Warren County's Deployment of GPS-Triggered Storytelling
Dan Forbush, Founder and Editor of Cliff & Redfield Interactive, and Sara Frankenfeld, Warren County GIS Administrator, will report on their deployment of “spatial storytelling” in western Warren County Thursday, September 28, at Crandall Library’s Folklife Center.
Learn More Thursday, September 28 at Crandall Library’s Folklike Center
A soon-to-be-launched mobile app that delivers GPS-triggered narratives to your phone as you drive or walk around western Warren County will be the focus of a presentation hosted Thursday, September 28 by the Warren County Historical Society.
Sara Frankenfeld, the county's GIS Administrator, and Dan Forbush, founder and editor of Cliff & Redfield Interactive, will introduce Explore Warren County, an app that will offer visitors to Warren County three audio tours starting in January.
Their presentation, "Spatial Storytelling in Western Warren County," is set for Thursday, September 28th, at 7 p.m. in Crandall Library’s Christine L. McDonald Community Room in Glens Falls.
Lovers of Adirondack history and high-tech gadgetry are likeliest to find this program interesting. Frankenfeld and Forbush seek 25 volunteers to try Explore Warren County for three months, providing feedback on increasingly evolved versions to be developed prior to the app's official January launch.
The GPS capability that connects audio stories to GPS triggers was innovated 20 years ago by Rochester-based Thomas Dunne and is now available in its most advanced form on a development platform called STQRY. So long as you download Exploring Warren County in area with a good wireless signal, the app will work anywhere you drive in western Warren County.
The First Wilderness Story Collaboration, which Frankenfeld chairs, has been researching and writing carefully timed narratives for the app since last spring. Interns from Skidmore College, SUNY Plattsburgh, and SUNY Adirondack are assisting.
"It makes us think in a new way about narrative," says Forbush, who will read most of the narratives to be featured in the app's first iteration. "We're writing to fit a particular stretch of road or trail rather than a page. We have to describe what visitors will actually be seeing at the very moment they’re approaching or experiencing a point of interest, so our timing needs to be precise.”
"Once we get our timing right, we'll turn the narration over to the many local historians and long-time residents are providing invaluable assistance in writing our copy," Frankenfeld adds. "We see Exploring Warren County as a powerful way to engage a community of storytellers in support of heritage tourism."
Of the three tours to be offered in the app's first iteration, the most ambitious is the First Wilderness Audio Tour. It follows the Central Adirondack Trail from “Big Bend” on the Northway to Thirteenth Lake and other attractions on Garnet Hill in the county’s northern-most corner. Also in development are an audio tour that supports the Warren County Historians’ Challenge and an audio walking tour of North Creek.
With funding made possible by the Warren County Occupancy Tax, the county’s GPS team embarked with Cliff & Redfield Interactive last January. on ten content-creating collaborations, of which the the GPS-triggered app is just one. At their September 28 presentation, Frankenfeld and Forbush will provide updates on all of the projects, which include:
a foldable printed map of historic points of interest in the First Wilderness that visitors will be able to keep conveniently in their glove compartments and knapsacks;
ArcGIS StoryMaps focused on Warren’s County’s Underground Railroad, Warren County’s First People, and the impact that a 70-foot dam proposed early in the 20th century on th Schroon River would have had if it had actually been built.
