Heritage stories, pinned where they happened
Overheard is about where you are. It is a map of stories about the place you're standing in. Tap a pin, hit play, and you hear the story behind the building, the river, the street name. Some of those notes are recorded by people walking past. The rest I pull together in the Overheard Archive.
I built this because passing through a city and not knowing what you're looking at is a small frustration I've had more times than I can count. The aim is to make the kind of thing a local might tell you off the cuff available at the spot where it actually matters.
Archive notes are short heritage stories adapted from publicly available sources and voiced using text-to-speech. Every archive note links back to the source it was adapted from, so you can read the long version and check the details yourself. I didn't want a layer of mystery between the listener and the original.
The first set is drawn from Wikipedia and from public heritage archives Department of Conservation, Christchurch City Libraries, Peeling Back History, regional papers and the like. The source link sits at the bottom of each archive note, under the transcript.
Archive notes are pinned to the spot the story is set on. When that spot no longer exists, they go to the closest identifiable place you can actually stand at a museum holding an artefact, for instance, is a valid pin for the artefact's story. If a story can't be pinned to a real coordinate it gets dropped, not parked on a city centre. A bad pin misleads someone walking to it more than no pin at all.
That said, things will slip through. If something on the map looks wrong a misplaced pin, a muddled date, a story that doesn't belong I'd rather know about it. See the contact section below.
Sign in, long-press anywhere on the map, and record. User recordings are tagged with your name and avatar. They aren't part of the archive, and they don't carry a source link just your voice on a spot you know something about.
I don't have a team checking these. If you spot a pin that's in the wrong place, points at a story it shouldn't, or just reads off, reach out and I'll pull it or fix it. The quickest ways through are Twitter or email: