Development

UBC iSchool Research Day 2018 & AAO Conference


“Archival Interfaces in Virtual Reality” makes its public debut! First at our internal UBC iSchool Research Day, and then in May, I will be presenting the project at the Archives Association of Ontario (AAO) Conference.

For Research Day (March 9), I gave an interactive demonstration of the ‘Archival Interfaces in Virtual Reality’ project (and presented a poster on the ‘Shades of #MAGA‘ project that visualizes the use of the #makeamericagreatagain and shorter #MAGA hashtags on Twitter). It was incredibly helpful to get informal feedback on the stereoscopic interface prototype, and the demonstration ended up tying for first place in the poster competition with Darra Hofman’s delightfully titled “‘A mouth is not always a mouth, but a bit is always a bit, and it matters little what it bridles:’ The relationship between privacy and transparency in digital records.”

One of the things that struck me while watching Research Day attendees try out the prototype was their desire to explore outside of the frame of the prototype – an appreciable fascination with the experience of VR itself. I’d certainly felt it myself upon trying the headset for the first time (I actually teared up a little at Google’s generic welcome screen) but it quickly became forgotten through the repetition of development and testing. The sense of immediacy – and bodily estrangement – has a powerful affective quality that I had wanted to explore with the project but it is also worth considering the threshold of where it becomes captivating to the exclusion of all else (i.e. the archives that it is meant to provide access to).

I also had the opportunity to meet the wonderful Nadia Caidi, our keynote speaker for Research Day, who suggested the possibility of using similar VR tools – given their portability and accessibility – as an entry point into the relationship-building process with communities who are underrepresented within the archival endeavour.

The next stop for the ‘Archival Interfaces in Virtual Reality’ traveling roadshow will be the Archives Association of Ontario conference at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, ON on May 10th, 2018.

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