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Unlocking Mysteries from the Past

New media faculty member Christopher Oakley uses animation technology to change what we know about a beloved president

By UNC Asheville

February 27^th, 2023

Christopher Oakley, associate professor of new media, was looking for a way to challenge his students when he first launched The Lincoln Project, with the goal of creating and animating a photorealistic Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address.

He ended up challenging history itself.

For years, scholars have pondered the details of Lincoln’s famous address, which happened so quickly photographers at the time didn’t even manage to capture an image of Lincoln giving his speech. One of those nagging details has been the exact location of the platform from which Lincoln uttered those now-legendary words that famously begin, Four-score and seven years ago…

Using the few photographs that do exist, and a 3-D modeling program called Maya, Oakley has determined what he believes is the real location of the Gettysburg Address—a different spot from where historians have long accepted the speech took place. The platform was believed to have been entirely within neighboring Evergreen Cemetery; Oakley’s research places the platform straddling the borders between cemeteries, putting Lincoln instead in the Gettysburg National Cemetery.

While it might seem like a small detail, Oakley says it’s an important one.

“I think there is a palpable feeling you get when you're standing in the spot where something momentous happened,” Oakley said. “It ignites your imagination and transports you back in time. You become, in your mind’s eye, another witness.”

Igniting his students’ imaginations, and their passion for a new subject, is one of the most exciting parts of this digital humanities project, Oakley said.

“Students leaving the project will say things like, ‘When I started this project, I was in it for the tech, I was in it for the challenge, and I had no interest in history.’ But now they’re all history buffs,” Oakley said. “This was our deep dive into the digital humanities. We were using technology to unlock mysteries from the past.”

Marrying 19th century analog materials with 21st century technology to solve a historical mystery was a transformative experience for both Oakley and his students.

“That's what I think is incumbent on us as educators, to find those avenues using the digital humanities. It's such a great gateway for our students,” Oakley said. “If we can find engaging ways to reach them through the computer, then there's a whole new area of learning that we're tapping into.”

For Oakley, those avenues have included the process of animating Lincoln, researching and recreating his cabinet room to develop a virtual reality experience, taking field trips to Gettysburg and even dressing up in period costumes.

The Science Behind A Historical Discovery

This isn’t the first time the Lincoln Project has led Oakley to an important discovery. In 2013, he made national headlines for locating Lincoln in a crowd shot of the Gettysburg Address. While the discovery was debated by some historians, Oakley’s compelling research was published in Smithsonian Magazine.

This time, however, Oakley’s discovery has been more readily accepted.

“I’ve not received much pushback at all,” Oakley said. “I think people are impressed with the science.”

Oakley, who has worked as an animator for companies such as Disney, DreamWorks, and EA Games, used Maya to line up the existing photographs taken at Gettysburg to determine the positions of where each photo was taken, and where the people and objects appearing in the photographs were located.

The map that Oakley created based on the data he collected

“I took those positions of the photographers, and I took their angles of view from each of the cameras; I can tell what that is because I'm doing it digitally,” Oakley explained. “If you look at it from above and look at where all those angles of views crossed, it forms a Venn diagram. The one place where all those camera views overlap each other is exactly where I have the platform.”

Everything seemed to be matching up as it should, but there was one problem.

“The few things that we know where they were, like the flagpole, the Evergreen Cemetery gatehouse and the horizon lines, I’m using all those to anchor myself and to recreate all these photographs. But I'd get the people's heads to be in the right places, and they were in the ground up to their ankles,” Oakley said.

If Oakley’s recreation was accurate, there was only one explanation: the ground must have been eight inches lower in 1863 than it is now. But what is possible? Or was Oakley’s recreation flawed?

“Five weeks ago the National Park Service sent me their cultural landscape report for the Gettysburg Cemetery, and it has every little piece of information you ever want to know about that cemetery, from its inception up to its current day,” Oakley said. “It said that in 1934 there was a CCC project to regrade the ground and raise it eight inches. I was like, here it is! Here’s the proof. I did my little historian happy dance.”

The Future

Oakley isn’t sure where his Lincoln research will take him next. He may investigate a local legend from Bostic, North Carolina, that Lincoln was actually born there, or work on identifying more members of the crowd in the Gettysburg photos.

“I would love to use the techniques I’m using in digital technology to help the National Park Service in some way,” Oakley said.

He’s also planning on writing a book on his journey into the world of Lincoln research, and he wants to relaunch the Virtual Lincoln Project, which has been paused in recent years due to the pandemic. He’s excited about what new discoveries the project may lead him and his students to in the future.

“We’re opening up and unlocking places, subjects, and areas of research and study that people thought were done,” Oakley said.

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