Preserving BIPOC Expatriates’ Memories During Wartime and Beyond: Building a Volumetric Archiving Platform for Immersive Storytelling and Humanities Pedagogy

FAIN: HAA-287657-22

Arizona Board of Regents (Tucson, AZ 85721-0073)
Bryan Carter (Project Director: January 2022 to present)
Rashida Kamilah Braggs (Co Project Director: May 2022 to present)

Research into the best practices for designing and preserving volumetric recordings of individuals for the purpose of teaching and learning history and culture in cultural heritage organizations.

We are applying for an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant at the level I planning stage in order to identify and begin culling important stories of expatriation by BIPOC during and beyond the war. The NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant in particular can help us explore whether volumetric video capture is an effective digital tool for preserving these unforgettable personal narratives and cultural memories in multi-sensory ways that make them accessible long into the future. We will rethink the nature of storytelling, considering, in particular, how immersive, interactive volumetric video capture and display are likely to dramatically alter what and how stories may be told, understood, archived, preserved, and accessed. A volumetric capture system uses a number of cameras to capture humans , turning them into lifelike, 3-dimensional renderings, producing a nearly identical, photorealistic representation of them.