Lunch at the Library: "Electing The President: The Debates on the Electoral College at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Virtual Reality"

Registration is required for all parts of the event and limited to 40 in-person attendees. Please register here to attend.

Join us to celebrate Constitution Day 2022 with a special Lunch at the Library event highlighting a collaborative effort among a group of historians, immersive technology engineers, theater personnel, and media directors along with large numbers of students at Shenandoah University and James Madison University to create a participatory virtual reality (VR) “experience” of the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. 

The event will consist of two parts. The first is an opportunity to experience a virtual reconstruction of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The experience will take place from 10:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. in the President's Room in Benjamin Franklin Hall (427 Chestnut St.). Those who wish to participate must sign up for a half-hour time slot, which are limited to 15 people each and are available on a first come, first served basis.

The second part of the program will consist of a lunch presentation with Professors Warren Hofstra and Mohammad Obeid of Shenandoah University, and Kevin Hardwick of James Madison University, and JJ Ruscella, EVP at AccessVR, who will address the challenges of VR production and engineering, its educational and academic applications, and the strengths and weaknesses of VR for presenting and interpreting history. A full description of the presentation may be found below.

Lunch will be provided. You do not need to participate in the VR experience to attend the lunch talk, but registration is required.

The talk will also be livestreamed via Zoom webinar for those who are unable or do not wish to attend in-person. Those wishing to participate via livestream must register separately via Zoom to receive the link. Zoom registration may be completed here.

**NOTE: In-person program attendees must provide proof of vaccination upon arrival. Those planning to attend should consult the APS’s website for the most up-to-date policies regarding COVID-19. Full details are listed on our website.**

Questions may be sent to Adrianna Link, Head of Scholarly Programs, at [email protected].

"Electing the President: The Debates on the Electoral College at the Constitutional Convention of 1787"

Historians, immersive technology engineers, theater personnel, and media directors along with large numbers of students at Shenandoah University and James Madison University have collaborated to create a participatory virtual reality (VR) “experience” of the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.  Given the complexity of the Philadelphia Convention debates, this project focuses on representing just one theme within them—discussion of the problem of how to select the proposed government's chief executive officer.  The project involves digitally recreating the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House (Independence Hall) as a virtual experience and then embedding a modern audience in the distant world of eighteenth-century thought, discourse, and political culture it represents.  Computer generated images, or avatars, based on historically accurate reconstructions of Convention delegates, animated by historical actors, and voiced by professional voice actors from scripts prepared by the project historians, provide the basis for the experience.

Participants in the experience achieve a rich, intuitive, and distinctly visceral appreciation of the problem—and of the difficulties in resolving it—that delegates at the Philadelphia Convention confronted.  No one in human history, no government the size of the United States, had ever chosen its executive leader on the principle of popular sovereignty—on the voice or vote of the people or some portion of the people.  The delegates at Philadelphia well understood the importance of their work, which imparted to it an elevation of the spirit—a high sense of cause and enduring purpose—that outweighed differences over the mechanics of government or the strictures of parliamentary procedure.  The result of their deliberations is, of course, the Electoral College.  The vaunted rituals of reasoned discourse, they surely felt, could, indeed, produce an effective, enduring government.  Our intent in creating a virtual reality experience surrounding these debates is to capture this drama and embed a modern audience in the historical foreign country it represents.  

Historians routinely evoke empathy as a premise for understanding the past.  We have strived to create an immersive experience that is as vivid, profound, and transformative as empathy permits.   Audience members will inhabit a compelling three-dimensional visual and acoustic rendering of Independence Hall.  They will witness the debates that took place in that room and listen as delegates explain themselves, grappling with difficult issues.  In a later stage of the experience participants will embody those delegates as avatars and recreate the debates firsthand.  We hope that stepping into these debates will convey this same elevated spirit and urgent energy to participants that delegates shared in 1787.   Both the problems with which the delegates grappled and their faith in deliberative politics, continue, after all, to have enduring relevance in the present.  Indeed, it is our purpose to demonstrate to contemporary audiences that alternatives exist to today’s political partisanship—that reasoned discourse and earnest debate over differences in principles and politics can produce truths in the form of valid governing institutions and just public policies.

Participants in this panel discussion are invited to put on the VR headset and enter into the VR world of eighteenth-century deliberative discourse.  VR is a new medium with distinctive features that give expression to historical knowledge and to the empathy with historical peoples and places required for understanding and applying this knowledge.  We invite panel goers to experience history firsthand and then join us to explore the challenges and tradeoffs involved in adapting historical methodologies to this novel medium.  Panel members bring together professional specialties in history, theater, and engineering to create an immersive experience exploring the debates at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that produced the Electoral College.  Panel discussion will address the challenges of VR production and engineering, its educational and academic applications, and the strengths and weaknesses of VR for presenting and interpreting history.

This program is sponsored by the Jack Miller Center.