What if Americans could revisit the founders' debate over creating the electoral college? In a way, they now can. A recent presentation by the Center for Mason Legacies and University Libraries Data and Digital Scholarship Services explored digital project The Great Experiment: Redebating the Electoral College in Virtual Reality with one of its creators, Shenandoah University Professor of History Warren Hofstra.
Through a series of progressively immersive and interactive stages, the site brings users into the constitutional debate over how to choose a chief executive. As an educational experience, the site brings participants back to 1787 and into a realistically immersive virtual Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House, now known as Independence Hall. A series of increasingly interactive participatory experiences at discrete stages leads them to actively engage in historical moments, surrounded by convincing avatars of James Madison and other leading Americans who were there.
Hofstra described building the site in collaboration with a large interdisciplinary team of scholars and community members at Shenandoah. The session, open to by CML faculty and students and members of the University Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Working Group, allowed participants to try out the virtual reality experience, seeing and hearing Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and other members of the Constitutional Convention as they debated how our government would work.
Project organizers recommend the site to a variety of audiences and venues. Most obviously, they recommend it for K-12 and university classrooms and for public history sites. But it also answers a need for those wishing to share in the experience of Independence Hall and other early American sites without having to travel, and potentially for libraries, community centers and homeschooling educators.
June 03, 2025