Understand individuals, places, and communities, now and in the past, close-up and from their own perspectives, to understand the present, as a foundation for a critical response, and to change the world for the better. Digital storytelling and immersive design are key capabilities. Stories are often explored through artefacts, buildings, and landscapes. Geodata and 3D models help with this.
The VR Club (part of DAHL) regularly showcases VR experiences for historical and cultural education.
Examples
- The Mapping Women’s Suffrage web site (led by Warwick historian Tara Morton) provides access to the stories of many women involved in the campaign for voting rights and representation, arranged on a map of the UK. This is a great example of a digital humanities online resource.
- Weaving History: The Cotton Famine Poetry Podcast: “Uncover a forgotten piece of working-class history through poetry, newspapers, and more. Join Ruth-Anne to explore the Lancashire Cotton Famine in a six-episode mini-series. Learn from Lancashire locals and leading experts about how the cotton weaving industry in North-West England connected to the American Civil War, the fight against slavery, and Victorian literature.” By Ruth-Anne Walbank of the English Department.
- The VR experience Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel reconstructs the experience of being in a siege in 1916, from the recorded oral history of a soldier. This enriches our understanding of their actions and how experience and memory becomes history. It could, for example, lead to different practices when recording the experiences of soldiers in current conflicts. Easter Rising was produced for the BBC by Warwick Theatre Studies Alumnus Catherine Allen.
- Child of Empire, a VR experience created by the Project Dastaan (including Saadia Gardezi from Liberal Arts at Warwick), is an award-winning immersive telling of story of the Partition of India, with historical detail brought to life through real stories of real people.
- In the Classics Department, students studying for the Hellenistic World module complete an assessed digital storytelling project using film making techniques.
Technologies and techniques
- Digital ethnography and storytelling tools (photography, video, audio, animation).
- Podcasting.
- Blogs and digital journals.
- Social media.
- Immersive storytelling (Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality).
Next
Patterns in large real-world datasets | Human stories in close-up | Creative practice and experimentation
We also run (and record) sessions that cover transferable capabilities.