HypeDyn, App Furnace and the Tudor Child

***Updated*** When I added a photo via my mobile device, I seem to have deleted half the post before publishing, so the headline won’t have made much sense. I’ve rewritten the  second half of the post now.  Apologies.

This morning I got my head around HypeDyn by working through the three tutorials they provide. The first tutorial is about building simple hypertext links, and it got me thinking about a text handling language I had on my very first computer, the little known Memotech MTX 500. I now realise his software, called Noddy, was somewhat ahead of its time. Indeed a contributor to the wiki page I link to above calls it a “forerunner” of HyperCard. I can’t say whether that’s true, but all it seems to have been missing was the point and click interface, that we’re all so used to since the Mac. As I worked through the first tutorial on HypeDyn, I was thinking how old fashioned this new software was. Still it is free.

The second tutorial didn’t improve matters much. Although it did introduce Anywhere Nodes, which were linked to every other node, it didn’t seem to offer a way of sculpting them very dynamically. Thankfully the third tutorial was all about sculptural hypertext, and I learned how to make the links conditional, not just on whether a node had been visited or not, but also on whether card independent flags (or “facts”) are true or false. I also learned how to make the text on each card more dynamic, again based on the reader’s node history or the state of definable facts.

It’s still pretty basic. It’s text only for example, it can’t serve pictures or video. But it will do to play with, and I’m going to have a hack at making an existing text more interactive. The text in question is the draft text for a proposed guidebook to the River Wey and Godalming Navigations – surely the National Trust’s longest bit of countryside at 20 miles long (and only a few metres wide in most places). We’ve already noticed that as pure text, it presupposes walking in only one direction along the towpath. Obviously people can start in more than one place and choose to walk either up-stream or downstream. So my first challenge will be to serve those users’ needs.

I mentioned last week that HypeDyn was designed as a tool for non-technical people, and by coincidence this afternoon, I heard about another one. I was chatting on Skype with the lovely people at Splash and Ripple about doing an evaluation of Ghosts in the Garden, which makes an eagerly anticipated return to the Holborne Museum, Bath, later this spring. They mentioned that the software that underpins the experience was made with App Furnace. The people behind App Furnace were, by coincidence squared, also in the team that put together the Riot! 1831 experience I wrote about yesterday. Like HypeDyn its a creative tool for non-technical types. It’s on-line and free to use, you only pay when you publish.  So it might be worth a play with. But only after I’ve got my head around HypeDyn…

And so to Picadilly, where this evening I went to celebrate the launch of The Tudor Child, a book (and for the next three weeks, an exhibition at the Weiss Gallery) which explores the place of the child in Tudor society, through the clothes they wore.

 

A child's mannequin in Tudor dress


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I came to cultural heritage via five years working at Midland Bank when I left school. In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said “we could make a business out of this” I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players’ investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters’ degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier’s “space syntax,” and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the “small business” end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we’ve returned Rudyard Kipling’s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust’s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams’ achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.

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