Fort Vancouver Mobile

Mobile phones have become ubiquitous yet remain untapped as a storytelling medium. They offer the power of media, text, audio, video, animation, in a fully personalized format. Through GPS technology these devices even can locate a user and share, on the precise spot, data tailored just for that user's particular interest. Users then can add written responses, video or sound about a site or event. The implications for such authoring precision, audience awareness and interactivity pose exciting challenges to the team creating the Fort Vancouver Mobile project, a storytelling environment accessible via smart phones that tells the history of the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Phase I, just completed, comprises apps for the iPhone and Android and a story module focusing on Hawaiians who lived and worked at the site in the mid 1800s. Phase II, the focus on this proposal, seeks $50,000 to create modules focusing on gender issues at the site that have, heretofore, gone unexamined

Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature

The Pathfinders project records performances by authors and ordinary readers of key early works of electronic literature, and develops presentation strategies to make these recordings accessible and useful to scholars and teachers. In the process we 1) preserve vanishing cultural material; 2) develop new strategies for recording and disseminating that material; and 3) provide prototypes for similar work on other digital texts