Unit 10

Real or Not?

I looked at Digital Karnak and Persepolis3d to see if they make it clear that they are digital reconstructions, rather than real. On the Welcome page, it says, in present tense, that Karnak “is one of the largest temple complexes in the world…” which is a little confusing if people don’t know Karnak is now only ruins. But on the About page, it says it is a 3-D Virtual Reality model. The site is very clear about who produced the site. Videos are clearly not photographs. And modern video footage is labeled as such. Persepolis3d.com clearly states on its home page that it is “a virtual reconstruction.” The pictures do not look like real photographs. The Statement page says that the goal is to bring Persepolis “back to life” and that it is a “virtual reconstruction” based on documentation from excavations.

Last winter, I visited the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, MO. They had a  room where you could stand in a plaster cast of what looked like a bomb crater. They also had a field of artificial poppies under a glass walkway as one entered the museum. Those were nice touches. I also recall watching a video at Mt. Vernon about George Washington’s winter at Valley Forge and having artificial snow falling from the ceiling, which was novel. Several years ago, I went to the Maryland side of the Potomac to a reconstructed farm that has a barn with drying tobacco and old heritage breeds of animals. Colonial Williamsburg also has old breeds from the Colonial period. Those are nice, real, 3D experiences, though not everyone (e.g., my husband) wants to talk to actors pretending to be living during the period.

With virtual reality goggles we may get closer to experiencing the past, but it still will not provide the taste, smell, or texture. We also come at history from our own life experience, environment, and culture. We can't experience history as someone living in the period did because we know that once we turn off the program or remove the goggles, the experience will be over. And there is always going to be some “fictionalization” in virtual reality because we can’t know every detail, word, or second of activity that took place. However, virtual reality may help us envision the past, improve our understanding, and empathize. The question becomes how can we enhance our knowledge and understanding through short experiences

Another experiential approach to history is to reenact it, but that also has similar limitations. Recently, I watched the PBS show, Victorian Slum House, in which several individuals and families temporarily lived and worked in slum conditions like those in Britain during the Victorian era. However, the participants received mini-lectures on what individuals like their characters would have been experiencing and talked to the camera about their reflections, so they were not just dropped into the period wholesale. It did seem that the participants’ and TV viewers’ understanding of slum conditions at that time were more specific than if they just read about the period in a journal or book. In the case of the PBS show, the participants wore the clothes, slept on the straw beds, lived in the rooms with peeling paper, and likely smelled the privies—of course, the viewers did not.

I am surprised there isn’t a bigger part of the tourism industry that lets visitors pay to temporarily “live” in the past—wear the clothes, do the work, eat the food, etc., from a past period. I’m not sure how closely covered wagon tours recreate the historic experience. In Kansas, the Flying W Ranch Bunk House lets you sleep on the prairie with the chuckwagon, and Wagons West Tours lets you ride and sleep in a covered wagon in the foothills of the Rockies. So far, I haven’t been tempted to part with indoor plumbing and electricity and give one of those tours a try.