In the academic year of 2019-2020, Dr Costas Papadopulous integrated the #dariahTeach course Remaking Material Culture in 3D into the Maastricht University MA in Media Studies: Digital Culture course Creating Digital Collections. Students were tasked with the objective of creating a three-dimensional model of two artefacts from the Nederlands MijnMuseum in Heerlen, The Netherlands. The goal of the course was to create a digital collection to explore and illuminate the rich mining history of The Netherlands.
The students first studied the material on #dariahTeach to familiarise themselves with the theoretical and practical knowledge of photogrammetry, emphasising the importance of making the history and the humanities more accessible. After a few testing rounds with objects around the university, the students were finally ready to select artefacts from the MijnMuseum, process the images through Agisoft Metashape, and upload the final models to SketchFab.
Overall, students gave positive feedback on the use of the Remaking Material Culture in 3D course as it provided them with “…having technical aspects explained in theory so that in class they could be applied in practice”.
In other aspects of site creation, the students utilised a design thinking approach (explored through IGNITE the previous term). The completed site, with the 50+ 3D models created by the class, is publicly available. Also, a video of the project is available from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences YouTube channel.
Below, you can see some of the models that were created: