Guilford Courthouse Battlefield, an historic site, wanted to convey the story of a pivotal battle of the American Revolutionary War to the members of their audience who are blind and low vision. This would have required the creation of eight tactile models in order to show the sequential positions of the troops. This was impractical both in terms of cost and space. A novel solution was devised which uses one tactile topographical model to show the geographical features that influenced the battle. It also includes an 8-page booklet containing raised tactile graphic maps, which correspond to the topographical model, and show the sequential movements of the troops. Additionally, an audio recording was created with a separate audio track to explain each page of the tactile booklet. In order to make this exhibit also useful to the sighted audience, fiber optic lights, which become illuminated sequentially when the buttons for the audio recordings are pushed, are imbedded into the tactile topographical map. Taken separately none of these techniques is ground-breaking, but the combination of a tactile topographical map, a tactile graphic book, a multi-track descriptive audio recording and fiber optic lights, into a single interpretive exhibit is a unique, and relatively low tech/low cost solution to a challenging interpretive message.
This “Model plus Booklet and Audio” combination has applications for representing numerous series of sequential events: the movement of borders between countries; the movement of continents on the earth’s surface or the construction of a building; the list goes on.
Prior knowledge of topic assumed: Low
Contains advanced technical content: No
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