Embodying Sophiatown | Mediating Multivocal Representations of Cultural Heritages in Virtual Reality
Izak Frederik Potgieter, Embodying Sophiatown | Mediating Multivocal Representations of Cultural Heritages in Virtual Reality
Winner - University of Johannesburg VYT local competition (2024)
Virtual reality (VR) as a medium for representing cultural heritage (CH) seldomly uses ethnographic sources as data for the representation of CH in VR. This has contributed to a geographic bias favouring the creation of CH in VR projects in the West, where CH sites tend to be protected and physically intact more often. The preference for physical sources over non-physical data sources, such as ethnographic sources, also contribute to a bias towards the representation of tangible CH over intangible CH. This results in CH in VR representations that focus on the visual appearance of objects and sites. This focus overlooks the practices, representations, expressions and knowledge inherent in the CH. This research uses constructivist grounded theory to analyse and extract valid data from ethnographic sources for the representation of CH in VR. Sophiatown in Johannesburg, South Africa is used as a case study to demonstrate the extraction and use of valid data from ethnographic sources, specifically interviews, for use in the representation of CH in VR. The physical CH site of Sophiatown has almost entirely been destroyed by the apartheid regime. Therefore, any representation of it in VR cannot rely on physical sources alone and ethnographic sources become essential to its representation. In the prevailing paradigm, favouring the physical aspects of CH and objective sources, a site such as Sophiatown is essentially unrepresentable. By laying out a technique for the extraction of valid data from ethnographic sources, CH in VR representations may be constructed with more data potentially at their disposal. This may enable the representation of CH that have been difficult to represent from tangible sources alone, such CH is often found in the global south. By practically demonstrating how valid data can be extracted from ethnographic sources, this research may also enable richer representations of CH in VR as ethnographic data and the intangible CH often inherent in ethnographic accounts may be considered and included into CH in VR representations using the framework laid out by this research. There is no CH that does not also have intangible aspects to it. Ethnographic data can be a rich window into the intangible aspects of CH, their use in the representation of CH in VR may lead to richer and more multi-dimensional representations of CH. References.
Transcript: Now, this research is focused on cultural heritage represented in virtual reality. Specifically looking at Sophiatown in Johannesburg, South Africa. A demolished neighbourhood and looking at how we can use interviews from people who lived there to represent the place.
Now, a lot of these cultural heritage and VR representations look at sites that already exist. This created a bias towards well preserved sites, which is specifically a Eurocentric bias. It has also created a bias for the preference to represent tangible aspects of heritage over intangible aspects.
If I told you what my childhood home looked like, pictured here, and you never had this picture, how could you reconstruct what this place looked like from oral accounts alone? So, we’ve had over 4 hours of interviews of people who used to live in Sophiatown. Coding everything they said, identifying places and events. Building a network out of that. A very large network indeed. And from it we’ve been able to recreate and reproduce and cross-reference a lot of these spaces to rebuild a plausible representation of Sophiatown.
