Excavating the secrets, scandals, and untold stories hiding below the surface of life, and giving voice to the characters who make or made those hiStories happen.
And I don't mean by watching reruns of the Flintstones.
In my last post, I mentioned that my work for Time Traveler Tours & Tales is only one of my jobs. I also work in collections at the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. The site is famous for being one of the only museums in the country that has a live paleontological excavation on site. And here's the thing:
We all know the thrill of being involved in a worthwhile project. Even better if it’s groundbreaking. Better still if you’ve got a foot in the door from the beginning.
I’m talking about my role with Time Traveler Tours and the part I’ve played in the development of our coming Story Tour to Florence:
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF GIANTS: MICHELANGELO, THE MEDICI & DAVID
It’s now on its way to the app stores (!) and Sarah is on her way to a much-needed vacation. So we thought it a fine time to share the serendipity that brought me to the team, first as Museum Liaison and now Community Manager.
All the creative assets are completed and loaded into the app; all the pages are designed; all the buttons added; all the images are hotspotted. Everything is wired together. Three rounds of beta-testing have brought excellent changes and primed the engine.
All that's left is to write the App Store Meta Data. But here's the rub: I'm hopeless with metadata.
Metadata is "data that describes other data." And that's the kind of definition that just makes this already very tired head spin. More to the point: It's keywords and other snippets of information that make it possible for you to search for and locate a specific document in the intertoobz.
Great news from TTT&T Head-quarters: We’ve just completed the first full build of In the Footsteps of Giants, our time-traveling tour to Renaissance Florence, and it's looking great!
As luck would have it, we seem to be launching at exactly the right time too. Who knew?
Last Tuesday, I received this gorgeous message from a young fan, one of the original pilot-testers of Beware Madame la Guillotine. She wrote:
“Sarah, have you seen Pokémon GO? Your Time Traveler Tours are the same thing, only better, because they teach cool facts and skills!”
Her message was like a magical salve. I'd been hacking for many days straight at that point and a fatigue reminiscent of my Kickstarter days had settled in. I'd also been feeling a bit hopeless -- perhaps because of the fatigue? -- in the face of the violence and intolerance that has gripped our world. These enthusiastic words immediately strengthened my resolve to harness today's popular technologies to Turn History On.
Two days ago, I woke in a cold sweat with a to-do list as long as my braccio.* We're going full-speed ahead on building the app right now and while I'm thrilled with the results, it's a lot of work. So I wasn't really relishing the idea of taking time from my busy app-building schedule to compose our weekly blog and newsletter.
