Emmett till memory project

Emmett till at the grocery store

In the early morning of August 28, , Emmett Till was abducted and murdered in Money, Mississippi. Plaques marking the people, places, and events surrounding the killing of the year-old African American and the subsequent trial have been vandalized since their installation in sprayed with bullets, scraped of their words, and even uprooted and thrown in the nearby river.

Weems and local community organizers and historians invited Tell to the area. Tell made contact with Google, which at the time owned Field Trip—an app that alerts users to sites of interests in their immediate vicinity. Lo and behold, we came up with these fifty sites. For sure, some of them are rather distant from the Till story. Including them was the cost of getting our prototype on Google.

The app offers a more deliberately curated experience, featuring 18 rather than the initial 50 sites. These are very different stories, and that is the point. Reducing the number of sites from 50 to 18 makes this possible, Tell notes. CurateScape is an NEH-funded web and mobile app platform that uses Omeka to publish location-based content.

CurateScape uses a common code for all its projects.