John Schofield (St Paul's Cathedral) and John Wall (North Carolina State University), Virtual St Paul's Cathedral and Paul's Cross (http://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/), Digital History Seminar, IHR, 18 February 2014
Virtual Paul's Cross Project. NEH funded. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlIgAXL-u7I
Visual and acoustic.
Moves audience into the model. Giving a flavour of an event which took place in a space that no longer exists (or at least only in engravings).
- good for teaching: helps people understand the sermon as a thing which unfolded over real time, as opposed to existed on a piece of paper.
Schofield
- Pre-Wren cathedral. Medieval St Paul's.
- Know something about it from engravings, closest pre-fire by Holler, but engravings in monochrome.
- Problem of many centuries of architecture: need to strip some work off to get to how it looked in 1622.
- Contruction of little parts, with the aim to bringing them together to make a whole.
- Colour a problem.
Wall
- Interesting contrast between hard data (plans) and subjective drawings, etchings, guessings.
- Bringing in time and weather to add sense of reality.
- Reconstruction of early modern London sermon experience. Sermon can then be heard from 8 different positions in the churchyard and with size of crowd modelled http://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/experience/
- Modelling suggests arrangment of the space at Paul's Cross ensured that people could hear an unamplified voice pretty well.
- Finding that if the pace of speech was slow, people could hear even better. Fast speech lost in the reverberations.
- Tolling of the bell every 15 minutes a clear interference: did preachers anticipate the bell? Structure their sermons around the bell timing?
- all Donne would have had was an hour-glass.
- Future plans to reconstruct the interior of the Cathedral and model acoustics in there.
- Problem of disagregating where model based on hard data and based on approximation.
- Big shift in thinking: now starting to see the text a memorial of a thing that happened.
- New realtionship between text, atmosphere, audience, speaker, time emerge by thinking through the sermon as a live thing.
- Why did people gather for over two hours on Sundays to listen to a sermon they couldn't always hear that well?
- Uses a manuscript at the British Library http://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/donnes-gunpowder-day-sermon-ms-royal-17-b-xx-2/
- Sustainability: humbling reality is that things change. Take a huge effort to save more than the underlying data, models, documentation.
- How do we ensure this looks good for as long as possible?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
