Publishing Enhanced, Interactive 3D Content for Research and Pedagogy

Elaine Sullivan
History
UC Santa Cruz

Three-dimensional content has yet to be fully integrated into Humanities scholarship. Primarily, this is a consequence of the difficulties researchers face in creating three-dimensional content with embedded academic citations, distributing the content, and access for others on no-cost platforms for viewing and interacting with the created models. This working group tested one new mechanism for creating and publishing academic three-dimensional content, utilizing information from an existing modeling project, Digital Karnak.The recent release of the VSim prototype, new NEH-funded software to facilitate educational use of academically generated three-dimensional content, allows three-dimensional projects such as Digital Karnak to be annotated, shared, and viewed in real-time by researchers and students. The collaboration resulted in  publishing the Digital Karnak model using Vsim through the digital scholarly publisher Anvil Academic and provided a test case for others ready to integrate three-dimensional content into their research and publications.