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Thursday 20 October 2011

Digital Seminar - App Masterclass

This week I attended an excellent case study, as part of the Arts Council/BBC Building Digital Capacity for the Arts programme, about Faber & Faber's The Waste Land App for the iPad. It is a beautifully done App that features the poem in text but also read by various people including Alec Guinness, Fiona Shaw (voice and film), T. S. Elliot and others, supported by notes, video interviews, the manuscript and archive photos. What really impressed was the immense care that had gone into the build. The development took a year and was costly but the App quickly recovered its costs and moved into profit as well as generating very positive reviews. An App like this based on a text could have been put together without much thought for supporting material but this one truly enhances the pleasure of reading the poem. The seminar itself was very detailed and the participants from Faber and Faber and the developers Touch Press were remarkably generous and open with information about the process, budgets and what they had learned during the App's development.

The whole seminar was filmed and will be made available on the website.

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