The Making of the Digital Racial Geography Tour
Celeste Henery
Dr. Gordon is often asked: How did this tour start and how was it digitized? As the description below explains The Racial Geography Tour began, about a decade ago, as a walking tour of The University of Texas at Austin’s campus. The digitization of the tour occurred in 2019. The digitization process was a collaboration with the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services (LAITS). Dr. Gordon and I worked on the research and content writing for the website and the LAITS team brought the whole site to life. Below you will find summaries written from the vantage of the leads from every area of the project: Academic and content development on Dr. Gordon and my end, Production, Web Development, Visual Design, and Audio. Each summary speaks to the tasks undertaken by each team. The overlap in narratives attest to the collaborative nature of this project. By drawing together the varied voices and labors, this narrative history helps to inform users about the detailed collaborative process behind such a digital scholarly undertaking.
I. How the Walking Tour Went Digital
The Racial Geography Tour began as a walking tour of The University of Texas at Austin’s campus. What began as lectures about UT’s Black history turned into a more sustained research project about the broader racial history of the University—an approach less taken. Controversies around the Confederate statues that once lined UT’s iconic South Mall were key sites to explore the intersection of the physical and geographical campus with its racial history. This physical articulation became a framework for examining other parts of UT’s campus and history and thus, the impetus for the public history provided in the walking tour.
Interpreting this history was far from a linear process. Over many years, Dr. Gordon researched parts of the campus through books, archives, conversations, and the conventional histories of UT. To address questions about the racial history of the institution required cobbling together research from architectural design plans to newspaper articles, to name but a few, in order to answer questions about the institution and its physical development. It began organically and continues as a living research project.
Although the makings of the tour began in the early 2000s, Dr. Gordon started consistently giving the walking tour around 2010. By 2017 the demand for the formalized tour had increased. Asha Thompson, the Electronic Publishing Specialist for the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, was assisting Dr. Gordon to book and publicize the walking tour. Given the increase in requests, she suggested that a digital version be made. Thompson reasoned that such a platform would not only help to meet the demand but also make it accessible remotely. She reached out to the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services (LAITS) and initiated the collaboration. They put together a team of designers, a web developer, a production team and students who assisted in each of these domains. We were able to begin work immediately with financial support of a Media Production Grant from the Media Humanities Project (UT) and a Vice President for Research Grant (UT). LAITS also invested countless hours into bringing this on-line project to life.
Content Development
The first concrete act was to have production team members take Dr. Gordon’s tour. From that experience, production team members suggested using 360° video as a way to make the digital tour interactive. The team accompanied Dr. Gordon to shoot footage at different points along the walking tour. These videos captured visuals, including buildings and monuments, pertinent to the narration of the tour, and those sites became eighteen digital tour stops (including the concluding segment).
To accompany the video footage, Dr. Gordon recorded a narrated version of the tour to create a transcript. Each segment of the transcript was edited for clarity and then re-recorded to join with the video footage. Using the narrated script, the production team then went to work to select historical images that would visually animate Dr. Gordon’s narrative and augment the user’s experience. One of the challenges was to bring the dynamic and interactive quality of the walking tour into the digital form. The production team used images and visual effects to simulate changes in the environment—such as the statues appearing and disappearing— and thus enhance the experience of the user. Furthermore, these effects were developed to help participants see how past ideas were built into the physical environment of the University. Creating each segment was a process of determining the imagery, timing, and sequencing in service of effective storytelling.
In addition to creating narrated segments to the tour, we worked with the team to develop an introductory video as well as a short documentary as part of the supplementary materials for one segment. Catherine Wetmore took the lead on the documentary. To support the scholarly integrity of the work, we augmented most segments with a supplementary essay designed to provide additional historical contextual information and analysis related to subjects discussed in the respective tour segment. These essays were enhanced by historical photographs we retrieved most from the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, as well as other digital photographic archives. Working with these images also included requesting and receiving permissions from the archives, as well as educating ourself about fair-use. Bibliographies were compiled for each essay, as well as the entire site, to help facilitate users’ own research and support the tour as a pedagogical resource.
The building of the website happened rather organically and co-evolved with the walking tour. As the walking tour changed during the creation of the digital tour, the digital tour also grew to reflect those changes.
Tour Founder and Narrator: Edmund T. Gordon
Research Associate and Project Coordinator: Celeste Henery
Electronic Publishing Specialist: Asha Thompson
Business Consultant (LAITS): Daniel Garza
II. The Making of UT Austin’s Racial Geography Tour
Kelly Webster
Dr. Edmund Gordon first came to the Liberal Arts ITS department with an idea to make his Racial Geography Tour virtually accessible online to everyone. Our department specialized in creating various types of videos for the University, and was very familiar with capturing footage and combining it with graphics or images. This pairing was the initial idea Daniel Garza proposed, and what I had in mind when I came in for my first meeting about the project.
After I learned more about the significance of Dr. Gordon’s tour for the University and city of Austin, our team realized that we had a real opportunity to create something special—something more immersive that you actually feel rather than just see. Our department was also unique in that we employed students to assist in the video-making process, and one of our students, Heather Finnegan, was learning the game development program Unity at the time. We thought it would be cool to create a 360° virtual tour, where the viewer can see the entire world around them with Dr. Gordon’s voice directing the tour. We discussed this idea further with Dr. Gordon and the team, and decided it was something to try out. What we really liked about the idea was that it actually placed the viewer in a particular location on campus, and by using video rather than just images, they would be able to see the campus in real time and feel what it was like to be there. There would be students walking around them, sounds from the campus combined with Dr. Gordon’s voiceover telling the story of each stop. We felt this type of experience might best convey virtually the impact of the walking tour; and, it was a creative and technical challenge that we were excited to meet.
We did a couple tests, and Heather did her best to bring the footage into Adobe Photoshop, then into Unity but we still had some trouble with this process. It was a little outside of our wheelhouse. Catherine Wetmore was our post-production specialist at the time, so we enlisted her help for more ideas. We decided to ditch Unity, and just work in After Effects via a plugin that had JUST become available called Mettle. Using this program, we would be able to assemble, edit, and add images, text, and graphics into the 360° footage to create a more visually engaging experience. We also started learning about gamified user interaction, and how we could use certain tools and icons to help the audience look where we want them to when given free rein inside the 360° video. As video makers, what was enlightening about this development process was the ability to create a medium where the viewer chooses their own adventure. We were not creating a single view, but rather an entire world in each segment, and there was so much to consider and play around with in each space. We realized immediately that we would have to enlist the help of several departments to successfully achieve what we needed, and the team we brought together was able to bring something new and exciting into the project.
Tech Research
We knew for a 360° video we would need to acquire a new 360° camera. We started testing with a Kodak version that our studio tech manager Bryce Seifert owned, and did some initial recording runs around campus. It worked well but it required further manipulation in Photoshop to get a seamless video—something that was going to take far too long for the 17 tour stops we needed to create. After research and viewing so many 360° example videos for a couple weeks, Catherine Wetmore and I decided on the Samsung Gear 360° camera. This was a high quality yet affordable option that came with software that would “auto-stich” the footage, meaning you would not need to manually put the two fish-eyed videos together. It also came with an app that could wirelessly connect to an iPhone. This provided us a viewfinder when setting up the camera on location, and also the ability to adjust camera settings according to the conditions (for example, we would turn the ISO down on very sunny days). The workflow became quite effortless with this camera, as we could view the footage about 5 minutes after we connected the device to the computer. We had students log and organize the footage, where we would review it and decide if we needed a retake due to technical or environmental conditions, or a subject that was too distracting in the video. For example, construction around campus was a significant obstacle, and sometimes we would try and wait a couple months to re-shoot a stop if it was too distracting.
We also realized that the footage looked best when there were partial clouds in the sky. If there were no clouds, we would sometimes get a “blown out” image or glare on the stitch line which looked glitchy. If it was overcast, the footage looked too dark. We paid attention to the forecast to plan when we would go out and record tour stops.
Another issue we ran into was making sure people didn’t interact with the camera during recording sessions, and making sure we weren’t seen in it. With 360° video, there is nowhere to hide—everything can be seen in the shot. Catherine developed a system where she would attach the camera to a tiny tripod, frame it up to get exactly what we needed by checking with the viewfinder, and hit record and run around the corner or behind a tree, somewhere out of sight. It did look a little funny to have a little camera on a tripod set up all by itself in the middle of campus, unmanned. On busy days, there would be students walking up to it and checking it out, sometimes touching it or looking directly into the lens. We started to create schedules around times when there would be less foot traffic in the area for this reason. We also tried to utilize holidays and summer schedules as we knew there would be less students on campus during those times. Eventually, we trained the student employees to help with this process, and were able to get all of the locations recorded in the best conditions.
Story Research
Catherine and I took Dr. Gordon’s tour, and listened to the audio track he recorded at our studio thoroughly. We both became deeply connected to this project, and really understood the value of creating an authentic visual experience with the historical information Dr. Gordon had researched and brought together. We researched videos that mixed current footage with historical photographs to get an idea for the look, and worked closely with Celeste Henery from the African and African Diaspora Studies Department on research and design development to ensure our visuals and context were historically accurate. Working at the University was extremely beneficial, as we had access to wonderful resources like UT’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. There, we were able to sort through old yearbooks, photographs, newspaper articles, and academic journals to find supporting imagery for Dr. Gordon’s research.
We took photographs inside the center and brought them back to our editing lab and cleaned them up in Photoshop. We also worked with the Austin History Center, The Portal to Texas History, and Perry-Castaneda Library for digital archival assets. The amount I discovered and learned doing this process was incredibly rewarding and eye-opening. I have to admit: it was all I talked about with colleagues, family, and friends the whole time I was working on the project.
Catherine is an incredible Photoshop and After Effects artist, and she developed the process of cutting out the photos and creatively placing them within the footage. It was breathtaking seeing how the image would fade up and fit perfectly in the space it was set in, like we were actually looking back into history. We worked together with Suloni Robertson and her design team to create custom graphics that could be inserted to enhance the experience. This included graphics such as little hands that would point in the direction for the viewer to look if an image was about to appear and a compass which both hid the tripod and provided an additional tool to assist the audience in identifying their geographical location in relation to the stop. Every design was motivated by branding and historical context of the project, and there would be many rounds of revisions for us to make sure we got the tone exactly how we wanted it. Catherine also trained several of our more advanced student employees on this image implementation process, which provided us with an ample workforce to add more imagery into every stop. Using various spreadsheets, carefully organized folders, and itemized file directories, we developed an efficient workflow to create each tour stop consistently. We were also careful to keep the images organized so we could create an accurate credit page and bibliography for the Briscoe Center, archival libraries, and all the donors that generously offered their resources to be used in this project.
We also decided that the website would need an introduction video for viewers to have a framework for the tour and more context for what they were about to embark on. Catherine took the lead on putting this together, and did a stunning job of capturing the enormity of the project and supplying incredible archival footage to create an emotional reaction to this history lesson.
Website Design and User Experience with Stacy Vlasits
The Liberal Arts ITS department has an internal web development and graphic design team that had previously created numerous immersive projects over the years. We worked with Suloni Robertson and her student design and web development employees to create a cohesive web design that would fit in with the branding of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department and historical context of the work. We enlisted the web-development skills of Stacy Vlasits, who is a Senior Software Developer in the department, and had previously worked on several successful projects that combined interactive artwork with academic research. Both Suloni and Stacy were pivotal to this project, as they understood how to integrate web design and UI to create the experience we had envisioned and planned for. I got so much insight out of sitting in those design sessions with Suloni, Stacy, Celeste, Dr. Gordon, and Catherine going over exactly how the site would look and be experienced by the viewers. You really have to think about how every button, layout, and click will be perceived. It’s quite amazing how much goes into that process, and we were lucky to have such a knowledgeable and creative team to collaborate together on this project.
One of the main challenges we encountered from the video side was the media player itself. It seemed that all 3rd party media players we were hoping to use just wouldn’t work for this specific experience, either because they didn’t play 360° video correctly, required specific browsers that could limit the accessibility for some users, or wouldn’t comply with our University security requirements. Luckily, since our department already had a large focus on online learning, we had proprietary players created by our development team that Stacy was able to configure into the site he built to play the videos properly. Catherine and I conducted various rounds of video formatting tests to figure out what would play the best, and provide the highest quality video without overloading the system. I remember going through many, many different export settings before we finally landed on the correct bit depth and output settings that worked with Stacy’s player. Quite a learning experience for system configuration and video setting requirements!
Using Students & Utilizing UT’s Resources
Being able to utilize the University’s many libraries, museums, and archives for this project was essential. Not only were we able to find a vast amount of supporting visual assets, but every employee that guided us through their libraries and helped find materials became invested in the project as well—everyone wanted to be a part of it! Dr. Gordon’s tours were already well-known experience for many visitors, students, staff, and faculty already. Being able to bring that work to a larger audience was profound. It became obvious that this project was necessary for the community at large, and what we were working on would have a lasting impact for the University. I think everyone felt that energy and wanted to be a part of it.
We were able to enlist the help of student employees along every facet of this project. From audio recording and mixing, 360° video recording and post production, to web design and development. We had students helping us at the Briscoe Center, and also assisting with the PR push we needed when it was released. I sensed the students got much out of this project, way more than their usual projects involving editing videos together. We would often discuss and reflect on the subject matter together, which would bring up personal stories and experiences. To say we learned something and were moved to action would be an understatement, and I believe everyone involved was motivated to get the word out about what they had learned from Dr. Gordon’s tour. I’m happy that we were able to both teach new technical skills to these students as well as enlighten them on this history of their school.
Working together with students, faculty, and staff from across campus was truly a rewarding experience. Being able to bring LAITS together with Dr. Gordon’s team to actualize and achieve the vision has been a highlight of my career. I love hearing about it on the news, and seeing it shared in circles outside of the University. It makes me hope that more Universities will see this work and be moved to look into their own past and confront their racial histories, generating discussion and action on how to address them.
Producer: Kelly Webster
Post-Production Supervisor: Catherine Wetmore
Assistant Editors: Victor Maestas, Ian Gibson, Natalie Roberts, Gladys Serafin, JP Hite, Aaron Chavez
Location Filming: Catherine Wetmore, Peter Northrop, Scott Morgan, JP Hite, Ian Gibson
Additional Support: Heather Finnegan, Hannah Barker, Bryce Seifert
III. Visual Design
Suloni Robertson, Valerie Tran
The LAITS Student Technology Assistants (STAs), with the guidance of Suloni Robertson, worked closely with Dr. Gordon to create a unique aesthetic for the web-based experience of the Racial Geography Tour. They determined what the website would look like and how the visitor would navigate it. The website needed to enhance the original in-person walking tour of the UT campus and the students were tasked to create the visual plan for this interactive website. Using their knowledge of User Interface Design, the team addressed requirements such as achieving appropriate visual impact, and designing the navigation so that visitors could easily make their way around the sections of the website.
Jac Alford and Anna Xu created static layouts using design software, such as Photoshop and Illustrator, to flesh-out the site’s architecture. These student designers created mock-ups for each page, applying a consistent color scheme and typography in order to produce a unified look. They designed graphical elements indicating what visitors should “click” on to move around the site. The drafts of the desktop and mobile versions of the site were all pictured in mock-ups before lead web developer Stacy Vlasits coded the functional site to resemble the mock-ups. Throughout this collaborative process, the team worked back and forth with Dr. Gordon and Stacy, to solidify the design. The team addressed all visual elements to help narrate the story of the campus’ racial history.
Several features highlight the original graphic work of the student-centered design team. An example of Valerie Tran’s unique contribution was the illustration of the map for each tour stop. Ian Gibson’s illustrated compass orients the visitor as they interact within the space of each 360° video. Both illustrations contribute to the geographical theme of the tour, while literally directing the user. Lastly, the team helped conceive and implement the Introductory page. Discussions about this page began near the beginning of the collaboration, but final decisions were made towards the completion of the site. Every detail of this initial page, from the video to the bold images and augmented graphics of Jefferson Davis, were discussed and created.
Supervisor for the LAITS Design & Coding Student Technology Assistants: Suloni Robertson
UI / UEX Website Layout Design: Jaclyn Alford, Anna Xu
Graphic Design: Melissa Lam, Valerie Tran, Ian Gibson, Catherine Wetmore (full-time staff member)
IV. Website Development
Stacy Vlasits
The primary designer, Jaclyn Alford, and I began the design of the RacialGeographyTour.com website with the idea of adapting the walking tour format of Dr. Gordon’s racial survey. After going on Dr. Gordon’s real-life tour, I was inspired to try to give site visitors a faithful replication of the experience Dr. Gordon had given me in person.
Most of that work came to us ready-made from Dr. Gordon and the audio and video teams. Early on we decided to place the video at the center of the experience, filling the entire screen. From there, we saw the design job as twofold: 1) To create navigation tools which would preserve the tour experience; and 2) To give site visitors convenient access to supplementary material which would broaden and deepen their experience of the tour.
The main challenge we had in accomplishing the first goal was replacing the tour guide who takes the visitor from one place to one another. Lacking a human to do the job we decided to create a simple, intuitive path through the material along with two other more complicated and more powerful ways of moving from tour stop to tour stop.
For the simple path Jaclyn designed the “Next Stop” icons to pop up immediately after each video ended. For visitors who wanted to skip from stop to stop, we created a traditional dropdown menu at the top of the page to satisfy users’ expectations that there be a way to move around that way. The overlay map created by Jaclyn provides both an attractive view of the campus and a third way for visitors to choose a tour stop.
Both the map and the supplementary materials start out minimized on the sides of the page. A click on their respective icons reveals them to the visitor when needed. We wanted the additional information to be easy to get to, even while it stayed out of the way during the speaking parts of the tour.
When making technical decisions we prioritized finding a tool that would be easy to use for our content creators. Rendering the actual webpages isn’t very complicated, so we chose WordPress. We thought our content creators would enjoy using it and our front-end needs were small. On the front end, we loaded fresh HTML and JSON for each tour stop including the video, maps, and supplementary materials. Then, all the interactions that happen within that tour stop are controlled using javascript in the browser.
The most difficult and complicated task was finding and setting up a 360° video player. We ended up using a tool called Marzipano. It worked well, but required some fairly significant configuration and code to coordinate all the interactions.
Lead Website Developers: Stacy Vlasits & Ruben Garza, Jr.
Website Development: Estella Sun
V. Audio Production
Jacob Weiss
The LAITS Audio Studio employs about a dozen audio engineers at any one time, and is comprised of a combination of part-time undergraduate student assistant audio engineers, as well as full-time professional audio engineers. The students often come from the Radio-Television-Film communications program, or Arts and Entertainment Technology fine arts program, and are studying how to become professional audio engineers in school.
Over the course of the 2 years that our studio worked on Dr. Gordon’s Racial Geography Tour, a team of 10 audio engineers worked on the project collaboratively. Our process can loosely be divided into 3 stages: recording, editing, and mastering.
A typical recording consisted of Dr. Gordon coming into our Audio Studio for about 2 hours at a time and recording 4 or 5 scripted segments about certain landmarks, statues or other geographical information. We typically record 2 or 3 takes of each segment, and then edit between the best line reads to make a polished end product. Additionally, Dr. Gordon occasionally liked to go off-script when appropriate in order to add additional information when he is recording in the studio. It was our job to incorporate any of these lines naturally into the rest of the content.
Only one or two audio engineers were in charge of a recording, but in post-production for editing and mastering, the project typically was handled by more engineers, depending on who was available. These engineers followed along with the recorded audio and compared it against the written script and with the session notes, to make sure that all of the text was correctly read, and it all flowed naturally together as if Dr. Gordon read the entire script perfectly in one take.
From there, once the content was all assembled, we moved on to mastering, which was putting the finishing touches on all of our final audio files. Because large projects like this are created over the course of years, it was the mastering engineers’ job to make sure that the first session we recorded in 2018 sounded the same as the most recent sessions recorded in 2021 – that the volume, the tone, the delivery and the overall quality of the entire project matched.
Finally, once we completed these files, we worked in collaboration with the LAITS Video team to integrate the files into the video recordings, and that everything lined up properly in the timeline.
Audio Engineers: Jacob Weiss, Samantha Skinner, Will Kurzner, Jared Marxuach, Morgan Honaker
Assistant Audio Engineers: Brian Wintz, Jessica Gutierrez, Carlos Arrazola, Karoline Pfeil