The Virtual Bronzeville Project

The objective of the Virtual Bronzeville Project is to create a virtual model of the history of Bronzeville, Chicago. This model will illustrate Bronzeville's complex social, political, economic, and cultural systems. By using virtual environments, animations, interviews, and GIS data, users will be able to explore this historic area.

Virtual Harlem

EVL is working with Central Missouri State University, the University of Missouri and the University of Arizona on the Virtual Harlem project, a collaborative learning initiative whose purpose is to study the New York Harlem Renaissance through the construction of a collaborative virtual-reality scenario that represents Harlem as it existed in the 1920s and 30s. Advanced networking technologies will be applied to the Virtual Harlem project and its integration into African-American Studies classes at the University of Illinois at Chicago and partner institutions.

The Virtual Harlem project has attracted considerable attention in African-American communities in New York, Chicago and other sites. Bryan Carter, the researcher who initiated the project as a complement to undergraduate courses in the Harlem Renaissance, was given an award by the MOBE (Marketing Opportunities for Black Entrepreneurs) group; Virtual Harlem was a special feature of their annual conference held in Chicago in 2000. EVL receives numerous requests for demonstrations of Virtual Harlem from local schools and community centers. More than half of the people building Virtual Harlem are African Americans, including programmers. The project has been embraced by the Head of the UIC African-American Studies Department, whose faculty members have served as instructors in Harlem Renaissance courses using Virtual Harlem. Indeed, several African-American high-school science students who were introduced to Virtual Harlem have worked at EVL to learn the programming skills required to build models.