Downtown Main Street. A few images may come to mind—historic buildings propped side-by-side, lining a short stone or paved street; people or tourists carrying shopping bags or sipping coffee at café tables; maybe even an annual festival that has closed the street to traffic. We all have an idealized sense of what “main street” means to us. But everyone’s image is a little different because we all have different experiences and perceptions.
With attempts to revitalize or bring tourists to their downtown areas, some post-industrial small towns are continuing to retell the history told by those in power in order to simply survive. But, this problem is not new. These attempts rely on an idealized past, which prompts issues in creating an imagined sort of main street in a historical way.
The problem with developing content to share with tourists is access, specifically accessing a more diverse history. Technology can be used as a bridge between what is already in downtown archives and what tourists are looking to learn about that destination, which will help create a history that is engaging. Not only would a digital platform allow for immersion into main street history, it will also provide an opportunity for the community to share other narratives or heritage artifacts, which broadens the narrative to include more diverse voices. With the use of augmented reality (AR) technology in particular, community members and tourists would be able to participate in experiential learning initiatives and collaborate with others, building upon and sustaining the town’s history.
For my dissertation and my CHI project, “Taking A Walk Down Memory Lane: Exploring Immersive Digital Approaches in Local Communities,” I am conducting a case study of Romeo, Michigan and will model such an approach. Romeo has been successful in bringing tourists to Main Street by offering weekly visitor hours at their brick and mortar historical society archives and public tours throughout the year. They even help new homeowners of the town’s historical houses learn more about their estates. However, my project, titled Memory Lane, will take what they already have and expand it to reach and include a larger audience. This expansion will use technology to allow community members and tourists alike to have more information at their fingertips, quite literally, when walking down main street. They will be able to immerse themselves into history and understand what main street is both spatially and temporally, and will learn more about narratives that have not been shared before. This project will be of interest to community members like business owners and educators as well as those interested in adding their own narrative to Romeo’s historical records. It will also be of interest to the many tourists that visit the area throughout the year, providing them an immersive platform to dive deeper into understanding the environment around them.
Finally, it will expand the boundaries of the brick and mortar location of the Romeo Historical Society as visitors and community members will be able to learn about how certain locations have changed the social and cultural environment of Romeo’s Main Street while using AR technology at each site. I will examine how history is created and how it is shared by critically interrogating what Romeo has already established and will propose a new approach. The goal is to break out of the static notions of how history was recorded by those in power and how one interacts with it, thus helping to include multiple narratives through the use of digital technologies. The digital space offers something other approaches cannot—more voices and visual layers that show the changes from the past to the present. Ultimately, this case study will show how to reanimize approaches to community history projects.
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