Office of Digital Humanities

Computers & the Humanities 281

Walking Tour Stack Assignment
(100 points)

Object: Imagine that you are a citizen of a major world city and that you are responsible for establishing a broader awareness of your city, its culture, and its sights among outsiders, with the goal of motivating and preparing them for an actual visit to the city. How would you accomplish this? One approach would be to create a virtual tour of the city, highlighting some of the major attractions to be found there. All should be within walking distance of each other, enabling a person to note what could be seen by a brief promenade. For this assignment, then, you need to create a LiveCode stack to present a brief "walking tour" of a fascinating and interesting world city.

Look for example Walking Tour Stacks in the Resources folder on the DigHT 210 server.

Methods: There are several ways to approach this assignment. You can start immediately with the preparation and complete the various tasks as we cover the necessary skills in class. I would suggest the following:

1. Pick a city and start collecting materials.
   • Choose a city with several interesting tourist sites within a small area.
   • Find a guide book or similar reference that has a map that covers your tour area.
   • Locate pictures of six of the sites. These can be pictures you took yourself, scanned from tourist guides, or from the internet. If you use other peoples' work, remember to give credit.
   • Obtain written information about the chosen sites. Again, remember to cite the source if it is not your own writing.
2. Decide on a method of presentation. Design the layout and organization of your stack.
3. Create a stack that will present your information in an organized fashion. Include the following:
• Title card with appropriate information.
• Clickable map of the tour area (the simpler the better.) Each site on the tour should have a clearly labeled button on the map that takes the user to the site.
• Card for each site on the walking tour (including appropriate information, both images and text.) Each card should also have a button to return to the map.
• Ability to navigate through the tour using forward/next and backward/previous buttons.
• A clear ending to the tour.
4. Put on finishing touches (proofreading, "thanks for coming", etc.).

Criteria: Here are the criteria for assessment:

• Title page (introduction, instructions, etc.)
• Map of area of walking tour (simple, clickable, labeled, etc.)
• Information on 6 sites (or "sights") on the walking tour
• Title/Name
• Picture
• Explanatory/Background information
• Quality of images (don't take 100 X 80 images and blow them up to 400 X 320)
• Bibliography/sources noted (can be on a separate card or on the title card)
• Functionality (navigation) and ease of use
• Observance of LiveCode Best Practices
• Neatness and organization
• Elegance and soundness of design
• Finishing touches—Proofreading (spelling, punctuation, etc.), fields locked!

The file name for this stack shoud be YourName-Walkingtour.rev. This assignment is due by the beginning of class on the due date specified in the class schedule. Turn in your completed project by dragging a copy of the stack from your data disk into the Assignment Drop folder in the DigHT 210 folder on the DigHT 210 server (hummac.byu.edu) as explained before.