This Monday, my friend Dimitri and I went on a hike through the woods of the Bear Mountain State Park on a journey to find Doodletown, a mining town abandoned in the mid-sixties which has become a bit of a tourist attraction.
While this is technically a "ghost town," it doesn't quite live up to the implications that that name carries. When I think of a ghost town, I think of rickety old abandoned buildings and the excitement of exploring the ruins of a time gone by. Doodletown, in contrast, consists of some roads, foundations, rock walls and graves. We knew this going in, so we weren't disappointed, but ideally we would have been able to explore the architecture.
Helpfully, signs were posted around the area, many with either drawings or photos of the
destroyed buildings and descriptions of the names and occupations of the inhabitants. We
amused ourselves by making up stories about the citizens of Doodletown and expanding them as we wandered down the streets and through the graveyards ("There are as many graveyards as there are houses!" I mused. There did seem to be quite a lot of graveyards for such a small town!)
The signs were helpful, as I said, but they got me thinking about augmented reality, something we discussed in our "Social Networking in Libraries" class. This was the perfect place to implement something like that. The locations of the houses were relatively free of obstruction and there were photos or drawings, as I said, of nearly all of the buildings. It would have been great if instead of looking at a sign with a picture of the house, you could hold up some sort of device (such as a smart phone) or look through special glasses and see a virtual representation of the house where it stood. According to the 2010 Horizon Report, "An application currently in development by the EU-funded iTacitus project (http://itacitus.org/) will allow visitors to pan across a location — the Coliseum, say — and see what it looked like during an historical event, complete with cheering spectators and competing athletes." Doodletown may not be the Coliseum, but the application of Augmented Reality in any historical location is an exciting prospect.
And all those graveyards? Remember this article? Maybe we could use technology to really make this place a "ghost town."
