Toys with Voice

Maastricht Masters Students learn to create 3D Scholarly Editions

Each year the students from the Master Media Studies: Digital Cultures at Maastricht University take a course called Creating Digital Collections coordinated by Costas Papadopoulos and Susan Schreibman. The students are tasked with learning the photogrammetry technique to create a 3D model of an object fitting the theme of that year’s cohort. They then have to work together to curate their objects into a digital collection for publication online. Past projects have included Mining the Netherlands from the 2019-2020 MA class, The Covid Collection from 2020-2021, The Virtual Time Capsule Collection from 2021-2022 and The Maastricht Collection from 2022-2023.

For the 2023-2024 cohort, the theme was Toys with Voice. The students teamed up in pairs to 3D digitise a toy of their choice and then to develop a 3D scholarly edition about the toy using the Voyager system. The students followed a similar training trajectory that the PURE3D team has been developing for our partners and projects over the past four years. The students dived deep into researching the history and societal impact of their toys in order to develop thematic tours relating to a variety of topics, such as gender stereotypes, franchise capitalisation, cultural representation and more. Each team was also required to develop a tour documenting and reflecting on their 3D digitisation process.

These 18 new 3D scholarly editions will soon be featured on the PURE3D infrastructure. Keep an eye out on PURE3D’s social media channels to learn more about Nerf toy guns and gun control in the US, Baby Yoda’s cutification strategy, Woody’s character journey in the Toy Story Franchise or whether model trains are just ‘toys for boys’.