I believe that understanding the past is essential to better perceiving the present and future.

In the years following the American Civil War, Atlanta, GA became a boomtown, drawing thousands of new residents and quickly filling the city's only public burial grounds. In 1877 the Atlanta City Council voted to clear a field within Oakland Cemetery. The field, sitting on a ridge then popular with the city's wealthiest residents and lying across from the Confederate Memorial Grounds, was cleared and each newly approved lot was sold for no less than $50, a premium (Thomas, 1966).

But the material goods Oakland and the city gained could not atone for what was lost morally, for the field was not empty. Known as Slave Square, the field served as the burial space for enslaved and free Black Atlantans before and during the Civil War. With the April 2, 1877 vote, the city of Atlanta removed the “bones and bodies” of these Black Americans from the coveted lot and reinterred their remains in Potter’s Field at the rear of the cemetery (Thomas, 1966, p. 45).

This project examines the value of custom-built wearable interfaces for historic reenactment, particularly for difficult cultural heritage topics. It includes the design of a special historic tour of Oakland Cemetery, which uses a custom-built dress and other novel interfaces to engage with visitors along the tour. Its central research question is: How could a prop or a device help the audience to feel more connected to the cultural heritage presented? This idea will be explored through the context of a Digital Humanities-informed HCI project for Oakland Cemetery, a historically significant site located in Atlanta, Georgia.

Research

Design

Rather than a static teaching or experience tool, the final project is an interactive prototype embodying all design criteria highlighted from the cultural probe. This includes the design of a customized tour for Oakland and the design and implementation of tangible interfaces to support the interpreter’s activities. Engagement of the visiting audience will encourage moments of performance, as their response and feedback will become a part of the prototype in action. This will combine with the actual performance, the reenactment component, delivered by the tour guide. All performance will be directly enhanced by the customized interfaces. The earliest design ideations envisioned as single technology enhanced object to tell the story. However, creating a cohesive and immersive narrative tour would benefit from multiple interfaces. Mourning status was most frequently displayed through clothing and jewelry. Since these two elements were held great importance and ritual significance to death culture, and particularly females, textile and non-textile elements feature in the final product.

Four sites within the cemetery are reviewed for this tour: 1) Slave Square, 2) Confederate Grounds Monuments, 3) African American Burial Grounds, and 4) Georgia Harris’s Gravesite.

The interpreter, in character and costume, gives a tour from the perspective of an African American woman living at the end of Reconstruction. The events of the tour are framed to occur on national Memorial Day (regardless of the actual date). The interpreter has taken the opportunity to use this Decoration Day to adorn the grave of a loved-one, and has invited friends (visitors) to participate. This loved-one was originally buried in Slave Square but was disinterred in 1877. The tour stops create a loop as participants walk from Slave Square, through the Confederate Grounds, to the African American grounds, and finally ending a few yards from Slave Square at the grave of Georgia Harris. The content of the tour allows interpreters to take advantage of the geographic placement of each stop, where meaning can be gleaned from the historical racism imbedded into the cemetery (Flowers, 2007).

Stop #2 Confederate Grounds

The obelisk was more than a decorative object. Though Southern White women could not vote, monuments they commissioned were representative of the Confederate “patriotism” which continued to “burn with unquenchable fervor” ("Our Atlanta Correspondence, Memorial Day," 1874, p. 4). These projects were supported by White Southern men who benefited from the women’s work as the memorials “provided the platform from which ex-Confederate men could lament their defeat” (Janney, 2005, p. 98). As proxies for depoliticized former Confederate men, Southern White women used their positions in organizations such as the Ladies Memorial Association to uphold racist and white-supremacist ideas. Furthermore, Southern White women softened the North to the Lost Cause Narrative (a sanitized view of Southern antebellum society) by caring for the graves of Union soldiers buried in Southern cemeteries. For example, at Oakland, sixteen Union soldiers are buried among Confederates in the Confederate section (Taliaferro, 2001).

1. A March 1866 LMA member letter to “the press and ladies of the South” (Collier, 1920, p. 20) calling for an annual observance of April 26 as Confederate Memorial Day;

2. An April 1875 proclamation from Atlanta mayor, C.C. Hammock, calling on Atlanta residents to “kneel at [the] illustrious shrines” of the Confederate dead that Confederate Memorial Day (Hammock, 1875, p. 2); and

3. A poem written by a secretary for an Alabama branch of the LMA and inscribed on the Confederate monument located on Capitol Hill in Montgomery, AL (Ockenden & Ladies' Memorial Association, 1900).

Stop #3 African American Burial Grounds

The concluding stop for this study is the grave of Georgia Harris. Harris, who was formerly enslaved, worked for the Boyd family for 27 years (Black Magnolias: African American Women in Atlanta’s History," n.d.). Like many Black women who called Atlanta home, Harris sought employment in one of the only avenues open to her, domestic service for a White family (Hunter, 1998). We have very little information on Georgia Harris’ life or her relationship with the Boyd family, but the rear of the headstone refers to Harris as "mammy." In the role of “mammy” a black domestic servant could expect to work round the clock tending to the needs of the white family, even more so if she were a live-in employee (Hunter, 1998). We do not know if the work Georgia Harris performed for the Boyd family was similarly as taxing or much more reasonable. Having Harris share the same plot was important enough for Nannie Boyd to petition Atlanta Mayor James L. Key and the owners of neighboring plots for permission since Oakland was racially segregated at the time (Davis & Davis, 2012). But less clear were Harris’ plans for burial. Nannie may have fulfilled Georgia’s wishes with a headstone in the Boyd family plot. Or Georgia may have preferred a traditional African American burial, without a formal headstone and near blood relations, we simply do not know. The question surrounding Georgia’s final wishes are the catalyst to Stop #4’s interaction.

A memorial ribbon pays homage to personalized keepsakes which are made for personal consumption and reflection. The goal is to create a feedback dialogue between the interactor and the dress, itself, for making meaning and teaching. By utilizing spatial, auditory, and visual interactions to make meaning from interactions with the object, users act upon and receive a response from the artefact. In addition to learning about individuals at and history surrounding Oakland, the user is invited to remember these individuals through deliberate action. The act of creating individualized memorials is a slow and thoughtful act, this is further bolstered through meaning making, where the user comes to better understand the elements included in the memorial image by learning about individual women. The struggles and successes of these individuals are highlighted through the lens of Victorian-era memorialization and with a backdrop of Oakland Cemetery.

The Dress

Study Design

This project is an IRB approved study. The study aimed to assess the value of different digital storytelling components to the historic tour. Participants were first introduced to the study and its purpose. Then, they were invited to sign the consent form. During the main part of the study, participants followed the researcher over several stations in the Oakland Cemetery. As the tour covers different elements at each station, individual digital interaction designs are activated. At the end of tour, participants completed a primary and secondary questionnaire on the experience. Finally, there was a six-question interview. The entire study took no more than 1 ½ hour. Consent forms and surveys were made available through QR code or hardcopy.

The primary questionnaire is based on three open-sourced studies focused on cultural heritage and usability. “Design factors in the museum visitor experience” (Forrest, 2015) provides a model for gauging how visitors experience different exhibition environments. Mapping Museum Experience (Trundles, et al, 2008) seeks to understand how art, installations, and architecture impact visitors. Finally, only self-reported experts in the field of cultural heritage will be asked to complete a standard System Usability Survey (SUS) (Brooke, 1996). Once the primary questionnaire is completed, participants will be asked to provide demographic data and finally participate in a concluding exit interview. The demographic data asks participants to report their gender, age, education level, and familiarity with Oakland Cemetery. The interview presents six open-ended questions to be asked in a group or individual setting, dependent on the number of tour participants.

Conclusions

Next Steps

Improvements are based on participant feedback and observations made by the research guide. Tests were completed with groups smaller than Oakland’s walking tour groups. Our goal is to explore expanding the interaction to involve more than 20 participants without leaving individuals out of the interaction or becoming too repetitive. Participants expressed desire for more information on the African American Grounds. Additional stops in the African American Grounds, Potters Field, and Slave Square could be added to the tour. Not only will the additions meet this goal, but the tour’s runtime will better match with Oakland's current offerings. To increase guide comfort and ensure easier access to embedded technology, the dress should be redesigned. The skirt would become lighter if LEDs specifically crafted for wearables were included. Unfortunately, these lights must be individually soldered and set into the garment. Including ribbons with their accompanying recordings into a gallery space on Oakland property was not realized for this study. This prospect is still a possibility. However, the voice recording modules used in this prototype inconsistently recorded and replayed audio. A viable solution to this issue needs to be solved before a gallery piece can be designed.

Prototype Video