The members of our group include Akweley Sai, Mason Lack, Kate Korb, and Max Southwell. The new tag for our group, to be used in blog posts hereon out, shall be Re-modeling Northfield High School.
We intend to create a digital reconstruction of the older Northfield High School building, which the Weits Creativity Center is built upon. The reconstruction will likely only include the exterior of the building as a 3D model. If possible, it may be fun or helpful to find some old building maps and georectify them.
We believe some of the online archives may be a good starting point for our research. We already have several websites – northfieldhistory.org, campushistory.sites.carleton.edu, and gouldguides.carleton.edu – which either mention or exclusively describe the old Northfield Highschool building. There may also be some physical records in either Gould Library or the Weitz Creativity Center that would be worth checking out. In either physical or digital records (on the Carleton site, the library, or elsewhere), it would be most helpful to find photos of every side of the old high school and, if possible, a layout of the building.
We will likely use Fusion or some other 3D modeling software such as Blender to construct the building, using the various photos we find as reference. We intend to make great use of a shared google drive where we can store our photos and other findings.
We hope to extrapolate the visual design of the different faces to the old high school building. With the nature of photogrammetry programs, we believe it will be almost impossible to get enough clean photographs (in the same photo style) to create a 3D model that way. Thus, it is up to us to build a model as neatly as we can by hand. If we find the building layout, we can also georectify such a map onto today’s map of the Weitz.
It will be most pertinent to gather all of these items into a single digital space; like many of the previous Hacking the Humanities final projects, a small website will do nicely. In such a website we can not only insert our 3D model and georectified building layout in accessible windows, we will also be able to gather the facts and other details about the old building in one space. Perhaps we can have multiple tabs for different pages depending on what the viewer wants to see: one for the 3D model and creation process, one for the building layout, and another for general facts and old photos of the high school matched with modern photos of the Weitz Creative Center.
For the timeline of this project, we propose this: most if not all of our textual (digital or physical) sources we intend to gather by the middle of eighth week. Ninth week we should have a georectified map, the beginnings of the website, and the 3D model nearly completed. By Tenth week we should have all of the proposed components finished and on display in the website. The website shall be shared with the class and we will have a brief presentation ready to show our work.
One DH model project that we took inspiration from was Willis Reconstructed. Though we probably will not be able to give a full panoramic tour of the old Northfield high school like Willis Reconstructed – due to the current lack of panoramic photos from when the building was intact – the building layout, 3D model, and facts of the school seems similarly doable.
Akweley’s Message
Out of all the buildings on campus, the Weitz is probably my favorite. I often discover new study spots and I go there practically every day of the week for class and band. With that, I know that there’s a lot of history to the Weitz. It used to be a middle school, but was transformed into the arts center for Carleton. Given that I’ve only experienced the Weitz from the renovated perspective, I’m interested in recreating what it used to look like before. I can get and understating of the previous building that pictures wouldn’t merely do. I believe that I can piece together what existed before and add-ons to develop a new appreciation for the Weitz, while honoring the old!
Mason’s Message
Weitz has become a special place for me. It is where I can separate myself from the crazy race of Carleton academics and focus on creating music and seeing how people express themselves through performance. For this reason, I would love to learn more about how this building came to be, and the history behind what used to be here. I cannot lie, the thought of attempting to model a whole school intimidates me, but it shall certainly be a worthwhile challenge to conquer.
From Max
I am quite interested in georeferencing and georectifying old maps. Though I quite enjoy photogrammetry, I am unsure if we will be able to use that technique for this project; so the next best thing, in my mind, is to build the exterior of the building from scratch. I believe the old Northfield high school would be an excellent object to focus my attention on given my interests spawned from this class. I also often enjoy seeing where the new and old buildings meet in the Weitz and I am curious to unravel how such structures fit together.
Kate’s Commentary
I spend a lot of time in the Weitz, probably too much time. It was one of the first buildings I toured as a prospective student. Something that really drew me in was the reused seats and benches that make up the wood paneling surrounding the elevator and a floating art installation over the hallway leading to the cinema. I’m really looking forward to diving deeper into this building and its predecessors. I look forward to digging through archives and records as well as modeling these previous structures!