Visitors at the Shawnee Town 1929 Museum can now take tours of the open-air exhibitions on their own, with the help of an app.
This week, the museum launched its Shawnee Tour guided tour app, which assists people on self-guided tours of the town portion of the museum. The app provides a tour map and audio clips that coincide with what people are viewing at each stop.
“It’s great for when a visitor just walks in the door and they want to self-guide (or) they don’t want the hour-long walk-around tour,” said Hannah Howard, curator of education for the museum. “(It’s also good) if they have kids with a lot of energy and they just don’t feel like they’ll have the attention span or they just like being solo.”
The app lets people create their own tour
Designed as a “choose your own adventure” experience, the app guides people through an audio-only tour of the town portion of the historic site, Howard said.
This allows sightseers to choose the section they want to explore, from the Garrett Grocery Store to the Bousman Barber Shop.
Using archival photos and video from the museum’s collection, as well as collections from the Johnson County Museum and Kansas City Public Library, the app gives visitors context of each space.
Still, museum staff want to make sure visitors keep their focus on looking around them in real life instead of staring at their phones while on the tour, Howard said.
“You’ll hear directions on how to move through the spaces and items to look for on the shelf, and why that enhances the story that they’re listening to, and who are the people that would have been interacting with that space,” she said. “The technology is simply a tool, and we can use it for the benefit of our overall mission.”
A tour guide for the farm portion of the museum will be available in 2026.
The app has been in development for more than 3 years
When Howard was hired by the museum in 2021, she immediately dove into Shawnee’s rich history in the 1920s and wanted to figure out a new way to tell it.
“I really noticed that we had so many amazing stories that we get to tell in detail on the guided tours and the living history programs,” she said.
Working with the New York-based app developer STQRY, they developed a platform that goes beyond the text-based plaques and signs visitors traditionally see at a museum, Howard said. Hopefully, the platform also reaches more people, she added.
“As an educator, that gives me a creative challenge to figure out the best way to communicate all of these stories and to really make it connect, rather than just writing a text panel, or creating very wordy, adult-centered content,” she said. “(I thought) ‘What are the ways in which I can make this engaging, make this immersive (and) blend it with the interactive nature of our spaces?'”
The app uses voices from the past and present
To capture the voices of the past, Howard transcribed audio from interviews with people who lived in Shawnee in the 1920s and ’30s.
Because many of the interviews were recorded on cassette in the early 2000s, the audio fidelity was not up to par with the museum’s standards, so Howard asked city and museum staff and local volunteers to help recite and record them.
“The decision was made that we really will use the modern day voices of the Shawnee community to capture the memories and the stories of the residents that we’re trying to highlight here,” she said. “I love the kind of symbolism of having the modern-day community record the memories of their history and put it into this app.”
The app is a living document
Because the museum continues to unearth new stories and media capturing Shawnee’s history, Howard said adding and updating content on the app will be an ongoing process.
“After a couple years of kind of continuing the research, it became clear that the job’s never going to be done because we have so much to learn and explore. But we had to just kind of put a pin in things and be like, ‘OK, this is good. We have to move into the next phase,'” she said.
As visitors use the app, the museum staff will be able to add more content, as well as see what areas of the museum people visited the most and what problems they encountered. Those key metrics will inform how the staff develops the farm portion of the app.
“We wanted to go ahead and get the town out there and get that going,” Howard said. “We didn’t want to hold that back while we developed the farm side. And we’ll also get some really great feedback from the community over the next year, and that will help us as we develop the farm (and) make sure we’re going in the right direction with what the public needs.”
As people use the app, Howard said she hopes they get an immersive experience and are reminded that technology can be a tool for telling history, not a distraction.
“I’m excited for people to get to use technology to better understand the past, and I think that it can really help us. It’s not even about reaching a different generation, it’s about reaching the stories that we weren’t able to tell in the spaces as they were designed,” she said. “If we are able to use technology to help further that mission, then it’s only going to benefit everybody.”
