Hello everybody!
Although I am doing the digital project, my first draft is mainly centered around the script that I have written for my audio tour. I’ve attached it here. A large majority of time has been taken up by using the digital archives at the National Gallery of Art to learn about the artists, subjects, and provenance of their collection in order to link it to legacies of the slave trade. In addition, I spent most of this week attempting to map the collection pieces I chose to highlight onto the physical space of the galleries, ordering them in a potential tour path that makes sense for visitors. The layout of the NGA’s Main Floor and Ground Floor are below, and I’ve added red circles to the areas where my tour will stop so you can see the galleries I’ve chosen.
My next step is the major digital aspect— recording each tour stop on SoundCloud. I haven’t yet been able to do this, because my tiny apartment is VERY loud, and it’s difficult to do sound recordings here. In any case, I’ll be spending the next week working on creating those. The NGA already has audio tour files on SoundCloud, so I will be doing my best to mimic their template for my own tour.
I also plan to edit this physical script to be more visually-pleasing, because I want to allow deaf or hard of hearing patrons to still take the tour without using the audio version. Inclusivity is the bomb!
I do think that I’ll make the intro/conclusion a bit longer, but I wanted to keep each tour stop short in order to allow for more stops and to avoid boring the visitor! Please let me know if you have any recommendations (or if you know of any other works I might include in the tour!)
Hi Sarah, I found the script for your tour to be very engaging and powerful. I found it to be effective in underscoring how the history of slavery is present right below the surface in a place like the National Gallery of Art, which most people don’t think of being connected to the history of slavery.
Very much looking forward to listening to the recordings on soundcloud!
Also, it is a great idea to produce a print version of the tour for folks who are hard of hearing. I think you are well on your way to that with the draft you have produced. It’s also great that you have those annotated maps. I think including those maps in your document will be great for helping to orient people to the tour. If you make the print version like that, you could also do something like put QR codes on it for each of the stops on the tour that link directly to the audio recording for that point in your tour, that way the print handout can also serve as a way of supporting navigation for folks using the audio tour.