1

Cityguide company? Travel­startup? Touringguide­creator? Struggling with the following?

Offered: International Tourguide companies

Creating a tangible “project­body” for your organisation Internships and immersive learning­environments, Experiential learning and knowledgebuilding

Not just a tool or gimmick Manual excerpts

Semiotic staging of the tour­location An example from live­practice

How to talk with buildings and spaces Spatial tour­design

So, which opportunities does that provide for tours and guides? Tour­analysis

ANVIL Some tools used: CLICK

Learn more and get into contact!

2

Cityguide company? Travel-startup?

Touringguide-creator?

Struggling with the following? ­ How do I stay ahead of competition? ­ I want to be local but can't get the local knowledge I need; ­ I want to offer more alternative tours but I can "only" get the traditional tourist; ­ I can't seem to make local connections ­ The guides I use, aren't really local, and it shows; ­ There is too much change in local staff/guides; ­ I give tip­based tours but it doesn't pay; ­ I try to "lose the umbrella" but it doesn't seem to work; ­ I don't know exactly which group I'm aiming for, anymore. Reality 1: " I am a multinational, operating in x different European cities " Reality 2: " I am a talented entrepeneur and I know 7 people in 6 different European cities " Both realities might be the same reading of your reality.

Offered:

­ Professional training­ and production manual for Cityguide­companies! ­ Knowledge­integration: collaborative and experiential learning and transferance of

knowledge­creation ­ International collaborations ­ On­site implementation; ­ On­location training and practice

3

International Tourguide companies

Creating a tangible “project­body” for your

organisation

Adopting the role of local organisation and collaboration­partner greatly broadens

your perspectives. In service– and tour­design I look upon the local presence of

Original Europe Tours, as beeing a project based­organisation.

Although very specific aswell as general research is used and employed, the actual

location based activities such as location­production, guide­training and tour­training

and especially the inter­local strategies of selecting and producing networkpartners­

and activities, are very specific and custom tailored to your company and locations.

With project­integration you literally get all the good stuff:

1. Knowledge,

2. Local presence;

3. A poject­based organisation, without losing any of your brand image;

4. International connections that actually mean something,

5. Training manuals and practical production processes;

6. Full­on Tourguide training and practical tourguiding;

7. Tour production techniques;

8. A huge knowledgebase and local contacts that last longer than your

average barterdeal for a free beer in a pubcrawl!

Internships and immersive learning­environments,

4

We can create personalised short or long­term internships with local museums,

theatres, concerthalls et cetera.

Experiential learning and knowledgebuilding What better way to learn about the cities than to move around in it? Engage with

subcultures, listen to the multiple narratives and poetics the city has to offer. Let

guides learn from eachother, fromexperience, co­production and co­creation, and let

them pass the knowledge on to eachother.

1. Knowledge,

2. Local presence;

3. A poject­based organisation, without losing any of your brand image;

4. International connections that actually mean something,

5. Training manuals and practical production processes;

6. Full­on Tourguide training and practical tourguiding;

7. Tour production techniques;

8. A huge knowledgebase and local contacts that last longer than your

average barterdeal for a free beer in a pubcrawl!

Knowledgebuilding­ and creation can best be conducted within a more substantial

concept, which will benefit your services, products ands relations hugely.

Conducting guided tours in multiple European cities is far more complicated than it

might sound. Although deploying (more or less) local guides and (ex)travellers, it

does not give you the local exposure and familiarity you need, in order to keep

business up and running in the long run.

Companies like these, often lack a local grounding. Without having to become part of

the local establishment, it is highly recommended you root yourself within the local

community, in order to:

5

1. Facilitate learning­environments for your tourguides

2. Grow a trustworthy reputation within the local community of stakeholders

3. Become a full and professional local project­based organisation.

I design and produce concepts that…

facilitate forms of networked coproductions, over different cities and even

countries, by means of a collaborative organisational structure.

They require implementation on locations and cities and a unified structure of

tours­production, in which knowledge creation takes place through practical

interaction and informal learning, making it accessable to new and even temporary

tourguides and several stronger local leadership­roles. They create “communities of

practice.”

Not just a tool or gimmick The project­integrations I provide­ in combination with knowledgebuilding and

courses or as standalone projects, are not just a service by its definition alone, they

create living networks.

6

Manual excerpts

Semiotic staging of the tour­location Don't take tour­locations "as is". Everything there­ material, immaterial, gesture, behaviour and space, is a stakeholder in the production of the experience. Likewise ofcourse are the participants themselves and their behaviour and expectations. Framing is a common semiotic principle, realised by different semiotic resources, in different semiotic modes. It is not only between the elements of a visual composition, it is multi­modal. Further more, the meanings and mediating qualities of objects, places, shapes, odours, tastes, material qualities of objects and materials, acquire different loads, different meanings, with the passing of time and produce of behaviour.

An example from live­practice An Amsterdam tourguide told me, on one of the pub­crawls, a few participants wanted their money back, as they saw little added value in the tour they received. The tourguides in question have a very close relationship with of the pubs in the tour, and are equally well acquainted with other locations. That is precisely the core of the problem. Especially at xxx (location name deleted by author)­ where they are quite at home ­it is important when arriving with paying tourists, not to show too much connection to xxx, as it puts you on the commercial side of the deal­ teaming up with Schuim. It is important to note that not every exchange of drink is the same as a hospitable action. On entering, the guide

7

was greated with familiarity and utterances of financial exchange, which placed the guide on the same commercial level as the venueholder. They had 2 things working "against them" : The time of the pub tour and the place. Time is generally acknowledged to be "a drinking time", and the place is there for drinking. So neither of those elements are an act or van be perceived as an act of hospitality. But they CAN be tailored to be that. The host­guest­relationship involves a complex construction of exchange and reproduction. The exchange in which one party gives, the other one receiving, creates a host­guest­threshhold, through which other acts of hospitality can flow. If there is no connection in hospitality exchange, other than the promised free shots, there is only a linear commercial engagement left. The mutual agreement on receiving a product on payment, holds no provision for hospitality. It is simply commercial, not hospitable. If you're conducting a pub crawl or tour along restaurants or pubs, it is very important to have your participants feel like guests, through every modality time and place presents you with. That includes peer­to­peer, that includes making them feel like a local. You provide a physical space within transactions of food, drink and performances of self, have social functions in mediating relationships, affirming and reaffirming social structures, while helping to construct host and guests' identities. By providing the context, place and space to the participants, the interaction between them, will act as new ground for interaction. There has to be a certain distance between the host and the guests. Even in the most equal partnerships, the most peer­to­peer­relationships, there has to be a shared space­ a shared, lived and performed act of hospitality­production and consumption. There are numerous ways to conduct and stage a location, space and time, using for instance the material qualities of the location, or make sure you design the experience beforehand­ up to a point, that is. For instance, on entrance you can sit at a table with a "reserved" label on it, including special drinking glasses or tour­merchandising. This forces the guests to sit at a table and receive whatever is coming from the bar, from the guide and the room itself. Actually participating in producing drinks or food on the spot, as a guide, will get you lots and lots of kudo's. This setting has created a host­guest­threshhold which is very fluid and easy to cross, on both sides. Introducing a game­element works in the same way. It also gets your guests to utilise the room again. Reciprocating also works through material subjects, through food and drink, through attributes on the table, the music, the aurality of te place. How to talk with buildings and spaces Many alternative spaces in cities, are either based in buildings formerly belonging to­ and embodying influential iinstitutions, or neighbour these very spaces. An example anyone will recognise, is that of the empty church buildings.

8

Close­proximity cultural enclaves in cities, constantly claim new territory, causing territorial shifts within cities. This claim is not neccesarily a physical one, or based on harsh arguments, let alone revolutions. An empty church can be looked upon as being a ‘conceived space’, in terms of its physical reality; being abandoned and empty. Or it is seen and experienced as being a ‘produced space’, a space that is experienced by the neighbouring community, living around the empty building. By that experience, it is acknowledged that the former catholic community for whom the church was initially built, has been replaced by a mosaic of cultures, of which the church, its history, users and their bodies, are part. Spatial tour­design Spatial experience­design is a relatively new profession, drawing on techniques from several sciences and modes of knowledge, such as human centred design, urban theories, marketing and architecture. Spatial tour­design can take more forms. It combines spatial reality with corporeal experiences of the self, within the built environment. In cultural geography, urban semiotics and urban morphology, the experiency cular meaning for the tourist industry, as it is a central feature of the experience economy. Scenographic approach and experience­scapes Although many “main­stream” tourists do come for the cannonised cultural narrative, especially backpackers and to some extent flashpackers will want something more locally brewed. It is important to note that also more mainstream tourists want special and local content, but they will react differently to the boundaries of the services the touringguides offer. Urban planners, local governments and policy makers­ when wanting to revitalise places that are ‘decaying’, they try to create attractive experience­scapes and compete with eachother to attract tourists.

So, which opportunities does that provide for tours and guides? Basically, as described above, the city tells stories through its structure, movement, growth, language and poetics. It is understood through multiple modalities. The main tourist attractions­ in the form of buildings ­have more than one story to tell. The general cannonised version is still relevant, but due to changing use and perception of urban spaces, the buildings are more about basic historic concepts and era’s rather than actual events. Elements of high culture are resampled and rather than signifying a single style, it is an architecture of concepts and remains an inexhaustible repertoire of connections for stories and narratives. As a tour­creator you can utilise the underlying storystructure to form new ones, weave context using them and using existing knowledge or preassumptions to create meaning and collaborative meaningmaking within the group. For instance, starting from a big square, you could start off with stories of a witch trial and executions on that location. Using the larger historic buildings, you can outline the story

9

further­ using them as ‘chapters’ and go into alleys and backways, to literally dive into the small and biographical world of some of the people, being accused of witchcraft. Tour­analysis

ANVIL

10

Multimodality has become a crossroads where many disciplines meet. Multimodality refers to the merge

of various sources of information, of multiple channels of communication, auditory (words, prosody,

dialogue acts, rhetorical structure) and visual (gesture, posture, graphics). In human-computer interface

design, a multimodal interface is the natural extension of spoken dialogue systems where the user can

communicate with speech and gesture and, in return, gets multimodal output. Annotation of multimodal

dialogue on audiovisual media (video) is crucial for case-studies, training (machine learning), testing and

evaluation. In quite a different area, we find similar needs. Psychologists, ethnologists and

anthropologists have long been concerned with the systematic exploration of human behavior,

specifically the relation between nonverbal behavior and speech

In particular, it was designed to accommodate a large number of different schemes that deal with, e.g.,

prosody;,

syntax;

dialogue acts;

utterance/turn segmentation;

and also gesture;

posture and

other behavioral units.

http://www.anvil-software.org/

http://www.anvil-software.org/#

http://www.dfki.de/˜kipp/anvil

See these resources:

Comparison of multumodal annotation tools

http://blog.la-clappeye.nl/conceptingknowledge/annotation-for-video-list-of-free-tools/

http://blog.la-clappeye.nl/conceptingknowledge/advene-annotate-digital-video-exchange-on-the-net/

11

Some tools used: CLICK

Learn more and get into contact!

Twitter:

@La_clappeye en

@hostelconcepts

La Clappeye Creative Concepting

t.a.v. Renk van Oyen

www.blog.la­clappeye.nl

www.la­clappeye.nl

p/a Sint­Lucasstraat 16

5211 ZG, ‘s­Hertogenbosch, Noord­Brabant, Nederland

Mobiel/Mobile/Whatsapp : +31 (0)62­4805848

https://www.facebook.com/acts.laclappeye

https://www.facebook.com/Hostelconcepting

12

13