NWPa Heritage Public History Project (Panel E)

Through NWPaHeritage (http://nwpaheritage.org/), a mobile application (powered by Omeka and Curatescape), visitors can readily explore Northwestern Pennsylvania (Crawford and Venango Counties and the Oil Heritage Region) with self-guided walking or driving tours. Tours online are supplemented by publicity cards and posters. NWPaHeritage is one of several national instances of this app project that is spearheaded by the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University. In this project, our work focused first on the history of Allegheny College, which celebrated its Bicentennial in 2015. Other tours are being produced in partnership with a wide variety of community heritage groups, including the Oil Heritage Region (supported by the Drake Well Museum and Pithole), the NEA Our Town Conneaut Lake Project, and groups in Meadville (the Crawford County Historical Society and Baldwin-Reynolds House). A tour currently in development with the Meadville Business Association will consider community ties in a more commercial context. As with other public history projects, NWPaHeritage seeks to deepen the public engagement with the past in order to enhance understanding of the present and support the decisions concerning the future. The experiences of the project might contribute to Network Detroit in several ways. The project might be displayed as an exhibit or on a panel that would demonstrate its technical capabilities. Based on the work in progress this summer with the MBA, a longer presentation could address our biggest challenges, i.e. how to negotiate the ideologies of so many competing organizations – desiring boosterism, advertising, entertainment—to achieve the impacts we desire. I would propose that the rich multimedia environment of the NWPaHeritage app in fact allows us to tell complex and even contradictory narratives of past social and political experience that make it possible to achieve our civic educational goals