• Hacking/Solving Mobile DigitalHumanities

    Along with text analysis and working with GIS metadata, one thing I’m currently curious about is applications for mobile devices; I’ve attended a few presentations about mobile websites in libraries and I know the nuts and bolts of Android and iOS development but other than mobile-izing a given search & browse website (which of course doesn’t need an app) I’m unsure humanities projects even want to hassle with a mobile device ‘app’. We could demo a few different apps and work to develop something cool; maybe someone has a particular problem and we can ‘solve’ it with an app.

2 Comments


  1. mgeimer says:

    This is an interesting point you bring up – MATRIX started mobile app development recently. We have 1 app that is in the realm of DH that has been published (Quilt Index 2 Go – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quilt-index/id407982060?mt=8#) and are about to bring another out that I would be happy to talk about. You are hitting the nail on the head that many projects entail mobile-izing a site which can be done much easier via css over making an app. There are however a lot of neat things we can do with the data contained within these repositories / data stores. Part of the problem is making scholars / grantors / users / enthusiasts / people understand is what *can* be done in mobile to make the data set / project more valuable and possible help fund further development if a paid app is done.

    Long story short – i think asking what people want to do is 1/2 the battle, the other 1/2 is giving them examples of what we can do.

  2. kirkhess says:

    The quilt app is a good example of what I was thinking about; at the University of Illinois there are a few apps that show new books in the collection and a very innovative Android app that allows users to navigate the undergraduate library for books.

    I think there’s some value in creating apps that expose locally digitized collections to give access to the community or impress grantors, but I’m not sure its worth spending 35k to hire a outside consulting company.

    If your quilt app source code is open source or sharable I’d like to look at it, even if no one else is interested in this topic!

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