Research Fellowship
As of January 2022, I have been a research fellow with the Humanities Edge Program and have been working alongside Dr. Lindsey Maxwell, Assistant Teaching Professor in History.
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The goal of the fellowship is to aid Dr. Maxwell in a digital humanities project that will utilize web-based Virtual Reality (VR) technology to reconstruct a building from 1950s Havana, Cuba within that three-dimensional atmosphere. This will allow virtual visitors to engage in historical conversation and see Cuba as it was in the 1950s.
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Unfortunately, I am unable to showcase most of the images that I had the opportunity to scan due to copyright laws. Thankfully, since we are simply referencing the images for the project, copyright is not an issue.
My Role
My first and main task is to find and scan photographs of various buildings in Havana from the 1950s. Our initial focus was to use the resources from FIU's Special Collection. After sifting through countless images and documentation, we narrowed our options down to three buildings: the Havana Cathedral, El Tropicana Night Club, and the Hotel Nacional de Cuba.
Next Steps
Now that I have finished scanning all of the materials available to us through the Special Collection, I will search for more images within the University of Miami's collections as well as other sources such as The Wolfsonian-FIU. Once we have finalized which building we will be recreating in a three-dimensional modeling program, we will work collaboratively to ensure the accuracy of the architecture.
