The Fort Vancouver Mobile project

I am coordinating The Fort Vancouver Mobile project, a major research effort involving several institutions, including my home Creative Media and Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver, and my doctoral program, the Technical Communication and Rhetoric program at Texas Tech University.

Much more information about the project is available here: The Fort Vancouver Mobile sub rosa blog

In short, though, this free noncommercial app (available initially in the Android format) is being produced by a core team of 20 scholars, digital storytellers, new media producers, historians and archaeologists. The nonfiction content -- including geolocated video reenactments, historical photos and texts taken directly from the vetted documentation -- is meant to help provide a richer and more fulfilling experience for visitors to the National Historic Site.

Fort Vancouver was the early end of the Oregon Trail, the regional headquarters of the British Hudson's Bay Company's 700,000-square-mile fur empire and the first U.S. Army post in the Northwest, home to such military leaders as Ulysses S. Grant, George C. Marshall and O.O. Howard.

The fort has more than 2 million artifacts in its collection, but most of those are kept in warehouses, unavailable to the site's 1 million annual visitors. Besides the archaeological items, gathered from more than 50 years of excavations, boxes of documents, drawings and assorted historical records also help to reveal the fascinating and multicultural history of the place, once dubbed the "New York of the Pacific."

This project will explore mobile technology as way to not only bring such information out of storage but also to wield that digital content in an effort to create an immersive and interactive environment for visitors.

Funding to date includes: a 2011-2012 National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Start-Up Grant, a 2011 Historical Promotion Grant from the Clark County Commissioners, a 2010 Research Grant from Washington State University Vancouver, a 2010 Historical Promotion Grant from the Clark County Commissioners and a contribution from WSU Vancouver's Creative Media and Digital Culture program.