The Spokane Historical Smart Phone App is in the House!

Spokane Historical on the web. But that is not all...

Readers with long memories might recall that I have been working with my students to create smartphone walking tours of local history. I am pleased to announce that as of today our smartphone app, Spokane Historical, is available in both the Android market and the iTunes store.You can also explore our contents on the web. Yeeessssss!

Sample stop on the iPhone 

We are launching with about 60 historic sites in Spokane and Cheney, but more are being added every day and by summers end there should be over 200 sites. We are currently in what is called "soft release"--the app is available but I am publicizing it only a little bit at a time as we work out a few bugs. My students in Digital History last spring did a great job in researching and producing community stories and getting them into the database. But without the app in existence we did make some mistakes in things such as formatting and labeling. Email me if you find any errors.

Many more sites are under development. My excellent graduate students, Julie Russel and Tracy Rebstock, are developing rich tours of Spokane's cemeteries and parks, respectively. I am teaching a Digital Storytelling class right now where the students will be developing tours of the Centennial Trail, Indian War markers, Fort George Wright, and more.

Next steps on this project include looking for sponsorship and content partners, software updates that will include QR codes and better tour functionality, and perhaps expanding the project beyond Spokane. If you want to help, drop me line.

Navigating with the Android app

Spokane Historical was made possible by the generosity and support of my colleagues in the EWU History Department, who voted unanimously to support the project with department funds. So many public historians complain about how their colleagues demean or ignore what they do, I am lucky to work in a supportive department. Thanks friends. I also want to thank all of the local archivists, librarians, and historians who have helped my students create these stories. Spokane has friendly and sharing historical community, without whom this project would hardly be possible. A big thank you to Mark Tebeau, Director of the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University and his team for sharing with us the software platform for Spokane Historical, along with their hard-earned expertise. And my colleagues at the Washington State Archives, Digital Archives offered some technical advice along the way.

Last but not least, Spokane Historical is the product of many hundreds of hours of work by my awesome EWU students in public history. A year ago I walked into my Digital History class and announced that everyone should scrap their final project plans, we were going to create mobile historical walking tours instead. "How do we do that?" they asked. "I don't know," I answered, "Let's get started." It is a brave student who stays in a class after that.

Check out Spokane Historical and let me know what you think.

Briefly Noted

These items seem worthy of further investigation. So get to it and report back here:

• WhatWasThere (see below) is a website (and iPhone app) that allows users to put historical photos on a Google map. It is not all that different than HistoryPin or similar services, but has a superior interface that integrates Google Street View to give you instant "before and after" views. Play with the slider on the image below!

• The Smithsonian lists the "Top Ten Works Lost to Time."

• My local newspaper the Spokesman Review now has a good local history tag. Local history is a staple of many newspapers and the reporting is often quite good, but finding the articles can be a chore. Glad to see this.

• This color promotional film of Berlin in 1936, produced for the Olympics of that year, is haunting. Combine it with this wartime newsreel, Bombing Berlin by Daylight and this post-war film of Berlin in ruins and you have a lesson plan. Or a lesson anyway!

• A single piece of recently-discovered paper in Peru is all that remains of a lost language.

• Big shot academic historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto says historians need to "start biting back" against bad pop history.

So, what are you reading?

Coming Soon: The Spokane History Mobile App

We have an exciting new project here at the Public History program at Eastern Washington University. We will soon be unveiling a smartphone app--for both iPhone and Android--that will offer tours of historic sites around Spokane and the region.

The Spokane Historical app will be an adaptation of an existing app, Cleveland Historical. At a conference a couple of months ago I met Mark Tebeau, Director of the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University. He is doing a bunch of neat digital stuff with his students, including the Cleveland Historical app. He was looking for a few partners to expand the reach of his app. I had been looking for a mobile platform for which my students could develop local content. Perfect!

Here is a YouTube that demonstrates the app. I like that it can have text, photographs, audio and video for each site. There is a YouTube channel with all of the short history videos that they have developed. Here is the YouTube promo for Cleveland Historical:

My students last quarter created a series of historical tours of 5-8 stops each. They did the EWU campus, Spokane Falls, Manito Park, Greenwood Cemetery, Bing Crosby's Spokane, Peaceful Valley, Kirtland Cutter buildings, and the Spokane Downtown. The Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University will be providing some technical support including rebranding their apps and releasing them as "Spokane Historical," creating an Omeka database (here it is) for the content, and providing the training materials they have developed to my students.

Spokane Historical should be available in the iTunes store and Android marketplace this summer. I am very excited and have a lot to do, including raising some money, partnering with other Spokane institutions (interested? email me!), developing some logos and branding, and above all working with my students to develop some first-class mobile history tours. I will keep all of you informed!

In a few days I will post some of the content that my students created.

Northwest History Goes Mobile

Did you know that Blogger has a mobile setting? It will automatically detect when someone reaches your blog via a mobile device and format your blog accordingly. Details here.

This discovery is a spin off of my spending that day at the Museums and Mobile virtual conference. It was my first virtual conference and it was very well-done. Much of the conversation was about apps--native versus web apps, iOS versus Android, developing them in-house versus hiring someone to develop your institution's virtual presence.

A lot of the technical models on display were big solutions for big museums. Form some committees, hire a developer or a firm, choose an OS, get the right voice talent (I kid you not), secure copyright, etc. Tens of thousands of dollars and year later, you have something spectacular. But I couldn't see where I or my students fit into the models. At one point I tweeted something like "Where is the Blogger for mobile?"

A quick Google search later and I found that Blogger had anticipated my need. One click and I was done. You can view this site in its mobile version here. I am excited about the possibilities. Perhaps we can use Blogger to create a mobile tour of a historic district? (You can now geotag posts as well, so it seems possible.) Use Blogger to generate the HTML to appear in the place marks on a Google Map or Google Earth?

Cell Phone Tours

Get your phone out to follow along with this post.

I was at the Seattle Art Museum a few months ago and was impressed by the cell phone interpretation they have running through the museum. In an age when museums are going through expensive contortions trying to use technology to improve visitor experiences, I found the cell phone tour a simple and elegant a solution.

The pictures below show a few examples, and the phone numbers are still active. Go ahead and call them as you look at the images. (I was going to download the audio and link it here--but you people need to meet me halfway here!)

This carved argylite box is accompanied by an interview with a modern Indian carver. Call 206-866-3222 ext. 123 to listen.

This 1850 ceremonial headdress of the Tlingit people is enhanced by the creation myth it portrays. Call 206-866-3222 ext. 124.

One more example is this modern glass interpretation of a Killer Whale. Call 206-866-3222 ext. 122.

You can see all of my photos from the SAM here. The museum also put all of the audio up online for free download. I downloaded a bunch of them before I came to the museum, but once I was there i found it far easier to dial the numbers in front of me than to fiddle with iTunes on my phone. A museum friend told me that these phone tours get used even after the exhhibit comes down, apparently from people who are looking at their vacation pictures and dialing the numbers.

So in conclusion--cell tours, yay! Of course museums can make mobile technology far more involved and complicated if they like. This NY Times article surveys some of the mobile apps for iPhones and Androids that museums are beginning to use. What jumps out at me from the article is that none of the apps seem to be very good! And how many of your visitors are carrying smart phones, and will have downloaded your app in advance of their visit? I think around 20% of Americans carry smart phones. And of course there are all kinds of interactive kiosks and other intensive technologies out there, all of which seem expensive, prone to breaking, and quickly outdated. By comparison a cell tour is dirt cheap to produce, leverages a piece of technology that nearly visitor already has, and has a potential reach beyond the museum walls.

Duke Digital Collections iPhone App

I am not sure if this is an oddity or a glimpse of the future, but Duke Digital Collections has developed what I believe is the first iPhone app for a digital archive. The app is really nicely designed and takes advantage of many of the iPhone's capabilities. Here is the demo they put up on YouTube:



And yet--I can't see using my iPhone to do historical research. What do you think, dear readers? Is this a very impressive novelty or something more?

[Hat tip to the frequently valuable Duke Digital Collections Blog--a nice example of an institutional blog.]