Fort Vancouver Project featured in WSUV class

Posted on by

For interested students at WSUV, the Digital Storytelling class in the Spring 2012 will feature the Fort Vancouver Mobile project. Co-taught by CMDC program director Dene Grigar and the Chief Ranger of the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, Greg Shine, the class is an excellent entry point for students beginning to explore digital media either through the DTC program or on their own. It provides excellent preparation for creative non-fiction writing combined with videography, and will widen students’ set of tools for storytelling in multiple platforms.

The class is open to all WSUV students, and no previous experience is necessary. However, a strong desire to explore and work in digital environments is encouraged. The class will meet both on the WSUV campus as well as at the Fort Vancouver historical site, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1:25-2:40.

History Department professor Sue Peabody’s class the same semester on Tuesday evenings,  Hist 400.01: History in Media: French Colonial History through Film, Fiction and New Media, serves as a fine companion course for students interested in a deeper immersion. In addition to working as a Core 2 class, students can use their visits to Fort Vancouver and their work with the mobile project in concert with HIST 400.01. This is a one-time-only class, so take advantage of it!

Fort Vancouver Mobile Project Featured at IDMAa

Posted on by

The ninth annual International Digital Media and Arts Association Conference (IDMAa), held in Savannah, Georgia, last week, included a talk by Brett Oppergaard, “Net Locality: Exploring New Ways of Storytelling and Learning with Mobile Devices at a National Historic Site.”

In his talk, Oppergaard described the advantages of using mobile technology to enrich the experience of visiting a National Park through his experience working on the Fort Vancouver Mobile Project. For example, the layers that an app can reveal help illustrate the layers of time and information in a given space. In testing the app, he found that people who used the app lingered at the site than longer than those with a brochure or with nothing. They also demonstrated more learning. It provided some meaningful validation for merits of the Fort Vancouver Mobile Project.

He finished by advising others designing apps to stay flexible, and don’t get hung up on the time something has taken. Sometimes, you have to scrap your work to come up with a better product in the long run.

Welcome to Fort Vancouver Mobile, Phase 2

Posted on by

The logo for the FVM“Fort Vancouver Mobile” (FVM) brings together a team of 18 scholars and storytellers from throughout the digital humanities field––including historians and archaeologists as well as experts in literature, rhetoric, and writing––to create digital content for mobile phones that can be accessed by visitors to the The Village at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, in Vancouver, WA.  Phase 1 developed “apps” for mobile phones that delivers nonfiction narrative content about the lives of Hawaiian workers of the Fort.  It has resulted in the “proof of concept” for the larger project.  Phase 2, the project chronicled in this site, focuses on women and domestic issues whose presence at the Fort until recently has not garnered much public attention.  At the end of our project we will have a series of digital stories, told through video, sound files, and other media, able to be delivered by smart phones to Fort Vancouver visitors.

I, along with my colleague Brett Oppegaard also from The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV), are heading up this phase of FVM. We received a Start Up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as a 2011 Historical Promotion grant from Clark County, and a 2011 Research Mini-Grant from WSUV.  Phase 1 was seeded originally with a 2010 Historic Promotion Grant led by Oppegaard.

We are using this website to document our work as we produce the project. The main site for the Fort Vancouver Project is managed by Oppegaard.  Please visit it for more information about our work.

You can download the app for both Android and Apple.