Since the arrival of the smartphone 20 years ago, STQRY has made possible the telling of stories in self-guided audio tours where history happened.
Artificial intelligence now enables us to sharply increase the efficiency of tour production and give voice to noteworthy historic characters. Especially for creatives who enjoy history and love to write, this makes spatial storytelling an especially rewarding and promising career field.
A Six-Week Course That Teaches Our Entire Process
Over six Wednesday evenings on Zoom starting September 30, The Power of Spatial Storytelling will lead participants through through the Smartacus Method of producing compelling audio tours — creating knowledge refineries in Gemini Notebook, writing narratives in ChatGPT, voicing narratives in ElevenLabs, and triggering narratives on smartphones with STQRY.
Having completed Voices of Lake Luzerne, we’re putting our AI tools to work in telling stories of those who made history on the shores of Lake George during the French and Indian War and America’s War of Independence. We’ll demonstrate the collaboration that’s creating an immersive experience for the Lake George Battlefield Park Alliance.
We’ll also demonstrate an audio companion we’re producing for A Gangster’s Paradise, Greg Veitch’s chronicle of gambling, bootlegging, and corruption in Saratoga Springs. That’s a story we’re telling in Peter Finley’s Fight for the Rule of Law.
We’re developing our curriculum on AI at Work and supporting our tours on our main platform at Stories from Open Spaceand our Substack of the same name. We invite you to subscribe to each for instruction and inspiration.
We’re delighted to be partnering with STQRY. For historians and writers, their app opens a new frontier.
Work Samples
Voices of Lake Luzerne
Two years in development, Voices of Lake Luzerne taught us how to create the imagined voices of historic characters, assigning them to read any narrative we write. Dominic Giordano, Skidmore College Class of 2025, generated the voices of 14 notables in the remarkably rich history of Lake Luzerne.
We also discovered in this project the full power of NotebookLM as a metaphorical “knowledge refinery” in which we can upload and corral knowledge in myriad forms.
We invite you to download tour here on
Stories from Open Space.
Voices of the
Lake George Battlefield
After hearing Voices of Lake Luzerne, our friends at the Lake George Battlefield Park Alliance decided a similar tour would help them tell the compelling and complex story of Lake George’s role in the French & Indian War and the American Revolution. We’re enjoying the collaboration that aims to launch an audio tour of the battlefield on or around September 8, the 271st anniversary of the Battle of Lake George.
In the meantime, we’re telling the story of that battle and more on our Stories from Open Space Substack.
The Adirondack Railroad
In this tour, we’ll take those who love history on a driving tour from Thomas Durant’s Saratoga Springs Depot to the end of the 60-mile Adirondack Railroad at the North Creek Depot Museum.
We tell the first-person stories of a dozen historic figures in this tour, which features miles of western Warren County’s most scenic roads along the Hudson River. They describe how Durant’s ambitious railroad opened the Upper Hudson to industry and tourism.
We’re aiming to launch this tour on September 14 in sync with the 125th anniversary of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Midnight Ride” to the North Creek station or at least share a few stories on our Substack.
A Gangster’s Paradise
In the summer of 1926, Saratoga Springs was booming—and wide-open gambling, political corruption, and organized crime flourished behind the elegance of the racing season.
Then Peter A. Finley decided to challenge the “Saratoga Way.” His accusations reached Governor Al Smith and triggered a state investigation that put Saratoga Springs itself on trial.
In collaboration with Greg Veitch, we’re telling that story here and developing an audio companion to his book, A Gangster’s Paradise.
Here’s What You’ll Learn
Course Schedule
Six Wednesday Evenings Beginning September 30, 2026
One Hour Sessions Starting at 7 p.m.
Week 1 — September 30
The Power of Spatial Storytelling
What happens when a story knows where its audience is? We’ll introduce spatial storytelling and demonstrate how AI and GPS technology can bring history to life in the places where it happened. We’ll introduce the complete workflow and the projects we’ll build upon during the course.
Week 2 — October 7
Mining the Knowledge of Experts
Great storytelling begins with human knowledge. We’ll show how Basecamp, Zoom, and Otter work together to organize experts, capture their conversations, and turn what they know into searchable source material. We’ll conduct an expert-mining session and follow the knowledge from conversation to transcript.
Week 3 — October 14
Building the Knowledge Refinery
Now we bring everything together. We’ll use Gemini Notebook to aggregate books, articles, web pages, archival documents, expert interviews, and other sources into an organized research environment. We’ll demonstrate how to create a knowledge refinerythat can generate content in any format for ChatGPT to style and refine.
Week 4 — October 21
Turning Knowledge Into Story
We’ll use ChatGPT to transform research into compelling narratives designed to be heard rather than read. We’ll create third-person narratives, stories told in first-person by historical characters, quizzes, and magazine-length features to promote our tours.
Week 5 — October 28
Giving History a Voice—and a Place
We’ll use ElevenLabs to transform scripts into realistic narratives and STQRY to attach those stories to the places where they happened. We’ll explore voices, pronunciation, audio production, tour stops, maps, images, and GPS triggering. We’ll use STQRY’s new AI features to create a compelling tour.
Week 6 — November 4
From Story to Audience
Finally, we’ll use Substack to publish the stories behind our tours and build an audience for them. You’ll see how to combine all of these tools to create engaging first-person tours. If you wish to continue applying your skills in developing your own tours, we’ll explain how to partner with STQRY and Smartacus.
Faculty
Dan Forbush has a long-standing interest in collaborative communications, beginning with his 1992 launch of ProfNet, an email-based network that connected journalists with expert sources. Thirty years later, he’s continuing that exploration, using artificial intelligence to discover how expert knowledge can be researched, refined, and transformed into compelling new forms. Of all the formats he’s explored, he finds location-based audio storytelling especially powerful—bringing history to life in the places where it actually happened. Seeing an opportunity to sharply scale up, he’s developing this course to train a new generation of spatial storytellers with whom to develop a national network of tours in STQRY.
David Mahloy has been exploring the possibilities of place-based storytelling since 2020, when he created a self-guided audio tour of the Concord Covered Bridge Historic District in Smyrna, Georgia. With COVID limiting access to recording facilities, he taught himself to become the tour’s sound engineer, editor, and producer, building the original experience with little more than a laptop, microphone, and Audacity. Now David is leading the tour into its third generation in STQRY, combining artificial intelligence, historical research, new voices, and community collaboration to create a richer visitor experience. With a $1200 grant, Friends of the Concord Covered Bridge has joined the ElevenLabs Impact Programwith the aim of introducing a more engaging version of the tour this fall.
Join Us
Because we want to expand our network of spatial storytellers as rapidly as possible, we invite you to participate in our Zoom course at no charge and sign up up for a free subscription to AI at Work.
If you have in mind a tour you’d like to develop, please let us know and we’ll give your free workspace in Basecamp.
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