In 1774, Shaker leader Ann Lee led her followers from England to the New World, seeking religious freedom. After leasing land from the Van Rensselaers near what is now Albany International Airport, the very first Shaker community was born. The culture thrived and brought the Americas creations like the packaged garden seed industry and the flat broom, not to mention music.
Now, more than 200 years later, the Shaker Heritage Society is sharing the Shakers with the modern world by creating Virtual Watervliet (VWV), a digital reconstruction of their historic settlement.
“(The Shakers) were amazing, progressive and innovative people. We try to use the Shakers as somewhat of a role model to help guide our daily functions,” said Executive Director of the Shaker Heritage Society Starlyn D’Angelo. “Knowing that they were lovers of technology and would use the latest technologies, we try to do the same as much as we can.”
After about two years of work, the Shaker Heritage Society released VWV in November 2012. The society sits on 27 of what was once 800 acres of Shaker land at 25 Meeting House Road in Colonie. The website provides online tours of the Watervliet site, before and after images of buildings, tracks of Shaker music and biographies of settlers.
There are several options for tours, including a 3D tour with Google Earth, a 2D map tour and a site layout, all with clickable images that describe infrastructure and even people that once lived there. Each tour has its own features and elements to further depict the Shaker site.
“We tried to be very mindful of different technical capabilities and people who use technology in different ways,” D’Angelo said. “Some people are going to dive in head first … and others want nothing to do with that. We wanted to make it accessible to everyone.”
The project initially started on a much smaller scale, D’Angelo said, and primarily showed detailed digital models of buildings from the site. D’Angelo was able to secure $50,000 in grants from the New York Council on the Arts and the Assemblyman Reilly Fund. Yet as the process got underway, adding in the extensive Shaker history, its music and people became fundamental goals.
“It was very important to me to also put it into a larger context, and focus on people who actually lived here,” said D’Angelo, who has been studying Shaker history for 15 years. “It was really important to me to add the human element.”
D’Angelo was first contacted about the project by Jose Kozan, CEO and founder of Virtual Grounds Interactive, who had worked on another, much smaller Shaker site digital reconstruction project and wanted to work on a website for the Watervliet location. There are at least 10 other Shaker museums across the country, including in Maine and New Hampshire, D’Angelo said, and having a website like the Virtual Watervliet project could help stimulate research of other Shaker villages.
“Virtual Watervliet is intended to be a model to show how you can use digital technology to interpret historic sites. We very much intend to help others to do similar projects to draw attention to historic sites and cultivate more support,” D’Angelo said.
After an extensive amount of research, including reviewing surveys, historic maps and Shaker journals, the website began developing.
One of the project’s challenges was ensuring the accuracy of the building placement. When Albany County bought the Shaker land in 1925, it demolished at least 20 buildings, and now only nine remain. For the website, researchers looked at historical photographs to define designations based on historical documents for each building.
One of the website’s main features is an easily adaptable mobile device component. In the “Augmented Reality,” visitors can walk around the Shaker site, aim a smartphone at a location and see computer-generated images of that particular spot. Similarly, visitors can scan a QR code and hear specific music from the mobile app, including a funeral song for Ann Lee while walking through the cemetery. The Shaker songs were recorded by Albany Pro Musica.
“One thing is when you’re home and at the desktop, but another thing is if you go to the site itself, you have the mobile website companion, augmented channel. We wanted to explore that. It’s such a rich history,” said Iara Beduschi Kozan, executive director and co-founder of Virtual Grounds.
Since its official launch, the website has won two awards. The National Council on Public History gave VWV an Honorable Mention for Outstanding Public History Project and Museumwise, The Museum Association of New York, issued an award of merit in the category of Innovation in Interpretation. The website was also highlighted in the Google Earth blog.
The recognition has been amazing, D’Angelo said, and she hopes VWV will become a primary source for teachers when discussing Shaker history. She said school tours have dropped dramatically in the past years due to budget cuts. With VWV, D’Angelo said she hopes visitors will come at anytime and take their own self-guided tours.
“Our goal is to really make it a place that people are proud of,” she said.