The main goal of this project was to “produce something that gives people a sense of what it was like and to help people understand what it was that transformed people then, and what can transform people today”.
The producers of this project could not make an exact replica of this speech, but they wanted to more focus on how Martin Luther King Jr. captured the audience that day. This connects to the digital humanities goal of preservation and immersive reconstruction. The major objective of this project is to use digital tools to digitally preserve such an iconic speech of Martin Luther King Jr. while also giving people today the ability to immerse themselves into what it was like to be in attendance at this speech.
There are not any audio recordings or videos of the speech “Fill up the Jails”, but this project does its best at capturing what it would have been like to be in attendance during this speech.
Preserving and archiving historical moments is a key goal of the digital humanities discipline. The virtual MLK project was started to give people the ability to look back on and reflect on some of the speeches that Martin Luther King Jr. had and how his speeches captured so many people during that time period.