Augmented Literary Landscapes: A pilot using locative AR

The Literary Landscapes Atlas is an ongoing project, started in 2010 and now developed by the Digital Humanities Lab at NOVA-FCSH. Its digital resources collate literary texts with geo-spatial references, in order to disclose vast Portuguese cultural assets regarding natural environments and landscapes (http://litescape.ielt.fcsh.unl.pt/).1 The Co-Create research group from Northumbria University it’s dedicated to develop interdisciplinary design, cultural and digital interactions using, among its several projects, textual sources and spatial representations to create innovative applications and methodologies (https://cocreatenorthumbria.org/).2 In this proposal we intend to present and discuss a “proof of concept” that has been developed by both teams, aiming to combine the Digital Humanities experience with Interaction Design expertise to generate a pilot application with geolocated Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) technologies. The growing use and readiness of geolocated technologies, available on most mobile devices, combined with AR/MR methods, hold a tremendous potential for real time digital visualisations in the geography of the cities, thus complementing and enhancing the academic analyses and the touristic experiences. With this pilot we hope to create new environments for audiences to assess and interact with the literary descriptions in digital geographies. The goal is to apply these “proof of concept” to the existing resources within Atlas regarding three places in the city of Lisbon, developing new culturally enriching ways of experiencing literary texts in urban contexts, and then to broaden the experiences to other cities in Portugal and in the UK.