Hunt Library Offers Blasts to the Past

If it’s not quite time travel, it’s the closest to it you’ll experience anytime soon.

More importantly, the Virtual Paul’s Cross installation in the Teaching and Visualization Lab at the Hunt Library is a prime example of how innovative scholarship can combine simulation, display and audio technologies to invigorate teaching and research and push the boundaries of the digital humanities.

Launched via a media blitz last week, the Virtual Paul’s Cross project brings you into a virtual re-creation of the church yard outside St Paul’s Cathedral. The year is 1622 and you’ll hear the literary giant John Donne (actually a very authentic voice actor) deliver his famous Gunpowder Plot sermon.

The project is the work of English professor John Wall, architecture professor David Hill and John Schofield, the cathedral’s archeologist, as well as more than 50 other researchers, artists and technicians. Combining the talents of experts in literature, history, design, simulation engines, acoustics, linguistics and architecture, the Virtual Paul’s Cross project not only allows you to step back into the past— it presents a great model of the cross-disciplinary work that is becoming a hallmark of research at NC State.

To ensure that the university community has a chance to enjoy, learn from and be inspired by the project, Wall will provide demonstrations in the Hunt Library Teaching and Visualization Lab at the following times:

• Monday Nov. 25, 9–10 a.m.
• Tuesday Nov. 26, 4–5 p.m.
• Wednesday Dec. 4, 9–10 a.m.
• Wednesday Dec. 11, 9–10 a.m.

If you cannot visit in person, check out the News and Observer’s video or visit the project’s website. Read more about the Hunt Library, including Wall’s project, in Results magazine.