are one way to promote heritage and they are often free to set up and use. Twitter and Facebook are easily accessible to a wide public and websites and blogs can serve to inform and entertain. The downside to them is that they require knowledge and effort to set up and maintain.

If our heritage sites are to stay relevant, we must seek out new visitors and hook them into coming back again and again. I leave it up to current and future heritage workers to figure out how to do this.