Redesigning Historypin for Open-Source Digital Humanities

FAIN: HAA-266562-19

Shift Design, Inc. (New Orleans, LA 70117-6726)
Hali Elizabeth Dardar (Project Director: January 2019 to February 2020)
Alexandra Dolan-Mescal (Project Director: February 2020 to August 2023)

The planning for a revitalization of the community-sourced history mapping platform Historypin.org and to migrate its underlying code to an open-source framework.

Shift Design, Inc requests $49,824 to support a 12-month plan for the revitalization of their existing Historypin.org web platform. Historypin.org is a free, user-friendly, and accessible platform for crowdsourcing history open to scholars, community groups, digital humanities classrooms, and the general public. The site has over 98,000 users around the world, over 4,000 of which are cultural heritage organizations. Although widely used, the Historypin platform is in need of revitalization. The project objectives are to 1) better understand the digital humanities scholars’ current use of Historypin, 2) document the general needs of a digital humanities scholar from a user-interaction (UX)/ user-interface (UI) perspective, 3) develop a revised and simplified design for the Historypin website, and 4) draft a plan for a transition to an open-source codebase. Completing this project would position Historypin to begin developing a platform tailored to assist digital humanities research.