Oakland Blues: Virtual Preservation of Seventh Street's 1950'5 Jazz Scene

Abstract

Digital technologies are becoming a popular vehicle for the re-creation and dissemination of cultural heritage, in the form of modeling buildings, people, and their activities. Video game engines can be used to let user virtually “inhabit” the digitally recreated worlds made accessible via the Internet, opening them up to people who otherwise would never be exposed to these cultural sites. Yet, like every medium ever used to preserve cultural heritage, digital media is not neutral: it impacts the represented content and the ways the audience interprets it. Perhaps more than any older technology, it has the potential to affect the very meaning of the represented content in terms of the cultural image it creates. This paper examines the applications and implications of digital media for the recreation and communication of cultural heritage, drawing on the lessons learned from a project to recreate the thriving jazz and blues club scene in West Oakland, California, in the 1940s and 1950s.