Bringing History to Life: Developing an Immersive Walking Tour for Downtown Harrisburg’s Civil Rights Legacy

Jake Kocher: October 17th, 2024

This semester I have the privilege of working with the Center for Public Humanities at Messiah University on a project to develop an immersive walking tour that brings to life significant historical places in Downtown Harrisburg. 

The project I’m working on is Harrisburg Historical, a mobile and web app that Messiah University is developing to serve as a platform to tell the untold stories of Pennsylvania’s capital city. Harrisburg Historical makes use of Curatescape, a digital platform designed to create location-based, mobile-friendly historical tours and narratives. Curatescape is typically used by public historians, museums, universities, and cultural institutions to present stories about places through multimedia elements like text, images, audio, and video. By leveraging mobile technology and geolocation, Curatescape enables users to explore historical sites through interactive, map-based storytelling. As a Curatescape-based platform, Harrisburg Historical will bring forgotten narratives to life in a unique way, offering not only a digital experience but also a personal, interactive, on-the-ground perspective. We expect that we will make it available in January or February 2025. 

The first tour we are developing for Harrisburg Historical is called “The Chester Way: A Tour of Harrisburg’s Long Civil Rights.” Through this walking tour, you will be able to follow in the footsteps of civil rights giants who shaped the city and region of Harrisburg. Over the last two years, humanities students at Messiah University have laid the groundwork for the tour under the guidance of Dr. David Pettegrew (see Alexandra Shehigian’s post about the tour last December). Their work on the Chester Way tour has provided a foundation of 20 distinct stories about places associated with the long civil rights movement in the City of Harrisburg and the State Capital Complex. In the fall of 2024, I will continue this work by mapping out a walking tour of downtown Harrisburg and the Pennsylvania Capital Complex. The places on the tour are spread across a wide area of downtown Harrisburg and the Capitol Complex, presenting a challenge in creating a single, comprehensive route. However, with Dr. Pettegrew’s guidance, I am confident we can design a walking tour that works. 

To prepare for the launch of this tour, I have been walking the tours myself utilizing the geotracking mobile application Strava to measure the distance and time required to complete them. By walking these tours with the assistance of the Strava app, I am collecting critical data necessary for facilitating a public-facing tour accessible and enjoyable for individuals of all ages.

You can get a sense of the tours and stories we’re developing by exploring this link to the Story Maps (image captures shown below). I’ve put these together to visualize how will organize our stories using the Tours feature of Harrisburg Historical.

 I am honored to have the opportunity to bring these stories to life in a public-facing tour that highlights the history of racial justice in Pennsylvania’s capital city.

(Left) Projected Map of the Capital Complex Tour. (Right) Projected Map of the Harrisburg Downtown Tour.

Jake Kocher is a senior history major studying at Messiah University.