Take a Virtual Tour of John Ashbery’s Victorian Nest

For you interactive enthusiasts: A new Digital Humanities Lab project at Yale has created a website that takes visitors on a virtual tour inside John Ashbery’s Victorian home; the poet himself even greets you upon entrance. The project, called “John Ashbery’s Nest,” had a soft launch on July 1, and its creator is Karin Roffman, author of The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), the first in-depth Ashbery biography. More on the project from Bess Connolly Martell at YaleNews:

...Ashbery carefully chose each of the items in his house, and as the website continues to grow, it will highlight the importance and provenance of each of these items via photographs, biographical details, and audio clips of Ashbery and his partner, David Kermani, describing each room.

Roffman says that the idea for the project originated while she was teaching and reading Ashbery’s poems as a visiting professor at Bard College. Ashbery, who was an emeritus professor at Bard, visited her class and then invited Roffman to see his home. It was after this first visit to Ashbery’s home that Roffman became curious about the poet’s past.

“I was really fascinated with the relationship between poets’ spaces and their poetry, and didn’t know that he was a collector at all when I went to his house. I was quite surprised by the house itself,” she says. She used her extensive research on Ashbery to develop the written content for the site.

The project, which was a year in the making, is sponsored by a faculty project grant from the Digital Humanities Lab. Monica Ong Reed, the user experience designer at the Digital Humanities Lab, led the collaborative production of the project and served as its visual designer.

The center hall of John Ashbery’s house serves as the main focal point for the project. It is brought to life with 3D images that hone in — by way of overlays — on the wide variety of objects that are on display in the room.

To develop the site, Roffman and Reed engaged with two teams who were responsible for the virtual reality photography and the development of the 360-degree immersive tour environment. When Reed was first approached about working on this project, she thought the idea was “compelling in its cross-disciplinary nature.”

“We wanted to create a sonic collage that a visitor feels when they go from piece to piece as they are hearing different moments of Ashbery talking about how he came across the piece as well as the poetry related to the object. There was a lot of collaboration involved in terms of curating the kind of experience that helps to amplify Karin’s research,” says Reed.

The full article about the project can be read here.