Curatescape develops accessible digital tools that empower small cultural organizations to tell richer, deeper stories through their audiences’ mobile devices. For example, Arizona State University, the Papago Saludo Association, and Scottsdale Public Television used Curatescape to develop Salt River Stories—a free, map-based mobile app that explores the history of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe, and the surrounding region. Curatescape emerged out of the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University. The app and web platform was initially designed to illuminate stories embedded in urban landscapes. With NEH funding, Curatescape worked with museums and universities, adapting the platform to meet the needs and constraints of interior spaces, multi-site institutions, and developing nations. In addition to making it possible for more organizations to use Curatescape in more places, the projects have clarified best practices for digital humanities interpretation in these contexts.
“Over the years the NEH funding has really allowed us to think about some of the core principles behind our work. It helped us to make something that a small organization or an individual could deploy on their own that would be robust and long-lasting.”
–Mark Tebeau, Founder of Curatescape
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Four NEH grants helped Curatescape develop open-access tools that enable cultural organizations to create digital tour experiences across multiple locations, connecting the public to stories, people, and places in innovative ways at minimal cost. With Arizona State University, Curatescape conducted research on user patterns and tested the limits of geo-location technologies inside small museum spaces. They learned it was both easier and more effective to use mobile devices to build upon user’s experience of physical exhibits through multimedia storytelling, rather than try to guide them through the exhibition itself. Through a subsequent grant, Curatescape applied these lessons and developed TourSites for WordPress with the Ohio History Connection. NEH grants also enabled Curatescape to partner with Maseno University in Kenya to work to surmount technological and linguistic barriers to mobile curation in East Africa. Together, they developed a beta version of Curatescape for Wordpress optimized for multilinguistic cultures and mobile-first Internet users, which these partners used to create a mobile site interpreting regional history and culture in East Africa.
These projects expanded access to digital humanities tools to institutions and markets where the cost of personalized apps is prohibitive. Each project produced practical knowledge that cultural organizations are using to make informed decisions about how to use mobile technologies to best serve their communities’ needs. To date, Curatescape has empowered more than 50 communities around the world to harness emerging technologies to more effectively share their stories. Each year, Curatescape convenes representatives of these projects to share lessons and ideas to further advance digital storytelling practices.