Increasing Public Awareness Through Technology

The bells and towers are key components of Venice’s culture and history, but are

currently underappreciated. In order to increase public awareness of the state of the bells and bell towers, we improved the Venice Bells web application implemented by previous projects and hosted at bells.veniceprojectcenter.org and developed interactive ways to advertise the bell towers to the general public. Our main contribution was significantly improving the underlying infrastructure of the app to make it more compatible with mobile browsing and easier to work with for future teams. Additionally, we improved the aesthetics and extended the set of core features of the app to deliver a more complete user experience. Finally, we devised ways to attract attention to the bells and bell towers through an eye-catching collection box and flyers advertising the web app that can be placed in churches.

3.4.1 Updates to the Web Application

The previous version of the bells.veniceprojectcenter.org web app (the “Bells App”) was a functional tool, and provided a solid foundation for our work. Before our changes, the landing page of the app was a map of the Venetian Lagoon with all bell towers marked in colors

corresponding to what data is available for each bell/tower. The user was able to filter the towers by various types of data fields. The user could see some basic info for a bell tower by clicking on an icon on the maps, and could then proceed to the tower’s individual data page to view the full database entry. These features provided a solid foundation and were kept in our updated version of the Bells App. However, while these map features were a good starting point, we believed there was room for improvement in terms of the aesthetics, feature set, and site mapping. A complete documentation of the updated Bells App can be found in Section 4.3.

39 Our main contribution alongside of the new features was re-creating the Bells App using the React JavaScript library to make it more accessible on mobile browsing and easier to work with for future teams. The previous version of the app was merely satisfactory when viewed on mobile; the map and icons loaded properly, but it was difficult to zoom in on the map without resizing the whole web page. Furthermore, navigating the map with a touch screen was difficult.

The previous version used the AngularJS framework, which works great for PC browsing but is not ideal on mobile platforms. Transferring the application front end to React improved its overall smoothness and functionality both on PC and mobile browsers due to the unique way it renders and updates components on the web page. Moreover, React is easier to learn than Angular, meaning that it will be easier for future projects to continue development and

maintenance of the Bells App, if so desired. Because AngularJS and React are quite different in architecture and syntax, we essentially had to build the new version of the app from the ground up. Once we achieved the base functionality that the previous version had, we began to add our new features and design changes. We used the WebStorm JavaScript development environment from JetBrains to allow us to easily install the necessary JavaScript libraries and build a

complete app from scratch.

Our transition to React also included a transition to a new map service under the direction of Nicola Musolino at SerenDPT. While the previous version loaded its maps from Mapbox, we have chosen to use Leaflet to load maps from OpenStreetMap instead. The latter are completely free to use, while Mapbox only allows free use up to a certain number of views each month, after which the VPC would be charged for continued use. In order to use Leaflet in conjunction with React, we used the React-Leaflet library, an open source JavaScript package that integrates Leaflet maps into React. Both Leaflet and React-Leaflet have fairly good documentation to allow future programmers to learn how to use the libraries.

3.4.2 Advertising the Venice Bells Web Application

In order for our revamped Bells App to be able to increase public awareness of the bells and bell towers, it must have an audience. In order to advertise the Bells App, we worked with Andrea Toffanello, the graphic designer at SerenDPT, to design a flyer for this Bells App. As we surveyed towers and explored the city, we noticed that many churches are open to the public

40 during the day and it is not uncommon for passersby to briefly stop and admire the inside of a church. In an effort to drive traffic to the Bells App, the flyers are intended to be placed on bulletin boards or ticket booths of publicly accessible churches in Venice to catch the eyes of visitors.

3.4.3 Innovating Donation Collection with 3D Printing

Just as we tried to draw attention to the Bells App using on-site advertising, we attempted to draw attention to donation boxes using models of bell towers. We noticed that many of the larger publicly accessible churches in Venice have collection bins for donations for when visitors come inside to see the church. As an example of something that could be done for more churches around the city, we created a 3D model of the bell tower of San Geremia to be printed and used as a collection box. We used Solidworks to model the bell tower (Figure 4.21) and were advised by Gabriel Rodriguez, a WPI student, since none of us had any prior experience with 3D

modeling. The model is hollow to hold coins, and can be separated at the bottom to empty its contents. The overall intent is that models of bell towers may catch the eyes of visitors and draw their attention to donation/collection areas.

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