Virtual Paul’s Cross Project goal seems to be creating a multi-dimensional experience of Preacher John Donne’s sermon for Gunpowder Day. The website uses 3-D models of the church grounds, descriptions of the weather, acoustics, and social environment, as well as recreations of the actual speech to create an all encompassing virtual experience.
The sources used can be partially found within the work cited tab. The primary sources listed are the actual manuscripts from the speech and records from the Church of England. The secondary sources include various works on John Donne and 17th century England. Actual venues are also included in as a source in addition to another very broad category entitled setting, which is broken down into subcategories. The broad array of sources that includes everything from almanacs to books on Shakespeare’s Theatre provides the context to a very the specific event.
While a many of the sources were clearly laid out, what was more difficult to find was how they were able to get the recordings of the sermon and how they built their website. Because there was no information on either, I’d assume that the recordings were original recreations and the website was either built from scratch or through a framework similar to wordpress.
The process used in this project was creating a structured website that features various components and background context. A lot of the process seems to involve digital architectural tools to create sketches of the church grounds as well as providing the acoustic quality information in spaces that no longer exist. Some video editing tools must have also been used to show the building models as video links. Other possible processes could include audio tools to recreate the sermons and the simulated ambient sound, as well as transcription could of been used to present John Donne’s sermon. The Process of research is also very apparent in the background information found about the setting, culture, and John Donne himself.
The project was presented in a website with clear and simple category tabs, possibly as to not overwhelm if it had a database or a encyclopedia list format. All imagery was embedded in scroll down posts, as opposed to a grouped gallery view. I’m not entirely sure why they chose to present them in that way. Possibly to remain consistent with all the other categories of information that didn’t focus on models. Overall each separate web page within the site had a manageable amount of information on it.
Overall I thought this project was very informative, user friendly, and successful in it’s goal in taking the website visitor as much back in time as possible with accessible information. My only complaint is that regardless of all the context provided in this project, the actual event, Gunpowder day, is not explained in a succinct way. I would probably have to google search is separately to find out what the day was about.