The Story Behind This Edition

This 3D scholarly edition was developed as a requirement for the completion of the Creating Digital Collections course in the Media Studies: Digital Cultures Masters Degree at Maastricht University. The theme for this series of scholarly editions is “Toys with Voice,” and pushed us to situate toys as meaningful artefacts in larger social, historical, and cultural contexts. 

The course combined theoretical and practical content to equip us with a solid foundation for developing these editions. Theoretical discussions centred on the authenticity of digitizing objects, the affordances of virtual vs physical objects, and whether or not aura is lost or gained. Toys also reflect the cultural values and social norms of the era they are produced in, as a snapshot of history. Another topic we explored was multimodality and the value of using more than one medium to express messages in the digital society. Digitizing the Woody doll means that its materiality is transferred and accessed through this interface. Interacting with the doll in this manner has unique affordances that can add to or take away from the meaning of the toy. 

Practically, we delved into photogrammetry and the technicalities of creating a shooting environment to capture objects and develop 3D models from them. From camera settings to developing the actual 3D model in Agisoft’s Metashape to importing the model in the program you are currently using :), we studied this all in depth.