Putting the cart before the horse – that is, my skill in Blender is well below the threshold of translating what Caswell et al. describe into practice  – “Imagining Transformative Spaces” is nonetheless a central text for thinking differently about what form an archival interface in virtual reality might take. So far, my experiments in Unity have focused on the foreground rather than the background – the actual archival materials themselves, not the space in which they are contained. Ultimately, take out the contents and they all look like this:

The default view for new projects in Unity. I’m posting it because, in my determination, it is not sufficiently original to warrant copyright protection. Unity, if you disagree, let me know and I’ll take it down.

I do not claim that the image above represents some sort of universally shared conceptualization of space, or that the default view in Unity isn’t emerging from its own historical context; it’s just been an underdeveloped facet of the project so far. But the virtual environment of the VR archival interface will be a vital element to consider in later stages of the project (once my skills have caught up?), with respect to the range of affects it is capable of producing.

Caswell et al. take up the physical spaces of community archives, largely overlooked in archival scholarship relative to more formal institutions (which have been characterized alternately as houses, prisons and temples); they use focus groups to examine how the spaces of community archives are imagined by their users. In the archival literature, the metaphor of the home (as semantically distinct from the house) is frequently invoked in relation to community archives – given that numerous community archives are, in fact, housed in private homes, the association is unsurprising. Their findings, however, revealed a more nuanced understanding of community archives by their users and surfaced three major themes: community archives as 1) symbols of representation made manifest [for the marginalized groups they serve], 2) a home-away-from-home or home-but-not-quite-home and 3) a site of potential political activism/a politically generative space (80). The authors also enrich the widely used metaphor of the home by noting its interpretation in terms of “a welcoming space in a hostile climate… a space where their experiences and those of their ancestors are validated… a space where intergenerational dialog—sometimes difficult and unsettling—occurs… [and as an alternative] to the domestic spaces of home, where previously taboo conversations could be started” (82).

For their study, Caswell et al. spoke with community archives users at five different community archives sites; the authors excluded the comments from users of one online-only archives from the article because they did not speak directly to physical spaces. The omission is unfortunate, as it would have provided a unique insight into the affective relationships that remote users experience within online archival spaces. Notwithstanding, what emerges from their account is an aspirational objective for archival interfaces in virtual reality: to foster a sense of representational belonging, what Caswell et al. term the opportunity for marginalized groups to assert that “‘I am here,’ ‘We were here,’ and ‘We belong here'” (89). At the heart of representational belonging, though, is the community itself; difficult to achieve for a technology that is currently imagined and deployed in a highly individualized sense. But the authors acknowledge that the affective dimensions of community archives are not contingent on the physicality of the space, and suggest that digital archival sites may also hold promise for personal and political connection.