Street Life Renaissance Florence: A digitally triggered location-based tour in an augmented reality environment

At the heart of this proposal is a document from 1593, a description of an imaginary 'pub crawl' through Florence, roughly from periphery to centre, that was written by a member of a Florentine literary academy. This document, identified as part of ongoing research in the AHRC-funded Connected Communites pilot project, Taverns, Locals and Street Corners by the RA (Dr David Rosenthal), triggered the idea to propose an innovative and engaging approach to presenting new research in a medium that will have wide appeal to a broad public of tourists and travellers in Florence, one of the world's leading cultural capitals.

The app will be presented as an itinerary of roughly fifteen sites, that can be followed by a user as a 'tour' or accessed in any order (or remotely in 'armchair' mode). Apart from providing a skeleton for the tour, the 1593 document speaks to a number of the issues that tavern culture raises in the early modern period - the nature of class relations and sociability; the importance of drink to carnivalesque or festive culture; the pleasures and benefits, physical and psychological, of drinking (wine); and the conflicts over, and policing of, public behaviour. The app will address these issues, among others, in a broad historical context at various sites on the tour, using stories from a range of sources - literary, administrative, letters, chronicles - to elucidate points in a easily digestible fashion. The app will thus use contemporary maps, images, and snippets of contemporary documents that the user will be able to access while in situ. It will also have a spoken narrative that the user can choose to plug into. Links will also be provided to further reading for those who want more detail and analysis, made available on the existing project website: tavernsproject.com.

The PI and RA will work with a specialist company in the research and development of geo-located apps, Calvium Ltd. Calvium (http://www.appfurnace.com/about-calvium/) are industry leaders in user-experience design in the app sector and have been responsible for developing various location-based apps (e.g. Guardian streetstories); the PI has already been in discussion with the company to explore how the app might be developed to achieve innovative goals in the research of user-response feedback and involvement through connecting to other social media platforms. We will hold an initial workshop where technology and industry specialists in story/walk for handheld devices will come together with RA and PI to explore and better define the research aims and how these can be achieved through digitally triggered location-based technologies. An iterative process suggested by Calvium will subsequently be employed to test and then refine the idea and subsequenty create a working prototype, or proof of concept. We anticipate this first 'proof of concept' to be easily re-edited for inclusion of additional content in the future. The aim for both PI and RA is to learn - within reason - the methods and approaches applied so that they will be able to manage, maintain and adapt the final product with minor aftercare from the developer.

We have established there is both an audience and demand for this product. The Florence tourism office (APT) are enthusiastic about the idea and will offer in-kind support through publicity through their website and various wifi hotspots in the city; also various Florence-based English-language university courses have expressed an interest in adopting the app. Moreover, this proposal is especially timely as GIS mapping and the application of digital technology to mapping Early Modern Florence is attracting attention from leading academic colleagues in North America (Chicago and Toronto) and Europe. The PI and RA have indeed been invited to speak at a workshop on digital mapping in June 2013 at the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florence, and this would provide an ideal and prestigious showcase for our project.

Impact is a key aim of the Street Life Renaissance Florence proposal and we have from the outset considered carefully the potential audience for the app and the perceived demand that there may be for it. This proposal sets out to develop a public-facing, engaging and enjoyable phone app that is aimed at a significant audience. Its value lies in taking established and fresh research to a wide general public interested in exploring history tourism, but also academic researchers and students. In considering users and demand and in order to maximise impact, the app will be promoted through multiple routes, a number of which we already have in-principle agreements with (see attachments).

1. Our first target audience is that of tourists and travellers in one of the world's leading cultural capitals, Florence. At present guidebooks and existing smartphone apps aimed at tourists tend to favour itineraries that take users almost exclusively to the iconic monuments of the city. While this is relatively unsurprising, in the increasingly saturated tourist destinations of the world, travellers also want to enjoy the opportunity of being guided along itineraries with a strong narrative logic, and which perhaps offer a more unusual or exclusive route. The app will offer precisely this, and its simple name, free delivery and self-guided nature will appeal to potential users. In order to ensure that our potential public will view and download the app, we will make use of our journalist contacts (the RA is a production editor at the Scotsman) for promotion of the completed app. Moreover, we have already been in contact with Dott.ssa Lucia de Siervo (Director of the Direzione Cultura e Sport) and Simone Tani (Director Economic Development) of the Comune di Firenze and received enthusiastic support for the project. They will offer in-kind support in the form of publicity through their major website presence (main city tourism website) as well as promotion at the free wifi hotspots provided at various sites in the city. This will enable users to access and download the app on site and at no cost.

2. Our second target audience is among the large community of Florence-based study abroad programmes, including those of Edinburgh University (UK), Syracuse University (US) and Monash University (Australia), whose premises in Prato are the hub for study-abroad programmes run by several UK and US universities belonging to the Prato Consortium. Faculty have expressed an interest to use the materials we develop (app and online content) with students, and indeed have also enquired about potential for future reuse of the underlying structure for different content. This offers interesting potential for future development of this 'proof of concept'.

Beyond the specific impact with users, there is also a broader impact objective for this proposal which sets out to explore new ways that historical and humanities research can make use of and engage technology and new media in the dissemination of our work. Inherent to this exploration is the development of a collaboration with our technology partner, Calvium, who are industry experts in user experience design and immersive geo-located apps. AHRC funding will enable this first experimental collaboration and the development of the 'proof of concept' app, but we hope - very much in the spirit of AHRC creative economies partnerships - that there will be potential for future development of this idea, with both cultural and economic benefits derived therefrom. Thus, it is hoped, that the impact of the funded work will have the potential to outlive and outgrow the first experimental application here outlined.