





































COMMUNITY ENGAGED RESEARCH COLLINS | COLLABORATIVE APP-MAKING 

Collaborative App-Making 
as a Community 
Engagement Research 
Method 
SAMUEL GERALD COLLINS, MATTHEW DURINGTON, CANDACE EVERETTE, JAMYA 

ANDERSON, KIRTSEN FOSECA, JAKAYLA HOLMES AND CA’SYAH WATKINS 

ABSTRACT 

This article details an ethnographic community engagement project involving 
mobile app technology as a participatory methodology to create a walking tour of a 
Baltimore neighborhood. Greenmount West is an historically African American 
community in Baltimore City that is now experiencing rapid gentrification. After 
receiving a “mash up” grant from a local museum, researchers from Towson 
University were partnered with the director of a local community center in the 
Greenmount West neighborhood and collaboratively crafted the idea to create a 
walking tour through the perspective of youth. 

In this case, four Black young women who were already involved in activities at the 
community center were solicited to participate in the ethnographic research and 
mobile app development project. Through a community engagement process that 
matched traditional ethnographic methods and technological development as 
methods, they shared their perspectives on their changing neighborhood and were 
involved in every facet of producing the tour. The goal was to put the agency and 
perspective of these young women as the leading voice of this process and 
development of a mobile app walking tour.  

The article provides a step-by-step process for how to use this particular technology 
as a form of community engagement and research. 

Keywords: Mobile Apps, Gentrification, Community Engagement, Technology, 
Ethnography 

Authors 

SAMUEL GERALD COLLINS  
Towson University 

MATTHEW DURINGTON 
Towson University 

CANDACE EVERETTE 
JAMYA ANDERSON 
KIRTSEN FOSECA 
JAKAYLA HOLMES 
CA’SYAH WATKINS  
Greenmount West 
Community Center 

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INTRODUCTION 

In cultural anthropology, and one could argue in 
society at large, the smartphone is now an 
indispensable tool. Over the last several years 
through a process we refer to as “Networked 
Anthropology” we have experimented and 
conceptualized ways to use technology as a 
methodological tool in ethnographic research. We 
define this approach as, “An anthropology 
undertaken in the age of multimedia social 
networks, one in which all of the stakeholders – 
ethnographers, interlocutors, community, 
audience – are all networked together in various 
(albeit powerful and unequal) ways” (Collins and 
Durington, 2015, pp. 4-5). Through this approach 
we have developed ideas on how to utilize various 
technologies such as mobile apps as a way to not 
only explore communities but also as a means of 
producing material relevant to ethnographic 
research (Collins et al., 2017).  

From keeping in contact with collaborators, to 
recording interviews, making photographs and 
film, and “live field noting”1 the ethnographic 
process2, anthropology has become app-driven: 
the smartphone has supplanted the 
ethnographer's paper notebook. That said, the 
process is not without controversy, and questions 
over the ethics of app-based media continue to 
arise--as well they should. Many apps are, after 
all, for-profit platforms that are (on many levels) 
monetizing the work of anthropology for profits 
that neither the anthropologists nor the 
communities in which they work will enjoy. Yet, 
we make the assertion that any community 
engagement activity in the 21st century is relying 
upon this technology as well, whether one is 
conscious of it or not. Therefore, this conceptual 
project informed by and producing ethnographic 

1 Taking field notes is one of the primary methodologies in 
cultural anthropology.  When conducting ethnographic 
research an anthropologist will listen intensively to 
collaborators while conducting participant-observation 
(both participating in and observing cultural interactions) 
and will later reflect on this experience and record post-
event field notes as records.  “Live” field noting connotes 
the process of doing this in real time as events are 

research challenges community engagement 
practitioners to consider the role technology 
should inform their methods and findings.   

There are many concerns about using technology 
in ethnographic research and while there is a 
comfort level with most audio-visual technologies, 
researchers have been slow to incorporate other 
networking and social media technologies in their 
work in a meaningful way. The same concerns are 
also present in the general public, whose digital 
labor -- the liking, sharing and following actions of 
individuals on mobile apps -- create a product for 
app developers and social media platforms to 
develop algorithms and targeted advertising. 
Essentially, our work as anthropologists and the 
browsing of our collaborators is a product that 
becomes monetized and sold back to us through 
mobile apps and social media. At the same time, 
we have simultaneously noted that the journal 
articles and books that anthropologists publish 
are hardly profit-sharing endeavors in and of 
themselves. The paywalls academic journals erect 
are obstacles to access for many of the 
communities in which anthropologists work, an 
obstacle that this journal thankfully works 
against. Smartphone-based apps, on the other 
hand, are accessible and familiar to both 
anthropologists and our community collaborators. 
For example, we all can show pictures and videos 
to friends and family, and people can discuss 

occurring.  While one can use tools such as pen and 
notepad for this, the smartphone offers up another tool to 
not only jot down notes in a writing application, but also 
record video, sound and take photos. 
2 Ethnography is the primary methodology of cultural 
anthropology which utilizes fieldwork and participant 
observation to study cultures while being immersive in 
those environments over an extended amount of time. 

For many of us, the collaboration needs to 
come first, and, moreover, arise from people 
in the community. In other words, only when 

people articulate their need for our 
collaboration do we begin the research 

process. 

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results accessible online much more readily than 
essay publications in obscure journals. Our 
assertion is that the smartphone can help drive an 
ethnographic project with the goal of creating a 
collaborative mobile app development to produce 
an outcome accessible to all parties. 

This essay outlines an ethnographic project that 
produces a collaborative, app-building exercise in 
Baltimore, MD, involving anthropologists (Collins 
and Durington), the Program Manager of 
Greenmount West Community Center (Everette) 
and young residents of the neighborhood 
(Anderson, Foseca, Holmes and Watkins). Over 
the course of several weeks in the summer of 
2019, we created and published an app-based 
walking tour of the Greenmount West 
neighborhood from the perspective of its young 
residents aged 9-12 years old. Our young 

collaborators were already involved in after school 
projects at the Greenmount West Community 
Center and when presented with the opportunity 
to participate agreed to do so with the consent of 
their parents and guardians. As researchers, we 
were pleasantly surprised by the tenacity and 
initiative shown by our young collaborators as 
they intensively discussed their neighborhood, 
engaged in mapping exercises and guided our 
walks throughout the neighborhood as we 
developed the tour. We also knew that our young 
collaborators had a keen sense that the 
neighborhood was changing and were already 
familiar with the term “gentrification” having 
heard it discussed by many around them. They 
also shared with us throughout the process the 
possibility that they may be losing their favorite 
places or might have to even move and leave their 
friends due to changes in the neighborhood.  

Figure 1 

The landing page for the Greenmount West mapping project. 

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Gentrification has occurred in Baltimore just like 
many other cities throughout the United States in 
a process undergirded by discriminatory historic 
processes such as redlining that depreciated urban 
neighborhoods in the latter 20th century 
(Durington et al 2009). Gentrification relies upon 
the stereotyping of racialized urban 
neighborhoods as riddled with crime, drugs and 
other social pathologies making them ripe for 
possible change by developers, politicians and 
others as potential investments for 
redevelopment. These neighborhoods and 
communities tend to have little home ownership 
and high rental occupancy and thus become 
attractive for redevelopment that caters to new, 
often mostly white, residents who move while 
historic, often Black, residents are displaced. This 
same process has occurred in dozens of historic 
Black neighborhoods throughout the United 
States and in Baltimore.  

3 https://bniajfi.org/community/Clifton-Berea/ 

Greenmount West is an historic African American 
neighborhood adjacent to the west downtown core 
of the city of Baltimore.  The larger demographic 
profile of the community in which Greenmount 
West is located is 93% Black, with a median 
household income of $31,219, and 50.1% of 
children living below the poverty line.  An 
indicator of incoming change is a rising racial 
diversity index of 17% with Whites making up 
2.4% of the total population as of 2018.3  

Gentrification in the Greenmount West 
neighborhood was inevitable with the changing 
development patterns of Baltimore, but it was 
triggered through the designation of a nearby 
newly labeled arts district by the city which is 
often just one signal of impending gentrification. 
When this occurs, housing prices rapidly increase, 
and many long-term residents are then forced out 
by higher rents. Those remaining families see the 
neighborhood shifting around them, sometimes in 
ways that are hostile to its long-standing, largely 

Figure 2 

The izi.travel website for the Greenmount West walking tour. https://izi.travel/en/88aa-
greenmount-west-community/en 

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Black population. This project's goals were 
therefore two-fold: to document a neighborhood 
undergoing rapid change through gentrification, 
and to help neighborhood youth engage in 
placemaking in a neighborhood changing before 
their eyes, in often unwelcoming ways. 

SMARTPHONES AND APPS AS A 
RESEARCH TOOL 

As smartphone access has increased globally, apps 
have become an everyday part of life for many 
people in the world. The ubiquity of apps 
demands that researchers pay attention to them 
as a medium of communication and as cultural 
media in their own right. Apps are global and 
utilized everywhere throughout the world. One 
only has to survey a classroom to find dozens of 
apps that students use on a daily basis to post 
content on social media, navigate their 
surroundings through GIS mapping or connect 
with others around them in unique ways. In South 
Korea, for example, nearly 100 percent of the 
population uses Kakaotalk (a messaging app with 
video capabilities) (Hjorth 2014). It would be 
difficult to do any research in South Korea without 
Kakaotalk -- it has become literally the platform 
upon which social life is built. Beyond this 
particular example, it is easy to assert that apps 
are a global phenomenon. In other words, not 
only should researchers be studying life in the 
context of these apps, but the apps themselves 
function as indispensable field working tools. If a 
researcher is not gauging what mobile apps their 
collaborators are using in their everyday lives, 
then they are truly missing a major part of the 
culture they are studying. While we still need to be 
critical of these new media, as Kenner (2016) has 
pointed out in her study of the neoliberal 
underpinnings of asthma apps, we no longer have 
the luxury of simply ignoring them as ancillary to 
either our scholarly work or our work in 
community engagement. 

Besides, apps offer researchers distinct 
affordances in their work in urban communities. 
First, apps are mobile, and, as such, they mirror 

the mobility of communities themselves: the daily 
travels that bring people across their 
neighborhoods, through the city, and back again. 
Second, apps support multimedia. Unlike 
conventional media, divided up into print and 
visual media, apps evoke transmedia possibilities 
that mirror the way we counter media in daily life. 
Finally, apps accessed through smartphones 
present sensory experiences -- we often only know 
where to walk with a phone app, which is operated 
according to technology interfaces built into the 
app such as GPS tracking. With all of the 
multimedia contained in them, apps suggest a 
better way of engaging the senses in our research 
through what Sarah Pink calls “sensory 
ethnography” (Pink, 2009). Sensory ethnography 
encompasses multiple senses gleaned from 
walking, feeling, hearing and seeing. Thus, apps 
extend the possibility of higher forms of 
community engagement, experiencing and, 
ultimately, involvement. In this way, we have 
suggested that apps represent the future of the 
discipline of anthropology and ethnographic 
research (Durington and Collins 2016).  Now is 
the time for practitioners of community 
engagement from any disciplinary background to 
recognize that the capacities of these technologies 
should not be ignored but actively utilized and 
theorized. 

RESEARCH ETHICS AND DESIGN 

We adhere to an ethical obligation to collaborate 
and reciprocate in our research as cultural 

Fundamentally, community engagement 
work and research must always start with 

the perspectives of the local populations we 
interact with. And, simultaneously, there 
should be an ethical concern to create a 

constant mechanism for feedback and 
involvement. Hence, we do not adhere to 

the hierarchical authorship of the 
academics being the sole authors, but 

positioning our interlocutors in the same 
space. 

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anthropologists. Many of us collaborate with 
people in the communities where we work. This, 
after all, is part of the applied and public research 
that characterizes much of the work in community 
engagement writ large. Of course, the meaning of 
collaboration varies across context and discipline. 
In anthropology, collaboration has meant 
researchers striving to incorporate the voices and 
the perspectives of the people with whom we work 
in the research we produce. For many of us, the 
collaboration needs to come first, and, moreover, 
arise from people in the community. In other 
words, only when people articulate their need for 
our collaboration do we begin the research 
process. The same ethos should guide any 
community engagement exercise and 
anthropology, among other social sciences, 
provides those parameters and methodologies.  

While there may be some trepidation to use 
technologies such as mobile apps and others, to 
ignore their omniscience in culture would be a 
shortcoming. 

This particular project grew out of an 
intermediary, the Peale Museum in Baltimore, 
that supports and displays storytelling projects 
from around the city. They had offered a “mash-
up” grant program, where teams would pair up to 
produce original work together, and Collins and 
Durington had fortuitously proposed a very 
similar project to Everette and the West 
Greenmount Community Center. Both of the 
proposed projects involved documenting the 
changing face of the Greenmount West 
community. Everette proposed working with 
children at the Center; they were extremely 
conscious of the changing politics of the 

Figure 3  

The research team prepares for a transect walk in the community. 

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neighborhood, and the ways that processes of 
gentrification were infringing on their own sense 
of place through both enclosure and through 
increased rents that were literally pushing long-
term residents out of the neighborhood 
altogether, including some of the youth and their 
families that we were working with. We all agreed 
collaboratively in rapport building sessions that 
the goal of the project would be to help the 
children articulate their stories of the 
neighborhood, and the eventual forms this would 
take included mixed media -- performance, an art 
installation and an app.   

Design and implementation begins with rapport 
building and forming a community of practice.  
Initially in this dialogue, community members 
may express their desire to develop a new app to 
introduce their communities and their projects. 

Geolocated apps allow a community to represent 
their neighborhood at a very material level: to 
people walking its streets. While this is certainly 
attractive as a platform, app development is an 
expensive proposition. Moreover, many of the 
functions that community groups may desire 
require extensive work on the back end, in the 
form of a substantial database housed on a server. 
One solution to this is to prototype specific app 
functions with the community in order to “triage” 
their relevance to community needs. In other 
words, after ascertaining what our collaborators 
want to do, we attempt to find platforms and ways 
to utilize technology to meet these interests. After 
this process, community members can revisit the 
question of app development with a better sense 
of what might work for their community. 

Figure 4 

Taking pictures of an important site on the walking tour for the online platform. 

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There are many app platforms out there that can 
be used for community projects like these.  Many 
can be re-purposed in order to serve politically 
committed needs. Of course, many of these app 
platforms may be initially free, but require 
monthly fees in order to maintain and advertise 
the app. An exciting development in recent years 
is the proliferation of open source and open access 
platforms that remain accessible without 
monetization. After considering multiple app 
platforms, we decided on a free tour app platform 
called “izi.TRAVEL.” The platform supports the 
development of geolocated tours, multimedia 
tours, and includes possibilities for text, audio, 
photography and hyperlinked media. As of the 
writing of this essay, the app remains free, 
although there are now pop-up ads on the 
smartphone app (that, of course, can be removed 
through paying a fee). More importantly, there are 

no fees for uploading multimedia content to the 
platforms despite the size of data. Since several 
universities and non-profits have created tours 
hosted on izi.TRAVEL, there are an especially rich 
and varied collection of “tours” available for 
Baltimore. Many of them are examples of 
“creative misuse” (Farman, 2016), a process 
whereby one utilizes technology for a purpose it 
was not designed for, such as utilizing a travel 
platform to spotlight social problems and 
structural inequalities in a city rather than tourist 
attractions.  

Of course, there is always the option of developing 
different apps or migrating to a fee-based 
platform. Whatever platform people choose, the 
important point is that the data should exceed the 
platform: collaborators should generate more 
interviews, more video, audio and mapping than 
they need for their app. And it is helpful to be 

Figure 5 

The picture taken in Figure 4 in the StoryMapJS tool with contextual quotes from our collaborators 
and co-authors. 

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redundant. For example, a walking tour developed 
on this platform can be easily replicated on other 
web platforms that serve as a quasi-archive. It 
may be that this excess data ends up on an online 
archive for others to peruse, as Durington and 
Collins did with their “Anthropology by the Wire” 
project (http://anthropologybythewire.com).  

Despite its recent tumultuous activity, we have 
found the Tumblr platform useful for this 
purpose. But whatever the case, collaborators 
need to have as rich and varied a data set as 
possible, if for nothing else, to support multiple 
forms of dissemination that might result in the 
future of being used in other media-based 
community engagement projects with 
collaborators. And, with digital photography and 
media technologies being readily available on the 
average smartphone, the tools are there at hand 
and collaborators already possess a level of 
proficiency. One only has to glance at Instagram 
to realize the huge amount of photography posted 
by youth populations, even if they are mostly 
selfies.  

What follows are steps in the methodology that 
utilizes technology for participatory ethnographic 
research that we have developed and 
implemented in this project. While there is a focus 
on developing and utilizing technology, there is a 
simultaneous opportunity to glean valuable 
ethnographic information throughout the 
participatory process. The development of a 
collaborative mobile app walking tour includes 
multiple conversations, social mapping, 
participant observation, background research and 
media analysis and production. All of these are 
hallmarks of ethnographic research, therefore the 
assertion is that the mobile app development is 
the end to an ethnographic means. 

Methodology I: Community and 
Technology Assessment 

It is important for the reader to understand that 
while the description of the mobile app 

4 Participatory Action Research (PAR) seeks to utilize 
research between community members and researchers to 

production methodology focuses on showing the 
reader how to do this, it should also be realized 
that this process is not done by automatons 
working in silos. It should be taken as a given that 
as we work collaboratively; we are discussing a 
variety of things such as background stories, 
observations about the community, likes and 
dislikes and other everyday things that most 
technology developers might dismiss, but 
ethnographers value as data. As our youthful 
collaborators were being taught about the 
development of a mobile app walking tour, they 
were providing us ethnographic insight into their 
daily lives, their families and their communities. 
Therefore, we recommend that community 
engagement practitioners wear two hats 
simultaneously: experiment with these technology 
methods, but remember that ethnographic insight 
undergirds the process and the dual data 
produced by the process, both technological and 
cultural. 

The first step in this process is to decide which 
features of the community to highlight. Here, we 
take our prompts from participatory action 
research4 and, in particular, the experiences of 
photovoice researchers (Gubrium and Harper, 
2013). Photovoice is a methodology that 
empowers communities to represent themselves 
through collaborative, visual forms such as 
photography that is frequently exhibited in 
schools, galleries, coffee shops and other 
significant places in communities. The idea is that 
communities represent their daily lives, and then 
there are convening events where dialogue is 

develop information for direct change through collective 
inquiry. 

It is the editorial control given to the people 
you are working with that empowers their 

voices as experts in the community and 
creators of its representation. 

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COMMUNITY ENGAGED RESEARCH COLLINS | COLLABORATIVE APP-MAKING 

fostered between community members and 
others.  In June of 2019, Collins, Durington, 
Everette and children from the Greenmount West 
Community Center met to map their 
neighborhood through an examination of the 
“daily round5.” Associated with the work of Eliot 
Liebow, Ulf Hannerz and others, “daily round” 
methods emphasize the neighborhood as a source 
of rich social connection and reciprocity, and as a 
method is an important corrective to 
overemphasis on family and employment as the 
only salient sites for social observation. This 
honed method from social science helps push back 
against murky uses of reciprocity as a community 
engagement strategy. As Dostilio et al. states, 
“Understandings and applications of the concept 

5 A focus on the “daily round” gives meaning to the daily 
walks to and from locations such as school, neighbors’ 

of reciprocity may vary widely, distinctions among 
uses of the term may be overlooked, and this term 
may be easily conflated with others” (Dostilio et 
al., 2012). 

By thinking critically about the hierarchical nature 
of community engagement work we seek to 
empower our community collaborators to 
safeguard issues that can occur despite possessing 
a participatory and reciprocity ethos. This is 
particularly important in a place like Baltimore 
where youth are not only racialized but often not 
provided a voice or platform to talk about their 
communities. By providing a space and a platform 
for their voices, our young collaborators are 
positioned as those possessing local knowledge 

houses, stores, work and others and the social encounters 
and observations one has during those times. 

Figure 6 

Recording descriptive audio for the walking tour. 

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and educating academic outsiders about their 
communities and lives demonstrating true 
reciprocity. And the fact that we are positioning 
our interlocutors as co-authors of this piece and 
not simply as research participants demonstrates 
a disruption of hierarchy in participatory work 
and authorship that all community engagement 
practitioners should employ. 

Methodology II: Media and 
Documentation 

Having identified numerous sites, the 
collaborators agreed on some good days and 
times for “transect walks6” through the 
community that would capture all of the sites the 
children had identified. Of course, the point was 
to not only identify those sites, but to explore 
their significance and the sense of belonging that 
came with the children's place-making.  
Accordingly, the team brought multiple 
technologies with them -- cameras, digital 
recorders, and video cameras. Over a three-hour 
session, the group created an overlapping media 
archive.   While we benefit from having access to 
these different technologies, it is important to 
assert that this could be done with the average 
smartphone as well. The capturing of media on 
these transect walks is collaborative as well. While 
we are shooting footage of the children talking to 
create a primary editing roll, we employ other 
cameras simultaneously and also put these 
cameras in the hands of our collaborators. This 
footage is spliced in and often possesses on-the-
spot interviews of our collaborators interviewing 
each other in addition to describing sites 
important to them on the daily round. As the 
process unfolds, we have seen time and time 
again that the more you provide the means of 
representation to your interlocutors, the 
collaboration becomes more powerful and our 
partners begin to take more control of the process 
of representation in community engagement. 

After creating the video, still photography and 
audio footage, we utilize editing software such as 
Adobe Premiere and Audacity to edit video and 
audio into clips. We also utilize Adobe photoshop 
for still photography. This edited cache of 

6 A “transect walk” is different than a “daily round” in that 
you determine a specific route to walk with community 
members’ input and then observe resources, landscape 

multimedia is then given back to our collaborators 
for assessment and possible inclusion in the 
mobile app walking tour or any other means they 
might need it for. This latter step is crucial in that 
the community members must be positioned as 
the primary editors. We simply provide the fodder 
for them to utilize in collaboration. (We can 
promise the reader that this particular set of 
collaborators had no problem telling us what they 
didn’t like.) This method tends to take the labor 
off of our collaborators and is useful for rapid 
projects, but there are other methods that utilize 
longer amounts of time to work with and tutor 
interlocutors through these technologies. 
Although it may be redundant, it is important to 
stress once more that all of these editorial 
processes can be found on free platforms and in 
apps on smartphones. Our savvy collaborators 
also had the capacity to edit media as it was 
loaded on to the izi.travel platform to build out 
the mobile app walking tour. This process of 
collaborative media creation once again positions 
our partners as both the educators about the 
community where they live, and also ensures that 
the now created media representations are vetted 
and approved before being disseminated on a 
public platform. 

Methodology III: Prototyping Technology 

Even after collaborators have a sense of the sites, 
there’s still a real question about what kind of app 
to build. With a tour app, the questions also 
include: where do you want people to go, and how 
do you want them to get there? The first step in 
any app design is to create a model of the tour that 
captures the flow of sites across the map. In the 
past, Durington and Collins have used pencil and 
paper or prototyping applications like 
“Prototyping on Paper” (POP), which allows users 
to hyperlink their pen-and-ink drawings in order 
to simulate the flow of an app. In either case, the 
point of the exercise is to think about the user 
experience. This app is about walking.  But how 
should people walk? In what order should they see 
significant sites? And how? What kinds of 
explanatory context should accompany images 

and other features to prompt explanations of what 
meaning those observations have to community residents. 

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and audio? And how detailed should these be? 
And are they narrated by our collaborators? Many 
features in a community may require 
sophisticated contexts and some features 
associated with gentrification may be welcomed 
by a community that has historically experienced 
under-investment. But there are also tensions and 
to see those through the lens of youth in the 
community provides a rare perspective. 

For the prototyping phase of our project, we 
utilized a mapping tool, Knight Lab’s “StoryMap,” 
a free application that allows people to visualize 
their daily round with text and photographs. 

These entries were completed with the children 
from the Community Center and became the basis 
for mapping out the narratives for the app, as well 
as selecting media. Laying out the prototype also 
showed us the holes in our work: where we 
needed more photographs or where there were 
more questions that needed to be answered. 

Methodology IV: Editing 

Once entries are complete, we undertake an 
editing process that involves conversations with 

our collaborators about what is working and not 
working. Using the same software noted above 
(Adobe Premiere, Audacity, Adobe Photoshop) we 
then complete another round of editing to “clean 
up” the footage and find additional footage, 
pictures or audio to fill the identified holes in the 
narrative being created. While capturing media is 
often seen as the primary component of this type 
of participatory fieldwork, we would assert that 
the editorial process is where true collaborative 
voices are truly realized and media-based 
community engagement comes alive. It is the 
editorial control given to the people you are 
working with that empowers their voices as 
experts in the community and creators of its 
representation. 

Methodology V: Walking and Applying 
Knowledge 

The izi.TRAVEL platform allows users to test their 
app tour before publishing it to the platform for 
the general public. This iteration is where the 
collaborative creative process is realized and 
excitement builds. Our young collaborators lead 
the way once more on the walking tour but this 

Figure 7 
One of the stops on the walking tour is referred to as “The Red Store” by youth in the community 
despite its actual name.  As the ethnographic quote illustrates it may be problematic, but it does 
have “icys.” 

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time with a smartphone in hand and earbuds in 
their ears listening to their voices and viewing the 
media they have created as they are geolocated on 
the route. The initial prototype walk-through also 
provides another layer of editorial control as we 
test out whether certain media are ordered 
correctly and the zones of geolocation are pinned 
correctly on the izi.travel platform.  

After completing the walk-through, we have a 
debrief about the process, what worked and didn’t 
work, discuss possible reordering of sites and 
possible changes. As anthropologists, this debrief 
provides another capacity for ethnographic data 
collection due to its format as a semi-structured 
interview which becomes valuable for reflection. 

In this case, we were able to ascertain even more 
insight into the feelings our young collaborators 
had about their neighborhood changing and their 
concerns about losing things valuable to them. We 
see many possibilities for community engagement 
methodologies and data collection at this stage. 
Questions are asked once more about why 
particular sites are important and what meaning 
they have for our partners, both foundational 
ethnographic data points. 

Methodology VI: Going Live 

Once the group has agreed that the tour is set, the 
button is pushed and the tour is made live. This is 
an exciting moment, particularly for our youthful 
partners to see it come to life not only on a 
computer and smartphone, but now in the public 
sphere. Just as with the photovoice methodology, 
opportunities now exist to take friends, family 
members and others on the walking tour placing 
educational power with the children.  

Feedback can be solicited by those taken along on 
the tour which becomes another valuable 
component of data expanding the local knowledge 
of sites for researchers. And participant 
observation can be undertaken as well providing 
yet another set of fieldnotes for ethnographic 
assessment and possible inclusion in the mobile 
app walking tour. 

Methodology VII: Assessment 

Effective community engagement is only as strong 
as the capacity to assess its impact. While this 
particular community engagement project is in its 
nascent stages, past utilization of this 
methodology has proven quite effective. For 
instance, we utilized the same process with 
partners from East Wilmington, DE, and the 
National Park Service (NPS) in 2018. Community 
members reported back in follow up 
conversations that while the app and walking tour 
was a positive outcome, it was the opportunity to 
build rapport with individuals they would 
normally not be able to talk about during the 
planning process that was the most meaningful. 
In addition, the NPS has utilized and replicated 
the model as a community engagement tool as 
they develop sites in Delaware. In addition, we 
have utilized the walking tour development 
project with students at Towson University in 
partnership with a variety of other communities 
including one in South Baltimore. This multi-year 
community collaboration with a fellow 
anthropologist in our department has provided 
both quantitative data of usage by high school 
students and anecdotal qualitative data. Quotes 
from students demonstrate that they appreciate 
the chance to develop technology tools and 
possess the authority to represent their lives and 
community. Finally, a walking tour developed 
with community members in the Baltimore 
neighborhood of Sharp Leadenhall illustrates how 
a walking tour can be utilized as a template for 
individuals becoming docents for walking tours 
themselves. Rough drafts can become fully 
developed web-based tours and resources as seen 
at the website 
https://sharpleadenhallwt.tumblr.com/ where a 
rich multimedia tour was created. 

We look to the literature on community 
engagement once more to utilize another 
assessment tool.  Distilio et al. (2012) provide a 
framework for gauging the nature of participatory 
community engagement through a three-step 
analysis of exchange, influence and generativity:  

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Exchange: Participants give and receive 
something from the others that they would 
not otherwise have. In this orientation, 
reciprocity is the interchange of benefits, 
resources, or actions… 

Influence: The processes and/or outcomes 
of the collaboration are iteratively changed 
as a result of being influenced by the 
participants and their contributed ways of 
knowing and doing. In this orientation, 
reciprocity is expressed as a relational 
connection that is informed by personal, 
social, and environmental contexts… 

Generativity: As a function of the 
collaborative relationship, participants 
(who have or develop identities as co-
creators) become and/or produce 
something new together that would not 
otherwise exist. This orientation may 

involve transformation of individual ways 
of knowing and being or of the systems of 
which the relationship is a part. The 
collaboration may extend beyond the 
initial focus as outcomes, as ways of 
knowing, and as systems of belonging 
evolve. (Distilio et al., 2012, p. 19-20) 

With this matrix in mind, this project in 
Greenmount West meets each of these community 
engagement criteria. There is demonstrated 
exchange through rapport building and 
collaborative exercises in developing the walking 
tour. Influence is demonstrated by having our 
young collaborators take the lead in developing 
the app, flipping the often-hierarchical nature of 
the research process. Finally, generativity is 
demonstrated in the outcome of the app being 
developed and a different way of seeing and 
knowing about the community through the lens of 
younger inhabitants. 

Figure 8 

Our collaborators and co-authors. 

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FINDINGS 

The ethnographically informed mobile app 
walking tour project described in this article has 
findings typical to the nascent stages of long-term 
anthropological research that are valuable to 
cultural anthropologists but could be even more 
valued by community engagement practitioners.   

1) When attempting to do any type of
community engagement research that is
ethnographically informed, the voice of
your collaborators should guide the
process as we have described.

2) When introducing novel technologies such
as mobile app projects to community
collaborators, a methodical process should
be followed while ensuring that it is not
deterministic. The insight of collaborators
could and should change the course of the
project.

3) While we may have an academic
understanding of processes like
gentrification, adding voices of those that
are not often listened to such as youth, is
an important indicator of what is
occurring to all members of a community.
Youth are just as anxious about being
displaced as adults may be and their focus
may be different than adults, and may be
the safe spaces and friends that they rely
upon on a daily basis.

4) By showing what youth value in a
community, we are able to understand
differential appreciation attached to space
and place. While the neighborhood corner
store may just be a place to get a snack or
drink for an adult and perhaps not
regarded as important on a walking tour,
for a young person it may be the center of
their cultural universe.

5) And, for those who both discount and
underestimate the voice and technological
savvy of youth in urban environments, you
are missing an important ethnographic

data set for understanding communities 
and their residents. 

CONCLUSION 

Although this exercise is specific to Baltimore’s 
tumultuous urban development, this kind of 
collaborative work can be used in any community, 
and it underscores basic truths about the ways 
that urban-based research should be conducted. 
Researchers and university administrators can 
also highlight and replicate these novel 
experiments to demonstrate yet another tool for 
community engagement based in reciprocity. 
Translating this work to the public and our 
collaborators enhances participatory 
opportunities. This addresses an invitation by 
Hammersley for the “…higher education 
community to deconstruct key terms used to 
describe community engagement activities and 
relationships, and encourage critical reflection on 
our attempts to enact them through our research 
and practice” (Hammersley, 2017). 
Fundamentally, community engagement work and 
research must always start with the perspectives 
of the local populations we interact with. And, 
simultaneously, there should be an ethical 
concern to create a constant mechanism for 
feedback and involvement. Hence, we do not 
adhere to the hierarchical authorship of the 
academics being the sole authors but positioning 
our interlocutors in the same space. It also asks 
that researchers work with communities towards 
forms of dissemination that are meaningful to 
people living in those communities. Furthermore, 
it outlines a collaborative process that works to 
break down hierarchies by engaging community 
members as experts rather than the subjects of 
research. It is just one example of the 
methodological toolkit for a Networked 
Anthropology.  

Theorizing about the experience of walking in the 
city, Michel de Certeau wrote, 

The long poem of walking manipulates 
spatial organizations, no matter how 
panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign 

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to them (it can take place only within 
them) nor in conformity with them (it 
does not receive its identity from them). It 
creates shadows and ambiguities within 
them. It inserts its multitudinous 
references and citations into them (social 
models, cultural mores, personal factors). 
(de Certeau, 1984, p. 101) 

Of course, walking around the neighborhood is no 
panacea to the many problems that may bedevil a 
community. It will probably not address questions 
of segregation, redlining, disinvestment, 
gentrification and abandonment. But as a form of 
collaboration, walking around a community 
guided by a community member’s vision may 
work to critique neoliberal understandings, where 
people “deserve” what they get and the only way 
to create a healthy neighborhood is to land a 
Starbucks and a Whole Foods franchise, the often-
tell-tale warnings of eventual class and racial 
displacement.  

In this context, walking creates a space for 
critique in the ideological overdetermination of 
urban development in the U.S. For people in a 
community, the app may have similarly 
ambiguous outcomes. Will this really help stop the 
skyrocketing rents?  Will it keep schools from 
being replaced by dubious charters? Whatever 
else, the collaborative app is another technology of 
place and place-making, inscribing a visible 
record of neighborhood identity. It provides a 
platform for further conversations and 
participatory research. The data gathered together 
-- the maps, photographs, recordings, films and 
texts -- are, ultimately, data for the community, to 
be re-mixed and re-used for presentations, grant 
applications and exhibits. In a larger media-based 
community engagement practice this is just one 
tool, but it provides demonstrable participatory 
opportunities. And, what we learned from this 
particular project is the power of the perspective 
of our young collaborators and co-authors. 

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