Virtual worlds for arts and humanities research
I invested this past weekend in an interesting workshop sponsored by the Federation of American Scientists and the Mellon Foundation, and hosted at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. This was an event that lived up to its billing as a gathering of leading scholars and technologists exploring the use of virtual worlds technologies for research in the humanities. As the first of three such events, this was a great success in terms of stimulating good questions and dialog. From my point of view, the issues raised here transcend the humanities, but the focus on humanities puts an interesting perspective on the subject.
Because not all the participants were humanities scholars, part of the time was spent in establishing a basic definition of the intellectual territory. Humanities generally consists of the study of human history, language and literature, philosophy and religion, law, and visual and performing arts including archeology. There was an argument that humanities is not the performance of these specialties but rather the study of them, and yet it is possible to find, e.g., the drama department as part of the humanities division in a university.
In any event, the key was the role that virtual worlds could play in research, either as a tool for researchers, or as a way to frame important research questions. A significant part of the discussion was about the use of VW as a kind of publication mechanism. This led to concerns of archiving and scholarly citations. The latter concern echoed a talk at the New Media Consortium (NMC) Symposium on the Evolution of Communication on the topic of virtual citations.
From my perspective, the most interesting issues broke down along two dimensions. One is about manner of use of virtual worlds, and the other is about the focus of humanities research.
What I mean by the manner of use of virtual worlds is that there seemed to be a significant split at the workshop between those who use three-dimensional technology as a way of creating and displaying artifacts (archaeological sites, art works, etc.) and those who use 3D VW technology in various interactive ways.
The artifactual use of VW for artifacts may be usefully classified along some interesting dimensions. Artifacts modeled in VW may be either utilitarian (housing, burial sites, cooking implements), aesthetic (cave paintings, statuary), or both (tapestries, decorated pottery). Such artifacts may be exemplars from the past or ancient cultures, present or future, such as 3D architectural renderings of future buildings that can be explored by avatars. Artifacts in virtual worlds can be virtual renderings of real world objects (most of what is mentioned above) or purely fanciful creations that can only exist in virtual worlds. These fanciful creations may be utilitarian (affordances for avatars) or aesthetic (purely virtual artistic creations).
The interactive aspect further breaks down, in my mind, into performance, simulation, and collaboration.
- By performance I mean things like Second Life ballet, or the ZeroG Sky Dancers.
- By simulation I refer to any number of AI robotics in virtual worlds, as well as real world feeds that cause activities to occur in a virtual world (such as IBM’s simulations of Grand Slam tennis matches in real time in Second life).
- By collaboration I am talking about joint work of multiple people working together partially or completely in a virtual world environment. This can include formal and informal meetings, conferences and symposiums, and joint development of intellectual content.
As can be seen, this consideration of manner of use of virtual worlds is quite multidimensional, so that the usage by by humanities disciplines can be quite varied.
By focus of research I am thinking of mode of engagement with virtual worlds by researchers, as well as the kinds of research questions being addressed.
The mode of engagement relates to whether research simply uses VW technologies, or the research occurs within a virtual world, or virtual world phenomena are the subject of the research.
- An example of research that uses VW would be something like a virtual replica of an archaeological site, where researches can jointly create and critique the aspects of the site as rendered in a 3D form.
- Research within a virtual world indicates that a distributed team of humanities researchers interact with each other, completely or partially supported by a virtual collaborative environment. This differs from the collaborative point above only by virtue of the fact that the previous collaboration would be the subject of humanities research, while in this case we’re thinking about methods of researchers themselves.
- Research about virtual worlds is humanities research that takes the emergence of humanistic behavior (plastic and perming arts, legal issues, language, philosophical manifestations, etc.) as phenomena worthy of research in their own right. Here is a very nice compendium of worthy subjects of such research, for starters.
A few examples of the kinds of research questions that arts and humanities research can pursue include:
- How are things being done in virtual worlds?
- What impact or implications does virtual world behavior have for real-world institutions and cultures?
- Are there new concepts being differentiated through the virtual worlds phenomena?
- Are there new syntheses of concepts that occur because of the capabilities of virtual worlds. An example of this kind of research question is the apparent possibility of merging the categories of libraries, museums and educational events, which is being explored in an upcoming conference.
The foregoing discussion sets up a set of categories of research and the subjects of research that can be seen to potentially form a rather complex analytic matrix. This obviously becomes much more complex when various humanities disciplines, and multidisciplinary subjects are overlaid upon the matrix. This is not intended to be daunting or obfuscatory, but rather it is meant to be a joyful recognition of the richness of this new universe that is coming into being at this important historical moment. It is also intended to be a useful perspective on how virtual worlds can enrich the research agendas of disciplines outside the humanities as well.
This is quite enough for one blog posting, but I thought I would just quickly mention that:
- Once again it was great fun to encounter the human (molecular avatar) form of people who I have previoulsy only known and interacted with in virtual form. In this case it was great to meet Barbara Galik (Puglet Dancer) and Terry Bubois (Tab Scott)!
- I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the new toy/tool (Cobalt) announced Julian Lombardi of the Duke University partnership with Open Croquet.
- It was wonderful to see the large gathering when this workshop group joined a reception hosted by the Metaverse U event that was occurring simultaneously, sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Lab.
February 20th, 2008 20:01
This is serious research. I should have guessed that more interesting views on virtual worlds might have come from researchers deep in the humanities … as opposed to those who come first from technology.
I’m afraid to ask the age distribution of the researchers, i.e. if you were one of the few with grey hairs, there!
February 21st, 2008 05:45
No problem, David — good mix of hair colors and other demographic factors! I agree, this is very exciting, and such a great opportunity for me to meet such an eclectic and interesting group of people.