Output details
36 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
University of the West of England, Bristol
City Strata
The City Strata project was funded by the AHRC Research and Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technologies (REACT KE Hub) Heritage Call (£35,748). This three-month rapid prototyping ‘Sandbox’ resulted in three connected practice-based outputs, the City Strata Platform itself, the Cinemapping Pilot and the published Lost Cinemas of Castle Park App. The project was a Knowledge Exchange collaboration between Crofts as PI, creative economy partner Jo Reid at Calvium and heritage partner Peter Insole, historic environment officer at Bristol City Council.
City Strata is a new app development platform for designing different “layers” of location-based heritage interpretation. One of the problems with large-scale locative heritage apps is the data limit for publication (only 50MB for Android apps), which is often not enough to contain content-rich heritage experiences over a wider terrain. The City Strata platform addresses this by drawing data from ‘The Cloud’ rather than containing all the media within the app.
In this instance geo-referenced data was drawn from the ‘Historic Cinemas’ layer in Bristol City Council’s Know Your Place map (a Geographic Information System database of Bristol’s historic environment) to create the Cinemapping Prototype. The prototype app tested a single point of interest, The Whiteladies Picture House, as well as the ability to download data from multiple points of interest in and around Castle Park—the latter developed into the Lost Cinemas of Castle Park app, published in November 2012.
Building on the research of the Curzon Memories project, the Cinemapping Prototype and Lost Cinemas of Castle Park app contribute to the fields of New Cinema History, Locative Experience Design and Heritage Interpretation and the findings have been disseminated broadly at international conferences, including keynotes at Environmental Utterances (Falmouth, Sept 2012) and Besides the Screen conference (Goldsmiths, 2012), and an award-winning poster (MeCCSA annual conference, Ulster 2013).
