An exciting new collaboration!

“...mobile devices - smartphones, tablet computers, portable technology of all sorts - have emerged with unprecedented power to reconnect worlds, recombine media, reconstruct images, and recount observations…” Oppegaard and Griger, The Interrelationships of Mobile Storytelling featured in The Mobile Story.

The ability to represent different stories, and different points of views, is one of the most important features in our mobile apps. Whether you’re working with a physical collection or using a mobile app to feature something like oral histories, there are always different perspectives to consider when presenting them to the public.

Whose interpretation are you featuring? Who are you collaborating with to come to those interpretations? We’ve been thinking about this a lot, and in working with one of our clients have found an opportunity that applies to almost any museum or destination.

The University of Chicago’s Anthropology of Museums class works with an Encurate powered museum, The Oriental Institute Museum, every semester for their final project. In the past, students have been given access to the museum’s collection to curate their own research. This is a great practice in traditional curatorial work, but this year, we’re going to try something different. This fall and winter, the students will work with the museum’s collection to add their own story and curatorial interpretation to the museum’s mobile app in the form of a self-guided tour. At the end of the semester, the tours will be published live for the museum’s visitors to explore.

The students will be given access to the museum’s Content Management System to create their mobile tours. Not only will they be curating content, but they’ll be exploring the use of mobile technology in exhibitions to present stories.This collaboration isn’t just an opportunity for students to gain practical experience in their professional and academic pursuits, it’s also an important opportunity for the museum, located on the University of Chicago’s campus in Hyde Park, to engage with their student body.

We’re proud to have built a platform that allows our clients a new way to engage with their community, whether they’re residents or students, and to give them the agency to tell their own story. Follow along on our blog as we continue to share this exciting project!

So, whose story are you going to tell?