Booksnake: Building and Testing an Augmented Reality Tool for Embodied Interaction with Existing Digitized Archival Materials

FAIN: HAA-287859-22

University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA 90089-0012)
Peter C. Mancall (Project Director: January 2022 to present)
Curtis Fletcher (Co Project Director: May 2022 to present)
Sean Fraga (Co Project Director: May 2022 to present)

The development of a prototype application that will allow users to view and manipulate digitized archival materials in augmented reality as well as an evaluation of its potential as a teaching tool for the humanities.

Interacting with digitized archival materials in a Web browser fails to replicate the close engagement possible during in-person research. We are building Booksnake, a mobile app that transforms existing IIIF-compliant digitized archival materials for interaction in augmented reality. Booksnake dynamically inserts a digitized item into the live camera view on a mobile device, making it feel like the item is physically present and permitting embodied exploration. Level II funding will support development of a beta-stage prototype and evaluation of Booksnake as a humanities teaching tool in university and K-12 education. We will use the NEH-supported Chronicling America collection of digitized historic newspapers to build support for compound objects, which have multiple images linked to a single catalog record. By the end of the grant period, we will publicly release a working prototype, open-source code, technical documentation, and project results, supporting extensibility and reuse.