One of the major benefits of digital public history projects is their ability to get users out of libraries and classrooms, and provide hands on learning opportunities in the field. The GPS tracking and map software we all have on our phones nowadays has not only changed the way we drive and navigate the world around us, but has also opened up massive opportunities for transforming how we interact with it as well, especially in relation to the past. Even as students of history it is often easy to forget that our surroundings have not always appeared as they do now, but with the help of mobile history projects we can discover another world that has been hidden from view.
One such mobile history application is called Historypin, a website that allows users to search their location, and suggests nearby points of historical interest sorted by distance. I tried this website in the town of Fairfax where I live, and though I thought I knew a lot about the local history, I was surprised by the amount of new information I discovered and the interesting places it took me. I spent the day walking to and from a number of these sites, the first of which was the Fairfax County Courthouse located on Chain Bridge Road about 5 minutes from my apartment. Although I drive past this building every day, I realized I knew almost nothing about it and had never really stopped to take a good look at it before. One of the best features of this website are the before and after comparisons, which allows users to change the opacity of the before image via a slider bar in order to see how much the location has changed over time. Personally, I already love finding before and after images of historic buildings, so it was a lot of fun to play around with this and see how much the courthouse has expanded over the years beyond its original layout. Seeing the Civil War soldiers standing on the steps of the entrance adds an additional layer of immersion that I think most people would be surprised with. After the courthouse I made my way over to the Civil War and Historic Blenheim Interpretive Center to see some of the graffiti that many of those soldiers left on the walls during their stay there. This was definitely well worth the walk, and If it were not for this website, I don’t know if I ever would have known about this graffiti in the first place. Historypin allows its uploaders to include a description of the photos that the user is viewing, and so I was able to compare those with the ones inside the building and get another layer of information such as the names of some of the soldiers who left their signatures which were hard to make out in person. Overall, this was a great way to spend an afternoon and I look forward to using this website even more when I leave for the summer in order to see what it has to say about my home town in Massachusetts.
Historypin is a great way to teach students about local history, and while on the website I noticed that many of the collections came from teachers or professors who had uploaded images themselves for their classes. As far as the theory of history that it is trying to put forward, I think that depends heavily on the descriptions of uploaders and the specific area that users access it from. However one overall message might be that it reminds us that we are constantly surrounded by history no matter where we are, and many times important events of the past are located only a short walk away from where you are reading this right now.
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