Project Director: Dan Trudeau, Geography
Part of our 2021/2022 DLA Faculty Fellows Cohort

Seeing public space through the eyes of others: toward a more inclusive and empathetic community 

My goal in this project is to create an interactive digital platform that fosters awareness of diverse experiences and engagement with different perspectives about shared spaces. The broader contribution of this work will nurture my scholarly interests in supporting public conversations about inclusion and belonging in public settings and support foundations for civil dialogue and democratic engagement. Specifically, I will work with people who are participating in a “mobile interview” project I am currently conducting in collaboration with Amanda Lovelee, a Parks Ambassador with the Metropolitan Council, who shares my commitment to supporting inclusive public spaces. As a DLA fellow, I will lead this process and then prepare and submit a proposal to the NEH Digital Projects for the Public Prototyping Grant to create the envisioned tools.

In August, my collaborator and I began making video and audio recordings of individual’s stories about their experiences in and perceptions of Lake Phalen Regional Park as we ambled through the park. Participants wear a GoPro camera as they give a guided tour of how they use Lake Phalen Park and respond to prompts about how they perceive specific locations in the park, what brings them joy and pleasure, what they fear and distrust, and what experiences build a sense of belonging or contribute to a sense of exclusion. 

As a DLA fellow, I will work collaboratively to envision a set of digital tools that will enable interaction and exploration of the mobile interview content. The fellowship will support sustained dialogue with mobile interview participants, Amanda and her colleagues at the Metropolitan Council, and representatives of relevant community organizations, including the Minnesota Humanities Center. One of the DLA contributions I will make to this dialogue is a StoryMap that enables users to interact with mobile interview content, seeing different and similar perspectives about specific locations in the park and interacting with the content thematically, seeing where and why people feel joy, sadness, connection, exclusion, etc. This will support the process of cultivating a high-level plan for 1) developing a set of digital tools that enable the public to explore different perspectives of Lake Phalen Park and 2) recommending goals and methods for public humanities programming to use the tools widely. 

I will share the StoryMap on A Field Guide for Public Space. I am the creator of and a contributor to this site, which I will maintain for the foreseeable future and so I expect the eventual digital engagement tools will also be available there indefinitely.