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.