Stephen:
Thanks for the feedback! You bring up some important points, and I’d agree that visitation is a critical issues (for historians and non-historians). I love the point about capturing a sense of place both within and outside of existing reference points. There’s also definitely going to be an increasing overlap between virtual and actual visitation, and my hunch is that VR and haptic technology are going to really take off to follow this trend, especially in the realm of public history and museums. Hopefully academia will follow closely, although it tends to lag behind.

Candace:
I hadn’t heard of the murmur project before, cool stuff! Spatial history has a strong tradition and big potential for growth as far as utilizing mobile technology goes, so I think you’re in a great position (just look at Google Earth’s use of historic maps in their last release). And access is without a doubt one of the biggest challenges facing mobile history (and digital history as a whole). You can’t expect all (or even most) historians to have the means or ability to utilize all of this technology effectively, and to assume otherwise is a crucial mistake.

I’m incorporating some of the technology you describe into my research and I see great potential in these new tools not just for the historian but also for public history. Haven’t figured out how yet but I’d like to be able to geotag historic maps superimposed over current maps since my area of research has undergone geographic changes over time.

One problem I see with mobile history as a whole is access. A smart phone and data plan are simply outside of my budget. And while I’d love to connect with others to pool info this will most likely occur around subjects that already have a hold as areas of interest. I wonder how it will apply to emerging subjects. Should definitely be interesting.

To me, “Conceptual Visitation” of places seems just as important as physical or virtual visitation. (I think I just invented that term… sorry if this steps on academic toes. I don’t know if there is something in ‘the literature’ that fits better.) What I mean by this is that when a place is visited (either physically, virtually, or even in one’s imagination), the experience is strongly conditioned by both prior expectations and reference points.

Regarding the latter, one thing that strikes me about many “place descriptions” is that they are, either explicitly or implicitly, relative to other places (especially with respect to tourism). For example, Toronto is sometimes described as “the clean-cut twin of New York” or “NYC’s stunt double” for the role it has often played in films. I recently heard Austin described as “the Bay Area without the bay… and a better music scene”. And, for any given place, these descriptions are both culturally relative and obviously will change over time.

As to expectations, I think this is fairly obvious, but my assumptions here are mainly based on several anecdotal examples. For example, I now live in a big city and my parents, let’s just say, are “not city people”. When they come here, they have certain expectations (biases) which I struggle to overcome in my presentation of the city to them, but which are almost invariably (and inevitably?) confirmed by their seeing the city through a lens of tension, suspicion, unease, and/or “abnormality”.

I’m curious how this things (will) play into the practice of mobile historianship (including things like geotagged travel accounts/reviews). For example, when getting and recording the “sense of a place” relative to some other place(s), perhaps technology can help keep descriptions and narratives of disparate places “in synch”, allowing for the contextualization of statements like the above for one place long after the comparisons to the other continue to hold. But perhaps, also, the “recording techniques” (whatever they may be), need to record much more — including (so-called) meta-data about the background, perspectives, reference points, and who-knows-what(!) of the mobile historian, especially if this is done in a “crowd sourced” way (although even if it isn’t).

Please forgive me if this is a worn out path in discussions of mobile history . (I’m suspicious the above points probably are also tired topics in the area of “normal” history as well, but I also suspect the “technologically-enhanced” emerging practices probably exacerbate things.) And thanks again for a thought-provoking post!