By Amy Kamosa
The Harvard Visitor's Center has launched a new Visit Harvard mobile app that will provide free, self-guided, self-paced themed walking tours of the University. The first tour released on the app is a historic walking tour of the Cambridge Campus. It incorporates 14 locations throughout campus that highlight some of the most important buildings and events of the University's nearly 400-year history.
In 2019, approximately 8 million people visited Harvard Square, and more than 35,000 visitors took part in public and private tours of the Harvard Campus. When the campus shut down in early 2020 due to the pandemic, Robin Parker, Associate Director of Harvard's Visitor Center, worked with colleagues and a small team of undergraduate tour guides led by Fari Mbaye '22 and Madi Fabber '22, to create a series of live, student-led online virtual tours as an option for would-be visitors who were no longer able to come to the Square.
The mobile app tour builds on the content developed for those virtual offerings, but provides a more accessible option that visitors can use to guide themselves while they visit campus in-person, or from the comfort of their own couch anywhere in the world.
"Our student tour guides really led the charge on the creation of these tours. Some of the images they've included have never been seen before, and the content weaves a really compelling story through Harvard's history," said Parker.
It was that storytelling aspect of the mobile tour that Mbaye said was the most challenging and important aspect of translating the live tour content to the app. "When we, as tour guides, give live tours, we're really just working off bullet points and we weave our own details and jokes in as we go. With the app, we had to turn the content into a complete story that people would want to read and listen to," she explained.
If app users choose to visit the campus, they can follow the geo-location tags on the app to travel point-to-point. The total distance of the tour is approximately one mile and should take approximately one hour to complete—including travel between stops, but the self-guided nature of the app means that users can complete this circuit at their own pace.
According to Visitor Center Manager Maggie Dawson, the ease of use and simplicity of design was an intentional choice to ensure that the app was as accessible as possible. Additional features like geo-location tagging, audio tracks with transcript, and image alternative text for visually-impaired users, all enable a large range of users to interact with the app in their own way, and according to Dawson, inclusion will continue to be a priority as more content is added. "Our hope is to tell many parts of the Harvard story to as many audiences as possible. Not only are additional tours in development, including a Black History Tour, and Arts Walk, and a Women's History tour, but we are expanding the tour languages as well," she explained.
The Visit Harvard App is available for download through the Apple Store and Google Play. There is also a desktop version of the app you can access here.