Try this tour: Minnesota's Dakota War

While the Civil War sesquicentennial gets a ton of attention (and a bunch of great tours) this year, here in Minnesota we're also marking the 150th anniversary of the U.S.-Dakota War -- a conflict that led to the largest mass-execution in U.S. history. The war took place across a broad swath of the Minnesota River valley in the summer of 1862 and evidence of it has mostly disappeared.

U.S.-Dakota War audio tour stops along Minnesota River
Valley Scenic Byway.  (from MNHS)

The Minnesota Historical Society just launched a cell phone tour that brings the stories of the war and the tumultuous years around it to life in places all over the valley -- like St. Peter, New Ulm, the Lower Sioux Agency and Montevideo. It's a good example of an effective scenic byway tour -- letting a story unfold as the miles pass by -- and I'm excited to drive a big chunk of the route next weekend. I'll post a review when I'm done, but I can already tell that MNHS makes wide use of their extensive oral history collection. Placecasting is an excellent way to unlock the unique insight of those dusty old tapes.

In the meantime, here's the map. The brochure (.pdf link) that accompanies it is also a good thumbnail overview of the war. No map is really necessary though: call 1-888-601-3013 to sample the tour. Use #01 for the overview.

T.O.U.R. in the USA - A Mellencamp audio tour

Seymour, Indiana has been trying to cash in on its most famous former resident for a long time. Indeed, rocker John Mellencamp's heartland mystique is "one of the larger attractions to the area" according to Jackson County Visitor Center director Tina Stark.

Now, Cougarphiles and rock pilgrims can roam Seymour with a CD driving tour featuring Mellencamp memories, factoids and music.

Did you know the Mellencamps have lived in Jackson County for 150 years? Did you know John's mother threw out his first written songs? Do you know who ELSE is on the Seymour High School Wall of Fame? The tour knows...

From the Seymour Daily Tribune:

“It was originally just the brochure, but we were looking for a way to creatively put together a new experience for our visitors,” Stark said. She said the CD offers information the listener could not have gotten anywhere else and more personal information about Mellencamp.

Those lending their memories and stories about Mellencamp are his mother, brother, sister, former teacher, friends and former girlfriends.

The tour is narrated by Dan Osborne and features 16 of Mellencamp’s hit songs, including “Small Town,” “Human Wheels” and “R.O.C.K. In the USA.”

The audio tour has been in the works for five years. Stops include Mellencamp's boyhood home, his junior high and high school and several other local landmarks.

The CD is apparently only available at the visitors center, so I haven't been able to preview it. But I'm optimistic that it's more than tourist schlock. What gives me hope is that so much of Mellencamp's music is rooted in place and memory. He both celebrates and laments the qualities of small town Middle America.

So fans will recognize the significance of tour stops like Larrison’s Diner and the Rok-Sey Roller Rink -- even if they're not directly referenced in Mellencamp songs. Also, any tour creator who seeks out interviews with former girlfriends must understand the power of oral history in placecasting. And in this interview with NPR's Fresh Air, Mellencamp talks about how his early experience with racial issues still affect his lyrics today. If the tour can connect those dots between place, people and art, it should be worth the time (and the $14 price tag).

Now I wonder how many little pink houses are along the route.

(Here's a more detailed review of the tour from Jane Ammeson, of the Northwest Indiana Times)
(Main street Seymour photo from a very nice placeblog about U.S. Route 50 called Rte50.com)

Scenic byways are made for audio touring

I'm working on a more complete list of audio tours along the Mississippi River. See Northeast Minneapolis, Wisconsin's Great River Road, and Quad Cities for some good examples. But I know there are more out there. I'm thinking of you, St. Louis...

Tonight, my search brought me to this driving tour page from the National Scenic Byways Program. It lays out a great, take-your-time style 2-day Mississippi River trip in Wisconsin. What's more, it almost precisely follows the route of the Great River Road Stories audio tour I wrote about in May -- still the best audio driving tour I've sampled so far, with interpretation of the cities, landscape and history all along the way. These sites are prefect companions for one another and it makes my wonder why more byways don't have this sort of grassroots audio tour.

The Scenic Byway Program is relatively new. It started in 1992. There are 125 designated routes all over the U.S. that meet a certain criteria. From the Byways.org:

The U.S. Secretary of Transportation recognizes certain roads as All-American Roads or National Scenic Byways based on one or more archeological, cultural, historic, natural, recreational and scenic qualities.

If you must travel by car, these routes are a great alternative to the Interstate highway system. The program stimulates local economies, highlights scenic or historical sites, and it helps the towns along the way work together -- like the Wisconsin Great River Road Stories group did. Oh, and the Byways are apparently becoming more bike friendly (though road biking isn't encouraged on the Wisconsin road yet).

Just last week, the Department of Transportation announced 41 million dollars of new spending on the Byways, including a lot of money focused on interpretation. Signs and visitors centers are great, but I think all 125 of these routes should have audio tours about the sights and cities along the way. After all, you're sure not going to watch YouTube videos in the car.

(photos from byways.org)

The wheels on the theater go...

I love it when artists embrace place.

The current show at New York City's Foundry Theater, "Provenance of Beauty", is about the South Bronx, peformed in the South Bronx -- on a bus that is rolling through the South Bronx.

THE PROVENANCE OF BEAUTY is a poetic travelogue performed on a bus touring the South Bronx. As we travel the streets of the neighborhood, Rankine's evocative text points out and reflects upon the sites that pass by outside the windows.

THE PROVENANCE OF BEAUTY. from Sunder Ganglani on Vimeo.

It looks like there is a mix of live action and recorded media. From their Web site:

The audience boards the bus in Spanish Harlem, puts on headphones and for 90 minutes eavesdrops on the voice - both live and recorded - of this historic place. PROVENANCE is an experience that both responds to and redoubles the landscape - its sites, history, present and future - mapping out a poetic cartography of a neighborhood - of any neighborhood - in its eternal state of evolution.

Good placecasting ought to be an artform. I love the sound of an innovative project like this.

Village Voice profiles the project here. And one of my favorite NPR reporters, Robert Smith, has a radio story about the performance on All Things Considered this afternoon.

**UPDATE: Listening to the NPR story this evening, it sounds like this is really more audio tour than performance. It's full or stories about the people and buildings along the route. In fact, it sounds a lot like the ArtShare Northeast Minneapolis tour that I've written about a couple times here: created by artists, full of oral histories, focus on an unexpected place. The big difference is that this one is on a bus. And that brings up a good point that Robert Smith makes in his story:

"It's a strange experience; the play is about the South Bronx, but we never get off the bus, never get to interact with the scenes we see. Much of the talk is about the issues of gentrification, but what could be more gentrifying than a brainy theater piece in a tour bus?"

Next trip: Great Smoky Mountains

I found another little audio driving tour while researching my next vacation destination. Great Smoky Mountain Association has a series of podcasts about Great Smoky Mountains National Park, including a two-part driving tour along the main park road from Gatlinburg to Cherokee. It's actually four parts, but I'm assuming the south-to-north podcasts are the same at the north-to-south, repackaged. I'll take a listen while I'm there and find out for certain.


View Placecasting: Audio tours I've found in a larger map

I'm going to start collecting tours like these on a Google Map as I find them and get time to plot them. The very basic beginning of this undertaking is here. Eventually, I'd like to make a one-stop map where people could look for relevant audio content. As I and others have discovered, there's no great system for geotagging audio content. This means the explosion of mobile, location-aware devices can't really take advantage of the great place-based sound work people are creating around the globe.

By the way, if you know of other good place-based audio, please post them in the comments or use the link on the right to add an item of your own to the list I'm finding.

Audio driving tour: the Mississippi River in Wisconsin

Radios were put into cars because audio is so good for multitasking, and that's the same reasonpodcasts are now giving radio stations a run for their money.  People want something to listen to while they drive and if what they're listening to is about the world they're seeing around them, all the better!

Thus, audio driving tours are such a natural part of the placecasting concept.  Here's a set of audio tours from my neck of the woods: the Mississippi River in Wisconsin.  Thirty-three towns along the Wisconsin side of the river have banded together to create 33 podcasts about the environment and history in their area. They're calling the project Great River Road Stories and the site is full of other information about this beautiful stretch of country.  (What's really impressive is that it looks like they created the audio tours 4 years ago, when podcasting was still very much in its infancy.)


View Larger Map

From Prescott to Keiler, the tours are 4-8 minute overviews of the history of each town the listener is about to pass through.  Some towns have more interesting histories than others, of course, but by the end, a listener should have a good sense of what this landscape used to be like.  I will definitely try to do this drive sometime this summer.

As I try to use my radio training to create this kind of place-based environmental journalism, I'm going to start collecting best (and worst) practices from the tours I hear.  So, with all respect to the hard work of the team that put this impressive series together, here's my critique:

• Pro: While most of the tour is a narrator reading a script, the tour occasionally breaks up this monotony by cutting to local experts who talk about geology or history.
  
• Pro: The narrator gives clear but brief guidance about how to use the tour...in each case saying to pause the podcast until you've passed through the town just talked about
• Pro: There is a simple, unobtrusive music bed under all the sections.  I think it's always the same music, which is too bad, but it adds energy and momentum to the items and makes them seem less like lectures
• Pro: There is a great diversity of information!  History, environment and geology are all rolled in here and it's packed with facts and statistics.
• Pro: There are good human stories in many of the towns.  Clearly, the writers made an effort to tell stories of particular events.  

• Con: The narrator's pacing never changes.  He doesn't pause when he switches topics from, say, history to geology.  This leaves the listener no time to digest the points just made.  A lot of the great facts and stats will never stay with a listener at a pace like this.  The narrator uses no vocal tools to set off particular pieces of information.  When everything has equal weight, everything becomes the lowest common denominator.
• Con: The script is not written for the ear.  The narrator does a nice job navigating some long, clunky, passive sentences, but ultimately the script sounds like text lifted from a guidebook or museum display.  Ears need short, active sentences written to paint pictures in the listeners' mind.
• Con: The script rarely references what the listener is actually seeing, or suggesting where to look when the listener gets to a particular location.  This neglects one of the great advantages to this kind of journalism...you know where the consumer is and you can use that to enhance the story.
• Con: Too many numbers.  It's hard to work numbers into a narrative.  Distances, addresses, ages all need context for a listeners' brain to really understand what they mean.  If that rock is 8-thousand years old, tell me why that's impressive.  Don't tell me the address of the historical society...tell me where to turn when I drive through town.  I'll be there shortly, after all.

No matter the technology, storytelling is key.  These Great River Road Stories are a wonderful service to visitors and residents alike, and they're just a re-write away from really engaging listeners' imaginations and connecting them with the environment of this beautiful part of the country.

Link: Great River Road Stories audio tours