What a Day

This week was a big one as a budding historian. I cemented the ideas for the app with integration of the reading screens for the visually impaired. We are going to have a general screen reader so the option is there for ADA but also if someone wants to just have an audio tour of the history center.

I had been putting off the thinking about doing a real guided tour with directions and all that because I didn’t want to tell guests where to go and also I didn’t have a good sense of how to do it. The museum is a courthouse, so if you do a general tour involving all the aspects of that you will undoubtedly encounter a problem of geography and narrative.

There is no start to the museum exhibits in a formal way. There are galleries, which were rooms of the courthouse. There is a military section, which connects to a room that has a dugout canoe and talks about the pre-Columbian tribes there, so in a chronological sense that is first, but its on the 2nd floor and on the first floor is a kids portion which covers the fossils and things from millions of years ago, so that is first. You can see the problem. If a guest without children comes in, they are very likely to skip the room and if they don’t they are going to be wandering around a room with fossils and then enter a room with a puppet show and small things for children, so its hard to figure out how to start a general tour like that.

I decided to follow the architectural tour’s route, which does go outside, and then describe what exhibits would be in the different rooms, with a single QR code for each room which will bring up the option to look at individual artifacts if you wanted more information or context that is not provided by the graphic in the case. That way we are not cluttering up the exhibit with stickers and someone who just wants to do the general tour can listen as they walk through and anyone with vision issues can zoom in on the object and see it better on their phone, if they are able to see. For that we might use a 3D Scanner, which is a great opportunity in the future for a UCF intern.

After all this, I went to the Polk County Historical Commission and petitioned for the erection of an historical marker in front of All Saints’ Episcopal church in Lakeland and it was passed, so it was a very productive day in Bartow. Maybe I will get a seat on the commission next time one opens up, then I can help the county expand its public history presence.