An academic poster which won the poster prize at 'Spaces and Places of Culture' MeCCSA 2013 Annual Conference (Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association) held at University of Ulster, Derry UK City of Culture.
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City Strata: Locative Experience Design and Large-
1. CITY STRATA: Locative Experience Design &
Large-Scale Heritage Apps
Dr Charlotte Crofts (Digital Cultures Research Centre, UWE Bristol)
Introduction
One of the key features of Bristol City Council’s Know Your Place website is the The Lost Cinemas of Castle Park App developed out of the second Conclusions
The personal devices which many of us now carry around with us ability for the public to contribute their own archive. During the Sandbox we have series of user evaluations, in which we tested multiple sites of interest. The Mobile technologies enable us to bring the past to life by accessing
everyday enable us to radically transform the ways in which we undertaken a feasibility study for users to be able to upload audio, text and images app spans over 100-years of cinema-going in Bristol city centre, featuring 13 dynamic heritage data in the field, transporting digital humanities
interpret and engage with cultural heritage sites utilising a range of whilst on the move and mocked up a mobile app to demo the user interface:
cinemas in the park and the immediate area – from the Tivoli which scholarship from desk-top bound websites and databases back into
mobile technologies from location-based services to cloud
screened the first moving pictures in 1896 to the Europa which opened in the material environment. The key findings of the City Strata project
computing and social media. This represents a subtle paradigm shift
Peter Insole: “Community contributions to 1973. The park itself was Bristol’s thriving commercial and leisure centre are the challenges of streaming and uploading content to and from a
from the virtual mediation of early digital humanities to one of
Know Your Place currently go straight into the before it was destroyed in the Blitz and none of the cinemas are extant - remote database across multiple ‘hotspots’, the need to design both
mediated co-presence: returning digital humanities to the actual
Historic Environment Record, they become a save the 1930s Odeon - presenting the challenge of how to bring the for the location and ‘armchair mode’, and the efficacy of social media
spaces and places of culture which have been their object of study.
material consideration within any planning invisible history of these buildings to life. We wanted to create a more in linking heritage apps to contemporary experience. In terms of
considerations and are already being referred
immersive, cinematic experience and consequently moved away from the the Sandbox process, the project has demonstrated the power of
to in Planning submissions. In the long term this
City Strata is an app-authoring system for curating mobile
sharing of information will improve our data for text-heavy interface of the earlier pilot to a greater concentration on audio, creative knowledge exchange between diverse stakeholders: “the
heritage experiences which allows developers to create different
managing physical change in the City and with pared down images and background map.
collaboration between UWE, Calvium and the City Council
historic ‘layers’ or ways of experiencing the city, that their users can
increase the appreciation of the value of our demonstrates the potential of projects that link data-rich local
then enhance by uploading their own content. As part of the 3- heritage.”
authorities with academic and creative partners” (Peter Insole).
Start screen: simple movie poster aesthetic with
month rapid-prototyping REACT ‘Heritage Sandbox’ process, the
choice between listening in Castle Park in auto mode, or Given the timescale and resources available, our objectives have
City Strata team developed the Cinemapping prototype, which maps
manual / armchair mode, plus a call to action to see
been to demonstrate the feasibility of the new platform and
The Cinemapping Prototype draws data from the ‘historic cinemas’ layer
Bristol’s historic cinemas, so that users can experience local cinema
‘What’s On’ at the nearest cinema, celebrating
characterize its limitations and requirements rather than to deploy a
extracted from Know Your Place, allowing users to access information about Bristol contemporary cinema-going as much as its heritage.
history in the places where it actually happened. Behind the scenes,
fully working system. What is now needed is further funding for the
cinemas past and present in the field.
the platform innovates by drawing content that relates to your
full implementation of these features. Since the collaboration, Bristol
specific location from a remote geo-database – in this case the Apping or mapping: in the first iteration we Working with production assistant Kieron Gurner, the app has been through City Council has won an English Heritage grant to further develop
historic cinema layer in Bristol City Council’s historic environment combined a cinematic aesthetic (left: landscape several iterations and user testing with various audiences, including an the City Strata platform with Calvium and there are plans for an
record ArcGIS map, Know Your Place. By storing content in ‘The
orientation, metaphor of the foyer) with the more illuminating comparison between GPS and the manual or ‘armchair’ mode, international collaborative bid to extend the Cinemapping prototype
traditional tab-based map interface (below). Following
Cloud’ more information can be accessed locally than can fit into a designed to make the app accessible for those who are unable to visit the to other cities and databases: “The possibility of creating global
user evaluation we decided to simplify the interface,
normal app, making it scalable for multiple urban, national or even park. Interestingly, users enjoyed the option of being manually in control layers that stitch together locally curated heritage-inspired stories is
with less emphasis on maps and tabs (bottom).
global points of interest.
even when physically at the site.
very exciting” (Jo Reid).
In developing the interface we piloted two key modes: the single point of interest
Mapping the past: kids Literature cited
and multiple cinema sites. The first of these focused on the Grade II listed
from Fairfield High School Chion, M. (1994), Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen ed. and trans. by C.
Whiteladies Picture House where, building on the success of the Curzon Memories
testing the app sitting roughly
Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press).
App (Crofts, 2011), we wanted to test how a rich single-site experience could be
where the stalls of the Regent
Crofts, C. (2011), ‘Technologies of Seeing the Past: the Curzon
integrated into the wider application.
would have been; the Regent
before it was bombed in 1940.
Memories App’ in Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, London
Conference Proceedings, British Computing Society.
Elsaesser, T. (1998) ‘Specularity and Engulfment: Francis Ford
The soundtrack became the primary means through which the app attempts
Coppola and Bram Stoker's Dracula’ in S. Neale and M. Smith
to bring the world of the park to life relying on the “acousmatic” images
eds., Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London and New York:
(Chion, 1994) that sound generates in the users’ imagination, and aiming for
Routledge).
the cinematic “engulfment” (Elaesser, 1998) afforded by a professional sound Hull, R. (2012), ‘Making Scalable Location-Aware Mobile
mix. The intention was always to use a blend of voiceover, dramatisation,
Apps’ (Calvium) http://www.calvium.com/making-scalable-
oral memories and sound effects at each cinema hotspot. Following user
location-aware-mobile-apps.
We envisaged two user scenarios: the engaged movie buff interested in cinema
feedback we introduced additional ambient zones with archive music, Reid, J., Hull, R., Cater, K., Fleuriot, C. (2005), ‘Magic Moments in
history and the casual user. Images and text were streamed from Know Your Place,
trailers, adverts and incidental cinema anecdotes between hotspots. This
Situated Mediascapes’ in ACM SIGCHI International
with additional data stored within the app, incorporating games and trivia with
During the course of the technical Research and Development for strategy also enables the user to respond directly to the environment
Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment
audio memories and in-depth cinema history, such as close ups of what was
the Cinemapping prototype, Calvium explored the challenge of without concentrating too much on the screen: a key consideration in
Technology (ACE).
screening on the cinema hoardings with hyperlinks to the films and stars on
dealing with large scale and dynamic content by caching ‘hotspots’ locative experience design where the aim should be to harness that
www.imdb.com. The user won digital souvenirs if they answered the quiz correctly,
within a 1km radius of the user (Hull, 2012).
serendipitous frisson between user interface, media content and the location Acknowledgments
such as a link to the first film shown at the cinema, a Mary Pickford silent, Pollyanna
itself, creating what Reid et al (2005) have termed “magic moments”.
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, REACT is one
(1921). Two key outcomes of the user evaluation were: firstly that listening to
Cache of Nearest 10 of four UK Knowledge Exchange Hubs for the Creative Economy
Hotspots Demo: The green audio memories at the actual location offers added value; secondly, the ability to
and is a collaboration between the University of the West of
circle represents the scope of the share and comment via Facebook and Twitter gives cinema heritage contemporary
England, Watershed and the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and
current ‘radar sweep’, and the red relevance, particularly when the live feed is available from within the app.
Exeter. City Strata is a collaboration between Charlotte Crofts,
blobs represent the Know Your Place
cinema hotspots in that sweep.
UWE (charlotte.crofts@uwe.ac.uk | @charlottecrofts), Jo Reid,
Extras: users
(above) testing Calvium (jo@calvium.com | @appfurnace) and Peter Insole, Bristol
various modes of on- City Council (pete.insole@bristol.gov.uk | @locallearning).
Calvium also tested the possibility of using the iOS Significant
site interaction such
Location Change Service which automatically ‘wakes-up’ suspended
as the Whiteladies Further information on this project can be obtained at:
iPhone apps when new location data is triggered, but found the
Various stages of interface development: http://www.watershed.co.uk/ished/heritagesandbox/projects/2012/
Picture House quiz,
mapping cinema footprints and layered thumbnail of
service was not yet granular enough to recognise the relatively small the ‘Your Name in city-strata/ | @citystrata
images (above), paring down to single image (top right)
changes in location required for multiple points of interest
Lights’ and ‘Remove
and the live Twitter feed (bottom right).
concentrated in the city centre. Initial tests suggest a combined
One Letter Film’
The Lost Cinemas of Castle Park is available for iPhone, iPod
games, audio Touch and iPad, iOS4.2 or later, just search for “Lost Cinemas” on
strategy of switching between the low-power qualities of cellular Initially the site for piloting the multiple cinemas mode, it became clear that
memories and the iTunes Store or scan the adjacent QR code:
positioning and the fine-grain accuracy and latency of GPS, plus facility to comment the Castle Park tour would work better as a spin-off, both available to
leveraging the intermediate characteristics of Wi-Fi positioning via Facebook and download from within the Cinemapping app and as a standalone
where appropriate, as the user approaches new points of interest.
Twitter
‘Cinemapping Experience’ in iTunes.
Info: www.www.cinemapping.co.uk | @cinemapping