The mobile revolution and creating place-based histories

When my grandmother turned 100, her many descendants traveled to George, South Africa from across the globe. At the high tea held in her honor, my cousin, a journalist, presented her life in historical context: Here is a woman who lived through two world wars, the space race, the end of Apartheid, and the first quarter-century of a new South Africa, and the invention of, well, a lot of technologies. She outlived two husbands, all of her friends, and two of her own children. But before that, she was known as Mooi Hansie — Pretty Hansie. She was still very pretty at 100, dressed in a summer shawl with a rare spot of rouge coloring her cheeks.

Netwerk 24 news clipping: “Grandma does the Charleston on her 100th birthday” by Jackie Kruger

Her dementia was so advanced, and she was so well-practiced at feigning understanding, that it was impossible to discern recognition in her eyes as she heard the words weaving her life story: “Great Depression …death of her husband …raised her twin daughters alone …” At the end of the speech, she smiled politely as we clapped and cheered for her. A longtime church friend, Pieter Koen, rose to the microphone and began to sing an old hymn. Hansie, who recognized none of her children, grandchildren, or friends, began to openly weep. She did not stop until well after the music had finished. Then she stood, applauded with fervor and finally spoke of memories she could access — of singing from church pews and being young in the rural Western Cape.

Creating a sense of place, virtually

Sounds can work a bit like time travel. “Listening and the human voice, in particular, evoke place in visceral and profound ways,” writes Mark Tabeau, architect of the mobile publishing framework Curatescape and curator of its flagship project, Cleveland Historical. “Human voices call forth memory, time, and context” (28). It is this kind of sensory connection that public historians now tap into when building digital histories of place. Multimedia digital storytelling projects provide textured experiences that connect meaning to location, democratize documenting, interpreting, and learning history.

Connecting historical stories to a location can work in two ways: It can add richness to physically visiting a place, or it can activate your senses and imagination to transport you there virtually. A primary-source oral history, contextualized with interpretive notes, images, music, or video, can bring an empty courtyard or the site of a long-since-demolished building to life. For far-away or hard-to-access locations, a virtual reality tour using panoramic images can be coupled with an oral history and interpretive notes to provide connection to a place.

Coffee with a ghost sign

The historic Longbotham Building in downtown Spokane, where I lived in an apartment and worked at Boots Bakery in my twenties, invites curiosity with its towering “ghost signs.” Using their phone’s location feature, Spokane Historical app users can find the building’s history in a matter of seconds.

The Longbotham Buildings “Rex is King” ghost sign. Photo by Axle Olson / Spokane Historical

At the end of the article, they’ll see photos — and almost certainly be enticed to scarf down their vegan fish sticks, cancel their afternoon plans, and embark on the app’s Ghost Signs of Spokane tour. Yet, not all place-based histories can be pinned precisely on a map, and physical markers may be long-gone or difficult to access (Tebeau 30).

Polar V.R.

Originating as a cheap and safe alternative to tourism in the Victorian era, panoramic “travel” now functions as more than entertainment. In Canada, many Arviat people encounter barriers to visiting heritage sites like the Arvia’juaq National Historic site in person — so virtual tours enable that important connection (Dawson 249). Incorporating oral history, images, video, and interpretive text into the virtual experience conveys the island’s historical significance to the public (258). As we continue to create new place-based histories, therefore, our approach should be driven by the needs of each particular place and audience.

Democratizing place-based historical storytelling

The question of whether history can be “done” well virtually has proven sticky among historians (as we can recall from last week’s reading). An even stickier discussion is whether history should follow suit with the “mobile revolution” by democratizing its creation, curation, and accessibility.

Who’s in charge here?

Putting place-based historical storytelling into the hands of communities creates dynamic historiography that includes voices not often called upon by academics. “…The openness of the digital revolution has made knowledge production more democratic, challenging traditional power relations between scholars and their audiences” (31). Tebeau argues that these changes are both valuable and, as part of a larger cultural shift, necessary. He acknowledges that historically marginalized voices remain underrepresented on the sites, and also that access to technology may create barriers to access for some. (It’s worth noting that smartphone use has increased from 50% to 81% in the U.S. since 2013, when Tableau’s article came out.)

Citizen historians

Democratizing historical storytelling also builds more history-literate communities. Training community members to do historical Cleveland Historical and other Curatescape projects — Spokane Historical, Intermountain Histories, and Salt River Stories — amass thousands of pieces of content from college students, community partners, K-12 classrooms, and volunteers. In order to do that work, each contributor must learn methods for researching and interpreting history. Much of the expert work is training amateurs to document and interpret like a historian, and “making sense” of all that data: curating it in such a way that it’s a meaningful resource for the intended audiences (Tebeau 30).

New access to history through digital advances may serve historical researchers whether or not they are engaging to explore. But to fulfill our role as public historians in the digital era, our audience is the public. To achieve that through digital place-based storytelling, our work must also be accessible, engaging, and inclusive of the communities that exist and have existed there. Whether by enriching an in-person visit to a historical site or providing a fully virtual experience, engaging people’s senses through digital multimedia experiences can provide that exhilarating “time travel” experience that drew so many of us to the field in the first place.

Sources

Dawson, et. al., “‘Some Account of an Extraordinary Traveller’: Using Virtual Tours to Access Remote Heritage Sites of Inuit Cultural Knowledge Études/Inuit/Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1, Collections arctiques / Arctic Collections
(2018), pp. 243-268.

“Demographics of Mobile Device Ownership and Adoption in the United States.” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. Pew Research Center, June 5, 2020. Last modified June 5, 2020. Accessed October 6, 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/.

Harbine, Anna, “Boots Bakery and Bull Durham Smoking Tobacco,” Spokane Historical, accessed October 6, 2020, https://spokanehistorical.org/items/show/417.

Kruger, Jackie. “Ouma Doen Charleston Op 100ste Verjaarsdag.” Netwerk24. Last modified October 19, 2019. Accessed October 6, 2020. https://www.netwerk24.com/Nuus/Algemeen/ouma-doen-charleston-op-100ste-verjaarsdag-20191018.

Oesterheld, Frank and Anna Harbine. “Tour: Ghost Signs of Spokane.” Spokane Historical. Accessed October 6, 2020. https://spokanehistorical.org/tours/show/6.

Olson, Axle and Anna Harbine, “Frederick/Longbotham Building,” Spokane Historical, accessed October 6, 2020, https://spokanehistorical.org/items/show/352.

Tebeau, Mark, “Listening to the City: Oral History and Place in the Digital Era” The Oral History Review 2013, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 25–35