3 

Theoretical Framework

This project is grounded in a theoretical framework that bridges Black geographies, spatial justice, speculative design, and digital ethics. Rather than treat immersive documentation as a neutral act of preservation, it engages cultural memory as a political and speculative intervention—situated in the afterlife of slavery, shaped by racialized spatial extraction, and oriented toward descendant futurities. The concepts outlined below animate Daufuskie3D’s methodological choices, narrative structure, and visual form, offering a critical vocabulary for understanding not only what is represented but how and why it is rendered.

I. Black Geographies and Spatial Refusal

Black Geographies provides a foundational lens for this work by framing space not as passive terrain but as contested ground shaped by race, power, and resistance. Following Katherine McKittrick, Black spatial production must be read through the logics of plantation violence, urban exclusion, and fugitive practice.1 Daufuskie Island, as a site of historic land dispossession and Gullah survival, embodies these geographies. The project aligns with the tradition of spatial refusal: resisting imposed narratives of erasure or decline by documenting vernacular architecture, oral testimony, and land memory through immersive media. This refusal is both methodological and aesthetic—an insistence on narrating Black spatial life on its own terms.

II. Wake Work and the Afterlife of Slavery

Christina Sharpe’s concept of “wake work” informs the project’s ethical approach to documentation.2 To labor in the wake of slavery is to contend with its ongoing structures—displacement, loss, and systemic invisibility. This framework demands that digital documentation not merely recover traces of the past but contend with the racialized systems that continue to fracture Black life and landholding. Immersive preservation, then, becomes a form of wake work: rendering visible not only cultural sites but the absences, silences, and violences that surround them. This ethic guides decisions about what to scan, how to annotate, and when to withhold.

III. Plantation Futures

The term “plantation futures,” as developed by Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, provides a critical framework for understanding ongoing forms of spatial extraction and aesthetic erasure.3 On Daufuskie, private luxury developments now occupy land once held by Black farmers and Gullah families. Gated communities have overlaid historic compounds, and speculative tourism has commodified Gullah culture while displacing its people. This project refuses the logic of plantation futures by reclaiming sites like the Robinson Family Home and the Tabby Ruins—not as nostalgic remnants, but as evidence of Black presence, labor, and endurance.

IV. Vernacular Cartography and Digital Memory

Nettrice Gaskins’ theorization of “vernacular cartography” provides a framework for community-driven spatial storytelling.4 Unlike institutional maps that flatten or erase cultural nuance, vernacular cartography centers community memory, layered meaning, and Afro-diasporic spatial logics. Daufuskie3D deploys annotations, ambient sound, and nonlinear pathways to embody this approach—creating a narrative interface shaped by the rhythms, references, and relationalities of Black southern life. This mode of mapping privileges what Sharpe might call “residence time”: the lived duration of memory and meaning embedded in place.

V. Immersive Counterpublics and Speculative Design

Drawing from the work of Michelle Commander and Reynaldo Anderson, this project positions immersive environments as digital counterpublics—spaces where Black communities can narrate futures not yet realized.5 Speculative returns, in this sense, are not escapist—they are epistemological strategies. The VR and AR affordances of Daufuskie3D extend beyond visualization; they become tools for diasporic connection, cultural pedagogy, and speculative repair. These worlds are not reconstructions of the past but reconfigurations of memory and possibility.

References

  1. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
  2. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
  3. Clyde Woods, “Les Misérables of New Orleans: Race, and Urban Planning in the Wake of Katrina,” in American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 1007–1017.
  4. Nettrice Gaskins, “Afrofuturism on Web 3.0: Vernacular Cartography and Augmented Space,” in Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, eds. Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016).
  5. Michelle D. Commander, Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, eds., Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness.
3 

Black Land, Memory, and Dispossession

Heirs Property: Legal Instruments of Dispossession

To understand heirs property as merely a legal anomaly is to miss its deeper significance within the afterlives of slavery. Christina Sharpe’s concept of the wake urges us to consider how slavery continues to structure Black life through atmospheric, juridical, and spatial forms.1 Heirs property, as it functions in Gullah Geechee communities, is one such formation: a legal structure born in the aftermath of emancipation, shaped by oral inheritance and collective landholding, yet persistently undermined by systems that refuse to recognize Black relational geographies. It is not simply a technical vulnerability—it is a racialized mechanism of erasure.

Defined as land passed without a will and held by multiple heirs as tenants-in-common, heirs property reflects intergenerational practices of mutual care and communal responsibility. But under American property law, it is treated as “clouded title”—undocumented, unprotected, and vulnerable to forced partition. Any co-owner may petition a court to sell the entire parcel, a loophole long exploited by developers, speculators, and distant heirs. Legal scholars Zuri Bailey, Ryan Thomson, and Benjamin Green, writing from a Critical Race Theory perspective, describe heirs property as a “legal technology” that facilitates Black dispossession under the guise of formal neutrality.2

On the South Carolina coast, this process plays out not only as displacement but as disappearance. As Ariel Butkus documents, many heirs property parcels are excluded from official GIS systems, rendering them invisible to planners, assessors, and preservation agencies.3 This omission has tangible consequences: families with longstanding ties to land are disqualified from restoration grants, disaster aid, or historic recognition. “It’s not just that heirs property isn’t protected,” Butkus writes. “It’s that it’s not even seen.”4

That invisibility is lived. During a field visit to Daufuskie, Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson—a sixth-generation Gullah resident, chef, and cultural historian—shared how her family lost access to ancestral land after a distant heir sold their share. What had once been her grandmother’s vegetable garden was redeveloped into a gated community.5

The U.S. Forest Service has attempted to quantify the scope of the issue. Its 2019 report, Heirs’ Property and Land Fractionation, maps heirs property clusters across South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and links them to long histories of racial exclusion and underinvestment.6 The report frames heirs property not merely as a land tenure issue, but as a racial justice issue: a structural record of how U.S. law has failed to account for non-Western forms of ownership grounded in kinship and tradition.

If Sharpe helps us understand land loss as an atmospheric inheritance—part of the wake—Katherine McKittrick sharpens our view of its spatial logics. Her concept of plantation futures reveals how the legacy of the plantation continues to animate contemporary systems of Black land theft, speculative development, and enforced erasure.7 On Daufuskie and across the Lowcountry, the transformation of formerly Black-owned land into private resorts, gated enclaves, or vacant tracts is not coincidental. It reflects the persistent arithmetic of race and property. Heirs property loss is not an anomaly—it is structural.

The consequences extend far beyond title. Praise houses, family cemeteries, oyster middens, and settlement-era dwellings sit on land that cannot qualify for preservation funding or public investment. Meanwhile, heritage tourism initiatives celebrate Gullah identity on land from which Gullah people have been displaced.

Federal reforms—such as the 2018 Farm Bill’s provision granting heirs property owners access to USDA programs—offer limited relief. Implementation remains uneven, and many families lack the legal support required to clear title or defend claims.8 Scholars such as Butkus have proposed treating heirs property as a form of cultural commons—a “public trust” that protects collective heritage in the way wetlands or historic shorelines are preserved.9 But to date, such frameworks remain largely aspirational.

To treat heirs property as a bureaucratic oversight is to obscure its role in a much larger architecture of racialized extraction. On Daufuskie, as in many Gullah Geechee communities, heirs property is not just land—it is infrastructure. It is memory. It is sacred ground. To lose it is not simply to forfeit an asset; it is to sever kinship, erase spatial knowledge, and foreclose cultural continuity. In Sharpe’s terms, this is wake work: the labor of tending to what slavery leaves behind—not only grief, but geography. And in McKittrick’s terms, it is a refusal of plantation futures—those recursive geographies where Black space is continuously rendered disposable. Preservation, then, is not merely a legal strategy. It is an ethical obligation, a political demand, and a refusal to surrender Black futures to plantation pasts.

References

  1. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 39.
  2. Zuri Bailey, Ryan Thomson, and Benjamin Green, “Heirs Property, Critical Race Theory, and Reparations,” Rural Sociology 87, no. 2 (2022): 492–518.
  3. Ariel Butkus, The Public Trust Debate: Implications for Heirs Property along the South Carolina Coast (Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021), 14–22.
  4. Ibid., 27.
  5. Field notes, Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson, Daufuskie Island, April 18, 2025.
  6. U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Heirs' Property and Land Fractionation: Fostering Stable Ownership to Prevent Land Loss and Abandonment, General Technical Report SRS-225 (Asheville, NC: Southern Research Station, 2019), 1–5.
  7. Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (2013): 1–15.
  8. USDA Forest Service, Heirs’ Property and Land Fractionation, 8–10; Butkus, The Public Trust Debate, 45–48.
  9. Butkus, The Public Trust Debate, 35–38.
3 

Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson: Cultural Stewardship and the Politics of Representation        

At the heart of this project is the work and wisdom of Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson—a sixth-generation Gullah woman born on Daufuskie Island and one of its most vital cultural stewards. A chef, author, historian, and guide, she has dedicated her life to preserving and transmitting the stories, language, and lived experience of Gullah Geechee people. Through the Sallie Ann Robinson Gullah Museum and Heritage Tour—the only Gullah-owned and operated cultural enterprise on the island—she sustains a lineage of place-based knowledge and community-led interpretation.

Born on August 4, 1958, to Albertha Robinson Stafford and Alton Ward Sr., Ms. Robinson attended the Mary Fields School on Daufuskie before continuing her education on the mainland.1 Her childhood was deeply rooted in Gullah traditions: gardening, crabbing, praise house worship, and the spoken cadences of Gullah language.2 She was among the handful of students taught by author Pat Conroy during his controversial tenure as a white teacher on the island. Conroy later fictionalized her as “Ethel,” a character in The Water is Wide based in part on his memory of Robinson during that time.3 While the book introduced Daufuskie to a national audience, it also signaled a pattern that persists: the shaping of Gullah narratives by outsiders.

Over the past four decades, Ms. Robinson has worked to reclaim and reframe that narrative. She is the author of two cookbooks and co-author of Daufuskie Island, a historical photo-documentary published by Arcadia Press. Her cookbooks—Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way and Cooking the Gullah Way, Morning, Noon, and Night—are more than culinary texts; they are vessels of oral history, seasonal wisdom, and cultural continuity.4 “I write so the children who come behind us can know how we lived,” she explains during her tours, often describing recipes as repositories of memory.5

As a heritage tour operator, Ms. Robinson does not rely on plaques or institutional signage. She narrates the island through embodied memory—identifying trees as landmarks, naming forgotten neighbors, and gesturing toward unmarked graveyards overgrown with brush. Her tours surface the histories left out of preservation frameworks: the labor of oyster shuckers, the traditions of praise house worship, the erosion of family land. In this way, her work exemplifies what scholars of Black geographies describe as counter-mapping practices—forms of spatial narration that refuse settler-colonial land logics and instead center Black epistemologies of place, kinship, and memory.6 Her interpretive labor is not merely educational; it is political and spatial, asserting a Gullah claim to land and story in the face of erasure.

Her stewardship extends to sacred spaces. Ms. Robinson has led efforts to protect family cemeteries and Black burial grounds that remain unmarked, untended, and increasingly vulnerable to private development. Her advocacy earned her a grant from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund to support restoration and interpretation of these sites.7 For her, these are not just burial places but sacred grounds—churches in their own right—where communion with ancestors continues.8

Perhaps most critically, Ms. Robinson challenges the frameworks through which Gullah culture is consumed—both by preservation institutions and by tourists who arrive with narratives shaped by non-Gullah voices. During our fieldwork, she offered a pointed reflection: “You can’t digitize a culture you never sat with. You can’t tell the story of this island from Google.”9 This was not just a critique of digital preservation without participation—it was a condemnation of the entire ecology of misrepresentation, in which developers, writers, and tour operators romanticize or distort Gullah life to serve commercial ends. One example she frequently highlights is the widespread myth of Haint Blue—a commercialized narrative that distorts both the color’s spiritual significance and its specific cultural origins. While often associated with St. Helena Island, its use on Daufuskie carried a distinct meaning: ceilings were painted indigo to prevent spirits picked up outside the home from lingering or entering the body during sleep. In popular discourse, however, the practice is frequently misattributed or flattened, with aesthetics elevated over ancestral knowledge. For Ms. Robinson, this kind of mythmaking is not harmless. Her critique is not nostalgic—it is political. Cultural preservation, in her view, demands accountability to living people, not just curated histories. It requires participation, precision, and the refusal of myths that exploit or oversimplify Gullah identity.

Ms. Robinson’s presence within this project is not ornamental—it is foundational. Her practice embodies a different epistemology, one grounded in relationality, ancestry, and self-definition. She reminds us that cultural preservation is not the fixing of a past in place, but the tending of practices that make Black survival and sovereignty possible. In doing so, she challenges institutional gatekeeping and insists on community-authored futures. She has lived what others come to study. She has returned to what others have left behind. And she continues to narrate Daufuskie not as a world in decline, but as one still unfolding.

References

  1. “About Sallie Ann,” SallieAnnRobinson.com, accessed May 4, 2025, https://www.sallieannrobinson.com/blank-2.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Pat Conroy, The Water is Wide (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
  4. Sallie Ann Robinson, Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way: Smokin’ Joe Butter Beans, Ol’ ’Fuskie Fried Crab Rice, Sticky-Bush Blackberry Dumpling, and Other Sea Island Favorites (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Cooking the Gullah Way, Morning, Noon, and Night (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2007).
  5. Field notes, Daufuskie Island, Day 2 (April 18, 2025).
  6. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 5–6.
  7. Field notes, Daufuskie Island, Day 3 (April 19, 2025).
  8. Ibid.
  9. Field notes, Daufuskie Island, Day 2 (April 18, 2025).
3 

Heritage Tourism and the Digital Turn: Contextualizing Daufuskie Island

Heritage tourism refers to travel centered on cultural, historical, and communal sites—spaces where visitors seek to engage with the legacies of place. It encompasses both tangible heritage—such as vernacular architecture, family cemeteries, and sacred landscapes—and intangible forms, including oral traditions, spiritual practices, foodways, and rituals of memory.1 While the sector has become one of the most profitable and rapidly growing in the U.S. South, it is also a site of contestation. When designed without accountability to local communities, heritage tourism can exploit cultural labor, flatten memory into marketable myth, and hasten displacement under the guise of preservation.

These dynamics are particularly visible in the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, designated by Congress in 2006 to recognize the unique cultural contributions of Gullah Geechee people across the coastal Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. The Corridor’s Management Plan explicitly calls for a shift away from plantation nostalgia and toward community-based cultural interpretation, economic inclusion, and narrative sovereignty.2 Yet many sites still lack the infrastructure—visitor centers, interpretive signage, protected access—that would allow Gullah communities to define and benefit from their own cultural heritage. More often, descendants are left out of key decision-making processes, even as their stories are spotlighted for tourists and branding campaigns.

The economic stakes underscore this paradox. In 2010, South Carolina recorded $15 billion in travel spending and $4.7 billion in tourism-generated wages.3 Cultural heritage tourists—those who travel specifically to engage with local traditions—tend to spend more, stay longer, and seek what the industry terms “authentic experiences.” But who gets to define authenticity, and on whose terms? As Deepak Chhabra argues, “authenticity” in tourism is often staged—constructed to meet consumer expectations rather than reflect living, evolving cultural realities.4 In Gullah contexts, this leads to reductive narratives that privilege surface-level performances—basket weaving, dialect samples, “storytelling”—while obscuring structural issues like land loss, climate vulnerability, and intergenerational displacement.

These tensions raise a critical question: how might Gullah communities reclaim tourism not only as an economic engine, but as a site of self-determined storytelling? Michelle D. Commander’s concept of speculative return offers a powerful response. In Afro-Atlantic Flight, she defines return not as a literal or geographic act, but as a form of diasporic imagination—a creative reengagement with ancestral geographies through memory, story, and design.5 This project takes up that call. Through Daufuskie3D, a community-anchored digital platform, Gullah descendants and diasporic audiences can reenter Daufuskie’s cultural landscape through immersive tools: layered LiDAR scans, oral histories, ambient soundscapes, and annotated memory sites. This is not tourism as simulation. It is heritage as relation—a form of presence grounded in witnessing, care, and responsibility.

Daufuskie3D actively resists the extractive tendencies of conventional heritage tourism. Rather than rendering Black cultural sites as aesthetic backdrops for external consumption, it invites what Chhabra calls visitor mindfulness—a slowed, reflective mode of engagement that privileges listening over looking.6 It also reframes the role of branding, rejecting tourism-as-product in favor of what the Corridor Plan terms virtual stewardship: the application of preservation ethics to digital space without severing ties to the land, labor, and community knowledge that gave rise to it.7

This critique becomes especially sharp when considered against the backdrop of plantation tourism—a lucrative heritage genre in the Lowcountry that continues to flatten Black life into nostalgic spectacle. These spaces, as Commander notes, often aestheticize slavery and minimize Black resistance, offering “consumable narratives devoid of continuity or agency.”8 By contrast, Daufuskie3D centers what I describe as narrative sovereignty—the right of Gullah people to define their own stories, to control the means of cultural transmission, and to intervene in the market forces that shape collective memory. The immersive interface becomes a kind of subaltern counterpublic, what Nancy Fraser describes as “parallel discursive arenas” in which historically marginalized communities can circulate oppositional interpretations of history, identity, and belonging.9

What emerges is not tourism-as-entertainment but tourism-as-witnessing. A reparative digital encounter. A refusal to let the memory of Daufuskie be shaped solely by the demands of the marketplace.

References

  1. National Park Service, Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Management Plan (Atlanta: U.S. Department of the Interior, 2012), 43.
  2. Ibid., 66–69.
  3. Ibid., 24.
  4. Deepak Chhabra, Heritage Tourism: Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010), 34–36.
  5. Michelle D. Commander, Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 129–134.
  6. Chhabra, Heritage Tourism, 115–117.
  7. National Park Service, Gullah Geechee Corridor Plan, 162–165.
  8. Commander, Afro-Atlantic Flight, 142.
  9. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 67–70.
3 

Reframing Preservation

I. Reframing Preservation

Preservation in the United States has long centered the material—buildings, monuments, and architectural form—often at the expense of the communities that made those spaces meaningful. Codified through the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards and reinforced by the National Register of Historic Places, preservation practices have historically privileged colonial aesthetics, individual ownership, and landmark-based significance.1 These frameworks uphold what the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (AACHAF) describes as “the dominant logic of preservation,” in which resources and recognition accrue to sites already legitimized by institutional power.2 For Black communities—particularly Gullah Geechee descendants on Daufuskie Island—this has meant that the places most vital to cultural identity often fall outside preservation’s reach: praise houses, family cemeteries, oyster society buildings, and kin-based landholdings held as heirs property.

This project begins from a different premise: that memory itself is a form of infrastructure. Following Christina Sharpe’s concept of wake work, preservation is not simply the act of conserving what remains. It is the labor of attending to what has been excluded, erased, or rendered invisible—what lingers in the afterlives of slavery, displacement, and land theft.3 In this context, preservation becomes a reparative spatial practice. It is not just about buildings—it is about relation, refusal, and return.

Andrea Roberts, through her work on the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, has advanced a framework for reparative planning that centers descendant knowledge, oral tradition, and community authorship.4 Her participatory mapping platform challenges conventional planning tools, arguing that Black placemaking cannot be fully seen in zoning maps or deed records, but lives in memory, ritual, and land-based stewardship. Roberts frames this as “planning as remembering.” Daufuskie3D aligns closely with that call. The immersive digital archive developed through the project is not simply a scan—it is an act of remembering with, not about. It visualizes stories and spaces that institutional frameworks have neglected and insists that what is vernacular, spiritual, or undocumented is no less worthy of preservation.

A growing chorus of preservationists, planners, and scholars are advancing similar frameworks. The National Trust’s Sites of Enslavement initiative emphasizes preservation as repair—calling for not just recognition, but restitution.5 Their Repair Work framework asserts that preservation must foreground story, relationship, and care, especially in spaces marked by historical violence. The Tuskegee University architecture program, under Professor Kwesi Daniels, puts these values into practice by pairing students with descendant communities to restore structures as acts of cultural continuity—not tourist spectacle.6 These models reject extractive preservation narratives that valorize ruins while forgetting the people who built and sustained them.

Daufuskie3D is part of that shift. On Daufuskie Island, the project takes shape through immersive documentation of sites that have been fenced off, allowed to decay, or interpreted without Gullah voices. Many of these are private homes owned by Gullah descendants who have been displaced or moved off-island—structures that have fallen into disrepair due to years of deferred maintenance. Despite their cultural significance, such homes are not prioritized by the Daufuskie Island Historical Foundation for restoration or recognition. Instead, they are often treated by visitors as ruins available for recreation, photography, or worse—vandalism. One example is the Robinson Family Home, whose windows were forcibly removed by trespassers in recent years.7 These are not abandoned structures—they are living evidence of a community’s spatial and familial history.

Other sites, like the Oyster Society building, speak to the economic and cultural labor of Daufuskie’s Black residents. Once central to the island’s oyster economy—a labor-intensive industry led by Black women and families—it has been physically refurbished but remains unopened to the public. Despite its potential as a site of memory and education, the building sits unactivated, disconnected from the descendants whose stories it holds. These are the sites Daufuskie3D seeks to render visible: not ruins for tourism, but repositories of care, work, and cultural endurance.

The AACHAF report Preserving African American Spaces outlines a preservation strategy that is both cultural and structural: lift up community-authored histories, expand what counts as “significant,” and deploy digital tools to broaden access and stewardship.8 Daufuskie3D enacts that strategy by using immersive documentation to center descendant knowledge and elevate overlooked sites. Through 3D scans, oral annotations, ambient sound, and spatial storytelling, the platform creates new channels for engaging Gullah memory work. It not only supports cultural preservation—it provides the evidence base and narrative depth needed to mobilize broader recognition and resources.

This is especially critical on Daufuskie Island, where many Gullah-owned sites, such as the Robinson Family Home, remain in urgent need of preservation. Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson has launched a grassroots campaign to restore her grandmother’s home, distributing QR-coded donation stickers at the end of her heritage tours. But her reach is currently limited to those physically present. While local news segments and photographs provide some visibility, the scans featured on Daufuskie3D—complete with oral history, historical context, and spatial annotations—humanize the site and crystalize the need. With expanded AR and VR capabilities, the project opens entirely new pathways for engagement—allowing descendants, funders, and the public to connect with these spaces in place-aware, emotionally resonant ways. In this way, Daufuskie3D contributes to the Action Fund’s goals by making descendant-defined preservation accessible, fundable, and experientially powerful.

To reframe preservation, then, is to ask not what is most architecturally intact, but what is most spiritually, historically, and communally held. On Daufuskie, preservation is not about nostalgia or aesthetic recovery. It is about making space for stories that refuse erasure. It is about continuity—not just of form, but of presence. Through this lens, preservation becomes not the fixing of a past in place, but the tending of a future still unfolding.

References

  1. U.S. Department of the Interior, The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties, 2017.
  2. Tanner Report 2, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, 2023, 8.
  3. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 15.
  4. Andrea Roberts, “Planning as Remembering: Freedom Colonies and the Creative Craft of Black Placekeeping,” in Countering Displacement through Collective Memory, 2024.
  5. Repair Work at Sites of Enslavement, National Trust for Historic Preservation, 2022.
  6. “At Tuskegee University, an Architecture Professor Leverages Historic Preservation Goals to Meet Community Ones,” National Trust for Historic Preservation, 2023.
  7. Field notes, Daufuskie Island, Day 3 (April 19, 2025).
  8. Preserving African American Spaces: Growing the Places that Matter, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, 2024, 34–36.
  9. Field notes, Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson, Daufuskie Island, April 18, 2025.
  10. Tanner Report 2, 17.
3 

Preservation as Wake Work

II.Preservation as Wake Work

Christina Sharpe describes the wake as the enduring afterlife of slavery—a spatial and temporal condition that shapes Black life through loss, precarity, and systemic erasure.1 Wake work, in her framing, is the practice of attending to that condition with care. It is a methodology of witnessing, resisting, and remembering within systems that refuse to see. This section argues that preservation, in the context of Black land loss and cultural erasure, must be understood as wake work: a practice of care, refusal, and memory-making in the aftermath of dispossession.

Rather than restoring a fixed past, preservation as wake work tends to what remains—material traces, spiritual sites, cultural fragments, and ancestral infrastructures that persist in the face of disappearance. The overgrown cemetery, the collapsed roofline, the stories passed from elder to youth: these are not remnants. They are acts of survival. They carry forward the presence of people, practices, and places that institutions have long failed to protect.

On Daufuskie Island, this manifests in sites that are both sacred and precarious. Family compounds where multiple generations once lived are now subdivided or condemned. Homes passed through heirs property sit shuttered or deteriorating, not for lack of care but for lack of structural support. Cemeteries like the one behind the Robinson Family Home remain unmarked, vulnerable to overgrowth and encroachment. These are not peripheral spaces. They are the ground on which memory is made and kept.

Wake work, in this context, is not symbolic—it is spatial. It requires mapping what is unmarked, remembering what has been removed, and holding space for stories that have no archive. This is the work of Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson when she gestures toward a tree where a neighbor once lived or calls out the names of those buried beneath her feet. It is also the labor of immersive documentation: capturing not only what can be seen, but what must be narrated, interpreted, and held in relation.

Through field scanning, oral history, and digital annotation, Daufuskie3D builds a counter-archive of wake work. In one 3D scan, the collapsed ceiling of a Gullah home frames the sky like an open wound. An annotation notes where a family altar once stood. This is not a simulation of the past—it is a record of rupture, and a call to repair. These digital environments do not claim to restore wholeness. Instead, they trace what Sharpe calls “the past not passed”: the enduring presence of histories that refuse to stay buried.2

In doing so, wake work becomes a bridge—from memory to action, from loss to reparation.

References

  1. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 14–15.
  2. Ibid., 9.
3 

Speculative Cartographies: Afrofuturism 2.0 and Digital Re-Mapping

VI. Storage, Stewardship, and Sovereignty

To extend this spatial analysis into the realm of technology and aesthetics, the framework turns to Nettrice Gaskins' concept of vernacular cartography, introduced in Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. Gaskins outlines a mapping practice rooted in Black cultural expression—assemblage, remix, and embodied narrative—that resists state-sanctioned geographies.1 This project builds on her formulation by treating spatial annotation, ambient sound, and digital quilting as speculative tools of cultural authorship.

Through LiDAR and photogrammetry, a new kind of augmentation emerges—one that overlays physical terrain with ancestral, symbolic, and spatial knowledge. The memory-site page for the Robinson Family Home exemplifies this approach. While Scaniverse’s upload limitations prevented the full context from being displayed—including a storage shed, family land boundaries, and surrounding forest—the annotations allow layered narration, communicating supplemental memory beyond the visible scan.

Platform limitations, such as Sketchfab’s file size restrictions, obstruct the rendering of full spatial context. But these absences also intensify the speculative function of annotation: enabling users to layer memory onto what is absent, not only what is seen. Despite these constraints, the scans and their presentation constitute a form of vernacular augmented reality—one that resists settler aesthetics by activating community memory and narrative.

Inspired by the techno-vernacular creativity of Houston Conwill, Estella Majozo Conwill, and Sanford Biggers, this project incorporates a digital quilt as a map interface. Each memory site—whether church, homestead, or burial ground—is represented by a quilt code symbol historically linked to the Underground Railroad. These codes, long debated as navigational semaphores for enslaved people in flight, function here as aesthetic signals and mnemonic devices, extending Black cartographic traditions into the digital.2

For instance, the First Union African Baptist Church is represented by the Carpenter’s Wheel, a secondary code pattern that, according to oral tradition, referenced Jesus as the “master carpenter.” While enslavers interpreted spirituals like Swing Low, Sweet Chariot as expressions of religious longing, they often contained directional cues—pointing west-northwest toward Ohio and freedom.3 Similarly, the navigation menu that appears on every page of Daufuskie3D takes the form of the Drinking Gourd or North Star, an emblem used to guide maritime escape routes from Cleveland or Detroit to Canada.

The significance of this quilt-as-map took on new relevance with the unveiling of Sanford Biggers’ Madrigal (2024), a sculpture installed at MIT’s Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building. Biggers, who views quilts as vernacular art and spiritual archive, sees himself as a “late collaborator” with their unknown creators.4 His work transforms quilt patterns into abstract monuments, recognizing them as spatial technologies of resistance. Like Biggers, this project treats quilt code symbolism not as historical fact or myth, but as cultural infrastructure—expressive, insurgent, and communal.

In this context, the quilt interface of Daufuskie3D functions as a digital cosmogram: a speculative, recursive, and symbolically encoded map. It remaps cultural space in dialogue with ancestral technologies, vernacular practices, and Black epistemologies of memory and mobility.

References

  1. Nettrice R. Gaskins, “Afrofuturism on Web 3.0: Vernacular Cartography and Augmented Space,” in Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, ed. Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 27–37.
  2. Eleanor Burns and Sue Bouchard, Underground Railroad Sampler (San Marcos, CA: Quilt in a Day, 2003).
  3. Ibid., 15–17.
  4. “Madrigal, 2024,” MIT List Visual Arts Center, accessed May 3, 2025, https://listart.mit.edu/art-artists/madrigal-2024.
3 

From Visualization to Analysis: A Spectrum of Documentation Tools

IV. From Visualization to Analysis: A Spectrum of Documentation Tools

This section introduces a core insight from this project: that the power of immersive documentation tools lies not only in what they capture, but in who controls the processing of that data. The distinction between visualization and analysis technologies is not merely about resolution or price—it is about infrastructure, access, and the capacity to tell stories with consequence. Visualization tools, typically mobile, lightweight, and cloud-enabled, allow for the rapid generation of visual representations. Analysis tools, by contrast, require local processing, technical fluency, and robust computing environments. The former democratizes viewing; the latter enables spatial reasoning, conservation planning, and legal advocacy. And the choice between them often determines which sites—and which communities—are seen, interpreted, or preserved.

These categories exist on a continuum. At one end are visualization tools, such as smartphones and tablets paired with apps like Scaniverse, Polycam, and Luma AI.1 These tools use photogrammetry and LiDAR sensors to generate lightweight mesh models, processed on-device or in the cloud. Their primary strength lies in their accessibility: they require no technical training, cost less than $1,200, and allow for quick uploads to platforms like Sketchfab. In the field, this means a single user can document a site in minutes and publish it online without ever opening a 3D editing program.

At the other end are analysis tools—professional-grade terrestrial scanners like the Leica RTC360 and BLK360, paired with specialized software such as Leica Cyclone Register 360 Plus.2 These devices produce millimeter-accurate point clouds that capture the spatial relationships of buildings, objects, and terrain with forensic precision. But this power comes at a cost: the devices range from $22,000 to $80,000, and the datasets they generate can easily exceed 200GB per site.3 Processing such data requires workstation-class computers, 128GB RAM, advanced GPUs (such as the NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti), and deep familiarity with 3D workflows.4

The difference is not just technical—it is epistemological. Visualization tools process data for the user. Analysis tools require the user to process data themselves. This creates vastly different relationships to knowledge production. In a visualization workflow, scanning concludes the labor. In an analysis workflow, scanning is only the beginning.

These stakes came into sharp focus during the documentation of the Robinson Family Home.5 Using the RTC360, we captured six interior and exterior scans in under twenty minutes. Once imported into Cyclone, Dr. Benjamin Daniels of Tuskegee University aligned and registered the scans, creating a high-resolution, geospatially accurate 3D model suitable for architectural modeling, historical restoration, and interpretive planning. This process required access to lab infrastructure, software licenses, and the technical fluency to troubleshoot point cloud alignment—a level of capacity not available to most descendants or community members.

This gap reflects a deeper form of infrastructural inequality. Just as heirs property regimes have structurally excluded Black landowners from legal protections, digital preservation systems risk excluding communities from interpretive sovereignty by concentrating analytic capacity in well-resourced institutions. As Andrea Roberts writes in her work on Texas Freedom Colonies, preservation is as much about political leverage and archival control as it is about material survival.6 A mobile scan shared on Sketchfab can raise awareness. But an analysis-grade model can support zoning appeals, grant applications, historical nominations, and public memory campaigns.

The contextual difference between tools is also critical. Using the RTC360, we documented the full perimeter of the Tabby Ruins in roughly ten minutes with four scans. The iPhone 16 Pro Max, using Scaniverse, took more than twice as long and failed to capture the environmental features—slope, trees, foundation layering—that shape interpretation.7 The BLK360, while lower resolution than the RTC360, proved more versatile in unstable areas: it could be handheld in tight spaces where the RTC’s tripod was unsafe to deploy. As Tuskegee’s documentation notes show, choosing the right tool depends on structural condition, lighting, and intended use case.8

In this light, visualization and analysis are not just technical choices—they are political ones. They determine what kinds of cultural memory are made legible, to whom, and for what purposes. The risk is not just under-documentation, but misrepresentation. A scan without context becomes an object without story, flattened into an aestheticized relic.

Recognizing this spectrum has shaped this project’s methodology. Visualization tools enabled rapid community-centered documentation and storytelling; analysis tools, deployed through institutional partnerships, produced archival-grade outputs for future conservation and advocacy. This hybrid approach positions immersive documentation not just as representational practice, but as reparative infrastructure—providing the evidentiary base and narrative depth needed to mobilize resources, generate public visibility, and support community-led claims to land, memory, and repair.


Visualization: iPhone Scaniverse Capture







For the best experience, click the fullscreen icon in the bottom right corner.

Analysis: Leica RTC Capture





Analysis: Leica RTC Capture - full context

References

  1. Apple, iPhone 16 Pro Max Technical Specifications, https://support.apple.com/; Polycam, Pricing, https://polycam.ai/pricing; Scaniverse, How to Use, https://scaniverse.com/
  2. Leica Geosystems, RTC360 and BLK360 Specification Sheets, https://leica-geosystems.com
  3. Field notes, Daufuskie documentation sessions, April 2025
  4. Tuskegee lab specs: 13th gen Intel Core i9, 128GB RAM, NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti, 64-bit OS
  5. Field notes and interview with Dr. Benjamin Daniels, Tuskegee University, April 2025
  6. Andrea Roberts, Texas Freedom Colonies Project, https://www.thetexasfreedomcoloniesproject.com/
  7. Field notes, scan comparison of Tabby Ruins using iPhone vs RTC360, April 2025
  8. Technical notes from Tuskegee University documentation lab, shared April 2025
3 

The Weight of Data: Compression, Compromise, and Digital Legibility

V. The Weight of Data: Compression, Compromise, and Digital Legibility

        Even the most rigorous field documentation is ultimately shaped by the limitations of digital platforms. The technical ceilings imposed by public-facing 3D hosting services like Sketchfab—including file size limits (500MB for free users, 5GB for enterprise), polygon caps, and reduced metadata support—force users into a cycle of compression, simplification, and loss.1 This creates a second layer of erasure: not in the act of capture, but in the act of sharing.

During this project, we encountered these constraints when uploading the Robinson Family Home scan. The original intention was to publish the full environmental context of the site, including adjacent family land, vegetation, and a neighboring shed that appeared in the original point cloud. However, Sketchfab's file size and rendering limits necessitated a pared-down version. Models had to be decimated, textures compressed, and key spatial relationships deleted to meet the platform’s caps.2 These omissions were not curatorial decisions—they were architectural losses enforced by platform architecture.

The stakes are not trivial. When a Gullah home appears on Sketchfab as a floating model, detached from the land it stands on, it suggests a portability and placelessness that runs counter to its lived significance. The model may look “complete” to a casual viewer, but it has been stripped of ecological, familial, and spatial context. What remains is a visual icon, not a cultural system.

This disconnect reflects deeper questions of data stewardship. Hosting platforms optimized for creative industries or game development are not designed to handle the scale, sensitivity, or relational metadata required for heritage preservation. They privilege compression over completeness, visual appeal over evidentiary integrity. As a result, even high-fidelity documentation tools are undermined when the datasets they generate must be truncated for public view.

This issue is not unique to Sketchfab. Cloud-based mobile apps like Polycam and Scaniverse also face storage bottlenecks, limited export formats, and unpredictable rendering across devices. Their interfaces are designed for usability, not longevity. And while they enable wide participation, they also raise questions of ownership, control, and long-term access to data.3

The result is a double bind. Community-driven projects are encouraged to digitize cultural sites for visibility, but the very platforms that offer visibility often enforce invisibility—of context, of scale, of nuance.

The consequence is not just technical; it is epistemological. When compression drives curation, we risk presenting cultural fragments as wholes, and visual representations as stand-ins for spatial relationships. In the absence of intentional hosting models, immersive preservation remains compromised not at the moment of scanning, but at the moment of showing.

A video demonstrating the processing process. Featuring the mesh of the Robinson Home captured by the Leica BLK.



The Robinson Home’s full context could only be shown by video. Press Play!

References

  1. Sketchfab, Plans and Pricing, https://sketchfab.com/plans
  2. Field notes, Robinson Family Home model preparation, April 2025.
  3. Polycam, Pricing, https://polycam.ai/pricing; Scaniverse, How to Use, https://scaniverse.com/
3 

Storage, Stewardship, and Sovereignty

VI. Storage, Stewardship, and Sovereignty

        Cultural preservation in the digital age demands more than capture—it requires infrastructure. Without sustained systems of storage, access, and governance, even the most advanced documentation risks becoming fragmented, inaccessible, or forgotten. In immersive workflows, the size and complexity of 3D datasets—from point clouds to photogrammetry meshes—introduce a new axis of inequality: archival burden. Unlike physical artifacts, these digital materials require high-capacity drives, cloud infrastructure, GPU-intensive rendering environments, and long-term storage strategies. Without such systems, digital documentation risks becoming a memory held in limbo—precise yet unusable.

During this project, we faced these tensions directly. The high-resolution point cloud of the Robinson Family Home captured by the RTC360 was only legible once processed using Leica Cyclone Register 360 Plus on a professional workstation at Tuskegee University.1 Without this access, the scan would have remained an unintelligible cluster of raw data. And even after processing, questions of long-term hosting, platform stability, and stewardship remain unresolved. Cloud-based platforms like Sketchfab offer short-term visibility but cap file sizes, compress models, and offer no guarantees of permanence.2 While useful for public engagement, they are insufficient for archival continuity.

These conditions raise urgent questions about who bears responsibility for data stewardship, particularly in community contexts where resources are limited. In many ways, storage is sovereignty—not just over files, but over timelines, narratives, and permissions. When cultural records are hosted on commercial platforms, the terms of preservation are dictated not by the communities they concern, but by corporate infrastructure and platform policy. Their compression defaults, subscription fees, and interface designs do not account for collaborative annotations, relational metadata, or permissions across descendant communities.3 While Sketchfab allows users to place annotations on scanned assets, these annotations can only be created and edited by the account holder who uploaded the model. The platform does not currently support collaborative ownership or shared editing rights—posing a challenge for community-based documentation efforts that rely on multiple contributors or seek shared custodianship over interpretive metadata.4

One can consider PLACE’s data trust model as a provocative alternative. PLACE (Place-based Landscape and Community Ecosystem) proposes a governance model in which community members, researchers, and institutions collaboratively hold and manage spatial data for mutual benefit.5 This “data trust” model recognizes that digital land records, environmental models, and heritage scans are not inert—they carry cultural, legal, and spiritual meaning. PLACE’s approach centers values like reciprocity, transparency, and local custodianship in the infrastructure itself. While this project has not implemented such a structure, its ethos resonates: digitized cultural heritage deserves governance structures aligned with the communities it represents.

At present, most Gullah families on Daufuskie do not have access to such infrastructure. Consider Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson, whose grandmother’s house is deteriorating due to age and deferred maintenance. She shares QR code stickers with visitors at the end of her heritage tours, directing them to a GoFundMe campaign in hopes of raising funds for preservation.6 Her reach is limited to those who physically attend the tour. While a short local news feature and some photographs offer additional visibility, these materials rarely convey the scale of urgency or the emotional gravity of the site. Her stewardship extends beyond storytelling. It requires logistical coordination, emotional labor, and public engagement in a context where institutional support remains minimal.

Here, immersive documentation becomes a tool of spatial advocacy. By producing annotated 3D scans of the home and publishing them online, this project offers a more vivid, embodied account of the house’s current condition. Users can orbit, zoom, and inspect the damage—viewing the porch collapse, the wood rot, the tilted foundation. With AR and VR integrations, these environments can be experienced in new ways by funders, descendants, and preservationists who cannot travel to the island. Unlike a static photo or grant narrative, these scans offer a dynamic and evidence-based platform for mobilization—supporting visibility, resource allocation, and future planning.

In this way, Daufuskie3D contributes to the preservation goals articulated by initiatives like the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, offering not just visual assets but infrastructures of legibility. The project reveals what is possible when immersive documentation is aligned with the politics of care and the ethics of shared custodianship. But it also points to the limitations of our current preservation ecosystems, in which those doing the work—like Ms. Robinson—must bridge structural gaps alone.

To meet the scale of dispossession, we must build infrastructures capable of holding memory with the same precision with which we now capture it. This requires not only scanners and software, but community governance, public investment, and sustained technical stewardship. Without these, documentation remains visualization—evocative, yes, but ultimately unmoored. One can consider this project an invitation: to help build the connective tissue between memory and material support, between representation and repair.

Ethical Considerations of Spatial Capture

Spatial technologies offer powerful tools for preserving cultural memory, but without ethical frameworks rooted in consent and community control, they risk reproducing the very extractive systems they seek to resist. High-resolution capture tools—such as LiDAR scanners, aerial drones, and 360º imaging rigs—do more than document physical space; they encode power. Left unchecked, these technologies can transform communities into commodities, memories into assets, and sites of resilience into objects of surveillance.7

On Daufuskie Island, these tensions were not abstract. Our team arrived equipped with a suite of professional tools, including a Leica drone capable of scanning the island’s terrain in high detail, a tripod-mounted RTC360 scanner, and a handheld BLK360. But technology alone does not confer legitimacy. The drone, in particular—large, visible, and audibly intrusive—risked breaching spatial and cultural boundaries. It signaled a top-down gaze, reminiscent of surveillance rather than stewardship.8

Rather than deploy the drone—which could have efficiently mapped spatial relationships but risked violating community norms—we chose instead to prioritize tools that supported trust, conversation, and co-presence. We began with less conspicuous technologies like mobile LiDAR on iPhones and iPads, introducing each tool gradually and collaboratively. Our approach was to move at the speed of trust, demonstrating value while remaining attuned to questions of power, consent, and community priorities.9

This ethical posture resonates far beyond Daufuskie. Consider Phoenix in Gaza, a VR project led by Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb in collaboration with the x-Real Lab and supported by Ruha Benjamin’s Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. Created in the midst of violent siege, it preserves Palestinian cultural landscapes with immersive fidelity—but also raises concerns: in militarized contexts, detailed spatial data can quickly shift from a mode of remembrance to a mechanism of surveillance.10

Similarly, Dr. Kwesi Daniels’ laser scanning of heritage sites in Rome underscores the power and precarity of accessible documentation. These scans offer tools of survival in one context and tools of speculation in another—reminding us that technologies of capture, without proper governance, can serve both cultural stewardship and erasure.11

Spatial data is not neutral. It carries memory, belonging, and vulnerability. From a distance, a 360º video may appear as a simple visual record—but embedded within it are ambient sounds, ghosted reflections, and personal artifacts, often captured unintentionally.12 In scanning these environments, we are not merely creating digital models; we are reconstructing lived worlds. That responsibility extends beyond representation—it includes safeguarding what has been shared, even inadvertently.

Ironically, some current technical limitations offer incidental protection. For example, Sketchfab’s file size caps and compression constraints force selective uploads. But such constraints should not be mistaken for ethical safeguards. Protective curation must be intentional, rooted in consent and community-defined priorities—not imposed by commercial hosting platforms.13

This project does not presume to resolve these dilemmas. But it seeks to model an alternative: a practice of ethical immersion that privileges consent, fosters collaborative authorship, and recognizes the political stakes of digital preservation. In doing so, it builds on earlier sections of this thesis that position immersive documentation not as spectacle, but as spatial advocacy. Projects like this one can provide the evidence base and narrative depth needed to mobilize broader recognition, material support, and reparative investment.

When we capture space, we hold more than a digital asset—we hold a fragment of collective life. Ethical data stewardship must become a shield for cultural survival, not a silent accomplice to its erasure.

References

  1. Field notes, RTC360 processing at Tuskegee University, April 2025.
  2. Sketchfab, “Plans and Limitations,” accessed May 4, 2025, https://sketchfab.com/plans.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Ibid.
  5. “Theory of Change,” PLACE.org, accessed May 4, 2025, https://place.org/data-trust-model.
  6. Field notes, Sallie Ann Robinson heritage tour, April 18, 2025.
  7. Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity, 2019).
  8. Field notes, Daufuskie Island, March 29, 2025.
  9. Ibid.
  10. “Phoenix in Gaza,” Just Data Lab Projects, Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, accessed May 4, 2025, https://justdatalab.org/projects/phoenix-in-gaza.
  11. Field notes, conversation with Dr. Kwesi Daniels, Tuskegee University, April 19, 2025.
  12. Field notes, 360º documentation review, April 2025.
  13. Sketchfab, “Plans and Limitations.”