ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to report a study of people’s experiences of digital history tours in Melbourne and London, and examines whether and how they might bring kinds of engagement with places. It shows that three digital tours to study—two in Melbourne and one in London—and evaluated their use by 29 people in all. The first app-based tour was created and published as part of Museums Victoria’s ‘Walking Through History’ series, and developed by MyTours, a New Zealand-based software company. The second app evaluated with 11 local participants, was also in the click-stop format. The third app, ‘Soho Stories’, is set in London’s West End and was created by the United Kingdom’s National Trust. In Dean MacCannell’s classic book The Tourist, he described an emerging generation of tourists in the 1960s and 1970s who seek out authentic experiences but are often presented with various forms of ‘staged authenticity’ in tourism sites.
