City Saga
A place-based mobile experience celebrating Black Atlanta history through site-specific narratives, multimedia archives, and an extensible student-authored publishing system.
Important Black and Civil Rights histories remain attached to places even when the physical evidence has changed or disappeared.
City Saga was an applied cultural-heritage platform for downtown Atlanta. The experience connected site-specific stories to physical locations, combining signage and mobile media so that visitors could move between a quick encounter in the street and a deeper archive of audio, video, historical photographs, panoramas, and contextual material.
The Atlanta deployment focused on Black history and Civil Rights movement history, with material authored and assembled through historians, graduate and undergraduate students, and cultural partners.
Digital leadership for a location-based storytelling infrastructure.
I served as project manager and digital lead, helping upgrade and develop the mobile experience and its content-management workflow. My role included coordinating digital implementation and supporting the system through which students and researchers could add, edit, and publish new location-based stories.
My role
Project Manager · Digital Lead. I led the digital side of the cultural-heritage platform and supported the translation of partner-authored historical material into a public mobile experience.
The platform paired street-level place markers with a continually extensible digital archive.
Visitors encountered stories at specific downtown locations and could move through photographs, audio, video, panoramas, and historical context. An administrative dashboard allowed Georgia State Honors College students and researchers to build new tours, create stops in the field or at a desktop, and attach multiple media types without rebuilding the application.
A multi-institutional public-history collaboration.
The project’s Atlanta content drew from organizations including the Georgia State Honors College / Herndon Human Rights Initiative, the Center for Civil and Human Rights, the City of Atlanta, the Atlanta Preservation Center, Sweet Auburn Works, and other local partners. The project was designed to celebrate and make accessible Black and Civil Rights history through the places where that history occurred.
A public mobile cultural-heritage system rather than a closed research prototype.
City Saga was released publicly on mobile platforms and the original project documentation reported more than 2,000 downloads.