Virtual Tours
Google Earth proves an effective platform for staging digital experiences of spatial sequences - a virtual tour.
Through a combination of bird's eye views of large spaces, like, say, a city, ground-level views of terrain with virtual models, and street-view captures, one can fashion quite compelling tours layered with rich amounts of information. The tours below result from collaboration with faculty in other academic departments within the College of Arts and Humanities. In some cases they served as translations of a class's end-of-semester experiences of their own physical tour and in others they were focus on an in-class lecture, a visualization beyond that of any powerpoint or prezi-fueled lecture. To view the files below it is necessary to install Google Earth on your computer (PC or Mac), free software that is available by clicking here.
Old Jerusalem and Its Sacred Spaces
This Google Earth tour was prepared with Dr. Matthew Suriano for a session in Spring 2013 in the Collaboratory of his course "Religions of the Ancient Near East." The tour, which is only lightly annotated, apart from descriptive placemark names, leads one on a tour from the Jaffa Gate, part of the old walled city, to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Christians believe Christ's body to have been interred, to the Dome of the Rock, the precint of which encompasses the Al-Aqsa Mosque and along which are the remains of the Western Wall of the Jewish Temple.
D.C. Latino Tour 2010
Take an electronic field trip on this Latino-themed, student-produced tour of Washington, D.C., commemorating landmarks, monuments, memorials and more of the Latino community in the United States. Based on the end-of-semester day-long tour researched, prepared and performed by students in Dr. Ana Patricia Rodriguez's course on Latino/Latina sites in Washington DC, this virtualization allowed visitors to the Collaboratory on Maryland Day 2011 to experience the richness of the students' voyage of discovery.