Hidden Florence: Geo-located historical walks in a context-aware environment.

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The Hidden Florence project addresses a non-academic audience of visitors to the historic city through the medium of audio-walks delivered on site through smartphone apps. The project is delivered by an international team of researchers and gallery professionals concerned with the lived experience and material culture of public space in early modern cities in Italy, presenting this through an innovative and engaging medium. We will work collaboratively to create a locative history city-guide smartphone app (for Android and iOS devices), through which issues of place, movement, meaning, and interaction with end users are placed at the heart of the research process and the end-user experience. The Hidden Florence project develops and creates new value from AHRC-funded work by PI that explored the everyday experience of early modern public space, including Taverns, Locals and Street Corners: Cross-Chronological Studies in Community Drinking, Regulation and Public Space (AH/J006610/1) and the Street Life and Street Culture research network (AH/G000417/1). It significantly develops the impact, reach and unanticipated potentialities for engagement with the museum and tourism sector of the AHRC-funded pilot project, Street Life Renaissance Florence (AH/K005138/1, 2013). This received additional university and HEIF funding, leading to the creation of a prototype app, Hidden Florence (see: www.hiddenflorence.org) published in July 2014, and has attracted considerable attention among the academic peer community. The current proposal sets out to test its scalability by developing a research methodology and collaboratively-created outputs developed in the context of workshop-driven activities. The project assembles a team academics working in digital humanities applied to early modern Florence, including an international CoI Prof Nicholas Terpstra, director of the DECIMA (Digitally Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive) research team at the University of Toronto, and CoI Dr Donal Cooper (University of Cambridge) who led a 3D visualisation of San Pier Maggiore project in collaboration with the National Gallery (2014). This offers a valuable opportunity for initial collaboration, which has to date remained informal, and we anticipate will be taken forward through other grant applications in UK and Canada (see Terpstra's attached letter). Importantly, we will also work closely with a group of project partners, including the city of Florence UNESCO world heritage office, the Polo Museale della Toscana (the state agency that manages many of the city's museums) and the National Gallery (London), to co-create public-facing outputs (app and supporting website) that connect with art works in gallery collections and address UNESCO policies for this much-visited city. The team and project partners thus combine academic researchers, gallery and heritage professionals and policy-makers in order to create public-facing outputs that address audiences of local residents, tourists, as well as students. We will be working with Calvium (http://calvium.com/) - industry leaders in user-experience design for placemaking location-based apps - to create the editing platform within which to build the app. The app will be made available freely on the AppStore and GooglePlay sites, and promoted through the extensive networks of our project partners, as well as with the support of our university press offices.The project offers a significant opportunity for international research and development collaboration between academics and museum professionals in the context of digital outputs aimed at a wide public of users. Combining state of the art product design supported by Calvium and research-based content, delivered in the form of a locative media augmented reality experience, the project adopts digital humanities approaches for the purposes of impact and engagement.