Building Medieval Worlds

This paper describes a course that I developed and co-taught with Dr. John Hopkins at Rice University in the spring of 2014, entitled “Virtual Reconstruction of Historic Cities.” In this course, student teams worked to digitally reconstruct ancient Roman and Swahili buildings. The final products followed from a semester-long engagement with research on these pasts, working with archaeological and textual sources, draft iterations of buildings, then digitally modelling the structures and building them into 3D worlds in open-source gaming software. In this paper, I describe the background to the course, how it was organized, and how the course unfolded.