Login

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.  Luckily, this is not difficult.

—Charlotte Whitton
Project Blog:
Mobile Black History Project
Imagine pointing your mobile phone at a Washington, D.C., landmark and reading about its relevance in African-American history. Layering data over real life is at the center of the emerging field of augmented reality, and this mobile phone application will bring black history to the forefront, starting with historic sites in Washington, D.C. Retha Hill, a recent Knight News Challenge winner and director of the New Media Innovation Lab at Arizona State University, will run the project.

Work is Underway

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Work on the Mobile Black History App is underway. I’ve partnered with a Boulder start-up called BloomWorlds to develop the augmented reality app that will guide users to interesting places in the nation’s capital where African American history took place. BloomWorlds’ founder Darrell Brogdon is a talented programmer who got his start at the company that became McAfee and then with Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life.  He’s done a number of iPhone apps, is a serial entrepreneur and, like me, a history buff.

I’m going through the often-tedious task of tracking down longitude and latitude for all of the notable (and not so well known but still significant) places where black history happened in D.C.  Aside from Google Earth and Wikipedia, if anybody knows of a better source for coordinates, please let me know.

Read more...

   • Posted by Retha Hill on 09/21 at 03:03 PM

Who's Blogging

 
image

RETHA HILL
Retha Hill is the Director of the New Media Innovation Lab and a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Hill joined the Cronkite faculty in the summer of 2007 after nearly eight years at BET.

Click for full bio.