The Virtual Viking Longship Project:
A Study in the Future of Liberal Arts Teaching and Research

This NEH-funded project explores and tests strategies for integrating and fairly compensating undergraduate student learning and labor in the development of long-term digital humanities research projects. Combining the strengths of two leading liberal arts colleges with the multidisciplinary affordances of virtual reality (VR) technologies, the project aims to create an immersive VR experience for visualizing the social and cultural roles of a Viking Age longship by forming a DH community of inquiry and practice that cultivates deep competencies in spatial computing within the context of a liberal arts education. Student co-authored outcomes will include:

(1) an open-source minimum viable product VR experience made in consultation with museum partners in the US and Europe;

(2) experience design document outlining future development;

(3) presentations on our findings at major DH and History conferences; and

(4) open-access article detailing the project’s strategies and recommended best practices.

More at the project site: https://virtualvikings.sites.grinnell.edu/
Project blog: https://virtualvikings.sites.grinnell.edu/blog-posts/

Collaborators:
David Neville, Digital Liberal Arts Specialist, Grinnell College, and Austin Mason, Director of Digital Arts & Humanities, Carleton College