Project Demo
Biographies
Duncan A. Buell is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina. He has written three books and more than fifty research papers in number theory, document and information retrieval, parallel algorithms, and computer architecture. He has recently turned to research areas in digital humanities, including critical interactives and text mining.
Heidi Rae Cooley is Assistant Professor of Media Arts at the University of South Carolina. Her manuscript, “Finding Augusta: Habit and Governance in the Digital Era,” considers how mobile technologies both instantiate norms for the governance of populations and constitute persons as expressive and socially connected subjects.
Abstract
Ghosts of the Horseshoe (Ghosts) is a “critical interactive” in the spirit of Mary Flanagan’s ”critical play” and Ian Bogost’s “procedural rhetoric.” Ghosts uses augmented reality (AR) to bring into view on mobile micro screens the largely unknown history of slavery that made materially possible the physical site of what is now the University of South Carolina. Based on the robust scholarship of history professor Dr. Bob Weyeneth and his students, Ghosts is the product of the authors’ work and that of their students enrolled in a combined course in the humanities and computer science. Ghosts uses GPS location tracking to trigger interactive “events” that incorporate audio and digital imagery. The goal is to change perceptions of the historic Horseshoe by provoking students, faculty, and visitors to see the site of the original campus through a different lens and to become aware of the institution’s complex history. When completed, Ghosts will include the history and digital reconstruction of “disappeared” outbuildings and slave quarters; the ghost presences of former faculty and students, who have left a record, and of the slaves whose presence is marked by an absence of records about them; and the Wall, built 1835-36 and which allegedly saved the campus from the fire that destroyed most of Columbia, South Carolina, in 1865. Ghosts will span the antebellum period during which the structures that populate the grounds of the Horseshoe were built (and sometimes rebuilt) and during which students regularly debated the subject of slavery itself and South Carolina’s economic dependence on slavery.