Mobile Historical

The Center for Public History + Digital Humanities (CPHDH) seeks NEH Level II Start-Up support for work leading toward the release of Mobile Historical, an open-source (and, optionally, hosted) software application (app) that allows cultural institutions, K-16 teachers, and university-based humanists to publish humanities information to mobile devices. The proposed project builds and extends (dramatically so) an existing mobile app development project aimed at curating the city, Cleveland Historical. We seek funding to scale up, revise, and extend our previous work toward the creation of the open-source tool Mobile Historical. Thus, the principal activities of this proposal are focused on creating a new vehicle for interpretive humanities publishing in mobile environments via innovative technologies and guidance on how to curate humanities content, including especially developing approaches to state-of-the-art interactive humanistic learning for broad public audiences and users

"Scholarly Hypertext: Self-Represented Complexity"

Scholarly hypertexts involve argument and explicit selfquestioning, and can be distinguished from both informational and literary hypertexts. After making these distinctions the essay presents general principles about attention, some suggestions for self-representational multi-level structures that would enhance scholarly inquiry, and a wish list of software capabilities to support such structures. The essay concludes with a discussion of possible conflicts between scholarly inquiry and hypertext

Writing Postcards from the Museum: Composing Personalised Tangible Souvenirs

Building a long-lasting personal relationship with visitors by maintaining their engagement after the visit is one of the most challenging endeavours cultural heritage sites face. When successful, this connection fosters new opportunities for the visitor to get in touch with the heritage, e.g. to visit again or to take part in cultural activities. One way to establish a personal connection is via personalisation services that generate souvenirs for the visitors to take away and foster future engagements with the heritage. This paper discusses how the techniques for personalised text generation can be applied to produce post-visit postcards exploiting the interaction logs collected during the museum visit. The personalised postcard summarises the visit, creates a link with what was experienced and suggests further paths for content discovery. A user study conducted over four weeks confirms the appreciation for the personalised postcard and suggests future developments