2011 Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool

As we finish up this week’s joint project with MSU Archaeology, I’ve been contemplating the role of time within geo-locative applications.

How does a historian, curator or archaeologist- employing the same technology used for contemporary social networking purposes- represent a physical location as it was in the past without completely differentiating those materials from the rest of the app’s content?

Using three fictional characters, Alexis and I (along with our MSU Archaeology group) sought to represent the layers of history on State’s campus.  Frederic Walter, class of 1884, recalls the early history of campus, while his son, Charles Arthur, and grandson, Frederic Charles, tell the story of how the school changed dramatically at the turn of the century.  While these characters allowed us to see campus through different eyes, it also limited us to about three sentences per physical spot for not one, but three voices to be heard.

While we momentarily considered the creation of various check-in spots to represent each physical location, Alexis eventually (and rightfully so) talked me out of it.  Though it would allow us to frame the site according to each era, it would also add a level of disorganization to Gowalla, as a student trying to check in at Jenison Field House might accidentally end up at Jenison Field House circa 1880.  Our check-in spots would also serve only our own limited purposes, and therefore limit our trip’s reach in attracting new users.  Finally, the spots would likely confuse anyone taking our Gowalla MSU Legacy trip, as the app would pretty much be asking them to ‘please just move five feet to the left and a little forward if you would, so as to arrive in 1902.’

Another idea we had was to simply link to each character’s comments about each site, using http://pen.io to host our content.  This didn’t work out either, as Gowalla’s mobile app doesn’t allow the user to click on links within the trip’s content, so the web address would have to be copy-pasted into the browser for each spot.  This would remove the viewer from the experience, and probably be the cause of more than a few phones being fished out of the Red Cedar.

Eventually we landed on our final solution, which is simply to use Gowalla as it is.  The limitations of the app are such that the intricate layers of history cannot be experienced in each physical spot, and so three hundred characters and the juxtaposition of contemporary and past will have to suffice.  As it goes, the app still allowed us to create the story of a family and their relationship to Michigan State (with the help of http://pen.io for developing the background of our tour guides) that exists in four time periods simultaneously.  Pretty good for three hundred characters.