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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

VII. Toward a Reparative Immersive Practice

To engage in preservation within Black geographies is to intervene in an ongoing structure of loss. For Black communities dispossessed of land, cultural infrastructure, and archival visibility, the act of preserving memory is inseparable from the politics of repair. In this context, reparative preservation is not merely a technical effort to record what exists—it is a spatial practice aimed at reconstituting what has been taken, disfigured, or erased. It asks how we might build technologies that not only document memory, but return it. This section posits immersive documentation as a form of wake work, extending Christina Sharpe’s call to attend to the afterlives of slavery through methods of care, witnessing, and world-making.¹ It draws as well on Katherine McKittrick’s theorization of Black spatial knowledge, arguing that immersive tools must operate not only as representational devices, but as instruments of spatial redress.²

While prior digital heritage efforts have focused on access and visualization, this project proposes a reparative immersive framework—one that centers Black spatial knowledge, descendant sovereignty, and narrative accountability. In Gullah Geechee communities such as Daufuskie Island, this work is urgent. Descendant families have seen their homes, praise houses, family cemeteries, and agricultural landscapes fragmented by heirs property sales, gated development, and a tourism industry that trades in myth over material history. These are not losses of nostalgia—they are fractures in continuity. Immersive documentation in this context becomes a means of re-stitching that continuity—of asserting presence in the face of removal.

Immersive tools are particularly well-suited to surface relationships otherwise invisible to planning documents or historic site surveys: the spatial logic of family compounds, the orientation of a praise house relative to tree cover, the weathering of a tabby wall over time. By capturing not just discrete objects but their environmental and cultural context—through point cloud modeling, annotated 3D environments, and multi-scalar scanning—these tools allow for the representation of place as lived, not simply as surveyed. Crucially, this documentation does not aim to fix a past in place, but to support conditions of return, continuity, and reactivation.

Yet the power of these tools lies not in their novelty, but in their use. Who wields them, for what purpose, and with whose guidance determines whether they replicate extractive logics or unsettle them. This project models a methodology of relational authorship, shaped by community-led review, oral history integration, and the epistemological leadership of stewards like Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson. It draws from traditions of Black feminist praxis and community-based design, resisting the depersonalization of conventional documentation workflows. As Ms. Robinson reminds us, “You can’t tell the story of this island from Google.” Preservation begins with proximity, not interface.

This reparative approach expands the horizon of use. Immersive scans are not static archives—they can function as tools for education, fundraising, intergenerational transmission, and legal advocacy. A 3D scan of the Robinson Family Home, viewable through VR, allows distant descendants to experience ancestral space. Annotated models of family cemeteries can support land claims or grant applications. AR overlays can embed oral histories directly into site-based tours, providing narrative context often excluded from signage. These tools do not merely visualize history—they enact speculative returns, enabling communities to engage with space that has been rendered inaccessible.

These practices do not replace political struggle. But they support its conditions. By offering richly rendered, embodied evidence of vulnerability and care, immersive tools contribute to a reparative infrastructure—a scaffold that supports future claims, policy shifts, and descendant-led planning. They provide the narrative depth and evidentiary precision required to mobilize recognition and resources. As the project’s earlier chapters have shown, platforms like Daufuskie3D do more than display memory—they support strategies of spatial repair.

One can consider this work a form of counter-mapping: not just locating memory sites, but restoring their felt, relational, and communal dimensions. In doing so, it contests dominant spatial imaginaries and affirms Black presence on its own terms. To sustain such work, however, we must invest in its infrastructure: XR labs embedded in HBCUs and cultural centers, collaborative stewardship frameworks, and policies that recognize immersive documentation as legitimate preservation.

If preservation is to be reparative, it must move at the pace of care. It must center those who have carried memory without institutional support. And it must recognize that immersive tools are not endpoints—they are openings. Through them, we glimpse not only what was lost, but what might still be returned.

Preservation is not the fixing of the past in place. It is the material work of repairing continuity. For Black communities whose histories have been excluded, displaced, or mythologized, preservation must extend beyond the archive—it must operate as a reparative spatial practice. This chapter has framed immersive documentation not simply as a representational tool, but as an intervention into the spatial afterlife of dispossession.

This project contributes a framework for reparative immersive practice: a methodology that combines spatial analysis, narrative restoration, and community stewardship to contest erasure and seed new forms of return. Drawing from Black geographies, digital heritage, and memory studies, it demonstrates how immersive technologies—when shaped by descendant priorities—can become instruments of care, evidence, and reclamation.

Daufuskie3D puts this into practice. Through annotated scans, community-guided tours, and the visualization of imperiled memory sites, the platform documents what is at risk while enacting what might still be restored. From the Robinson Family Home to the Tabby Ruins, it surfaces stories and spaces that would otherwise remain inaccessible to funders, policymakers, and descendants. These models are not just invitations to bear witness—they are calls to invest in Black spatial futures.

And yet this project also gestures beyond itself. Its methods illuminate what is needed: embedded XR labs at HBCUs and cultural institutions, policies that treat immersive heritage as infrastructure, and frameworks that recognize community-led documentation as preservation in its most vital form. These models do not ask to be preserved; they demand to be used—as tools for legal claims, fundraising, education, and return.

To preserve under conditions of loss is to build while mourning. But it is also to dream while building. This is the work of reparative preservation: not simply preserving what was, but protecting what still might be. This project marks a beginning—not an endpoint, but a portal.