Author: Jeffrey Shellenberger
Each of the University of Pittsburgh’s Nationality Rooms is a small version of a museum. Everything inside them, from cabins full of assorted books and cultural artifacts to the walls themselves and the very wood those walls are made from, is meant to store and share the knowledge of a particular culture. However, these rooms are also classrooms, hosting thousands of students each since their construction decades ago. This dichotomy is best captured by the rooms’ desks, each built carefully to match the culture of their room but now marred by scratch marks, circular stains from water bottles, and many other signs of use and (occasionally) abuse. For my internship, I worked with Mona Wiley (Associate Director of the Nationality Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Programs), Daniel Kaple (Digital Creation Specialist for the University Library System), and Celeste Smith (Fellow Intern) to gather 3D scans of the various artifacts throughout the Nationality Rooms, for the purpose of displaying them online. We had access to two types of scanners: the Leo, a high-fidelity scanner which was limited to objects less than a foot in all dimensions; and the Spider, a scanner with about half the fidelity of the Leo but no limit to the size of the objects it could scan. The scans gathered by these would then be uploaded to Arctec Studio, which combines scans from different angles into one model that could be used for digital display. For long-term storage, these models have been, and are being, uploaded to Sketchfab on a University account.
While initially we attempted to capture a diverse range of artifacts, eventually we focused our scanning on two subjects: traditional outfits, Celeste’s focus, and classroom chairs, my focus. Working around the various constraints on our work (such as class use of the rooms, scanner availability, and our own competing work and school schedules), chairs emerged as an especially practicable object for us to access. We could take them out of the room, flip them several ways for scanning, and put them back without bothering anyone in there. Many rooms also had multiple different kinds of chairs, with those meant for students being more like desks and those meant for professors being larger versions without a desk arm. Some were unscannable because they were built into the walls or arranged as pews, but with about two kinds of chairs per room and thirty-one nationality rooms, there were still plenty to go through. By the end of my internship, we’d gotten through just about every room that was available: the Austrian, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Yugoslav rooms. As these digital assets are made available through the Nationality Rooms virtual tour app, they will help provide visitors an experience of the objects in these rooms when they are unavailable to see – and perhaps even help virtual visitors to imagine the experience of sitting on these infamously uncomfortable chairs!