ABSTRACT
How do the examples in this chapter help us understand the practice of storytelling in the mobile media age? This chapter focuses on the production of a mobile history platform used to explore Fort Vancouver, a historic site located on the banks of the Columbia River in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area. Fort Vancouver, once dubbed the “New York of the Pacific,” is a major archaeological resource, with more than two million artifacts in its collection. Most of those pieces, gathered from more than fifty years of excavations, are kept in warehouses, along with the boxes of documents, drawings, and other assorted historical records in storage that, because of severely limited access, obscure the fascinating and multicultural history of the place. It is a goal of the Fort Vancouver Mobile project to make these materials available through a direct experience with the site with the aid of mobile phones. By drawing from this example of a mobile storytelling platform, the chapter points toward ways that mobile stories utilize “intermediality,” a term with expansive edges that helps us understand that a wide range of media should work together to transform the ways we experience space.
