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LoJoconnect’s Olympic Tour: Literally, a walk in the park

By Satta Sarmah

With a bit of anxiety and great anticipation, the LoJo team ventured to Washington Park this morning for a trial run of our Chicago 2016 locative tour.

We were armed with our HP IPAQ GPS-enabled devices, headphones, response surveys–and loads of coffee and bagels— for the people who were kind enough to volunteer as our multimedia guinea pigs.

About 10 people showed up for our experiment, which was the perfect number for our five-person team.

Though we had more GPS devices than people, even the best laid plans sometimes go awry.

A few of our devices went haywire. Some couldn’t locate a GPS signal and others didn’t trigger in the right spots.

Besides the technical errors, there were also human ones. We decided to put markers along the route of our locative tour, but some people got lost or continued walking along the path when they were supposed to stop at a particular point to hear the story.

Some of these mishaps were probably because our directions weren’t as spot-on as we thought.

At the end of the tour, we asked participants to fill out surveys. The feedback was a mix of positive and constructive criticism:

- Because of the glare from the sun, many of the pictures we loaded were difficult for our tour-goers to see. Some even said the pictures were a bit of a distraction and that they would have liked fewer of them, so that they could be more engaged with the physical location.

-Many people enjoyed the historical aspects of the tour. The beginning of the tour included historical photos and information about the World’s Fair held near Washington Park in 1893. We also had Chicago historian and lifelong South Side resident, Timuel Black, talk about what the park was like in the early 1900’s. Hearing and seeing historical information and pictures of Washington Park while touring the modern version of the location really seemed to work.

- Though some said there should have been less narration from LoJo team members, another tour-goer complimented our narration by saying it reminded him of something that would have been written by NPR personality Ira Glass, a compliment that our team will graciously accept.

- Some said more user-control would have been great. However, the nature of GPS-based storytelling is that the content is triggered by the location, which has its pluses and minuses. A good alternative for this would be a podcast, which users could download to their mp3 players.

- Many tour-goers also said locative storytelling could be adopted by news organizations, with a little bit of tweaking of the platform and the storytelling itself. Suggestions included more directions to orient users to the location and an improved interface in regards to the GPS technology.

-As for what stories are best told in this format, people said stories about real estate and gentrification worked best. Downloadable neighborhood tours posted on a newspaper’s Web site are the best way for news organizations to monetize and make use of locative storytelling, tour-goers said.

All in all, we think our locative tour was a success. Though it was, literally, a walk in the park, the LoJo team is a bit exhausted. We’ll be using the rest of our Saturday to engage in an activity that’s a little more lax than a walk in the park— a nap in our beds.

Saturday, May 31st, 2008 Filed under Audio tours, GPS-enabled devices, Locative storytelling, Mobile technology, Multimedia journalism |