Journal Article

New Technologies and the Practice of Early Modern Global History

Clulow, Adam

2019

Overview

The Virtual Angkor project, which was built from the ground up by a team of virtual history specialists, archaeologists, and historians, allows us to place students inside the Angkor Wat complex, to view the famous bas-reliefs firsthand, to sail down one of the hundreds of canals crisscrossing the city, to inspect a marketplace selling goods from across Southeast Asia and to watch as thousands of animated people and processions enter, exit, and circulate around the city. Once they slipped on the bulky virtual reality headsets, the experience was dizzying for students who jumped to move aside as processions passed, experienced vertigo as they looked down from elevated structures and became aware of the sun slowly rising in the sky above them. The product of almost a decade of intensive 3-D modelling, the Virtual Angkor project is a particularly striking example of technologically driven interactive history that looks close to the immersive historical worlds that many of us imagined as children. Other developments have been less visually arresting, building upon the promise of the internet and technology that has been widely available for decades now, but which represent no less of a sea change in the ways in which we can do research and engage with students. What follows is a personal overview of the developments and technologies that have had the greatest influence on my own practice as a teacher and student of early modern global history.

• Publisher: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers Inc,The University of Chicago Press,University of Chicago Press
• Subject: 16th century / Animation / Archaeology / College students / Connectivity / Early modern period / How are new technologies providing early modernists new opportunities for conduction better research, better pedagogies, and more global discourse? / Virtual reality