Mobile Social History/Memory Digital History Project
This project explores new ways to combine social history data with web 2.0- collected personal memories and oral histories, and to make that information available, on a house-by-house basis, on both mobile platforms and web browsers. Drawing on significant work already underway at Brown, in the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, and the Initiative in Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences, and at New York’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum and at City Lore, the project initially focuses on sections of New York and Providence, but will be expandable to other cities.
The historical data for this project includes local maps, historic building images and data, and most importantly, an NSF- and NIH-funded project that connects the 1880, 1900, and 1930 US manuscript census data and “health district” data for subsequent decades, with actual addresses. Together this data provides remarkably detailed access to the lives of individuals in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The historical memories with which this data is combined includes Web 2.0-collected stories and memories, Flickr photo albums, and oral histories. These memories allow both community input and the chance for users to add their own stories, to collect new stories. These stories, audio, video, photos, or short messages will be added to the geographic database to extend the historical stories.
Together, these diverse sets of data will provide detailed historical information and interpretation on individual buildings, individuals and communities in a way that brings the everyday past to life, connecting past to present.
Users will be able to access the information on smartphones, learning about the communities they’re walking through, or from web browsers, seeing a more general picture as well as zooming in on the stories about a particular address. By pulling information from censuses, maps, images, and other historical datasets, users will feel that they are walking through not just space but time.
Here’s what our final product will do: A tourist walking down a street on the Lower East Side could see on her smartphone a historic map (rectified for correct alignment), showing the street in the context of the changing city; a list of everyone who lived at that address in 1880; images of the buildings as they’ve changed over time; and statistical information on, for example, occupations, ethnicity and education of the block or neighborhood, and how that has changed over time, and maps of the area showing how the area has changed over time. Moreover, she could add, using voice of images or text, her own family stories, or even her reactions to the history around her, bringing the history to the present day, and to life.
A student or genealogist could get the same information from a web browser, virtually walking down the street to capture the rich history of an area, or the geographical, social, and cultural context of the areas where his ancestors lived. He could also add additional stories, attaching to the addresses new information for the next user.
This project draws on several significant trends in the digital humanities. On the technical side: It uses map rectification, large social history databases, web 2.0 story collection, community memory maps, and mobile delivery of data.
Integration of several kinds of data is one of the ways in which this grant is innovative. But even more important, it is innovative in some of the historiographic questions it raises: by combining history and memory, bringing together social history and community and individual memories by making them available on a house-by-house level of detail, it offers the opportunity to compare different ways of thinking about the past. History classes at both the high school and university level will have detailed personal stories on which to build a more profound, and more interesting, understanding of American social history.
And finally, the project is innovative in a third way: it offers a new model for delivering historical information to the public. The tools we will build, and the new data sets we will build on, will be available for other users. We believe that many public humanities institutions - historic house museums, historic districts, and others - will be able to build on our work to provide ways to connect the public with the past, and with the memories of the past, in new and exciting ways.
This is an ambitious project. But we plan to start small, and focusing on building tools and models that will allow for focused, but useful products, and which will raise interesting questions both historiographical and technical.
Environmental Scan
This project takes builds on new technologies, newly available data sets, and new interests in sharing and collecting stories. It also builds on considerable recent work on place-based computing, collecting local stories and memories, and new ways to make historic maps available to the general public.
Mapping: Two projects represent the state of the art in making historic maps easily available for a general audience, and for mobile use. Martin Ceperley is working to make geocoded maps available for iPhones (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN3LnCOl9zA). At the New York Public Library, http://dev.maps.nypl.org/warper/, a new project is crowd-sourcing the georectifying of historic maps. We will build on these two projects to provide the historic maps for our work. We will combine these with OpenStreetMap to provide an open-source contemporary map layer.
Community memory maps: There are many, many projects online and in neighborhoods across the country, and the John Nicholas Brown Center has undertaken several of its own. We will draw on the best of these: so far, the most interesting are New York City Lore’s City of Memory http://www.cityofmemory.org/ and Toronto’s Murmur (http://murmurtoronto.ca/) Condordia University’s Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling is developing an open source oral history platform; we may try to build on that.
Historic photography mapping: The best example is http://PhillyHistory.org, which maps historic images onto very detailed historic maps, and allows for searching by neighborhood, date, address, keyword.
Place-based messaging: We want to capture not only oral histories and memories, but also images and text messages, and so we may build into our system the capabilities for a smartphone user to leave messages in a specific location that would be available to other users walking by; a web user would see these memories superimposed on the map he’s looking at. Socialight, Brightkite and Graffito for the iPhone have some of this capability.
Combining history and contemporary memories: There are a few interesting projects that combine historical and contemporary data. Most are focused on pictures. The National Library of Australia’s Picture Australia project http://www.pictureaustralia.org, for example, collects contemporary images on Flickr and juxtaposes them with historical images.
