My NULab work was tied into a larger, longer-term project that I have been developing since 2020 under a NULab Seedling Grant. The project, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory: A 3D Reconstruction, is a virtual reconstruction of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory intended to be navigable both in browser and using a Virtual Reality headset.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
The Fire itself occurred on March 25th, 1911 in the Triangle Shirtwaist (a type of blouse) Factory. The factory was located on the upper three floors of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, New York City. Many workers, primarily young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, were trapped in the factory after a fire broke out on the 8th floor. All told, 146 workers died in the fire, which, combined with the horrific spectacle of young women trapped in a burning building jumping to their death on the sidewalk, sparked massive public outrage.1Leon Stein’s book, first published in 1962 and drawing on interviews with the survivors, remains one of the best accounts of the tragedy. Leon Stein, Michael Hirsch, and William Greider, The Triangle Fire, cen edition (ILR Press, 2011).
The fire remains one of the most widely remembered events of American labor history. It has been cited time and again as a watershed moment in the movement for Labor Safety Reform2“The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: An American Tragedy,” American Society of Safety Professionals, https://www.assp.org/news-and-articles/the-triangle-shirtwaist-factory-fire-an-american-tragedy and continues to be a major part of high school curriculums, especially sections dealing with the Progressive Era. The Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations also hosts a site with a number of primary sources, inspired by consistent requests from middle and high school students for information about the fire.3“Cornell University – ILR School – The Triangle Factory Fire,” https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/.
The Project
My reconstruction is a digital exhibit, using 3D modeled recreations of historical objects to lead users through an interactive narrative of the Triangle Factory before, during, and after the fire. The exhibit is located within a 3D reconstruction of the factory itself, divided into 3 sections, each occupying one of the floors of the factory.
The first floor of the exhibit (which would have been the 8th floor of the Asch Building) is a reconstruction of the Triangle Factory as it was before the fire. This section contextualizes the Triangle Factory into the history of labor and the labor movement in early 1900s America. It introduces the user to the union agitation and the exploitative work culture of the American factory in this period. Notably, it establishes that despite dire working conditions and very limited workplace safety protections, the Triangle Factory was actually an example of a relatively “modern” factory for this period.
The second floor (9th floor of the Asch Building) is dedicated to the events of the fire itself. This floor is a reconstruction of the Triangle Factory in the aftermath of the fire. It narrates the events of the disaster, from the start of the fire on the eighth floor to the tragedy of the over one hundred workers who ended up trapped in the burning building. On its own, this floor could serve as an excellent teaching aid for any module that deals with the fire.
The third floor (10th floor of the Asch Building) has the broadest focus. Its goal is to explore the Triangle Shirtwaist Fires place in the wider arc of American labor history. It is divided up into three sections: the first dealing with the immediate aftermath of the fire (the acquittal of the owners and the trade union response), the second dealing with parallels to later workplace disasters in American history (for example the Hamlet Chicken Fire of 1991), and the third looking at the modern connections of the fire, especially contemporary fights for better workplace conditions. This section is aimed at helping students not only understand the fire as an important historical event of the Progressive Era, but also as part of an ongoing struggle which neither started nor ended with the Triangle Fire.
A major focus of the project is keeping the program relatively lightweight. Digital humanities has exceptional potential for creating easily accessed historical scholarship, but only if those projects are able to run on commonly available hardware. So, while virtual reality remains an exciting part of the project, it has been developed with in-browser explorability also in mind. The in-browser version is aimed primarily at a school system that is highly unlikely to have access to virtual reality headsets or particularly powerful computers. The virtual reality version of the game, by contrast, is aimed at fixed exhibits that can use a few headsets to make virtual reality to a number of visitors.
The Goals of the Reconstruction
The initial form of the project was developed in 2020 in the course Texts, Maps, and Networks: Readings and Methods for Digital History with a team including Benjamin Grey, Paul Martin, Fahim Rahman and myself. This first version dealt only with a general overview of the event in the framework of a 3D reconstruction. While useful pedagogically, this goal was limited in its scope, especially in going beyond a traditional framing of the Triangle Fire solely within the Progressive Era. As part of my Digital Humanities Certificate work in 2021–2022 I expanded the scope of this project to incorporate the story of the fire into a wider history of the American labor movement. In particular, the role of the memory of the fire in this movement and the still-ongoing struggles for workplace safety are core parts of this contextualization. It remains aimed at high school students, however, and the division of the project by thematic floors enables educators to use the sections most important to their lesson plans. If, for example, a teacher only needed or had time for a brief look at the narrative of the fire, they could use the 9th floor separately. This modularity is core to the conception of the project as a pedagogical aid.
Current State and Ongoing Work
During the 2023 Fall semester as part of the NULab DITI Fellowship I developed an updated captioning system which is both more accessible and also able to incorporate historic images to accompany the 3D models. This was a longer process, part of which involved deciding the approach to where to anchor the text. Previous versions had a user interface that was effectively overlaid with text after interaction with a narrative model; however, this proved to be somewhat limiting, especially because it took up a significant amount of screen space. In light of this, I opted to move to canvases (on which the contextual information of the objects is displayed) anchored in the game world which would appear above or next to their connected objects. Though this made reading slightly more complicated, it did allow for the use of larger canvases and opened up significant screen space. This allowed for the inclusion of historical photographs to complement the text and historical models themselves. Additionally, I have spent the last year modeling more objects, especially objects that can serve as part of the narrative of the exhibit. The focus currently remains on the 9th floor, as this is the most stand-alone of the three. After this floor is finished, it will be hosted online at a dedicated site and be available to explore in-browser. This site will also host the sources for the objects modeled and the sources quoted as part of the narrative.
Next Steps
The immediate next steps will be to finalize a demo of the 9th floor and launch it along with the website. Following that, I will update the 8th floor, which is partially completed in the form of the initial Triangle Demo. This will involve rearranging models and some retexturing, as the original demo was intended to serve as a model of the 9th floor before the fire. After this is completed, I will turn to the 10th floor to model the sections about the legacy and continuity of the Triangle Fire within the American labor movement. Like the 8th floor, this work is already partially done, but some models remain unfinished and the final arrangement of the floor needs to be carried out.
Public memory develops unevenly, and often incorporates only parts of events, frequently taking the views of the powerful or wealthy. The historian’s role in social justice is to rediscover and reintroduce those outsider voices and revise or replace that public memory with one that recenters the voices of those forgotten.4The best and most well-known example of this approach in American history remains Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, Reissue edition (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2015). When we look for future possibilities, especially one’s that radically break with the way things currently are, the first place we seek guidance is in the past. By reintroducing these voices, we do not just bring attention to injustices of the past, but also offer alternatives for more a more just, equitable future. This project is not just aimed at creating a teaching tool for the Progressive Era. It is also aimed at connecting the struggle of the Triangle workers, though the battles of workers throughout American history, to the present struggle of American workers against degrading working conditions and increasingly oppressive workplace regimes.
