ABSTRACT
The ubiquity of digital technologies intensely affects the way tourists perceive urban destinations, as the physical and virtual worlds are inseparable. In the context of self-guided tours, smartphones connect places with site-specific information and guide the user's perception toward ‘meaningful’ objects. A self-guided tour provided by Freiburg Living History serves as a case example for the following study. By introducing a phenomenological approach, the interactions between traveling bodies, urban settings, and mobile media can be analyzed. Augmented reality technologies, audio files, and textual descriptions facilitate a feeling of time travel. Jason Farman's concept of the “sensory-inscribed” body serves as the main theoretical foundation. In addition, qualitative research methods, in the form of participatory observations and in-depth interviews with the app inventors, are applied to analyze the reading processes of traveling bodies. Nora Winsky's chapter illustrates how the interplay of material and immaterial elements stimulates users’ imaginations and impressions of how the cityscape changes. Especially the audio sequences with narratives about former living conditions guide the tourists’ auditory perception by adding a narrative layer onto the city's physical infrastructure. The technical features create bodily feelings for the atmosphere of Freiburg in the Middle Ages and simultaneously for today's cityscape.
