Supporting the Reader in the Wild

Abstract

This paper explores the potential features and functionality of software to support 'literary tourism'-a type of cultural tourism that focuses on real-world settings associated with fictional works and the authors' lives. We explore the research literature on literary tourism to create a set of five literary tourist personas, and to tease out potential design and functionality for applications to support these different categories of literary tourists. We then analyze a set of current websites and applications aimed at the literary tourist against the personas, as a test of the usefulness of the categories in identifying potential gaps in literary tourism support.