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University of the West of England, BristolOver the last decade, digital mobile technologies have played a leading role in transforming the visitor experience at European sites of heritage.2 Applications for phone and tablet have allowed heritage site managers greater control over the delivery of interpretative content by triggering automatic audio or visual interventions. Paradoxically, mobile apps have simultaneously permitted visitors an impression of greater agency in environments less cluttered with signage and props, and less reliant on their ability to find the right page in the guidebook. Apps invite forms of content design in which greater degrees of interactivity and even personalisation are privileged. In the educational sector, this potential is slowly gaining recognition and a number of institutions have begun to experiment with locative app design to change the ways students engage with, understand and evaluate primary historical evidence.3 However, most critical commentary on these processes has been dominated to date by reflections on form rather than content and purpose, and little in the way of systematic analysis of locative experiential interpretation at historic sites using mobile devices has been attempted. 4 The question we should in any case be asking perhaps, is not 'how can we use mobile and digital technologies to get larger and more diverse audiences through the door?', but 'how can we use mobile and digitally enhanced forms of interpretation to change the questions we ask and the ways in which we engage with historic sites?' There are, broadly, three main ways in which digital technologies, some mobile and some static, have been considered for use in the heritage environment: as an augmented guidebook and information resource, as a tool for enhanced simulation, and (less frequently) as a tool for changing the rules by which we construct and define historical knowledge at heritage sites. This essay reviews each of these approaches in turn and argues the case for a deeper engagement with the third. Locative mobile technologies, it is suggested, have the potential to positively transform some of the ways in which visitors to heritage sites are addressed, challenging the notion that historical data is best presented for passive consumption, and promoting, as an alternative, an experiential model of knowledge built upon agency, dialogue and informed choice. Ghosts in the Garden, an experimental project in which the author was a researcher and participant, is presented here as a case study. Its rationale was to disrupt both the form and the content of traditional interpretative approaches to the use of mobile, firstly by concealing the technology, secondly by requiring collective evaluation and decision making, and thirdly by commissioning original historical content 'from below'. Downloadable tour appsIn the first approach considered here, phone and tablet apps, freely downloadable from the Apple IStore and Google Play, dominate the field, and companies like Audio Tours, Treasure Trails an...

Disclaimer UWE has obtained warranties from all depositors as to their title in the material deposited and as to their right to deposit such material. UWE makes no representation or warranties of commercial utility, title, or fitness for a particular purpose or any other warranty, express or implied in respect of any material deposited. UWE makes no representation that the use of the materials will not infringe any patent, copyright, trademark or other property or proprietary rights. UWE accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual property rights in any material deposited but will remove such material from public view pending investigation in the event of an allegation of any such infringement. PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR TEXT.http://journals.cambridge. Abstract Agricultural incendiarism was a perennial factor in social relations in some areas of nineteenth-century rural England and is often understood by historians as an expression of 'covert' social protest. However, such categorisation risks oversimplifying what may be diverse and locally specific factors. In 1830, the high sheriff of Somerset presided over England's last ever scene of crime execution at the Somerset village of Kenn following the conviction of three labourers for incendiarism. This requires explanation. Crime scene executions were not only anachronistic and rare, but unfashionably brutal and expensive by this time, and were not undertaken lightly; moreover arson was soon to be removed from the list of capital statutes. Yet, oddly, the case was not obviously connected to the agenda of 'social protest' characterised by Swing as it emerged just months afterwards; indeed understanding the behaviour of the county authorities here requires an appreciation of a considerably more specific and parochial set of concerns and conditions. The Kenn incendiaries, it is argued here, were put to death at the scene of their crime to protect and uphold the principle of informing in a rural community whose dysfunctional social relations made the practice a judicial necessity. * * * * * Despite its frequency across early nineteenth-century rural England, relatively few attempts have been made by historians to quantify or fully understand agricultural incendiarism. The importance of arson as an indicator of social tension in rural affairs is nevertheless undeniable. David Jones traced a total of 671 assize committals for arson in ten Southern counties during the 1840s alone; a figure which at least confirms the seriousness with which contemporaries viewed an offence which, in Jones's phrase, had by then assumed 'epidemic proportions'.

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