Conclusion: Toward Stewardship Beyond the Scan

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.