This panel or roundtable will address an emerging form of digital scholarship employing immersive technologies to create virtual experiences in history. We experience natural worlds, material worlds, and social worlds directly. Not so with history. Existing media through which historical scholarship is created and communicated—speech, text, video, digital—provide mediated, indirect encounters with the past through primary methodologies of narrative employing story and argument employing ideas and evidence. Immersive experiences in virtual reality, however, present the opportunity, when the virtual world becomes the cognitive equivalent of the real world, to experience the past through presence within it. Presence is, in fact, the term of art in the field of immersive technology when optical headsets deceive the mind in suspending disbelief and experiencing three-dimensional, sensory rich recreations of events and sites of the past. Where we listen to lectures, read books, watch movies, or visit digital websites, we indeed experience virtual reality. The neural substrates of the mind receive, encode, consolidate, and recall these experiences as memories replicating real experiences. In neural networks these memories associate and generalize with memories of life’s real-world episodes in a common process called learning. Can we then rightly experience the past, learn from these experiences, generate new ideas, and communicate them with colleagues, teachers, students, the public? These are the research questions this session raises for consideration and discussion.

William Thomas, dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Montana State University, will chair the session and bring to bear upon it more than three decades of experience in creating experimental work in varied fields of digital humanities. Panelists include Warren Hofstra, professor of history at Shenandoah University and one of the creators of The Great Experiment: Re-Debating the Electoral College in Virtual Reality. Recently published by the University of Virginia Press as a peer-reviewed work of scholarship, this program, i.e. “experience,” provides a model or template for exploring how we can learn to experience the past. Annie Evans will bring to the panel decades of experience in K-12 education and her more recent work as Director of Education and Research for New American History at the University of Richmond. She provides an educator’s perspective on the role of new media scholarship in history. Allison Maynard of the Clemson University Virtual Reality and Nature Lab will focus on public-facing educational applications of immersive learning experiences. Nathan Prestopnik, co-director of the Shenandoah Center for Immersive Learning (SCiL) will share his practical experience in preparing future generations of virtual reality designers in combination with his own creative scholarship developing innovative history-related virtual experiences in the setting of World War I. Our collective objective emphasizes outreach to an expected audience of historians, educators, public history professionals, and other scholars through panel and audience discussion.