Urban Humanist

This post is a draft of my contribution to a discussion of mobile on In Media Res during the week of 5/21.

Download Cleveland Historical (iOS and Android) after viewing the videos to get a sense of how its functionality and content. View the website (optimized for mobile web). Imagine walking and discovering the city, serendipitously, thru geo-location, street-visible QR codes, or a thematic tour. Imagine joining scores of K12 and university students and community partners in the formal and informal learning environments created through developing digital stories. Or, imagine extending this to the landscape and interpretive context of your choice, as we’ve done through the Curatescape tool in Baltimore, New Orleans, and Spokane. (The soon to be released Curatescape tool emerged from our NEH Mobile Historical funding and is available in hosted form or as an open-source theme for Omeka.)

Mobile technologies promise to transform how we understand and “make” place by erasing boundaries between the landscape & interpretation, putting space and place into dynamic new conversations. Mobile allows for cultural interpretation to become performative public art as it creates an elaborate dance between memories, places, and objects. By erasing the distance between teacher/learning, community/university, memories/objects, mobile creates an ubiquitous interpretive environment as the bases for the emerging world of pervasive computing, with its so-called Internet of Things.

Pew Internet argues that mobile represents a paradigmatic cultural shift, one akin to the introduction of the PC. More than 50 percent of Americans presently have smartphones, and Ericson estimates that as many as 80% of all Americans will access the Internet through their mobile devices by 2015. Scholars have only begun to imagine how mobile might transform scholarly interpretive practice, from m-learning, to museums and cultural organizations, to universities, and into the broader culture.

As we theorize the mobile transformation, we must recognize the blurring boundaries between theory, technologies, and practice. Our research Center argues that practice–in the form of curation–bridges these boundaries, allowing us to remake scholarly discourse altogether.

Our work explores these questions in the realm of landscape. We Curate the City, seeking dynamic models for exploring landscape and memory, collaborative remaking a sense of place in Northeast Ohio. At the same time, we are seeking to develop tool0-based approaches (embodied in the development of Curatescape and creative use of Omeka) to extend this theoretical approach to other places.

I invite you to join me in seeking answers to a host of questions and raise new ones (feel free to comment with questions.)

How does mobile storytelling allow us to reinscribe a sense of place that is particular to a locale, but also transcends it?How can mobile teaching & learning be used to transform scholarly discourses, engage in public scholarship, and enhance civic life?How can thematic tours and tagging become part of an interpretive network of meaning within the storytelling environment? And, then, how can those features become part of the technological representation?

First introduced in November 2010, Cleveland Historical has been downloaded nearly 8000 times; the website receives approximately 4000 visitors and 15,000 pageviews monthly.

So, our question of the morning is how do we transform our K-12 history classrooms into sights of mobile learning, of informal teaching & learning?

Let’s jump off the ledge. Why are we jumping? We are jumping because we are using mobile devices for teaching & learning, not just for texting & media. And, generally, our school environments are simply not there, mostly because it is forbidden, and also because even lots of personal sharing (on email even) is not allowed for reasons, including FERPA.

But, the day will come. Let’s get beyond Wikipedia and webquests.

Cleveland Historical (and curatescape)

Why?
Informal learning, pervasive (anytime, anywhere) learning, and students are likely to have these tools readily available.
Connects you to the community beyond the classroom, takes anywhere in the world instantly,
It remakes how you access information.
It remakes your control
And, it remakes how we express information.

It is about more than the technology then, but the basic organizational structure of, and access to knowledge.

Explain the Internet of Things.

Information might be ubiquitous, but we need frames of understanding… that’s where historical thinking skills come in, why they are important, and why we so desperately need them.

How?
One way that people will use mobile, especially tablets, is to replace desktop computers and access to the internet. Although tablets are better than phones at this, they are not optimal for obtaining and processing information (at least not yet.)

Devise approaches to mobile teaching & learning that actually emphasize the import of the mobile device, not just the digital.

Cleveland Historical as a model for this. Create a network of users (Frank O’Grady will do this for us.)

Here are a list of topics.

Discovery

1. inside classroom (QR Code posters as example…)
2. outside classroom (Rob & Dave & Nordonia & Royalton)
3. creating and critiquing tours (process of synthesis)
4. illustrations for historical stories/lectures

Creation

1. append a story with new information (i.e. photograph, text, sound)
2. create an entirely new story (i.e. at a site), with authors
3. bibliographic connections
4. tags & tour development
5. lead tours of your community

Skills

1. deep analysis & historical thinking
2. creative writing
3. oral history
4. metadata (sourcing + context)
5. locating (geography back in) history
6. research, i.e. newspaper & archival work (P-D)

Deploy your own app OR Create a visible knowledge-creation process

1. Use course blog, wiki, or google apps to have students document their community
2. If you do that, why not connect it to other projects, not as a substitute but as another expression
3. Knowledge is more powerful when shared and connected
4. Deploy Curatescape in your community OR deploy a blog that leads to Cleveland Historical

Why Cleveland Historical (Curatescape)?

1. common platform,
2. standards-based database
3. supported by CSU
4. sharable & scalable (in theory)
5. based in best practice

Teacher Skills

1. Create & use your own blog: wordpress, tumblr …
2. Create & use Google apps + Google Maps
3. Create & generate your own QR codes (Andreas & Nordonia)
4. Use existing services & tools: FLICKR, Google, HistoryPin

All of these are lo-cost solutions, but often time intensive…

Challenges:

1. Sharing
2. Building user communities
3. Connecting students to best practices beyond their community (or the problem with walled gardens)

I noted at the annual National Council of Public History meeting that about 70% of academic journal articles were not being read in the context of arguing for open access and new measures of assessing impact of digital publications of all sorts (in journals or not.) I am a very big fan of analytics.

I mis-spoke the research has argued that 75% of all social science articles are not cited and 92% of Humanities articles are not *CITED*.  My error in making my point to baldly. My friend Ann Whisnant tweeted this. And, of course, this was picked up in the twitter stream where it lost all nuance, was amplified and questioned–all in 140 characters, rapidfire.

So, attached are a couple references about citation as promised to the twitterverse, and also a few notes about what this means.

You can see the original source of my statement as well as a critical assessment of the original research by Charles Schwartz. It possesses citations and a google search reveals that much of the original research has been questioned (although I am not sure convincingly so.)  Even so, there appears a persistent strain of research that suggests a persistent (and perhaps growing) trend toward uncitedness, for example this essay in the Chronicle.

My point at the NCPH was that we need to find alternative ways to measure impact and influence, including on *public* audiences (not present in the twitter discussion of my statement.) And, although I misspoke about readers, my point was precisely about trying to gauge impact beyond the academy (which usually uses citations.)

Indeed, my misstatement is precisely the point. We *DON’T* know how many readers we have; we know purchasers for books. This is why citation emerged as a measure of influence, one related narrowly to scholarly reuse, but a measure nonetheless.  Moreover, as Tim McCormick noted on the twitter exchange, what constitutes reading is not clear either. (Just realized I don’ t know how to show a tweet on my blog. Will have to remedy that later.)

My point here and at NCPH is that we should care about engagement–measured by citation (surely such a measure), reading, re-using (linking), and other such measures the impact and influence of our work. And, with digital humanities and digital analytics, we may have a way to do that.

Take an example of print verse digital. My book Eating Smoke has had about 750 purchasers (based on sales figures) and >15 citations (perhaps more if I were to do an exhaustive search of linking.) I have no clue how many folks have read all or part of it. By contrast, Cleveland Historical has over 4000 unique visitors monthly (or about 75,000 since the project originated), about 50% of those folks stay beyond their initial entry (i.e. they’ve not “bounced.”) Those who stay, read the various interpretive narratives for an average of five minutes and delve deeper into the site with an average of three clicks (probably three stories).  I can bore you with more details.  The difference between the projects is interesting, as is the difference between my ability to observe the measures.

I would throw out some modest propositions.

1) Citation is not a good measure of impact. Of course, it is not a bad measure either. But, it is very imprecise and shaped by many factors. (Many universities and fields use an even worse measure, Impact Factor, to assess research quality. Impact factor measures the “quality” of a journal, rather than its contents–sorta like assessing a book by its cover. But, I digress.) Even so, it only measures the impact of a citation on an academic subfield–hardly a model for public history.

2) Readership statistics via google analytics get us much closer to where we want to be, because they actually measure number of readers, time spent, material explored, and so forth. This is a great step toward a richer analysis.

3) But, readership figures need some context in order to be understand. We desperately need such measures across academic settings. Marin Dacos has done some interesting work in this area, that I will link to once I find it and write more about it (in a later revision.)

4) We (in the Public History community, at NCPH and elsewhere) need to push toward something more like Peter Binfield’s PLoS-ONE, which makes that information public and which is open.  Both of these are goals and should be emulated.

Finally, and broadly, I recommend that we make our work more widely read and more widely cited by not only making it more open, but by creating a rewards infrastructure around the analytics of that work. BUT, to create such a structure, we need to have better analytics and better comparisons in our public historical work.