20 June 2011 2 Comments

This post was hand crafted with love by Ethan Watrall

Introducing msu.seum

While the CHI Fieldschool has been working on a series of small projects, the ultimate goal of the fieldschool is to produce a significant cultural heritage informatics project.  It is important to note that the goal of the fieldschool was to dictate the scope and nature of this final project, and then have the students build it.  Instead, the students were challenged to envision and develop the project themselves, thereby given them a deep vested interest in what they ultimately produce.  It is also important this the project isn’t intended to be an intellectual exercise – the fieldschool students are actually going to build it in the remaining time (2 weeks).

In the spirit of this, I am proud to introduce msu.seum

msu.seum

The spaces that we inhabit and interact with on a daily basis are made up of hidden layers of cultural activity that build up over time. While museum exhibits and history texts can represent this cultural heritage, they do not allow for the public to meaningfully engage with place-based heritage content. In addition, traditional museum exhibits rarely explore the binary nature of material culture: the presented information about objects and the process by which scholarly research has reached those conclusions. In short, the scholarly narrative of material culture is often hidden from public consumption. 

It is within this context that msu.seum, a native iOS and Android application developed by the Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool (http://sites.matrix.msu.edu/chi-fieldschool/), will allow users to interact with the rich cultural heritage of the Michigan State University campus, and explore the processes by which the Campus Archaeology Program helped reveal it. Building on the idea of “campus as museum,” msu.seum will connect cultural heritage directly to place, highlighting both what is known as well as the scholarly narrative of the archaeological and historical research. Compared to other geolocative mobile applications, msu.seum will function less like a “check-in” system and more like a museum tour guide that will address the cultural heritage of campus. The ultimate goal of msu.seum is to provide an engaging way for users to interact with the cultural heritage of Michigan State University.

msu.seum is a multi-phase project. In the first and current phase, the native mobile application will be developed and deployed. Future phases of the project will include a companion website, user-generated content, and QR Codes situated at the physical location.

Features:

msu.seum will include the following features 

Exhibit Based Navigation: Content will be organized into a series of thematic exhibits mirroring the physical layout of a museum. Instead of being contained within a physical structure, the exhibits will be distributed around the campus of Michigan State University.

Geolocated User Experience: Each exhibit in msu.seum will be made up of a collection of locations on the campus of Michigan State University. Users will be free to visit each location in the exhibit at their leisure.

Rich Content: Each location in the exhibit will contain rich media and content that provides information about the location as well as the archaeological and historical processes of their formation.

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