Week 1: Getting Started at the Polk County History Center

I grew up in Polk County and as a child always had to travel outside the limits of my home to engage my love of history. It was only later, when I was a freshman at UCF in 2002 that I learned about the deep and rich history of my home. Ever since that day I have tried my best to teach anyone and everyone about the history of Polk County. It is only natural that I use that drive to achieve two goals at once: bringing history to the people of Polk County and completing an internship for my Master’s Degree requirement.

I am on the Public History track, which is not what I thought it was when I signed up but it was exactly what I needed to be on. I previously spent about 5 years researching and writing a book about the birth of the Mafia which is what I thought an historian did, but I would also give tours to people and produced a jazz album which imagined what one of the first jazz concerts by Buddy Bolden would have felt like, which I considered a history project as much as it was a musical endeavor. All that time I had been engaging in public history without knowing the technical term for it, so I am glad that I randomly clicked the “Public History” box when I excitedly applied for graduate school.

My interests are wide, but for the sake of this internship and blog post, they include integrating augmented reality into public history and figuring out how we can not just teach history but make people feel or understand it in a different way. Since I am staying home and working for my home county’s history center I am able to make the app that I would want to and will use in the future. My primary focus will be developing and creating tours that bring local history to life for visitors. So I will be creating an app that will allow the museum to offer visitors 3 options for tours or the option to just go as they please and get the information as they go.

We will be using QR codes with colored borders which correspond to the different tours: Architectural, Historical and Exhibition. If someone wants to come to take an architectural tour of the historic courthouse they can follow the corresponding colored QR codes and learn about the building in a self guided tour. The same goes for the other 2 tours. The historical tour will involve the establishment of the courthouse, trials and historic events inside it and a brief outside portion about the surrounding downtown area. The exhibition tour will provide extra information about artifacts or subjects in the exhibits inside the museum.

If someone just wants to visit the site and go as they please, they can scan the QR codes in any order and get more information. The objective for this internship will be to have a working app that can assist guests in self guided tours and will involve augmented reality, which is something I am developing in a separate app for my thesis and possible PHD. The integration of AR will be key to informing the guests of the history of the building and the court proceedings because they will be able to match the internal and external structures easily since the building is kept in the same condition as it was since its 1920s expansion.

My tasks will be spit between researching the history and architecture and adding on to what they already have as well as developing the tour using best practices and then developing the app. I will be doing all of these in no particular order as developing the app will happen in batches as I test it out. Each bit of research might bring a new need for the app, for example, if I can find courthouse records of famous trials , there might be an opportunity to dramatize the transcripts and add an audio player so that guests can stand in the court room and hear portions of those trials in the very place they happened which will bring the court room to life in a way that some text on a plaque simply cannot. Its exciting to be able to make something that I would love to use in other places one day. Something that connects me and others to the place we are in. I essentially want to get as close as possible to a pocket time machine or portal to glimpse the past as it was via AR or audio or any primary documents.