I had one thought, and wasn’t sure if it crossed your mind but I thought I’d spell it out. The way the project is described it sounds like you are producing a somewhat interactive exhibit. That is, the elements that your class would be learning how to reconstruct in virtual space (i.e., architecture, sound, and population) would allow you to recreate in considerable detail a place like early 20th century Johannesburg.

I’m wondering if you can take the concept of interactivity further. What if the virtual space was not just an exhibit, but rather, a game in which players could create avatars, exist in the virtual space and otherwise gain a fuller “experiential” knowledge of life in the past? The elements you identify are essential elements of a historical space, I don’t deny that, but I wonder if in the gaming context they would fall more into the background.

In contrast, how might you research/recreate the historical experience of living under a particular political ideology? Let me move this from apartheid to an area I know a bit better. When I was taking Pieter Judson’s Fascist Europe seminar I remember learning a lot about the experience of totalitarianism and the so-called atomisation of everyday life. Now, imagine a game whose code/rules recreated similar structures of governance. These in turn would affect how the characters in the game would live and interact–and that experience might be very informative. In a way this is not that different from the experience you get from reading first-person literature (I’m thinking about the Diary of Anne Frank), in that by identifying with a first-person narrator we do transport ourselves into a version of a historical past. But virtual space is different, and that’s something to talk about as well.

Most of all, I’m sure that the idea of “playing” a Jew would raise all sorts of interesting historiographical questions for you to talk about.

And yes, I agree, interdisciplinarity is pretty great.

I also couldn’t even read the description of the class because it sounded SO BORING.

Come on Tim. Pander to us! We’re lazy and were raised on television. Call it Queer Eye for the Primary Text; you’ll be beating them off with a stick.

This course sounds great. Specifically, I know it’s just one example, but I didn’t realize there was a meeting like that between historical linguistics and history. Wouldn’t it be great if you got people who had previously or were currently taking this and Sean Crist’s course in that (or if not, maybe he would be willing to advise people anyway)? The methods in his course are all about how to figure out the phonology of a language from the past. His focus is more on languages that we would have less information about than something as modern as 19th century, but I’m sure that it would be useful, along with dialectology, sociolinguistics… After figuring out what the language really looked like at that time, finding a way to turn that work into something practical would be just as interesting. Maybe it’s possible to get a speaker of the modern language to learn enough of the phonology (this is the hardest part, I think) to make correct utterances for you? Or perhaps it could be treated as a problem in speech synthesis? Or some combination. Cool stuff. Interdisciplinarity is great.

I’m very undecided about whether to try this again or not.

On the other hand, given the choice between this and the History of the Future, I know what I’d like to take….