Digital Field Trips uses a visualization studio with 360° projection + 3D printing to recreate sites, landscapes, and material objects for students of medieval European history. Each trip focuses on a different mode of analysis: material culture, visual narratives, and space.
Digital Field Trips uses a visualization studio with 360° projection + 3D printing to recreate sites, landscapes, and material objects for students of medieval European history. Each trip focuses on a different mode of analysis: material culture, visual narratives, and space & place.
Digital visualization allows students to experience the landscape with its Neolithic remains, transcribe and transliterate runic graffiti in its architectural space, and interpret graffiti in relation to its space and place. The use of an immersive environment brings alive the questions and theories of the anthropology of writing and the archaeology of space.
“Graffiti . . . ‘speak’ not just as literary fragments but as part of a very particular material environment.” Kristina Milnor, Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii, p.9.
The early medieval ship burials at Oseberg (Norway) and Sutton Hoo (England) and their artefacts are the focus of this digital field trip. The combination of 3-D printing with digital images turns the studio into a museum space where students analyze material culture hands-on.
Students experience the Bayeux Embroidery in life-size digital replication on the walls of the visualization studio and analyze medieval visual narratives by applying Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics.
Julie Mell: Julie Mell is Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University, where she teaches medieval European history and Jewish history. Her current interests focus on the history of play, game theory, and the anthropology of writing. She published recently "Graffiti as Gaming: Vikings at Play in the Orkney Islands" in Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages.
Shaun Bennett: Shaun Bennett is the research librarian for Business, Education, and Data Literacy at the North Carolina State University Libraries, where he primarily works with students and faculty to make sure they have the techniques and tools to succeed at NC State. His research interests include instructional design, experiential learning, and medieval Scandinavian literary culture.
History Dept., NC State University
Research Librarian, NC State University Libraries
Bayeux Embroidery = 10+ years
Runes & Ship Burials = 6 years
medieval Europe, ship burials, graffiti, runes, anthropology of place & space, anthropology of writing, graphic narratives, material culture
The article that emerged from the digital field trip on Maeshowe was published in: V. Kopp, E. Lapina (eds.) Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Brepols, 2020)
Material Culture - 3D Scans and rotatable PDFs: Viking Ship Museum
Runes & Writing: Photos and Info on Neolithic Orkney