Augmenting Home Base
Reflection — Explanation
Both of the images I choose to augment deal with the same topic. In 1937 Memorial Hall was still the UD Library. It was very small staffed, and the basement was pact to the brim with books since the space was too small for all the purposes it was used for. On July 5th, 1937 a massive rain storm hit Newark. Since it was Independence Day weekend there was a long weekend and the library was closed. There were reports that many buildings in the area had been flooded form the storm so William Lewis, one of the dedicated workers at the library, went to see if Memorial Hall had begun to flood. Though the night he worked to take books out of the library to save them from water damage. A lot of the work was done by Lewis on his own since it was late in the night and it was hours before people were able to come help. The basement of Memorial was flooded with one foot of rain water on the night of July 5th, 1937. At the time, one fourth of the total library collection was in the basement and one seventh of that was within five inches of the floor. Because of this there were a lot of damages to the book. The bill for rebinding ended up being $2600! There was no insurance money to be given, but luckily a generous anonymous donor paid the bill. I wanted to tell this story because I knew there was a interesting history of flooding in Memorial Hall and it wasn’t something Mrs. Gensel (the archives coordinator that came into class) talked about.
This is an image of William Lewis laying out books on the steps of Memorial Hall. The drying books filled the front and back steps and more! I wanted to use this image because it is very clear where it is taken, and it shows what Lewis looked like. This image worked very well with the HP Reveal app because I was able to line the image it choose to augment relatively easily using the columns as reference points.
This image is more of an info graphic. Instead of an image of the even I choose to make my own image to help people understand how high the water came up. When I decided to do this for one of the augmentations it highlighted the limitations of the HP Reveal app. Originally this image was a png, but since phones don’t work with pngs the app did not either. I was also disappointed that I couldn’t add text to the image inside the app. I had to use a separate app to create the full image you see above and then use it and the image has a white background instead of an invisible one like I originally pictured. It was also very hard to line up the drawing to an actual foot and imagine it will be hard to find since it’s on a random wall in the basement and it has to be at the perfect angle. While doing this I planned on taking the picture near an outlet to help with a reference point, but the app would not allow me to take a picture at any of them so instead it is on a random wall, but there is a flyer on the wall to help people find the image. Once they find the wall with the flyer they can find the image.
I think the app we used was very limited. In museums and other informational places, the applications they use allows them to use link and texts which I think is much more helpful. Which archival I find it very helpful and the app worked very well for my first image because my goal was just to help the viewer image what it would have been like if they had been in that spot-on July 6th, 1937. Therefore, I think AR works very well for archival purposes. Right now, the most common form of AR I see is snap chat filters. It is very limited, but it is expanding to museums and other informational purposes. I think in the future this will happen even more. During class someone talked about people augmenting a particular wall. This is a very creative use of AR and I hope to see more of this in the futur becaue it would give a lot of artists an unique and wonderful opportunity.
