Shannon Carroll is an award-winning artist and creative entrepreneur based in Brooklyn, NY. She is Creative Director at Vivid Story, a studio focused on the power of visual storytelling for causes. She produces compelling visual narratives for social enterprises to increase their impact and authentically connect with core audiences. As an experienced collaborator, she brings her multidisciplinary skills spanning video production, photography and interactive design to engender empathy and catalyze engagement. She spearheaded Southside Stories, a site-specific audio walk featuring long-term residents of South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and in June 2015 co-led the “Writing for Location-Based Experience” workshop at the Made in NY Media Center by IFP in NYC.
Michael Epstein is an interactive director, specializing in mobile narrative applications for urban exploration and storytelling. His “Walking Cinema: Murder on Beacon Hill” was the first iPhone app to win an award in a major film festival and his “Walking Cinema: Posts from Gloucester” won the 2013 Gold Muse Award. He has a degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and is currently teaching a course called “Landmarks, Memory, and Mobile Media” at the California College of Art. Michael’s 2015 production “Museum of the Hidden City” was an official selection of the Green Film Festival and features a unique combination of documentary film, live theater, and mobile-guided urban exploration: www.seehidden.city.
Holly Ewald is a visual artist who has blended studio work and community engagement for over 30 years. Her studio explorations are both an inspiration for, and a response to, the arts programming she initiates with communities who inhabit and treasure under-recognized public spaces. Since 2008 she has focused on the urban ponds of Providence, building an organization, UPP Arts, that brings artist workshops focused on the history and environmental challenges of Mashapaug Pond and the lower Pawtuxet River watershed to the area’s schools and residents. Through her work with Brown University’s Public Humanities Program for the past four years, she has provided a significant community connection for student research – of benefit to both students and the community. In 2013 students created a cellphone walking tour around Mashapaug Pond http://storiesfrombeyondthepond.com/ and in 2014 a mobile app tour which is part of Rhodetour.org.
C. Morgan Grefe is the Executive Director of the Rhode Island Historical Society. She has been at the RIHS for more than ten years serving as the Director of the Goff Center for Education and Public Programs for 6.5 of those. In the summer of 2011 she took the helm of the RIHS. Her work as a historian focuses on U.S. social, cultural and public history, with special attention to R.I. She holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown and a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in the same. Her recent publications include “‘Jews, Turks, and Infidels:’ How Rhode Island’s Lively Experiment Helped Chart the American Way” and “Sourcing a Rhode Island Legend: The Story of Kady Brownell.” She lectures widely on topics relating to Rhode Island’s social and cultural history, as well as the history education crisis in our state and nation.
Chelsea Gunn is a Ph.D. student in the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Sciences, and holds a Master of Library and Information Science specializing in archives management from Simmons College. As the Archivist and Manager of Digital Initiatives at the Newport Historical Society, Chelsea has worked with the Explore Historic Newport mobile tour app, with an emphasis on project planning and evaluation. Previously, she served as the Rhode Island History Online Directory Initiative (RHODI) Project Coordinator at the Rhode Island Historical Society, surveying the state’s cultural heritage sites and collections. Her areas of research interest include the evolution of diary-keeping practices, humanities data, digital preservation, and project evaluation.
Therese Kelly is a licensed architect, artist and editor. Passionate about public space and the creation of more livable cities, she employs evocative cartography and innovative outreach tools in her work to foster a vibrant civic realm, whether re-envisioning such iconic L.A. landscapes as post-industrial Baldwin Hills and Downtown L.A. ‘s new Grand Park, or cultivating place-based awareness of water as an essential public resource. She is co-founder of the Los Angeles Urban Rangers, an interdisciplinary collective offering site-specific interpretation and investigation of the city and its various ecologies. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the 2009 Rotterdam Architecture Biennale and the 2010 California Biennial. Both as an editor at Princeton Architectural Press and as a board member of the L.A. Forum for Architecture & Urban Design, Therese has produced and edited over two dozen titles in architecture, design, and cartography. She graduated from Princeton University with honors and earned her M.Arch from University of California, Los Angeles.
Monica Muñoz Martinez is the Director of Refusing to Forget and an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University. At Brown she offers courses in Latino/a History, American Studies, Ethnic Studies, the Public Humanities, and feminist research methods. Her research has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation, the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, and the Texas State Historical Association. In addition to developing her manuscript, “‘Inherited Loss’: Reckoning with Anti-Mexican Violence, 1910-Present,” she is also a Public Humanities Fellow at the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage.
Jim Mathews is the Education Director at the Field Day Lab, where he co-develops tools and learning experiences aimed at engaging youth and adults in studying people, places, and issues in their local community. Field Day is home to ARIS, a user-friendly, open-source platform for creating and playing mobile games, tours and interactive stories, and Siftr, a “lightweight” data collection tool that can be used to support cultural and ecological fieldwork. Mathews earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in Digital Media; his first Augmented Reality-based design, completed in 2005, was a situated documentary called “Dow Day” that used roles, archival documents and site specific video to immerse users in a series of protests that occurred on the UW-Madison campus in 1967. Along with several other researchers interested in mobile learning, Jim co-founded the Local Games Lab, where he helped produce a number of geo-games, including “Riverside: A Milwaukee Story,” “Sick at South Shore Beach,” and “Saving Lake Wingra.” Each of these games, which included interconnected roles and real world data, was designed for a specific neighborhood in Wisconsin.
Dietrich Neumann is a professor of the history of modern architecture and director of Urban Studies at Brown University. With his students he developed an Iphone and Android App for Brown’s campus and its architecture (“Brown Facades”) and is now series editor for the campus guide app series at Princeton Architectural Press. The first app published under this arrangement (in collaboration with app developer Gokce Kinayoglu, Montreal and architectural photographer Hassan Bagheri, Providence) presents the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. The University of Virginia, Harvard and MIT are next.
Denise Pinto is the Executive Director of Jane’s Walk, a global movement of free, citizen-led walking tours inspired by Jane Jacobs. As a digital urbanist, she thinks deeply about co-opting emerging tech to shape better cities and advocates for the use of digital tools to enable open government, sharing economies, and the global organizing of DIY citizen projects like Jane’s Walk. Denise is the former Chair of the Editorial Board for Ground Magazine (the quarterly publication of the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects) where she also frequently contributes. In 2012, she won a Medal of Excellence at the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Urban Design Awards for a project on urban agriculture. An active placemaker, she sits on the Advisory Board for Open Streets Toronto and is a Steering Committee member for the grassroots pedestrian group, Walk Toronto. Denise holds a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Toronto. (Presentation)
Dr. Marc Ruppel is a senior program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Public Programs, where he specializes in digital media and transmedia storytelling. Before joining the Endowment, Marc worked on several transmedia/digital-experiential learning + gaming projects, including the Tribeca-funded Robot Heart Stories. He holds a Ph.D in Digital Studies from the University of Maryland College Park where he studied transmedia design, and has held positions with the Maryland Institute in Technology for the Humanities (MITH) and NASA. Marc has written widely about transmedia and digital practices in venues such as The International Journal of Learning and Media and Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, and in edited collections such as The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices and Locative Technologies.
An urban, public, and digital historian, Mark Tebeau has directed more than two dozen digital humanities, oral history, and public history projects. Tebeau leads the development of Curatescape a framework for mobile publishing that seeks to make open-source and/or low-cost hosted mobile tools available to scholars and curators. With funding from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, Curatescape is being used by more than twenty cultural organizations, universities, and heritage preservation organizations to curate landscapes and museums. Projects include Cleveland Historical (which Tebeau co-directs), Spokane Historical, Baltimore Heritage, New Orleans Historical, Explore Kentucky, and Connecticut Communities. Prior to joining Arizona State University in 2013 as Director of Public History, Tebeau directed the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University.
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