About
The Interpretours digital content creation platform and its associated Guidetags mobile app is a new digital tool that automatically triggers geolocated multimedia stories on smartphones in the field based on the phone user’s physical location. It provides a new way to link physical locations with stories, images, and other interpretive multimedia content with a broad audience in the field.
The digital interpretive platform is called Interpretours. It has an associated location-sensitive mobile app called GuideTags. You can download an overview brochure that will give you some background and context for how the platform works.
The starting premise is “Every place has a story… tell it!”, and the Interpretours digital interpretive platform is set up to facilitate that process, by connecting physical locations in the landscape with the stories they represent, conveyed to the user onsite via a rich array of multimedia content delivered by the GuideTags app on the user’s smartphone.
The GuideTags app is available online in both Android and iOS (iPhone) formats, if you would like to download it. Existing content is very diverse, ranging from ecological profiles of local landscapes in Ontario (1, 2), through historical, natural and cultural heritage destinations in Niagara Falls, London (England) , Paris, Berlin, history and heritage sites in London (Ontario) (1,2), and cultural / tourism destinations in Thailand, to First Nations, Black History, and Pioneering Women tours along the Laura Secord Legacy Trail, to Andrew’s geolocated poetry readings around the brink of Niagara Falls. All content is delivered using the GuideTags app, and was created by non-specialist users on a web interface based on a widely used content management system (CMS) called Joomla.
Undergraduate students have been engaged in digital content development on the platform for a few years now, and have produced POI pages in various categories. You can see examples of student work (of varying quality!) at this link, some with audio clips (1) and some without (2,3).
We can also make good use of existing digital content. If conventional online material already exists in web form, creating a geolocated mobile GuideTags version of that same content is quite simple, since we have the ability to ‘spider in’ existing web pages and display them on a GuideTags page in the appropriate location (e.g., Brock University’s existing web-based Omeka-S archival library exhibit on Prospect Point embedded on this geolocated Guidetags POI page). Annotating local landscapes with musical and soundscape impressions has great interpretive potential, I believe.
If you would like to explore geolocating your own multimedia content, I would be glad to facilitate an online workshop for you explaining how the platform works and how to go about creating custom POI pages.
I’d also be happy to talk about potential collaborations with individuals, groups, and organizations interested in telling stories about places of signifigance.
Meanwhile, here is some more background information on the platform:
- A brochure about the GuideTags / Interpretours platform:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OyEnR0QFGNPnN_aaXseUKTSxP7AoPJ-l/view?usp=sharing
- a link to a video that describes the fundamentals of the Interpretours / Guidetags platform (the video overview is from a course – please ignore any irrelevant course-specific content):
2020-10-02 Overview of the Interpretours platform.mp4
- The web version of all the published Guidetags content can be found here (over 3200 POIs, so it loads a bit slowly!):
https://www.guidetags.com/guidetags/explore/
- The GuideTags app is available here:
https://www.guidetags.com/guidetags/explore/downloading-and-installing-guidetags/4920-downloading-and-installing-guidetags
Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
Best regards,
Dave Brown
______________________________
David T. Brown, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Dept. of Geography and Tourism Studies
Mackenzie Chown Building, Room C-425
Brock University
St. Catharines, Ontario
L2S 3A1 CANADA
Email: dbrown@brocku.ca
Tel: 905-688-5550 ext. 3293