At Playful next week I’ll be talking about RL Stevenson’s classic adventure novel ‘Kidnapped’ and the various ways I’ve been playing around with it over the last six months or so.
As mentioned on the Kidmapped blog, several opportunities have arisen out of trudging across the Highlands. One is the idea of developing Kidmapped as a format for a series of crossplatform documentaries about several different books, each of them mappable and walkable in their own way. Here’s a sample of some the maps I’ve dug up so far:
A slightly more space-age idea was indicated by Jo Flintham’s fab mashup of my trip (see how proactive and smart followers and friends can be?), suggesting, as it does, a mobile app that could provide location-specific material for anyone interested in undertaking a literary walk. Better still would be if you could geotag your own tweets, pics, blog posts etc and use them to create a print-your-own booklet – so anyone can then become a Kidmapper if armed with the basic kit of a mobile, a camera and a map/book:
I’m already experimenting with ways of taking the digital content generated on my walk and placing it automatically into templated pages; thus – hey presto – you should be able generate your own personalised booklet or bind-in:
And finally I’m already thinking how I might return to the Kidnapped Trail next year with something bigger and better. I still dream of gathering a merry band of travellers and, every day, organising relevant games, talks and conferences along the way in pubs and local village halls and even out in the open air (weather permitting). It would be like an extended itinerant arts festival & conference that anyone could join either online or out in the wild - sponsored, of course, by Famous Grouse ;-)
It’s unlikely I’ll have the time or the opportunity to play around in all these areas at once. (I do have a home to go to and children to feed, no, honestly). So a choice has to be made. For 2010 should it be Kidmapped again or all-round Bookmapping? What do you think? If you’re coming to Playful, do please help me make up my mind.
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