The next text highlighted in the second instalment in my review of emerging electronic literature in Naarm, invites audiences into a relationship that steps outside the walls of the Museum and takes them into a commons of living history. Essentially an interactive audio tour, Museums Victoria’s Walk Through Time is a guided exploration, connecting history and place, through audio-based digital content supported by images and text curated to enrich understanding of the Victorian capital.
The well rated app presents a suite of walking tours that take listeners on a journey through the city centre, World Heritage precinct, and industrial hubs. It provides access to over 700 images, many from Museum Victoria’s collection, and 90 audio recordings written and narrated by Museum Victoria staff. Each tour is easy to follow with a GPS-enabled map of the route and its stops. At each stop, detailed text, audio commentary and archival historical imagery reveal the stories of the characters, businesses and architecture that have transformed Melbourne and Victoria.
Audio accessibility makes materials more readily available for people with vision difficulties, via the use of “read-aloud” technology but it can also, as Rebecca Herrmann, founder of Melbourne company, Bolinda audio, has asserted, “make sure that anybody from anywhere with any background, literate, illiterate, can actually experience a story” (Better Reading, 2015). Ferris Jabr (2013) has discussed at length the detrimental effects of reading from digital devices, and audio recordings seem to provide some solution to this in terms of accessibility. However, as Huang has noted, this is not something limited to students with disabilities. In a 2012 study looking at using digital literature in an English as a foreign language course, he highlights that the online dictionary and read-aloud aspects of ebooks [on Kindle] were also considered as beneficial by students (2012, p. 276). For English teachers looking to engage and enrich visitors and new Australians’ experiences with the community and its histories, having such tools of conviviality can create a deeper awareness and appreciation of the learning environment of the commons of civic space itself. One potential drawback of this form of mobile-dependent digital literature is that continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life, which could present issues when planning excursions if listeners are not prepared.
Saunders and Moles (2016) have discussed audio walks as “modes of transport” which “pick up their passengers at certain points, and set them down at others”. They see audio walks as disclosing certain views to their passengers while withholding others. They add that “at each point of interest the passenger is momentarily re-connected with the world, while the world inbetween is intended to pass them by having no bearing on their movement. Thus, audio walks affect how we experience and come to know the world, and, at the same time, our expectations of the form, condition, or affect, the very manner in which audio walks present and convey information” (Saunders & Moles, 2016) The authors argue that linearity of audio walk tests impose a linearity on the narrative experience of readers and invoke Deleuze and Guattari who resisted this stating that it:
…is not defined by the points it connects, or by the points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through the middle, it runs … transversally to the localizable relation to distant or contiguous points. A point is always a point of origin. But a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, as cited in Saunders & Mole, 2016)
When critiqued from this perspective, one of the areas of development that might be achieved by future audio walks is an attempt to disrupt linearity and present engaging narratives that wind and meander in their machinations of meaning, guiding listeners into new ways of imaging the city and its history. Additional interactivity might allow visitors a place to record their stories and interactions with the diverse points of the map, utilising digital capacities in a more collaborative format. What is certain is that few perspectives could be as well informed and trusted as the voices of Museums Victoria staff guiding the curious through the many layers of Melbourne’s multicultural topography.
Finally, the audio tour is accompanied by a rich collection of primary source and archival images. Fuhler (2010) has discussed using primary-source documents and digital storytelling as a catalyst for writing historical fiction. As such, this additional feature provides even more content for audiences to reflect on and incorporate in their studies.
References
Better Reading. (2015, December 10). The power of audio books: A different way to ‘read’. http://www.betterreading.com.au/news/the-power-of-audio-books-a-different-way-to-read/
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2004). In: Massumi, B. (Ed.), A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Continuum.
Fuhler, C. J. (2010). Using primary-source documents and digital storytelling as a catalyst for writing historical fiction in the fourth grade (Ch. 11). In B. Moss, & D. Lapp (Eds.), Teaching new literacies in grades 4-6: Resources for 21st-century classrooms (pp. 136-150). Guilford Press.
Huang, H. (2012). E-reading and e-discussion: EFL learners’ perceptions of an e-book reading program. Computer assisted language learning, 26(3), 258-281. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2012.656313
Jabr, F. (2013, April 11). The reading brain in the digital age: The science of paper versus screens. Scientific American. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=reading-paper-screens
Saunders, A. & Moles, K. (2016). Following or forging a way through the world: Audio walks and the making of place. Emotion, Space and Society, 20, 68-74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.06.004