“LiveGuide: An Online Guided Tour” Goes Live

 

 

 

X-posted from custardether.co.uk

After many months of development, I am pleased to announce that my latest project – “LiveGuide” – is finally online.

 

LiveGuide is a new design of online tour, intended to more closely mimic the features of a real world guided tour of a location thank traditional virtual tours.  In particular, LiveGuide focusses on the narrative and interactive elements of a live tour to deliver a more complete experience for the online tourist.

 

In the course of researching this project, it became apparent that there is a tendency when communicating factual information online to using hypertext to provide a lot of the contextualization for the information.  However, in the real world, this contextualization is often supplied by narrative – as in a guided tour.  LiveGuide is an experiment in combining the functionality and flexibility of hypertext and the stricter structure of a narrative.  The tour has a defined tour route, around which the narrative is structured, but there are also opportunities to pause at particular locations and select from a range of options so one can explore the space on a thematic basis.  This balances the expectations of online users – who are used to the freedom of hypertext – with the need for narrative to make sense of the space in context.

The tour design also includes a live chatbot, named Tour Guide, who is programmed to answer any questions the tourist may have during the course of the tour.  The training for this is ongoing, so I am able to review its responses and improve the quality of its comments the more people interact with it.  The bot is also able to engage in conversation, as would a real tour guide, to enhance the user’s personal experience of the tour.

 

The tour design – featuring a 35 minute tour of the World Heritage City of Bath – is currently on show here.  You will require headphones or speakers to listen to the tour and the latest version of Flash Player.  This is a test version of the design, submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MA in Creative Writing & New Media at De Montfort University, Leicester.  I would be interested to hear about people’s experiences/reactions when taking the tour and invite comments either on this blog post or by email to: custard@custardether.co.uk.

the word “enjoy”

Last week I went to see a local production of Martin Sherman’s harrowing play Bent, which aside from reducing me to tears, forced me to contemplate lots of issues about my knowledge of history and my understanding of the word “enjoy”.

The story focusses on the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps as early as the mid-1930s. What is almost as horrific as the theme of the play is the fact that this issue is almost completely ignored by the education system… I (a modest A grade History student) was completely unaware that this persecution began so early, or how the Nazis used a labelling system among prisoners to create a hierachy – with gay inmates at the bottom. The play deals creates a very vivid profoundly disturbing picture of life at Dachau, in which the desparate main character commits dreadful acts to survive and gain a coverted yellow star to label him as a Jew, rather than a pink triange, denoting him as a gay man, as he thinks he is more likely to get better treatment pretenting to be a Jew… that he is more likely to survive….

The whole portrayal of the treatment in these camps was sickening and the play has haunted me since – producing more than one bout of tears. It was an am dram production, but stunningly acted and very well produced. If it does not win a Rosebowl Award (or all of them!) I’d like to know what the judges felt was more deserving!

All that said (and you have no idea how difficult that all was to phrase… or how much I just couldn’t say!) I came out and had to say that I enjoyed the production.

Enjoyed was totally the wrong word, but there just doesn’t seem to be a better word. I had gone to see a friend of mine who was playing a drag queen – at which he was frighteningly fabulous. I wanted to come out and tell him I had really enjoyed it. I did, in fact. It just didn’t feel right saying it that way. However, after other friends went to see it as well, we were able to have a discussion about how enjoy wasn’t the right word. There just is no word to express the sentiment of something being a good and enriching experience, but not being a happy experience. Granted it is a complicated emotional reaction, but we have dedicated words for stranger things in the English language!

I think the whole experience of a play like this is an extremely valuable one, and it should probably make it onto the English Literature and History A Level courses, even if teachers do not feel comfortable teaching about it to younger students. Its absence says a lot about our remaining prejudices as a society and our discomforts at facing such representations of history. And our ideas about the truth of the history we are taught…

Anyway, despite my roundabout and lexical constipation over the issue, I must take my hats off to all involved in Bath Drama for a stunning production and some tremendously touching acting. Excuse me whilst I just go find another tissue….