I made this interactive guide as part of my final thesis project for my MPhil at Trinity College Dublin in Digital Humanities & Culture (a field of study that applies digital technologies to enhance and transform traditional research methods & other applications within the broad humanities field). My intention was to create a guide focused at primarily curious “western” tourists like I once was to quickly understand the fundamentals of Bulgarian Christian Orthodox art via a tablet device (this was around the time that iPad Minis were introduced) that they can reference while on site at a church to help them quickly decipher and therefore better understand and appreciate this ancient visual language that is distinct from Protestant and Catholic traditions.

Before creating my own interactive guide I analyzed five mobile apps guides that had recently been released by leading art museums: Getty Museum in LA, Minneapolis Institute of Arts (where I was previously an education intern), the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Prado Museum in Madrid, and the National Museum of Art in DC. I created a standardized instrument to create both quantitative and qualitative data that I could analyze and draw conclusions from. Then I applied the findings from this research to enhance the design of my own “app”, which ended up being an interactive iBook (a now unfortunately defunct Apple software) due to time, technology, and budgetary constraints (I did my entire thesis in one crazy summer!).

Below are a selection of pages from my interactive guide. While I see a few loathed errors now (especially in typesetting), I’m really proud of this guide and in retrospect quite impressed that I pulled all this off, including writing a twenty-thousand-word accompanying thesis on top of the entire contents of this guide, in a few short frenzied months.

You can access a PDF of the entire guide below (minus a few bits that are missing such as scrolling text and expandable text blurbs).