ANALYSIS AND NEWS
TAKING LIBRARY COLLECTIONS OFF THE MAP
Stella Wisdom explains how technology and digital methods can
enable innovative interpretations of library collections
T
he ‘Off the Map’ competition is an unusual collaboration between the British Library and GameCity; a videogame culture festival, which takes place annually in the UK city of Nottingham. The competition challenges higher education students based in the UK to create videogames, explorable virtual environments and interactive fiction inspired by the British Library’s digital collections. The Off the Map competition is one of the
library’s experimental projects investigating how the institution can collaborate with digital creative practitioners.
Each year a different Off the Map competition topic and three sub-themes are decided, usually based on an upcoming exhibition, to be held at the Library. Curators select collection items to be digitised and these are provided to the participating students in the form of downloadable ‘asset packs’. The students then create an interactive digital experience relating to the competition themes and “assets”.
A drawing of Alice from Lewis Carroll’s manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, written between 1862-64 (c) The British Library Board
The first Off the Map competition took place in 2013 with these three sub-themes: Stonehenge, including a proposed plan to rebuild the fallen stones; the pyramids at Giza; and 17th Century London, including a survey map made months after the Great Fire of 1666. The 2013 winning team was called Pudding Lane Productions; these were six second-year undergraduate students from De Montfort University, Leicester, and they created a very detailed and atmospheric interpretation of 17th Century London1
.
In addition to studying the digital British Library resources provided, they arranged
Alice Gardens by Chris Lonsdale for Off The Map 2015 4 Research Information DECEMBER 2015/JANUARY 2016
a fieldwork outing to York, to examine, photograph and sketch the architecture of the buildings; enabling them to model authentic looking buildings for their virtual explorable environment. The fly-through of their work, which you can see on Youtube at http://youtu. be/SPY-hr-8-M0 is breathtaking. The 2014 Off the Map competition accompanied the British Library’s exhibition Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination. The three themes for entrants to base their videogames on were: author William Beckford’s home Fonthill Abbey (which no longer exists), Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death and the seaside town of Whitby, which features in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. The 2014 winning entry Nix was created by three computer gaming students from the University of South Wales, and it invited players to reconstruct Fonthill Abbey by collecting glowing orbs, which are hiding from you in a spooky underwater world. Their game used Oculus Rift, a revolutionary virtual reality headset for 3D gaming, to enable the player to virtually build, and then explore the Abbey. You can see a fly-through of their game at
http://youtu.be/8ESieZO4VHw. Tim Pye, curator of Terror and Wonder and a member of the 2014 Off the Map jury, said: ‘The original architectural model of Fonthill Abbey is currently on display in Terror and Wonder. What is so impressive about the Nix
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