As Seen through Smartphones: An Evolution of Historic Information Embedment

Abstract

People who want to learn about history also want to learn about it in theways and through the media that they prefer. Sometimes it happens by reading abook, with the learner at home in a comfy chair in front of a fire. But sometimes–especially now, in the smartphone era–meaningful history-learning moments canoccur just about anywhere. So, historians need to adapt. This chapter outlines howhistory-seeking audiences have always followed advances in communication tech-nologies and how mobile technologies today simply offer opportunities for the nextperiod of field expansion. The desirable affordances of smartphones can be tracedconceptually back to the earliest people who read about historical events on papy-rus scrolls (much more mobile than stone monuments), through volumes of boundpapers cranked out on the printing press (prompting the need for mass literacy),and in complicated multimedia contexts (like with text and graphics overlayingvideo on television screens). As a confluence of the media that have come before itbut also as a bridge to emerging forms of new media, mobile media are only nowstarting to be understood as viable media for history. This piece puts the intellectualfoundations in place for such an exploration and also presents some reflections onwork like this from a pioneer in the field, who has been designing locative historicalexperiences for more than a decade.