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Lots of great themes are already emerging from the pre-conference posts; allow me to add a couple thoughts about mobile, which is one of the things that I’ll be interested in discussing and learning more about.

My digital humanities research explores how one can curate a city through mobile devices. Over the past several months, this culminated in the release of Cleveland Historical (clevelandhistorical.org) with a recent news story about the project here . Our work at the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities has taken this challenge of curation into multiple educational, institutional, and digital environments over the years: from simple websites (such as that on the Cleveland Cultural Gardens) to street-level history kiosks to an extensive (700+) collection of oral histories. Our work is all crowdsourced through community-based processes, emphasizing scads of project partners sharing similar goals. Our number of partners exceeds 1000 individuals and organizations, for example.

We built Cleveland Historical using Omeka as a CMS. It includes iOS, Android, basic mobile stylesheets, and a web presence. It includes multiple layers of interpretive materials and stories that are geolocated, tours, and social media integration. We are currently making the tour features richer, integrating QR codes (easy), and building a version for regional museums (that has a different navigation strategy.)  Lots of other cool features could easily be developed, including content added directly from mobile devices and new interfaces.

We designed the project to be extensible and scalable beyond Cleveland.

In fact, Cleveland Historical is the first instance of a broader project we’re calling Mobile Historical, which is essentially a mobile publishing platform that sits atop a lightly customized Omeka installation. We will soon open a second instance of what we are terming Mobile Historical in collaboration with initiative partner Larry Cebula at Eastern Washington University. We are exploring collaborations with several other partners to help us work out the technological kinks associated with extending the platform to multiple cities/institutions. We are seeking to make the cost of each new instance ridiculously cheap (seeking only to recover costs associated with labor, maintenance, and sustainability of the mobile client.) Toward this end, we have begun moving toward connecting with Omeka.net in conjunction with our lovely friends a CHNM, hopefully making it available as part of the Omeka.net ecosystem early next year. Also, as we do this, we’ll also be developing an open-source version, which is further down the line (time-wise.) But, first things first–extending the project to a couple other sites.

Interestingly, the most critical part of our work is not the digital, but the humanities. How do we create interpretive stories for mobile, in conjunction with multiple communities as works of scholarship, teaching, and public engagement? Curating cities and collections happens collaboratively. Our larger work seeks to create a vehicle for scholars, GLAMs, and communities themselves to take charge of cultural interpretation by giving them both tools AND an intellectual community of best practices and approaches. Building this community and these best practices are well underway in different mobile settings. Even so, extending, building, and sustaining dialogues mobile interpretation is as critical to what we’re about as is the technology.

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Building off something that crossed my mind some time ago, it seems to me that “the history of humanities computing” is ripe for an online presentation–one that (naturally) uses all the best practices for the gathering and presentation of history in the digital environment.  It’s got everything we need: a finite start date in the not too distant past, but a long and varied enough history to be interesting, many players who are still available (which is to say: oral history), electronically–  and traditionally-published professional literature to mine, professional organizations, illustrative project examples.

Several folks have undertaken projects related to this, but so far it doesn’t seem that there’s a one-stop shop to provide a real context for people seeking to better understand the history of the field and a sense of the specific projects that have emerged from and contributed to it.

Ideally, this session would attract the éminences grises of the digital humanities who can provide their own experiences with and read on the history of the field, the young’uns who have questions about what’s come before, folks interested in clever ways to present historical information (text, video, oral history, etc.) online, historians of the (digital) humanities, information managers who can help organize all this mountain of pertinent information, and anybody else who feels they have a dog in this hunt.  Help us:

• Figure out who to talk to about the history of the digital humanities (both players and scholars)
• Figure out what to talk to them about
• Think about best practices for archiving and presenting oral (and other) history online
• Find examples of good work to inspire us
• Develop visualizations: timelines, thematic treatments, “family trees” of projects and scholars

I fully admit to being a context hound–I love to see how planets relate to one another within a solar system and solar systems within galaxies.  In many ways I lack a context for my own specific work in the field and an understanding of how it fits in with others’.  And part of this, too, is a response to the broader notion that newer practitioners of the digital humanities–which in many ways is all of us–are unaware of their (our?) place in the history of humanities computing.  They/we too often lack a sense of the bigger picture.  So maybe we can create a living, breathing, go-to resource to help answer that very need.

What else might such a project enable, or do, or present?