Let’s begin with a tour of the functionality. When you start the app, it loads some resources while displaying the title screen, and then you have the chance to view an introduction or skip ahead to the map screen.

Because the project centers around the White River near Indianapolis, we only assembled hydrological data for the area around Marion County for the application (I’ll go into more detail later). On the map screen, a prompt appears to inform you that tapping on the map will simulate a rain event. When the map is tapped, the app displays the series of streams, storm drains, and/or sanitary lines that would carry a raindrop from that location to the White River. It also displays the area (known as a drainage basin or watershed) from which other raindrops would follow the same path. Another prompt then appears to let you know that tapping on the raincloud icon allows for selection of storm intensity. As little as a quarter inch of rain can cause sewers to overflow into streams in this area, so when this option is selected, the path displayed will change to reflect this so you can see where you don’t want to go fishing. You can also toggle the display of the 100-year floodplain, which shows you where you can keep your feet dry during a big flood event. In addition to selecting a location on the map, pressing the compass icon locates your device via GPS, and typing in the address bar uses the Google Maps address look-up feature. Tapping on a question mark icon provides some information about pollutants that threaten the path upstream, as reported by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management.

Pressing the “i” icon at the top opens the informational menu. From here, you can learn more about the app, check current weather alerts and conditions, find out how weather differs from climate, get some tips on how to improve water quality, and visit the project website.

Now we can get into some behind the scenes stuff. We wanted to try to reach a broad audience with Raindrop, so we decided to put the time that we had into developing a cross-platform mobile application. These are known as web apps, in contrast to native apps. If we only had an iPhone native app in the App Store, people using Android phones wouldn’t be able to use it, and vice-versa. To handle cross-platform compatibility, we decided to build Raindrop using a framework called jqMobile, which was in a very early stage when we started. It hasn’t quite had an official release yet (it’s in its third beta release at the moment), but has become increasingly robust with each version.

As for the map, you might wonder how we figured out the path that raindrops take to get to the river. Our collaborator at Williams Creek combined information based on digital elevation models, which can be used to derive the boundaries of natural watersheds, with data from the city that indicates where all of the storm drains and sanitary systems are and which areas drain into them.

We then wrote Python scripts to read the scientific data and generate KML geometry files and look-up tables. The application uses a spatial grid look-up to figure out which basin is tapped (so it’s not perfectly accurate, but not too slow either), and then loads the appropriate file with the graphics to display for the path and the basin. It also reads information from another table that has all the details about pollutants.

Along the way, we’ve combined this technology with graphical elements and design guidance provided by Mary’s team, and scientific guidance and content from Butler. The multi-disciplinary process has really embodied the nature of Mary’s City as A Living Laboratory concept. And just as the aim is to lead curious folks from Mary’s eye-catching mirrors and markers along the river to the website and the web app to learn more, hopefully those who discover the project online will follow the raindrop and find their way down to experience the river as well.

When I first visited Japan, I bought an electronic dictionary. This saved me from looking up kanji (the complex characters borrowed from Chinese) by counting strokes and identifying radicals (the root component of a kanji character) to index into the enormous tome that I had been using. The dictionary was much lighter, and had a stylus that could be used to draw kanji. Using this sort of input method, the order that you draw the strokes still matters, but it’s much faster than flipping pages. I used this dictionary for getting around Japan, studying, reading manga, and playing video games. Years later, after the Nintendo DS came out, I upgraded using a cartridge called Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten. It uses the same stylus input method, but the results are marked up in color and it has a nicer interface, including a history of recently looked-up words, which is extremely useful. One of the other tools that I was using at the time (and still use today) is a plugin for Firefox called Rikai-chan. When enabled, this plugin allows you to hover the mouse over a word and see the definition in a pop-up.

Rikai-chan also has dictionaries for German, French, and Russian, and similar tools may exist for other languages too, so make sure to look for this kind of plugin for the language that you study if you like to read online material in the original language.

My favorite dictionary now is Japanese for the iPhone. You can look up words by typing roman characters with the default Qwerty keyboard, or by enabling the Japanese and Simplified Chinese Handwriting keyboards in the iPhone settings you can enter a word using the Japanese input method (which presents you with possible kanji as you type phonetically), or by drawing kanji. It includes expressions, proverbs, conjunctions, and interjections, and has an impressive catalog of example sentences. As if this isn’t enough, it also has a vocabulary list feature. I like to create a list of new words for each novel, manga, or video game that I’m into, and then study them using the flashcard feature wherever I am when I have a spare minute. The flashcard feature uses an algorithm based on a series of steps.

When you identify a word correctly, it advances to the next step, and eventually into a “Known” category. Usually there are about twenty or so items between the “Unknown” and “Known” categories that you’re working on, but occasionally you see some items that are in the “Known” category as well. I’d highly recommend an app for your language of interest that has this sort of system for reviewing vocabulary.

In fact, I recently discovered Smart.fm, an online tool/community that’s based on a similar system. There’s a video on the home page that describes how their system automatically determines which material you need to be presented with at a given time to have the best chance of remembering it. I actually recall reading an article a while back about a man who was living his life according to this sort of algorithm. One of the other interesting things about Smart.fm is that in addition to the Goals (sets of material to study) curated by Smart.fm, the user community can create their own. So you can find Goals for varying grades of vocabulary for Japanese, Spanish, and other languages, as well as Goals consisting of the capitals of the world or the names of stars and galaxies. For Japanese, the system does a good job quizzing you on the phonetic reading of a word, the meaning of the word, and the kanji. Some of the goals include sentences, which serve as examples and are also presented to quiz your knowledge. From what I’ve read, images can also be incorporated into the material for a Goal, so the system has the capability to support many areas of study. Unfortunately, their main quiz interface is a Flash app and they dropped the iPhone app that they had developed, but I suspect that they’re working on a new HTML5 solution that will work both on their site and on multiple mobile platforms.

On their own, the tools I’ve mentioned really only help review and expand vocabulary. Without a solid foundation in grammar, even Rikai-chan can only help so much. I have a few books and dictionaries for grammar reference, but I haven’t come across any nice apps or plugins to help in this area of language study. My best suggestion here is to take classes to build your foundation, keep your books, and seek out interesting material at your level to practice with. I’m currently trying to figure out if there’s a good way to get manga in Japanese on the iPad. If you can build some friendships with native speakers, that’s another good way to explore new grammar, and maybe even learn a regional dialect.

And of course the ultimate boost for your language skills, once you have a good start, is to immerse yourself by living abroad. You’ll learn more about the culture, customs and lifestyle, which will reinforce your understanding of language and vice-versa. You might even gain some new perspective and learn more about yourself. And you’ll always have an urge to go back someday.

Have it Your Way!

Well, our intrepid team of media and software guru’s are busy preparing to launch our first outdoor mobile content tour to highlight the opening of 100 Acres this weekend.  Folks are a little bit frazzled and wishing for the sunshine, but I think we’re all universally excited about the incredible stories there are to tell in the park.

While we’ve ironed out our initial set of tour content for 100 Acres, we could use your help in planning the next great escapades we undertake for mobile content.  So, in the great tradition of McDonalds… if you could “Have it Your Way”, what should our next mobile tour look like?

If you’ll answer a few of these questions, I promise to come back next week and share with the class all we’ve learned from your responses!  We’ll take the best ideas from this survey and see if we can wrap them into our next mobile tour!

Thank You! -Rob

We’ve promised this for a while, and today I’m pleased to announce that we have released ALL of the materials and source code we’ve used to make TAP as open-source, and freely available to the museum community.  I think it’s clear to many of us that mobile content and interpretation is an incredible opportunity for cultural organizations and the role we play in engaging and educating audiences about our collections and programming. Our hope is that the contribution of TAP might spur collaboration and contribution from other museums to further develop a tool – owned by the community – that can power and deliver those mobile experiences to the public.

I think it’s important for us to explain some of the foundational ideas behind TAP, and why museums might choose this direction over so many of the other options.  In that light here are:

5 reasons why TAP should be your museum’s next mobile platform

1. First-Class Content Management
2. Open-Source, community owned, freely available
3. Open Standards (TourML)
4. Multi-Platform
5. Intuitive and Tested Mobile Client

1. First-Class Content Management

The task of creating mobile tours for museums is an art form in and of itself.  I’m not sure that we’ve  nailed it yet, and we’re certainly still learning a whole lot from our peers about what works and what doesn’t when engaging audiences on a mobile device.  One thing I know for certain is that creating these experiences is a lot of work, and the results are pieces of content that we would be well advised to preserve and reuse over a long period of time.  Along those lines, it is incredibly important that we treat the mobile content we create as a first-class citizen with respect to the other content our museums care for.  If we take this content seriously, we will necessarily store and manage it professionally and for the long term.  A proper content management system is critical in this effort.

The Homepage of the TAP CMS Showing Two Different Tours

TAP is based on an open-source content management system called Drupal (http://www.drupal.org) that the IMA (and many other museums) have used successfully over the years to drive all sorts of online experiences.  This means that any museum adopting TAP as their mobile platform will immediately benefit from the depth of experience in the Drupal community and from the possibilities for expandability and enhancement that come from an active open-source platform.

Because creating the tour content can be time consuming, we need to be sure that the tools we give content authors are as easy to use as possible.  TAP features a very simple user interface, and takes all of the guess-work out of creating a tour that is properly formatted for the web.

TAP's User Interface for Adding Tour Stops

For those of you who have authored these tours in other platforms, there is nothing worse than pushing content to your device platform only to realize that you missed some small little detail or that tour stops were mis-labeled, mis-linked or otherwise incorrect.  TAP’s CMS offers the ability to preview and view media and connections between tour-stops so that authors can be sure all the content is correct prior to publishing to a device.

TAP's Stop Preview Pop-Up for Video

2. Open-Source, Community Owned, Freely Available

If you’ve been paying attention to the mobile tour space over the past few years, you’ll already know that we are seeing an incredible growth in the number of options available to museums who want to create mobile tour content.  Many of these systems offer very nice interfaces for authors to create engaging content and offer very attractive pricing options and incentives for museums who want to publish tours on those platforms.

I can’t help but think we’ve seen this movie before…

In the past 5-10 years many museums adopted proprietary CMS tools to drive their websites too with varying levels of success.  To me, many of the available options for mobile tours today seem very similar to the kinds of options museums pursued to get collections and content on the web to begin with.

At the end of the day, I think we’ve seen now that only a few of those proprietary solutions have been successful over the long term.  Museums bear a responsibility for the preservation of collections and content as our primary and core business service to the public.  Certainly this is possible within a proprietary context, but I would argue that open-source platforms and solutions put museums in the driver’s seat with regard to their own success and content preservation issues.

We are releasing TAP so that others can take advantage of the work we’ve done in this area, and can extend and enhance it to meet their needs as well.  I think we’re all still learning all the features we want and need as a part of a mobile solution.  Our requirements will continue to evolve over the next several years as mobile computing cements itself into our audience’s expectations.  I’m hoping that those who use TAP will also contribute their changes back so that we can build a suite of tools and help each other succeed in this area.

Google Code Project Hosting for TAP

Source code and documentation for TAP can be downloaded from a Google Code Project (http://code.google.com/p/tap-tours).  Instructions for installing the CMS and configuring the iPod Client can be found there as well.  There’s also an email list that we will monitor to answer questions about using the tool.  While we’ve made the process of authoring tours very simple at this point, it will still take someone familiar with web and mobile development some time to correctly setup and configure the CMS and particularly the Apple Development environment.  We’re happy to help with this as we can and continue to document the process.

3. Open Standards (TourML)

As we think about ways that mobile tours are different than web pages, and more so, how we might encode these tours in a way that’s portable and future proof…  We eventually end up needing some standard description of a Tour, its content and its structure.

We’ve floated a proposed meta-data standard for mobile tours called TourML (pronounced Turmoil)  and have published this for comment on the Museum Mobile Wiki.  We’ve successfully used TourML on a few production tours now, and have shown how it can be used to drive many types of tours.  We’re certainly not saying that TourML is perfect, and would really love to receive input from the community on ways that it could be improved, but it serves as a useful (and functional) straw-man as we try to settle on a good standard.

4. Multi-Platform

5. Intuitive and Tested Mobile Client

In addition to the back-end CMS and authoring infrastructure, we are also releasing an iPod-Touch application client that we’ve used at the IMA for public tours.  The keypad based tour is not the only type of tour museums will want to offer based on the TAP platform, but offers a multipurpose and easy-to-use interface that is a great starting point.

We’re working on several different kinds of clients for future versions of TAP including web-based and outdoor versions of TAP tours.

The future of TAP

For our part, we’re working on a new set of tools for an outdoor tour for our 100 Acres Art and Nature Park which will include an HTML5 web client that visitors will use on their own devices.  We’re also going to add some support for GPS and mapping features so that visitors can locate themselves on trails throughout the park.  As a teaser, here are some mockups of our ideas so far.

I’m going to let the images do most the talking, but please note that none of the design or content is completely finalized below.

My first idea was to do simply what I described above. I searched around a bit for a Flickr app, but I haven’t found one written by the Flickr team and I don’t really want to give my information to yet another third party. It seems, however, that Flickr has a really nice mobile web interface. Paired with the ability to email photos to Flickr from the phone, I think I have all I need to take that route. However, in the meantime I found that uploading photos with the Facebook app is really easy. This, along with the fact that the iPhone camera can’t compete for image quality with my digital camera, has led me to decide that the iPhone will fit the bill for the sort of in-group photojournalism that my close friends would appreciate, as I capture photos of my pets (and theirs) and other humorous things while I’m out and about. Some might argue that this is a waste of digital resources, but hey… what’s life without a little whimsy?

My discovery of the Google Earth app’s integration with Wikipedia and Panoramio, however, rekindled my interest in contributing high quality geotagged content. Contributing content to these resources is something that could have been done before, but the iPhone (and other devices that utilize both GPS and wireless networks) provides a new level of exposure. Rather than needing to research a travel destination beforehand, it is now possible to whip out a device like this and find interesting features nearby, or learn more about your current surroundings.

I decided that it would be quickest to try out Panoramio. After signing up for an account, I uploaded a couple of my photographs (one of them taken here at the 100 Acres) and found the process to be very easy. I could really see myself getting addicted to uploading new images and waiting in great anticipation to see if they are deemed Google Earth worthy, at which point they should show up on my phone. There are also thematic contests that are very easy to enter, so I couldn’t resist adding my photos to those as well. We’ll see if people think they’re any good.

I might also try out Wikipedia. After signing up and reading the newbie documentation, I’m a little concerned about finding what they would call “notable” subjects (among other qualifications, things of more than just local interest). According to the guidelines, I can’t write about the IMA, so I’ll have to find other local gems… seems like a good challenge.

I believe that these new devices could open up an era of increased engagement with our surroundings. It will be interesting to see how these tools handle the increasing amount of geotagged information as more people contribute content. Hopefully the result will be high quality resources that educate and inspire the people who use them.