 So, Poetic Places is a project that has been funded by CreativeWorks London. I don't know if you know them, they were AHRC funded and they came to the end of their funding this earlier this year. And I was funded under their Creative Entrepreneurial Residence scheme which is very worthy as my father put it. Thanks dad. Most of the time I'm creative geek at time of age. More on that story in a moment. I've been working in collaboration with the British Library where I've been resident during this project. So this is my job description. It's gratuitously vague on purpose. Digitise things like the British Council's 1940s film collection, make video games, do exhibitions, whatever needs doing really. So this was a great opportunity because I'd never made an app before. So what is Poetic Places? Has anybody come across it before now? Nobody. Perfect. That's great. So it is a free native app for Android and iOS devices. You can download it now if you want. It's free on both stores and quite easy to find. It brings poetic depictions of places into the physical world and it helps you to discover, for example, a poem about a place in the place. And it draws on archive materials, music and images and a tiny bit of film, I think, to kind of bring things to life. So one of the things that I was keen to do with it was to not do any tours. There's lots of things that do location based narratives and archive materials that involve walking tours, which are fine. But with walk tours you have to set aside time to go do them. It's an active choice. You have to kind of know where the stuff is, what's going on. I was moving towards a mode of more serendipitous discovery. So the idea with Poetic Places is if you give it enough permission on your device and leave it running in the background, it will notify you when you happen to come through a place where there's content. So if you happen to have the app running and go to King's Cross, it will pop up with notification, sorry, notification with a poem by GK Chesterton about the place. That said, I don't believe that you should have to go to King's Cross to access the poem. Why would you? So you can also access content without going to the places. Finally, we had the ambition of this being a project that could inspire other small arts organisations. So let me explain what we had as resources to work with. We had, funded by Creative Works London, £5,000. We've been fairly upfront about the costs and everything and how the project has been made. And if you go on the website for Poetic Places, which is poeticplaces.uk, you can find blogs about the development. And the £5,000 had to cover all of our costs, including my time, as the creative in residence. We had six months because we got the funding late August last year and Creative Works closed at the end of the financial year. I said, you have to have the report to us by the end of January. Good. It's loads of time. And finally, we have lots of experience with coding and apps. That's not true. I can't code my way out of a paper bag. This is a comic from XKCD about your code looking like an IKEA conversation. And as I said earlier, I've never made an app before, but I wanted to prove that you don't need to be able to code and you don't need to have a lot of time or a lot of money to be able to make something like this anymore. So the way we had to do it was we had to find an app building platform. There's quite a lot of these on the web these days and I have tested most of them now in an attempt to find something that met very few requirements actually. So first of all, the platform had to allow geofencing or GPS triggered events. It had to be able to tell where you were and then do something with that information. It had to allow push notifications to tell you when you've discovered something. That kind of meant it had to create a native app. So something that you download and has its own icon rather than be a web app with the way we were doing it, push notifications, web apps, a bit complex. Two complex for this project, certainly. It had to develop apps that were media-friendly, which is a very weird thing to say, but some of the things I tested looked great up until you tried to load them on your phone and everything was sideways or you couldn't zoom in on the pictures or it didn't resize on different devices, which was surprising to be honest. So this became a requirement and finally it had to be affordable. Well, I told you the budget. Some of the things I tried, they wanted quite a high monthly cost. Some of the things were free and then when you went to publish it, they wanted quite a lot of money. So finding something that did all of this was actually quite a challenge and meant that we didn't really get into building the app until December, but we got there in the end when I came across a platform called Goodbarber. They're based in Corsica and the reason it took me so long to find me was because they're mainly targeted at people who own, say, a small chain of coffee shops. I want to alert people to sales of, I don't know, pumpkin spice stuff. So this is Goodbye, but you can see it's kind of got a visual interface. You can put your text in your pictures. It supports all sorts of media, so that's quite nice. You can put a video in it and link to SoundCloud and all sorts of things. This is sort of interface for setting up the geo location notifications. And you can see in the top right there how the notifications come up on your mobile phone screen. So it's pretty straightforward to use. You can feel about the coding and if you want, I only did a very tiny bit because as we've ascertained already, that's not my forte. And here's the pricing structure. It is in euros, so this was cheaper last year. And think about ongoing maintenance. I may need to re-budget that, but so you pay them manually or monthly depending on how you like. Pros and cons do it this way, of course. The con is that I am beholden to them. If they go bust, I've got a problem. By the way, the point of choosing somebody who seemed quite robust, I did my research on the company. Also if I stop paying them, of course, I don't get my app anymore. But on the bright side, whenever there's an operating system upgrade, they deal with it. So if you think of the annual cost as being what you would be paying to keep your app up to date anyway, it doesn't come out too badly. So what's in the app? There's kind of a triumvirate, as it were in the app. The first thing is text, the poems and the prose that go into it. To save time, I drew on existing anthologies and resources. There's an excellent website called Poetry Atlas, which pins a lot of things, not always correctly. I'm not sure the process that they use. I also drew on old anthologies of predominantly London-based stuff. We decided to only use content from London to start with because we had to limit something somewhere because we didn't have enough time to do the entire country as much as I would love to. So most of the content is in London, although it's now creeping out. So when we launched, we had about 30 entries. Five of them were licensed, things I particularly wanted. Most of the content in the app is out of copyright. For a whole host of reasons, mainly time and money because clearing copyright is hard and slow, especially if you have to go through a major publisher who sometimes have a note on one of their websites saying it may take eight weeks to get back to about a copyright inquiry, which is no good when you've only got six months. To go with the text, we've got images, and this was a great opportunity to highlight open collections now to copyright works. So, for example, the British Library's Flickr collection is a million free images. You can do whatever you like with them. That was a great resource and, obviously, being in partnership with the British Library, the one I prefer to use. The Yale Centre for British Art was another favourite who I hadn't even heard of until I started on this project, but they've got loads of high quality images under, again, a completely open licence, which is great, and if you email them, they'll send you high quality tiffs if you're feeling keen. So anyway, the benefit of using both out of copyright texts and images that could kind of get contemporary images for the poems, and we'll see why this is particularly useful in the moment. Where we couldn't, we went to Flickr and found more generic, evocative images to do with the place or the poet or the poem itself. We went for one to five images per entry, and there's only about, again, five licensed images in the app where we really wanted those images for whatever reason. We're on that store in a moment. We didn't make a habit of it. To go with these two things and marry it together, we researched the poem, the place, to find something meaningful or unusual or evocative to bring everything together and kind of make it memorable. It's contextualising and it provides a history lesson and it can completely change your understanding of a place or a piece of text. So, here's an example for you. I'm going to read you a poem now, which I'm sure you're all very excited about. And I'm sorry, this is not my, I'm not a poet. Earth has not anything to show more fair. Dole would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty. The city now doth like a garment where the beauty of the morning silent bear. Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky, all bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep in his first splendor, valley, rock or hill, now saw I never felt a calm so deep. The river glideeth at his own sweet will, digop the very houses seem asleep and all that mighty heart is lying still. So it's quite nice, it's quite a visual thing, it's quite evocative. This is the text that goes with it in the app. Start of ten, the date is wrong in the title of the poem. Currently Wordsworth can't keep a diary to save his life. His sister Dorothy however was quite good at it. So we can tell you that it was written at 6am on his way to Dover to visit his aunt, if I recall correctly. We can tell you the bridge is not the bridge that's there now. It was the first wooden bridge to stand at Westminster which was the first bridge upriver of London Bridge built quite late. And the Palace of Westminster which you're perhaps imagining when you think about this poem isn't there. So this is what you might imagine when you read the poem or perhaps you're stood there because you're using the app in that way. But this isn't what Wordsworth is describing. This is what Wordsworth is describing. This is from the Alesons for British Art. You can see the old medieval palace in the background before it burned down. And you can see the other bridge there. There's another entry in the app which is a poem complaining about the fact they're going to build a bridge at Westminster. And you can see the construction works in that painting. So putting the image and the text together gives you a new sense of the place and a new appreciation perhaps for the writing as well as the location. And here's the other picture that goes with it in the app which we licensed from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Unfortunately it's licensed for the app and not for presentation and not for web so I can't really show you it. You'll have to download the app. But I include this slide to make a point about open collections and how they are a great creative resource and how having this was quite an expensive image to license. If we'd had to pay this much money for every image in the project we'd have never gotten anywhere with it. But it is an amazing painting so go have a look. You can turn the music down a bit if you like. I'm going to talk all over this. So this is a preview video of the app in action on an iPhone 5 I think. This has changed a little bit. We've added a music section in collaboration with the State Library of Queensland. We've found some jaunty in 1920s tunes about particular places in Queensland which you can now access off the main menu. So you can see here you go in through the map interface and you can access content that way because I was quite aware when I was designing it of having a nice smooth user interface to make it more accessible. And some people like to go in through the map. Some people like to go in through this listing here if we click on poems. You can just sort of browse things this way instead. I don't have a demonstration of the notifications popping up but they look like every other push notification on your phone to be honest. And you can, every place where we've gotten the images from has been referenced. You can zoom in on the images to see a bit more detail. You may not watch all of this. Oh, and you can get back to the map through the bottom there. And the directions opens up. Directions in your native map browser for your device. One of the other things that we've included in this is, in which we'll come up in a moment, is the facilities who suggest content to include going forward. So there's a feedback form going to tell us what you think of the app. But then there's another bit saying please suggest a place or a poem or a poet or whatever inspires you to include. And people are welcome to submit their own works if they feel keen. Although we haven't had that yet, we're working on that, but... We'll skip this. How are we doing for time? We're okay. Right, enough of the video. There's a lot of points of interest, a lot of different things we were experimenting with with poetic places. And if you go on the website that these are expanded out, I didn't want to inflict all of this on you. And yet here we are. So GPS is very good for outdoors things. It's not very good for indoors things because there's a certain area of effect. So when you set up a geofence to trigger materials, you have to allow a 50-metre diameter on that because GPS isn't that accurate. And different devices process it differently. An iPhone will assume that you're in a very large area if it can't tell you exactly where you are on trigger early, which is fine, but Android devices don't always do that. Because there's such a variety of Android handsets that can be a little bit difficult to get round. So the platform supports Bluetooth beacons, iBeacons and QR codes. So if you were doing a variety of things in one museum or library or archive, you would probably want to take that approach. Low budget, I didn't specify, but the technical costs for this project have been up 500 pounds. So if you have a member of staff who's all right with a computer and you've got 500 quid, you can make this yourself. And another thing that's a couple of the points. It's been very nice, whilst I've been based at the British Library, I haven't been restricted to using only their collections. I've been able to draw all of these different collections from all over the world, and it's been really nice to bring things together in one place and match two paintings from different collections and put them next to each other and mean more together. And also using GPS as a slight aside allows you to not have to get permission from people to base things in a place, which is nice. We thought about using iBeacons at the beginning, and then I realised I would definitely get arrested trying to stick one to Westminster Bridge. So, yeah. Moving on. Oh, yeah. So how's it gone? It's gone pretty well, actually. We've had some nice press. We actually did a soft launch because we launched this back in March. We didn't promote it really through the British Library. We kind of did a quiet announcement just to see how it would go because we were rare. There's only like 35 things in it, which are great, but, you know, it's not like 500 items because everything's had to be hand-researched. But we got this article on the Vice-Creator's Project, got Techable Japan, which is actually the nicest article if you can read it. Google translates excellent these days, but not quite there. And some Facebook chats. So we've had about 7,500 downloads in the first six months, which isn't bad, I think, considering we've not promoted it through the library particularly strongly. Mainly on iPhone, interestingly, I'm going to be publishing a kind of analysis of downloads and usage and stuff in the next couple of weeks on the website. But preliminary kind of browsing suggests that about 80% of the downloads are iPhone, which is somewhat surprising. I thought it would be more balanced. I'll have to look into that. And the feedback we've had has been almost or entirely positive. We've had a few people going, how do I get it? The American content, and I have to reply, well, you write it and then you send it to me and then I load it and then you read it again. But there is a vision to expand, of course. As I mentioned earlier, we've just started a little collaboration with the State Library of Queensland with their old music files, which you can see a couple of examples of in the app now. These are a test to check if the triggering works correctly in Australia as much as anything. Should do, no reason why it shouldn't, but just a check. There's also a couple of the other people we're threatening to work with. We would like to add more content in geographically across Britain, if not the rest of the world. With all sorts of little experiments, which I encourage you to browse on the website because we've listed it all, as I said, we've been pretty open with it. And I encourage you to try it out. I've got some little postcards at the front here if you want to take a printed entry from the app to take home and remind yourself about it, have a browse. But other than that, I will stop. On time? Good. Thank you.