Unit 9: Final Project Proposal

For the final project I have decide to research Victorian Spiritualism in America and build a multipage website using Weebly or Wix. While the website will be touching on the societal sand historical aspects, the focus will be on the mediums themselves. Ideally I will be able to find primary source advertisements from the Balch Library archives and the Library of Congress to name a few. 

Most of the secondary source websites fall into two different categories of being either a wall of text, or being so heavily biased on the subject matter. The goal will be to try and present the information as impartially as possible. And that does mean researching some of the mechanical engineering which went into rigging a room for a false seance.

A stretch goal, which will most likely not happen due to time restraints, would be to build a playable experience of a Victorian seance. The user would be able to select playing through as a medium, a guest or as a spirit and make choices to influence how the seance goes and the beliefs of all other parties involved. It would be a single player game, though it has the possibility to have multiple players filling the different roles.

The game would be built using a program called Unity and with a plugin called Fungus which is primarily used to make games that play like a dating simulator, or a choose your own adventure. While I do not have much experience myself using those tools, I do make the artwork for type of game  and have access to people who do. The game's artwork would require a different set of research to build upon the spiritualism research, mainly interior decorating trends and specific fashion choices.







Other ideas for this project:

• John Poultney Mill- using research from a previous class, presenting information about a small mill which was operational for only 2 years and exploring its connection to Noland's ferry. Research would have been continued to follow the property through the years. Most of the images would be historic maps, and GIS overlays as well as diagrams of how the mill was most likely made
• Manners of Colonial America- exploring the social nuances of the time period based on location, social class, and company. Information would be presented as a webpage with different pages for each social class. its crowning glory would be a playable game where a player uses the social graces they have learned to survive social situations. The first chapter would have been surviving a tea party, and there would be an option of playing as either the host or as a guest.
  This would have been a first installment of exploring the cultures of America. The overarching idea would be to see how different cultures have influenced what we think of as "American" today. So there would be research required on immigration numbers, and then each chapter would be made corresponding to the incoming populations' previous country. The ending question of every chapter would be something along the lines of  "Does your family do something like this?"
• American illustrators of the Golden Age- while there are plenty of pages like this, they are mainly focused on the art only. This would be a combination of history and art.
• Magical Elixirs: Collection Exploring the Quack medicine of the Victorian Age- building a gallery of the advertisements, possibly tracking where the ads were by location, seeing if there is any patterning. Basic historical research on the time period, societal causes to their rise and the ramifications following.