74 SP – A Guided Tour of Amerigo, an Interactive Mobile Storytelling Platform for Digital Heritage, Presentation at DHBenelux2019

1. AMERIGO
Mark L. Thompson – American Studies, University of Groningen,
@mark_l_thompson
Joanne van der Woude – English, University of Groningen, @ jw0ude
An Interactive Mobile Storytelling
Platform for Digital Heritage

2. OVERVIEW
• What is Amerigo?
• Who will use Amerigo?
• Sneak Peeks
• Who’s building Amerigo?
• Challenges and Changes
• Take aways
• app development; public-private partnerships; fundraising; code;
choices in digital heritage, serious gaming & sharing stories

3. Website and software
application Amerigo explores
meaningful, multi-layered
connections through space
and time between the
Netherlands, the United States,
and the Atlantic World at large.
In its earliest stages, Amerigo
uses one location as its
jumping off point—the city of
Groningen in the North of the
Netherlands—and maps its
role in the initial settlement of
and trade with the Americas by
the Dutch.

4. Groningen features legible signs of its
colonial past—as, for instance, a seat of
the West India Company—in its current
lay out and street-scape. Human
geographers, urban planners, and
cultural theorists have long examined
how people use, understand, and
construct urban space in time. More
recently, media scholars have brought
new attention to mobile narrative and
locative media as subjects of study, and
heritage research has focused on the
significance of contemporary cities as
locations for the production,
consumption, and study of heritage.

5. WHO WILL USE AMERIGO?
• Scholars: Amerigo answers research questions from
the fields mentioned above
• Students: Amerigo provides a low threshold,
interactive introduction to complex historical and
literary material
• Tourists: Amerigo strives to be entertaining and
informative
• Heritage and Data scientists: the choices users make
while navigating the cityspace are recorded and
yield information as to audience interest and
accessibility of the presented sources

6. SNEAK PEEKS
• Early story lines focus on the
Groningen-born Caribbean pirate
Rob Brasiliano and Albert Eckhout,
who painted Natives in Dutch Brasil.
Amerigo thus models elaborate
realities, incorporating architecture,
cartography (both in 3D) material
history, literature, and visual arts
using computational methods to give
a wider audience access to such
sources and their complexities.

7. Early

8. WHO’S BUILDING AMERIGO?

9. CHALLENGES
AND CHANGES
From a “mobile
hypertext model,”
which maps texts,
images,
documents etc.
onto the city . . .

10. CHALLENGES
AND CHANGES
…to drafting narratives in “Ink,” where
the app responds to user choices.

11. CONCLUSION
• Take aways RE:
• app development;
• public-private partnerships;
• fundraising;
• code;
• choices in digital heritage;
• serious gaming & sharing stories