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Requests an NEH Digital Projects for the Public • Project Title: Exploring the Roots of Freedom: Augmented Reality Tour for Mitchelville South Carolina Gullah-Geechee Heritage Site • Institution: Florida Atlantic University, College of Arts & Letters, School of Communication & Multimedia Studies. • Project Director: Christopher Maraffi, [email protected] • Grant Program: Digital Projects for the Public: Discovery Grants Application Narrative A) Nature of the request Florida Atlantic University (FAU) requests an NEH Digital Projects for the Public Discovery grant in the amount of $30,000 to develop design documents for Exploring the Roots of Freedom: Augmented Reality Tour for Mitchelville South Carolina Gullah- Geechee Heritage Site, a transmedia project consisting of a site-specific augmented reality tour application, a portable augmented reality museum installation, and a 360- degree interactive web site. Augmented reality technology overlays interactive media on a live camera feed from a mobile device or a headset like the Magic Leap One or Microsoft HoloLens, so that virtual structures and figures appear to inhabit the surrounding environment. We have assembled an interdisciplinary team of digital media and humanities faculty from four universities, preservation institutions, and industry leaders in emerging technologies, to develop an engaging experiential learning application for visitors to an important site related to Reconstruction-era history and African American culture. Mitchelville was the first Freedman’s town in the United States during the Civil War, a central feature of the Port Royal Experiment in African American self-governance, and now a Gullah-Geechee heritage site on Hilton Head Island South Carolina. Our project is to create an augmented reality tour application that will immerse site visitors in Mitchelville’s rich history and culture. Tourists will be able to literally follow in the footsteps of figures from history, picking up virtual 3D artifacts to examine, and interact with historical personalities like Harriet Tubman, General Mitchel, and Robert Smalls. The augmented reality tour will feature Gullah-Geechee storytelling and dance performances to make the experience more culturally diverse and authentic for year- round visitors to the park. Our goal is to present Reconstruction history as both educational and entertaining for visitors to a heritage site, while digitally preserving its cultural assets for future generations, and improving attendance so the tours become self-sustaining. We are collaborating with History and African American Studies faculty from University of South Carolina Beaufort (USCB) and Coastal Carolina University (CCU), the Mitchelville Preservation Project, and Reconstruction National Monument sites in Beaufort County South Carolina like the Penn Center to develop the humanities content of this project. We plan to produce a basic self-guided augmented reality tour for mobile phones that will be freely downloadable on app stores, and a deluxe guided tour for small groups that will utilize Magic Leap headsets for a rental price of about $15 per visitor. Magic Leap headsets have the capabilities to spatially map the environment in ways that can’t be done by standard mobile devices, allowing us to augment the site with 3D content in a more believable way, while using the tour proceeds to update and maintain the site technology. The Mitchelville tour is a flagship project in a new educational partnership between FAU and Magic Leap, one of the world leaders in spatial computing technology, and who has offered to provide technical support for developing the paid tour app. We are also working with computer science faculty who specialize in interactive media research from North Carolina State University and University of South Carolina Beaufort, and who are also partnering with Magic Leap. Our Media, Technology, and Entertainment MFA faculty and graduate students will be using their multimedia production expertise to design the augmented reality experience, starting with preproduction concept art and storyboards, and a proof-of-concept for the technical approach. Although this project is on the cutting edge of emerging technologies, we have the interdisciplinary team of digital artists and technologists to successfully create a new way of experiencing and learning history in Mitchelville. To reach a wider audience and encourage people to visit the physical site, we will also explore creating a portable Mitchelville exhibit-installation that will demo some of the augmented reality tour scenes in a museum or gallery space. Since FAU multimedia and computer science faculty already partner with the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Discovery and Science (MODS), Daruma Tech, and Magic Leap to teach augmented reality to high school students in the MODS App-titude Internship program, we plan to have MODS summer school students contribute to the Mitchelville augmented reality museum exhibit. Ideally, we would like such an exhibit to travel widely to campuses, libraries, and museums around the country, such as the International African American Museum in Charleston. To distribute the content even further to the public, we plan to design a web site that will feature 360-degree video of the site, with some of the augmented reality tour content embedded in the media, with point-and-click documentary supplements and interactive timelines. We will be working with South Carolina Educational Television (SCETV) and USCB broadcasting faculty and students to produce educational video in the Beaufort SCETV production facility. B) Humanities content Historic Mitchelville was the first Freedman’s town in the US, even before the Emancipation Proclamation (Jan 1st 1863) during the Civil War, in Union occupied Hilton Head Island South Carolina. Founded by General Ormsby Mitchel in late 1862, the town was occupied and run by former coastal slaves collectively known today as Gullah-Geechee. Mitchelville, as a central feature of the Port Royal Experiment (1862- 65) in self-governance, was a significant milestone in African-American history. The Gullah-Geechee inhabitants of the town had unique styles of rhythmic dance, music, and storytelling, such as the Ring Shout, that became central to the Southern roots of African-American culture. Harriet Tubman, famed Underground Railroad freedom fighter, was assigned to the Port Royal area to serve as a nurse, and while on Hilton Head Island visited Mitchelville. After Reconstruction during the Jim Crow years in South Carolina at the end of the nineteenth century, Mitchelville became abandoned and forgotten as inhabitants migrated North to Charleston and beyond, but a century later renewed local research and archaeology are restoring its important legacy. Today, Mitchelville Freedom Park is a Gullah-Geechee heritage site being revived by the Mitchelville Preservation Project and Hilton Head Chamber of Commerce. The original site structures have long since vanished, but information outposts inform visitors of the park’s rich history, and annual Gullah-Geechee special events feature physical tours and storytelling performances. To develop the content of the tour, we will be meeting with humanities and digital media faculty from four universities, the Mitchelville Preservation Project, and preservationists from related Reconstruction National Monument sites. In this first exploratory phase, our objective is to develop a narrative for the Mitchelville tour that furthers the discussion started by recent critical documentaries like Reconstruction: America After the Civil War by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. on PBS, and Reconstruction 360 on South Carolina Educational Television web site. These new documentaries tell African-American stories that were actively suppressed in the South through Jim Crow-era revisionist history, and forgotten by much of the rest of the nation. Mitchelville and the Port Royal Experiment was one of those forgotten stories of African American self-governance that wasn’t fully covered in these other documentaries because it occurred before the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. This project is unique in several ways compared to other educational media on Reconstruction. We will look more closely at Coastal Carolina history from the years 1861-1865, especially related to Mitchelville, the Port Royal Experiment, and the story of Robert Smalls, a Gullah- Geechee born into slavery in Beaufort, who emancipated himself and family members when he commandeered a Confederate war ship to escape to Union occupied Hilton Head Island in early 1862, and who later became a war hero and US congressman. We will also take an aesthetic approach that puts a spotlight on Gullah-Geechee culture, the language, craft, music, and dance practices of the Freedman who inhabited Mitchelville, and whose coastal descendants still struggle for recognition of their impact on African American history. Also, where other educational media on the African American experience during Reconstruction was done through documentary video and interactive web sites, we will use spatial computing to design an augmented reality tour experience that is intended to create a theatrical liveness that surrounds and engages the visitor in ways not possible with video. Humanities Themes: Some themes we will explore in this discovery phase will be: • Theme1: As part of the Port Royal Experiment, Mitchelville and other Freedman institutions in the Sea Islands of Beaufort County South Carolina were ground zero for the first federal movement to give
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