CTODCD 3: 360 Degree Tour

I'm very excited about "Tours" in Open Durham - although they can function as literal tours, they are, more broadly, a new way to utilize the data in Open Durham (i.e. the data from Endangered Durham + ) to tell new kinds of stories.

Each "Building" in Open Durham is a story about that building and location, in much the way Endangered Durham has told those stories. I.e., on the northeast corner of West Main and N. Corcoran, there have been two buildings - Blacknall's Drugstore, which burned in 1914, and the Geer Building, which was mostly torn down in 1972. Now it's vacant.

Tours are stories that interlink multiple locations or buildings - so that you can take a series of buildings that have a story interconnecting them and place them in one 'post' - interlinking them with text.

As some simple examples, without much text to tell the stories right now:

Fire Stations of Durham:



Or if you were concerned about the fate of the Liberty Warehouse, and wanted to tell the story of all of the tobacco auction warehouses in Durham to make clear that Liberty No. 3 is the last surviving warehouse of a once-thriving tobacco sales market :



Or, a more complex tour would be the re-work I did of my rather massive Trinity College/East Campus post into this format:



The possibilities here are wide-ranging. Places your grandmother lived. Amusement Parks. Drive-ins from the 1950s. All the places a group has had their annual meetings.

They can be used to tell the story of an architect - i.e., my post about Milburn and Heister.



In each, the building index card is inserted amidst the text - and the reader can 'drill down' on the building of interest to them, and read the parcel history that has been part and, um, parcel of Endangered Durham.

It can also be used for literal tours - i.e., the Preservation Durham tour, DCVB tours, Trinity Park Home tours, etc. Once the Open Durham mobile application is out, users can download these tours and use their phones as 'tour guides'.

It becomes possible then to do various forms of augmented reality through a phone and the tour - although I don't think the tech is mature enough yet to make this really viable at the density of information contained in Open Durham, it is cool as a proof of concept.


100 block of East Main


Main and Mangum

Like the other content types already previewed, anyone can create tours. In a sense I think of this like Legos - I've created a bunch of varied blocks and presented a huge bag of them to you. You can reassemble them in any order you want to, as many different ways as you want.