Chapter 35

Making the Model: Scholarship and Rhetoric in 3-D Historical Reconstructions

Elaine Sullivan, Angel David Nieves, and Lisa M. Snyder

The workflow for traditional humanistic scholarship might be loosely described as follows: (1) identify a research question, (2) gather and critically analyze the materials (primary and secondary) that inform said question, and (3) write an interpretive analysis using selected elements from your materials to support and communicate an argument.[1] In evaluating the resulting scholarship, reviewers are asked to gauge the work and its potential impact on their field. Is the research question important? Did the author use the appropriate source materials (in terms of both quantity and quality)? Were the source materials harnessed to make a convincing argument? Did the author approach the question in a unique or interesting way?

In this chapter, we argue that the creation of three-dimensional (3-D) virtual reconstruction models of historic sites is a new form of knowledge production equivalent to traditional textual analysis. The process of making a computer model asks scholars to perform the steps described above; however, the final product is an interactive environment and not the written word. To design a research project focused on reconstructing now-disappeared (or altered) historic places, the scholar must identify a question that is best (or sometimes can only be) answered when considering space and spatial relationships in three dimensions. In each step of building the model, the researcher must select and discard information, weighing its validity and pertinence to the research being addressed. The resulting model is not a neutral representation of “the past,” but the scholar’s interpretation of specifi aspects of a place at a certain time — an interpretation that can be challenged, revised, or rejected by others. 3-D reconstruction models are thus not illustrations or simple representations of an incontestable past; they are a form of rhetoric (here in visual form) akin to the traditional scholarly argument.

Building such models and using them as tools of analysis creates a wealth of new research opportunities. Models can offer new techniques to investigate questions of how gender, ethnicity, and power are conceptualized by a society and inscribed into the very space that structures such relationships. The process of modeling helps us to confront and define our own gaps in the historical record, challenging our ability to recover and comprehend the past. The use of 3-D reconstruction models offers methods for virtually exploring issues of human experience, such as how visibility and movement influenced actions or meaning in a place, that are otherwise impossible (due to the degradation or disappearance of sites). The process of navigating through 3-D models constructed for pedestrian-level, real-time interaction also allows us to ask questions about scale, adjacency, design, and experience. Finally, these models move beyond strictly subject-specialist questions, contributing to broader debates about learning (such as visual literacy) and human-computer interaction.

This chapter identifies two major foci where 3-D models impact historical research. First, we posit that historical argumentation can be made through the very process of modeling spaces in three dimensions. If modeling is a form of rhetoric, then both the development of the 3-D reconstruction and the selection and evaluation of source materials constitute interpretive processes. In untraditional ways, the scholar interrogates source materials at vastly different levels of resolution and uncertainty, at each point formulating and revising hypotheses. Second, the completed reconstruction model functions as a locus for dialogue. It offers fresh points of entry into the examination of lived spaces, placing research questions into a spatial framework for new types of analysis. We see models as specifically relevant to not only understanding complex spatial change over time but also addressing how power manifests spatially through aspects of human experience and movement in past places.

We use three examples of scholarly historical reconstruction models as case studies to support these suppositions. Intentionally, these projects cover vastly different historical times and places and were designed with different research goals. The Digital Karnak model is a diachronic model, visualizing 30 separate reconstruction phases of the ancient Egyptian temple of Karnak, starting in approximately 2000 B.C.E.[2] The model of the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893 was initiated as a testbed for research on educational applications for interactive computer models of historic urban environments. The twentieth-century South African township of Soweto model considers how historical reconstructions of the recent past could be used to document resistance and help to gather victim testimony of crimes committed by the apartheid state.[3] What these projects hold in common is their attempt to visually (and virtually) reconstruct important historic places in order to investigate how space influenced human experience.

The Model as Rhetoric: “Building” an(d) Argument

In A Companion to Digital Humanities, Willard McCarty (2004) defines models as “a representation of something for purposes of study,” and the act of modeling as “the heuristic process of constructing and manipulating models” (26). The physicist Freeman Dyson (1999) similarly describes models as “a construction that describes a much simpler universe, [by] including some features of the actual universe and neglecting others” (xiv). What is vital here is the emphasis on the process of construction and interpretation as a means of gaining knowledge. Reconstruction models differ from “reality-based” models (produced through techniques such as laser scanning and photogrammetry) that capture the state of an object or site in the present and are used frequently for archaeological or cultural heritage recording, study, and conservation.[4] Virtual reconstruction models attempt instead to harness many types of information (both what exists in the present and through documentation/supposition of what is lost) to investigate what is not present.[5] Frequently, the original structure or site has been destroyed or altered so dramatically that capturing a “reality-based” model is impossible. Degradation can occur because of the age of the structure and ancient modification (e.g., Karnak’s buildings are now between two and four thousand years old and were frequently modified in ancient times), purposeful disassembling of a site at the end of its use-life (e.g., the Columbian Exposition was an ephemeral event, only open to the public for six months), or environmental change, looting, or intentional modern destruction. Some sites (such as Soweto) remain in use, and tens or hundreds of years of human occupation have altered them in ways that obscure their earliest history. Reconstruction models therefore often combine information from existing structures, archaeology, photographs, ground plans, or observer descriptions. The reconstruction process uses existing evidence to interrogate that which remains unknown. It is thus always biased, selective, and interpretive. Models can never fully re-create a real “lived” moment in the past. Instead, reconstruction modeling centers on the production of “potential pasts” (Forte 7–18), hypothetical slices of what may have been that offer new potential for studying past environments (Favro 276).

The following section focuses on how scholars use modeling to acquire new knowledge about past places. This knowledge includes the modeling process as a form of scholarly discovery, where information on the architectural and social history under examination can be considered variously, testing out conflicting narratives and inconsistent sources within a defined space as well as integrating and reconciling data at different resolutions, scales, and levels of detail. Data incompatibilities are often left (silently) unresolved in traditional scholarship but are glaringly obvious in visual models. Both processes ask scholars to grapple with the historical record and make conclusions based on the strength of existing evidence.

Reconstruction and Conflicting Data

Historical writing can be described as a type of “verbal model” — a series of abstractions about the past woven together to create meaning (Staley 58–59). Like traditional written scholarship, the 3-D modeling process asks scholars to collect and weigh primary and secondary sources and to build a visual and/or spatial argument that interprets the past. In both cases, the scholar “constructs” understanding from a selection of materials, choosing what is important to the argument and omitting the irrelevant. The modeled outcome, like a written article, is the culmination of choices made by the author that must be cited and supported.[6] Some sources are familiar to most humanities scholars: the archive, archaeological materials, artistic representations, literature, and historic maps. Some perhaps less common sources include satellite imagery, aerial photographs, “reality-based” models, and geographic information systems (GIS) data. While the source materials used to build a historical reconstruction model may differ widely from project to project, all such scholarly models have the same goal: to interpret past material culture through the combination and consideration of multimodal forms of historical evidence.

Each model is unique, as each reflects the specific research goals of the author as well as the source materials harnessed. Some models attempt to replicate the appearance of historic sites with photo-realistic visualizations, reconstructing colors, patterns, artwork, brickwork, landscape features, and other details.[7] Other models are concerned with reconstructing the ephemeral: human movement, sound, or one-time events such as ritual spectacles (Johanson 403–418). Visual hyperrealism may be quite unnecessary for such models, and instead they can be designed to seem almost schematic.[8] Authors interested in visualizing entire historic cities or large numbers of structures for which only basic information is important can use “procedural” modeling, which rapidly generates shapes based on geometric rules articulated in computer scripts (Saldana and Johanson 205–210; Haegler, Müller, and Van Gool 1–11). Here again, the goal of scholarly models is not to fully replicate past places, but to selectively examine and interpret certain aspects of historic sites, leaving other elements unstudied. In each case, the author chooses how best to structure the model to address the question at hand: What was the potential viewing experience of a person inside this lavishly painted room? Could the oration at a funeral spectacle be heard standing in a particular place? What form might an entire ancient city take at a specific moment in time, and how might that form have changed one hundred years later? As David Staley (2003) usefully reiterates, the point of historical scholarship is not to reduplicate the past. “It is the inquiry that matters most, the questions and answers and the benefits therein that historians seek” (Staley 59).

Scholars producing digital reconstruction models necessarily grapple with issues of incomplete information that also face traditional historical scholarship. The vagaries of the archaeological record, missing data in the archive, and incomplete information mean that models are never a simple reassembly of an existing whole. In creating a historic reconstruction, the author is interpreting information that is always ambiguous. One of the largest challenges to reconstruction work is also one of the major strengths of 3-D visualization: making gaps and suppositions inherent in each model. At every point, the researcher is confronted with shifting levels of certainty and missing/conflicting information that result in a literal hole in their model. They are forced to grapple with the impact of each interpretive choice on the larger meaning of the modeled space and to imagine the result of their choices for the viewer. The following three examples illustrate different challenges and opportunities emerging from the reconstruction process.

Modeling Conflicted Spaces

Generally, the physical reimaginings of a conflicted space—the fact-finding involved in the reconstruction of a historical model—pose a unique set of problems. In the case of recent histories, a scholar must remember that some constituencies may be actively contesting disputed documentation. In other instances, some groups may have privileged existing documentation from the site of the model and events related to it, and any surviving accounts that take exception to the dominant narrative may be in short supply. For example, did a so-called “Fourth Estate” or neutral press corps document breaking news in the townships of Johannesburg during the resistance against apartheid regimes of the twentieth century? In the case of South Africa, at best one journalist from the mainstream press may have written dispatches at a certain flashpoint, but the official reports from the dominant apartheid regime most likely stuff the ministries’ filing cabinets.

Scholarly inquiry into how historical reconstruction models might incorporate conflicting narratives about real-life victims living at a particular time and place informs Nieves’s analysis of the Student Uprisings. In particular, Nieves’s research in South Africa focuses on Soweto, a so-called “model native township” comprised of systematically planned, would-be South African garden cities designed to reinforce the state system of apartheid. (Physical spaces such as Soweto and other townships built under the apartheid system have provided the social, political, and economic context for black urban life since the founding of Johannesburg in 1886.) Nieves’s unique work of historical recovery is grounded in the inter- and multi-disciplinary field of African American studies and the African diaspora. His research into spatial reform and resistance in conflicted spaces also incorporates landscape studies, architectural history, historic preservation, women’s studies, and cultural studies.

Nieves offers this example of how 3-D spatial analysis contributes to the study of place-based history: on the watershed morning of June 16, 1976, in Soweto, members of the South African police and security forces gunned down black African students who marched to protest the use of Afrikaans as the primary language of school instruction. The subsequent worldwide distribution and dissemination of Sam Nzima’s iconic photograph depicting the shocking death of Hector Pieterson—a child who was a casualty of the protests that day—coupled with the deaths of tens of other school children, catalyzed the student uprisings and sparked the global anti-apartheid movement. To this day, the various accounts of both Pieterson’s death and the site of the shooting are subject to dispute. Nieves’s model of Soweto (see Figure 35.1) combines 3-D reconstructions of structures and landscapes with the use of avatars as virtual persons inhabiting the site at the time in question. This use of avatars allows people to act out and study contested scenarios from the Student Uprisings.

Context and Lost Environments

Environmental information is vital to contextualizing the temple of Karnak within the larger landscape of the ancient city of Thebes. However, during the two thousand years of the temple’s use, the contemporary position of the Nile river (the state’s most important conduit for commerce and communication) is only (vaguely) known in a handful of moments because it gradually shifted westward. Nevertheless, its interpreted position is included in all 30 phases of the Digital Karnak model, placed appropriately within the known parameters of all existing information (see Figure 35.2). The modeled location of the river at any given moment is based on Sullivan’s interpretation of source material that includes the dates of quays found through archaeological excavations, an image of the temple on a tomb painting in Thebes’s Tombs of the Nobles, and geomorphological studies in modern Luxor (Sullivan). The expansion of the temple structure at key moments was directly linked to the movement of the Nile, as the river’s drift opened up new land for expansion but also threatened to leave the temple without riverfront access. While the river’s location in the model lies on a spectrum of uncertainty, without its inclusion the direct relationship between the position of the Nile and the westward expansion of the temple is obscured. At every stage of the construction, inclusion of the river in the model forced Sullivan and the project team to question the correlation between the two entities as well as how gaps in that information impact our general understanding of the temple’s form and the larger landscape of Thebes at that time.

Visual Strategies for Revealing the Unknown

3-D models function usefully as knowledge representations (Favro 326–27); the careful reconstruction of what is known about a historic place makes clear how much remains unknown. As McCarty explains, “Computational models, however finely perfected, are better understood as temporary states in a process of coming to know rather than fixed structures of knowledge” (257, emphasis in original). While gaps in the reconstruction model highlight aspects of place undertheorized by the researcher, they can also distract users in negative ways.

A critical goal of Snyder’s reconstruction model of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 is to explore how real-time interaction with the model impacts user understanding of this landmark event and determines the circumstances under which users would be intrinsically motivated to explore the modeled environment. To that end, incorporating into the model small details gleaned from source material is essential but oftentimes problematic. When reconstructing the Street of Cairo installation from the Midway Plaisance, for example, the model must convey to users information about the various shops and restaurants along the street. At question was how to fill in the gaps of available source material without negatively impacting user experience in the virtual environment. The atlas in Daniel H. Burnham’s (1989) final report on the fair included references to the function of the spaces, cross-referenced with contemporary photographs. Signage was replicated where possible, with “lorem ipsum” substituted for illegible text. In the absence of photographic information, placards identifying the shops’ contents were created. The three available black-and-white images of the shops from 1893 were cropped and placed in the model at their appropriate location; color photographs of similar content-appropriate shops from modern-day Cairo were placed in the model for all other shops (see Figure 35.3). The result is a subtle clue that references the source material used to build the model and provides an opportunity for users to reflect on the model as a site of interpretation.

These types of decisions reinforce the interpretive nature of model construction. Like books, no two models (even of the same subject) are the same, because the process and the final output are influenced by the content creator’s reading of the source material and over-arching objective for the work. As Gaffney (2008) asserts, “The experience of interpretation is . . . a central role of visualization rather than the simple representation of any particular reality” (Gaffney 129).

The Model as Dialogue: Exploring Spatial Research Questions

Through its formulation, each historical reconstruction model represents a scholar’s argument about a potential past. Embedded within and extending out from this construction are complementary humanistic research issues. We identify three major areas where modeling offers unique contributions to ongoing scholarly dialogue. First, questions about how race, gender, sexuality, and power were inscribed into built spaces and then renegotiated by those inhabiting the spaces can be an integral part of the modeling and post-modeling process. A second powerful aspect of modeling (in contrast to textual description) is the attention it draws to our lack of complete knowledge about past places and their historical meaning and function. The reconstruction process forces us to engage with uncertainty at every level, in ways often ignored when we do not directly confront the lived realities of the three-dimensional world.[9] Finally, the creation of diachronic models—models that trace change across time in a historic space—generates other points of analysis. To produce each phase of a model, the author must grapple with temporal uncertainty, how earlier stages influenced or impacted later forms, and how people’s perception of places changed as they did. In all three of these instances, modeling offers a new technique to answer complex research questions about the relationship between human action and space in the past.

Investigating Power and Space

In the past 30 years, archaeologists and historians have persuasively demonstrated how space is socially constructed; human actions and relationships shape and are shaped by the natural and built world in which people live.[10] More recent scholarship goes further, suggesting that space should be understood “as the relational arrangement of objects and humans in a place . . . permanently constituted as well as changed by social practice” (Meier 507). Space is thus directly constituted by the social interactions between people and things, the same interactions that are laden with power dynamics based on gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. A scholar can study past manifestations of these dynamics through 3-D spatial analysis.

Nieves’s model of Soweto offers one example. As Edward Gonzalez-Tennant (2013) argues, the “uncritical” use of digital technologies and new media methodologies at sites of “dark” history have resulted in the de-politicization of inequality in those places (Gonzalez-Tennant 64). Modeling provides a means to explore how the very fabric of sites such as Soweto was designed for control and repression, re-situating ostensibly innocuous spaces directly within the ideological context of apartheid. It also affords opportunities to examine how such seemingly homogenous urban fabrics can reveal social and political strategies of resistance, such as the re-appropriation and modification of space by inhabitants of Soweto who resisted apartheid policies. The spatial is political, and the Soweto model is used to consider how particular strategies signaled political and social resistance to the internal community.

Much like other models in this chapter, Soweto was not built only from primary source materials found in the archive. As with any humanities project, it suggests and even encourages reinterpretations of existing historiographies. As such, the Soweto model permits interrogations beyond the research of previous scholars. Specifically, its 3-D model-making process intervenes in and corrects state-sponsored narratives that have erased the everyday lived experiences of those involved in the liberation struggle. These interventions and corrections are important because the South African apartheid security state actually produced its own documentation to facilitate diachronic model-making of Soweto’s dark history. For instance, a cache of aerial images taken of Soweto over several decades was unearthed recently in the offices of the Chief Directorate: Spatial Development Planning Archives in Cape Town. Although it is now difficult to determine exactly why these aerial images were taken over a fifty-plus-year period, the white-minority government’s paranoia over black-majority rule may have meant that surveillance of this magnitude was deemed critical to political and social control.

Additionally, some hypotheses about the influence of the Garden City urban planning movement on Soweto suggest that the densities resulting from planned interventions might have encouraged empowerment among its residents. The indigenous black population (specifically in Johannesburg), which was widely dispersed and even landless before arriving in the emerging megacity, could organize politically and culturally in Soweto to resist the National Party and its apartheid policies. By 1950, well over 40 acts and amendments were passed to secure the Nationalist Party’s formal control over the urban landscape and its growing urban population in townships such as Soweto. However, these acts also insured that, over the course of several generations, the majority of the black population would develop longstanding ties to—and a rich cultural heritage within—their respective townships as they waged a struggle against apartheid. Nieves’s 3-D reconstructions of Soweto examine the micro-geography of resistance as well as the layering of meaning and action between the apartheid state and township residents in the low brick bungalows and city blocks characteristic of the township. For example, the reconstruction of Hector Pieterson’s slaying—in a circumscribed, micro-geography of an imagined Soweto (i.e., a handful of dense blocks within the township) from 1976—is just one part of scholarly inquiry into the conflicting narratives of other various, real-life victims and sites of the Uprisings. Such reconstructions restore suppressed material evidence of this traumascape.

Acknowledging and Interrogating the Unknown

While the level of architectural reconstruction in each model may vary widely, even a complete record of a past place cannot lead to a model that inherently “reveals” the cultural relationships enacted there. Researchers must investigate and hypothesize the myriad ways such spaces could be used and understood, and also admit that different people’s perspectives significantly influence such understandings. Building the model is thus in many ways an attempt at recovery: of spaces as well as real embodied human movement, actions, and feelings. Modeling asks us to lay out in detail the possible forms that contributed to human experiences, while acknowledging that some elements will always remain unknown.

Many visitors to the Columbian Exposition traveled, for example, by boat to Jackson Park from downtown Chicago, landing on an immense wooden pier jutting into Lake Michigan. Where guidebooks like Rand McNally’s Handbook of the World’s Columbian Exposition and A Week at the Fair provide great detail about transportation options for getting to the fair and suggested routes for adventures once there, they are silent on the specifics of how visitors might transition from the pier to the grounds. When considered on a 2-D plan, their most direct route into the Court of Honor, the formal core of the fair, appears to be through the Peristyle, a screen of monumental columns representing the original states of the union. In navigating through the computer model, it quickly becomes apparent that movement along the southern edge of the pier was more likely the dominant route. From this promenade, fairgoers’ first impression of the exposition would have been of the primary artifacts and relics related to Christopher Columbus, the namesake of the fair, which was held in honor of the four hundredth anniversary of his journey to the New World. On a promontory to the south stood a replica of the complex—the Convent of La Rabida—where he began planning his expedition and which was filled with Columbiana; straight ahead were replicas of his fleet: the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Reinforcing the importance of reconstruction models as research outputs, the ability to interact with the 3-D computer model generates new arguments for movement through the exposition and reveals new interpretations that suggest a logical sequencing of visitor experience that established the country’s historical foundations before revealing the wonders of the great exhibition halls.

Diachronic Modeling

Diachronic (or temporal) models offer new tools to the humanist to investigate how the meaning and function of places change over time. At complex historic sites, it is often difficult to reimagine how the meaning of a space shifted through a series of renovations, all but the last of which are usually inaccessible in the present. Perhaps most instructive is the opportunity with each model phase to challenge the inevitability of the latest phase and to examine intentionality with each addition or subtraction. Even more challenging is mentally reconstructing the experiential aspects of a person inhabiting those now-gone spaces. In modeling multiple phases of a historic place, the researcher is confronted with each small and large modification. Why this particular change? What does it tell us about how people lived? Why did their priorities or actions change at this time? How is this change related to the previous phase or the one before it? The model itself can then be used to answer a second layer of questions concerning human experience in those spaces, including questions of changing visibility, aurality, access, paths of movement, or chiaroscuro.

The Digital Karnak model clearly demonstrates the opportunities emerging from temporal modeling. One of the main functions of the temple was to provide a sort of stage for the performance of ritual events. On these occasions, the statue of the god Amun left his shrine to visit important cult sites or specific areas of the temple in an elaborate parade. The routes of these processions, some of which can be traced following textual and artistic depictions, changed over time according to religious and political priorities of the king. At Karnak, even over very short periods of time, spaces that would have been important parts of these religious events were radically modified. For example, the Wadjet Hall, which texts tell us served as the place where special ceremonies related to kingship were conducted, was built and significantly remodeled in five major phases in the reign of four kings, covering only 80 years.[11] Sullivan and the project team modeled this rapid reconceptualization of the space; the resulting reconstruction leads to a number of questions concerning how rituals and religion at the temple functioned. During the first two stages, the edges of the open-air hall were lined with peristyle; the next phase substituted the peristyle for a wooden roof supported by papyrus-form posts on two sides of the hall, and a pair of monumental obelisks was erected in the center of the court. The fourth phase saw the bricking-in of the obelisks by a large gateway; the final renovation replaced the wooden roof and posts with monumental stone papyrus columns and a matching roof. Thus, the original light-filled open space was darkened, visibility across sides of the hall was blocked, and the scale of construction continually increased. While the central axis of the temple (running through the middle of the hall) was respected, movement within the hall at each later stage was constricted and redefined, and the interior space filled in, significantly reducing the number of people who could have stood within it.

In studying the physical manifestation of the rituals that occurred in this space, it is clear that they could not have remained the same after such drastic modification.[12] Did aspects of the rituals move to other areas of the temple, or were the forms of the rituals adapted to the new space? Should we interpret these rapid alterations of key cult spaces as evidence of intense development of new religious ideas at the time—ideas that needed new architectural expression? The diachronic Karnak model shows that the temple and its rituals were not fossilized timeless forms but rather dynamic expressions of shifting royal priorities. Scholars are asked to address each moment at the temple, not to collapse and simplify complex religious changes that impacted the performance of ritual within it.

We argue that the creation, publication, and use of 3-D models for research and education form new types of interdisciplinary scholarship that integrate design, technology, archives, and historical information in ways that test the boundaries of current academic production. The act of modeling—of making—is a complex, iterative form of experimental research analogous to more traditional forms of scholarship. In this interpretive space between archival research and construction, scholars have the opportunity for new discoveries and experimental interactions. Each new piece of source material adds to the fabric of the computer model, slowly building toward a cohesive whole.

Beyond discipline-specific research questions, the process of modeling and the potential for dissemination to the broader academic community demand new forms of interdisciplinary scholarship, technology, and learning. Critical areas of related future research include the teaching and learning affordances of interactive computer technology, the thresholds for user engagement with academically generated reconstruction models, the design of instructional technologies and interfaces for educational use of cultural heritage reconstructions, the requirements for peer review of 3-D scholarship, the use of 3-D content as a boundary object of knowledge production, and long-term sustainability for this form of academic production and argumentation.

Reconstruction models and 3-D spatial analysis are rapidly increasing the relevance of historical research because improvements in personal computer memory and content sharing platforms make possible broad dissemination. 3-D materials will get bigger, faster, and easier to access. Most important, however, is the potential of 3-D content for scholarly innovation. Humanistic inquiry hinges on the idea that there is no single way to read a source, research a question, or interpret an argument. We reassess and revisit past people, places, and texts in order to examine them from fresh perspectives and see them in new ways. As historians, we consider 3-D modeling to be an exciting method to open up new viewpoints on the past—viewpoints that ask us to look again at places we thought we knew, approaching embodied human experience, time, and the unknown through a different lens.

Notes

Bibliography