Context and Significance of Edmund T. Gordon's Racial Geography Tour

Racial Geography Tour, racialgeographytour.org/ (accessed May 21, 2021)

There could not be a more vital time to engage with Edmund T. Gordon's Racial Geography Tour, a critically curated and deeply researched online exhibit that offers itself to the visitor as "an interactive guided exploration of the historic origins of the University of Texas at Austin's buildings, landmarks, and spaces." Gordon, the founding chair emeritus of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin as well as the university's vice provost for diversity, narrates and curates the tour as a Black radical rescripting of UT Austin's origins and development. The tour addresses the university's foundations and institutional continuities in chattel slavery, American apartheid, frontier/border warfare, and colonial white nationalism while providing a compelling, docent-like accompaniment for visitors to the UT Austin campus (physical or otherwise). As virtual campus tours have quickly become the (temporary?) normative substitute for in-person visits to colleges and universities in the time of COVID-19, Gordon's project gestures to the vital critical, aesthetic, and scholarly urgency of projects that demystify these canonical (and canon-creating) institutions in friction with their own racial-colonial premises.

The Racial Geography Tour is simultaneously an educational experience, pedagogical intervention, and historical encounter that utilizes a multimedia, POV, virtual apparitional format. Ghostlike, old-timey images of significant figures in UT's history follow visitors as they traverse each virtual site, inducing a creeping recognition of the university's animating aspirations as a frontier-apartheid institution in the service of a particular "public." Beyond its function as a critical counternarrative to the University of Texas's long-standing self-articulation as a proud symbol of frontier modernity (its official motto is "Disciplina Praesidium Civitatis"—a cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy—although the slogan/greeting/chant "hook 'em horns" is far more recognizable), the tour is an online exhibit sui generis, rich in archival imagery and 360-degree virtual interactivity.

Figure 1.

Screenshot from "Introduction," Racial Geography Tour, racialgeographytour.org/ (downloaded May 2021).

Production and Design

The origins of the digital exhibit are in Gordon's in-person tours of the UT Austin campus, which began in the early 2000s and grew into an extended archival research project that drew from architectural design plans, yearbooks, photographs, newspaper articles, and other institutional ephemera. Working with Asha Thompson, the electronic publishing specialist for UT Austin's African and African Diaspora Studies Department, Gordon responded to increased demand for the tour in the late 2000s by supplementing it with a digital version that eventually became the Racial Geography Tour. Collaborating with the university's Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services (LAITS), Gordon and Thompson assembled a production team that included designers, web developers, audio specialists, and numerous student assistants.¹

The project manager Celeste Henery and the lead producer Kelly Webster shaped a multiyear, interdisciplinary effort that encompassed the university's library, archival, media, and information technology infrastructure. Protracted collaboration between dedicated groups of visual designers (led by Suloni Robertson and Valerie Tran), website developers (headed by Stacy Vlasits), and audio engineers (under Jacob Weiss's guidance) focused on developing interactive multimedia footage at each site of the virtual tour. These scenes were meticulously arranged to mesh with Gordon's voiced and transcribed narrative, resulting in a panoply of visual effects that accentuate a history of changes to the campus's built environment. Student technology assistants from UT's Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services helped create the tour's distinctive web-based aesthetic.² This student-centered design team drew from Gordon's archival work while enacting a collective approach to the process of adding historical images, text, and augmented graphics throughout the tour stops (e.g., the looming, ghostlike visages of significant institutional figures that haunt the tourist at various sites). The website development and audio production teams assembled the visual design, archival materials, and narrative audio into the finished version of the tour. Ten audio engineers—a combination of...