{"id":129,"date":"2017-10-20T19:35:36","date_gmt":"2017-10-21T00:35:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/games2016\/?page_id=129"},"modified":"2017-10-20T19:36:24","modified_gmt":"2017-10-21T00:36:24","slug":"interview-with-geraldine-heng","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/games2016\/interview-with-geraldine-heng\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"
September 27, 2017<\/div>\n
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In the context of her work with the Global Middle Ages Project and Medievalists of Color, I had the opportunity to ask Geraldine Heng (UT-Austin)<\/strong> about her perspectives on the use of video game environments for learning about global medieval cultures. —Lynn Ramey<\/em><\/div>\n
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Virtual reality and immersive environments allow embodiment and perspective in new ways. What might this mean for students and researchers seeking to understand experiences far removed from their own?<\/b><\/p>\n

VR and immersive environments are a projective extension of human reality and offer experiences that would otherwise be impossible. \u00a0How could we even begin to visualize for ourselves, say, Marco Polo\u2019s Hangzhou, in 13th century China, the greatest city of its time, with an estimated 1.5 million people? \u00a0VR can enable us to walk\u00a0around the city,\u00a0listen to soundscapes, look at where the bridges are positioned, watch entertainments taking place on the lakes, and understand how the city is laid out, when our own capacity to visualize from historical or\u00a0literary material\u00a0fails us, because the subjects are so distant in time and place from our everyday reality. \u00a0Even when they survive the centuries, some places are literally inaccessible today. \u00a0Sarah Kenderdine\u2019s 3D visualization-in-the-round of the Dun Huang caves, using animation and AR, enables students and researchers to experience Cave 220, now closed to visitors because of its fragility. \u00a0Because immersive\u00a0environments are data-driven creations, they are uniquely valuable cultural experiences that extend the\u00a0possibilities of knowing, and of experiencing the global past, in resource-rich ways. \u00a0They’re\u00a0not fantasy creations for purely recreational purposes, like movies and popular video games\u2014which are\u00a0entertaining and fun, and therefore useful too, but are imaginary, rather than data-driven, learning encounters.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

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What kinds of empathy might these experiences provoke?<\/b><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/b><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

If you have access to data-driven, re-created worlds that circumvent time and space, the sense of discovery and wonder in exploration, coupled with the intimacy and immediacy of your sensory experience, should conduce to the evolution of new kinds of empathy and increase intellectual sensitivity to cultures distant from your own quotidian reality. \u00a0If you can experience virtually how a woman lived, in a house or a town on the Swahili coast in the 15th century, you might better\u00a0understand how women\u00a0functioned in human\u00a0societies on the Swahili coast. \u00a0These sensory experiences are social, humanizing encounters of a new kind in the 21st century, inviting empathy on the part of the person undergoing the experience. \u00a0They are important ways to make the past live again, a global past—ignored too much in the West\u2014which can challenge some of the old, tired, received cliches in the West, like the claim that there was only one\u00a0industrial revolution, or only one\u00a0scientific\u00a0revolution, and these occurred in modern time in the West, or the claim that sub-Saharan Africa had little engagement with the world till colonization. \u00a0As the technologies improve, so will our human responses and empathic experiences.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

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What are the dangers of designing immersive experiences in cultures of which we are not a part?<\/b><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/b><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Cultural and contextual understanding is crucial. \u00a0If there are gaps in understanding, we run the risk of misrepresenting the cultures we visualize digitally and amplifying mistakes already committed by selective historiography (selective historiography that often coincides with foundational\u00a0historiography, I should add). We can mitigate the dangers by ensuring that our research into those cultures is robust and as complete as possible before progressing to the design phase.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

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What are the dangers of entering immersive experiences in bodies that are not our own?<\/b><\/div>\n
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The technologies we speak of are still in their infancy, so caveats at this stage would be speculative, perhaps premature. But we may argue that human existence is already an immersive experience — a biochemical brain residing in an external body that’s “not its own.” There will be more opportunities to gather data and conduct research as these sensory enhancement technologies mature, and as the experiences heighten and increase in realism — the point being that we have to push the boundaries before that can happen.<\/i><\/div>\n
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In sum, what are the promises and pitfalls of immersive environments for global medieval studies?<\/b><\/p>\n

Pitfalls: inadequate research and cultural sensitivity in preparation and design. Promise:\u00a0potentially, panoramic reconfiguration of how our entire\u00a0premodern past is studied, in media-rich, resource-rich, environments, in which the global does not have an ultimate horizon.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

September 27, 2017 In the context of her work with the Global Middle Ages Project and Medievalists of Color, I had the opportunity to ask Geraldine Heng (UT-Austin) about her perspectives on the use of video game environments for learning about global medieval cultures. —Lynn Ramey Virtual reality and immersive environments allow embodiment and perspective…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/games2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/games2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/games2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/games2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/games2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/games2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/games2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/129\/revisions\/131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/games2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/games2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}