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Interactive
Storytelling
10th International Conference
on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2017
Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, November 14–17, 2017, Proceedings
123
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 10690
Commenced Publication in 1973
Founding and Former Series Editors:
Gerhard Goos, Juris Hartmanis, and Jan van Leeuwen
Editorial Board
David Hutchison
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Takeo Kanade
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Josef Kittler
University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
Jon M. Kleinberg
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Friedemann Mattern
ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
John C. Mitchell
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Moni Naor
Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
C. Pandu Rangan
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India
Bernhard Steffen
TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany
Demetri Terzopoulos
University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Doug Tygar
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Gerhard Weikum
Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7409
Nuno Nunes Ian Oakley
•
Interactive
Storytelling
10th International Conference
on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2017
Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, November 14–17, 2017
Proceedings
123
Editors
Nuno Nunes Valentina Nisi
Instituto Superior Técnico University of Madeira
Lisbon Funchal
Portugal Portugal
Ian Oakley
Ulsan National Institute of Science
and Technology
Ulsan
Korea (Republic of)
LNCS Sublibrary: SL3 – Information Systems and Applications, incl. Internet/Web, and HCI
This volume contains the proceedings of ICIDS 2017: the 9th International Conference
on Interactive Digital Storytelling. ICIDS 2017 took place at the Madeira Interactive
Technologies Institute (Madeira-ITI), Funchal, Madeira Island, Portugal. This year the
conference included several categories and tracks such as workshops, demos, posters, a
doctoral consortium, and an international art exhibition.
ICIDS is the premier annual venue that gathers researchers, developers, practitioners,
and theorists to present and share the latest innovations, insights, and techniques in the
expanding field of interactive storytelling and the technologies that support it. The field
regroups a highly dynamic and interdisciplinary community, in which narrative studies,
computer science, interactive and immersive technologies, the arts, and creativity
converge to develop new expressive forms in a myriad domains that include artistic
projects, interactive documentaries, cinematic games, serious games, assistive tech-
nologies, edutainment, museum science, and advertising, to mention a few.
The ICIDS conference has a long-standing tradition of bringing together academia,
industry, designers, developers, and artists into an interdisciplinary dialogue through a
mix of keynote lectures, panels, long and short article presentations, posters, work-
shops, lively demo sessions, and the art exhibition. Additionally, since 2010, ICIDS
has been hosting an international art exhibition open to the general public. This year we
inaugurated a new entry, the doctoral consortia, enabling PhD students to receive
feedback on their ongoing research.
The review process was extremely selective and many good papers could not be
accepted for the final program. Altogether, we received 88 submissions in all the
categories. Out of the 65 submitted full and short papers, the Program Committee
selected only 16 long papers and four short paper submissions for presentation and
publication, which corresponds to an acceptance rate of 31%. In addition, we accepted
13 submissions as posters, and five submissions as demonstrations, including some
long and short papers that were offered the opportunity to participate in another cat-
egory. The ICIDS 2017 program featured contributions from 47 different institutions in
18 different countries worldwide.
The conference program also hosted three invited speakers:
Jay Bushman an award-winning producer and writer of transmedia and
platform-independent entertainment. He was the Transmedia producer and a writer for
“The Lizzie Bennet Diaries” and a groundbreaking video and social media modern-
ization of “Pride and Prejudice” – the show won an Emmy Award for Outstanding
Original Interactive Program and had over 70 million views on YouTube. He was the
cocreator and co-showrunner of the sequel interactive series “Welcome to Sanditon.” As
a writer and producer at Fourth Wall Studios, Jay helped to create the Emmy-winning
series “Dirty Work,” and wrote and created the show “Airship Dracula.” Jay has worked
on interactive campaigns for properties including “Game of Thrones,” “Silicon Valley,”
“Terminator: Genisys,” and “Arrival.” He has also worked as a writer and consultant
VI Preface
for major studios and networks, including Google, HBO, Disney, Paramount, Bad
Robot, and Lucasfilm. An innovator and leader in the transmedia community, he pushes
the boundaries of next-generation entertainment. Jay was one of the original founders
of the professional organization Transmedia Los Angeles (now StoryforwardLA), and
one publication even named him “The Epic Poet of Twitter.” Jay’s keynote was on
“Transmedia Storytelling: No, Really, What Is It?” The joke goes like this: “Put two
transmedia creators in a room together, and pretty quickly you’ll have three definitions
of transmedia.” Everybody who uses the terms means something a little different. With
stories from the trenches of making transmedia projects over the last ten years, this talk
delved into what people mean when they say “transmedia” and why nobody can agree.
The second keynote speaker was Pia Tikka, Adjunct Professor of New Narrative
Media and a professional filmmaker. She is the principal investigator of the NeuroCine
research project and has held a position as a director at Crucible Studio, Department of
Media, Aalto University. In the field of naturalistic neurosciences, she has acted as a
core member of the directory group of the neuroscience research project aivoAALTO
at Aalto University. Her research in neurocinematics focuses on studying the neural
basis of storytelling and creative imagination. She has contributed to neuroeconomics
as a member of the advisory board of the NeuroService research project at the Laurea
University of Applied Sciences, funded by Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for
Innovation. She is a Fellow of Life in the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving
Image. Currently, her research team NeuroCine applies neuroimaging methods to study
the neural basis of narrative cognition. Pia’s keynote was on “Systemic Second Order
Authorship for Creating Complex Narratives – A Neurophenomenological Approach.”
In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the theoreticians of interactive narrative
celebrated the birth of the creative audience at the corpse of the author, echoing Roland
Barthes’s words in La mort de l’auteur (1967). But this may have been premature. The
notion of second-order authorship allows for the reformulation of creative authorship in
a manner inspired by the neurophenomenology and systemic enactive mind theory by
Francisco Varela and colleagues (1991). This was exemplified by describing the
authorship of enactive co-presence between a virtual screen character and the viewer.
The third keynote speaker was Suzanne Scott, an assistant professor of Media
Studies in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at
Austin. Her work has appeared in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Trans-
formative Works and Cultures, Cinema Journal, and New Media & Society, as well as
numerous anthologies, including How to Watch Television and The Participatory
Cultures Handbook. Together with Melissa Click, she has co-edited The Routledge
Companion to Media Fandom (2018), and her current book project considers the
gendered tensions underpinning the media industry’s embrace of fans within conver-
gence culture. Suzanne’s keynote was “Choose Your Own Adventure: Fandom and the
Future of Interactive Storytelling.” Fan culture has, from its inception, treated media
objects as inherently interactive, playing in the textual gaps and margins and, in some
cases, radically reimagining a storyworld’s fictive limits. Tracing both the history of
transformative fan texts (e.g., fanfiction, fan vids) from analog to digital participatory
Preface VII
dynamism and creativity that they brought to the conference. A special thank goes to
the ICIDS Steering Committee for granting us the opportunity to host ICIDS 2017 at
Madeira-ITI in Funchal, Portugal. Thanks to you all!
General Chair
Valentina Nisi Madeira-Interactive Technologies Institute,
University of Madeira, Portugal
Program Chairs
Nuno Nunes Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal
Ian Oakley Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology,
Ulsan, Republic of Korea
Demo Chairs
Paulo Bala Madeira-Interactive Technologies Institute, Portugal
James Ryan University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Steering Committee
Luis Emilie Bruni Aalborg University, Denmark
Gabriele Ferri Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands
Andrew Gordon University of Southern California, USA
Hartmut Koenitz HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Alex Mitchell National University of Singapore, Singapore
Frank Nack University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
David Thue Reykjavik University, Iceland
Program Committee
Elisabeth André Augsburg University, Germany
Ruth Aylett Heriot-Watt University, UK
Julio Bahamon University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
Alok Baikadi University of Pittsburgh, USA
Udi Ben-Arie Tel Aviv University, Israel
Rafael Bidarra Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Anne-Gwenn Bosser Ecole Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Brest, France
Luis Emilio Bruni Aalborg University, Denmark
Daniel Buzzo University of the West of England, UK
Beth Cardier Sirius-Beta.com
Marc Cavazza University of Kent, UK
Fred Charles Bournemouth University, UK
Fanfan Chen National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan
Teun Dubbelman Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht, The Netherlands
Gabriele Ferri Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands
Mark Finlayson Florida International University, USA
Henrik Fog Aalborg University, Denmark
Andrew Gordon University of Southern California, USA
Dave Green Newcastle University, UK
Charlie Hargood University of Southampton, UK
Sarah Harmon Bowdoin College, Brunswick, USA
Ian Horswill Northwestern University, USA
Ichiro Ide Nagoya University, Japan
Noam Knoller Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Hartmut Koenitz HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht, The Netherlands
James Lester North Carolina State University, USA
Boyang Li Disney Research, USA
Vincenzo Lombardo Università di Torino, Italy
Sandy Louchart Glasgow School of Art, UK
Stephanie Lukin Army Research Laboratory, USA
Organization XI
Story Design
Games
Posters
Demos
Doctoral Consortium
Workshops
Timo Kahl1 ✉ , Ido Iurgel1, Frank Zimmer1, René Bakker2, and Koen van Turnhout2
( )
1
Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, Friedrich-Heinrich-Allee 25,
47475 Kamp-Lintfort, Germany
{timo.kahl,ido.iurgel,frank.zimmer}@hochschule-rhein-waal.de
2
Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen, Ruitenberglaan 26, 6826CC Arnhem, The Netherlands
{Rene.Bakker,Koen.vanTurnhout}@han.nl
1 Introduction
Arnhem en Nijmegen, regional tourist offices and Erfgoed Gelderland. The project is
funded by the European Union in the framework of the Interreg programme, by public
administrations and other participating partners.
The overall goal of the project is to develop a framework that allows creating story‐
lines for cross-organizational museum experiences. This requires a high grade of flexi‐
bility, e.g. with respect to integration of changing exhibitions in the story line and to
different partner constellations (see Fig. 1).
Museums provide a favourite playground for IDS experiments due to the various facets
of storytelling that occur in museums, such as “history”, artist’s “biography”, the inher‐
ently personal approach to art, which can be transmitted through “personal stories”, or
the joy of “reporting” to friends and family of a museum experience. The CHESS project
has studied several aspects of mobile technology, storytelling and AR for museum visits.
Of particular interest are their experiments to promote social interaction in spite of indi‐
vidual devices, without making communication mandatory for the experience – an
approach of high relevance to RLX, since we assume that many young visitors will come
in small groups [4]. Kuflik et al. have researched the pre and post visit phase to a museum
[5], in addition to the core visit; for RLX, the in-between visit phase is of particular
relevance, which implies similar challenges. Zancanaro et al. reports on innovative uses
of tangible devices to structure the museum visit [6] – for RLX, those insights will
become important when we decide, for the experience in the inside of a particular
museum, on how much shall happen on a mobile device, and on what shall be presented
through dedicated, locally fixed interaction systems. In SPIRIT, following the lines of
the older GEIST-project [7], Spierling et al. [8] have created a linear story experience
based on georeferenced movies for a historical site; the notion of narrative, time and
location dependent adaptation, employed GEIST (similar to [13]), is of high relevance
to RLX, because the visitor retains much of his freedom to choose individual pace and
path. But the authorial burden will probably be too heavy to adopt such a strategy directly
in RLX. In SPIRIT, filmed sequences are employed (similar to [13], which uses rendered
videos); RLX will rely on real time graphics, because of the advantages of real time
behavior generation, the communication design opportunities of using more abstract
virtual characters, and the easier authoring and adaptation to changes in the museums.
Apps are already in regular use by many museums; top quality examples include the
6 T. Kahl et al.
Städel Museum in Frankfurt, where inspiring questions are part of the audiovisual guide
[9], or the app of the Rijksmuseum [10] in Amsterdam, which already integrates presen‐
tations from different perspectives and a family oriented game, but no IDS.
Our work differs from the previous work through the concept of a continuation
network, i.e. we are creating concepts, techniques and software to integrate several
museums within a narrative and experience framework, where a satisfactory UX within
a museum leads to the desire to continue the experience within another museum.
Furthermore, we are systematically and extensively developing and employing user
centred innovation methods, with design thinking as a core approach, to devise the most
appropriate UX.
3 Requirements Analysis
As one of the first steps in the project a requirements analysis was performed and is still
ongoing. The analysis is based on expert interviews with professionals of the partici‐
pating museums and surveys of museum visitors. This leads to a set of business require‐
ments which focuses on the overall goals of the solution. In addition, in its initial stage
the project focusses on gathering user (stakeholder) requirements. The user requirements
mainly apply to the storyline and are the basis for the implementation described in
Sect. 5. In a next phase of the project we will specify these requirements in order to
derive solution specific functional and non-functional requirements.
In general, the framework should take into account the requirements of a heterogeneous
audience. This might also lead to various implementations and can range from interac‐
tive games (or a set of games) for a younger target audience to interactive storylines
based e.g. on a hero’s journey story pattern for experienced museum visitors. In any
case the storyline has to be adaptable in order to facilitate the integration of exchange
exhibitions and different partner constellations. Further on, the access to the story and
games should be possible from any participating museum. One of the most important
business requirement deals with the integration of museum visitors. From the very
beginning of the project, museum visitors will be invited to co-create the story and the
concepts, following participatory design methods.
foster UX and immersion, and the fusion of digital and tangible content. Further on, a
navigation functionality should be included to find the most exciting and informative
path through the museum. However, it should not be given too much information in
order not to constrain the tension arc of the game or the story. Based on the interviews
we assume that story and game play would function both with and without virtual char‐
acters; however, a fictional character will facilitate the realisation of flexible storylines.
Concerning the technical roles the key players of the participating museums high‐
lighted that the editing of the storyline should be performed easily. Most interview
participants mentioned that the application will be further maintained by professional
users without extensive programming skills.
4 Framework Design
According to the requirements described in the previous chapter the technical framework
supports different user groups. In order to accommodate completely different stories and
flexible storylines (e.g. along a route which interlinks several museums), the framework
must be flexible and modular, and it consists at least of the following fundamental
components.
The main component (“story engine” in a wide sense) enables users, e.g. a director
of a museum, to implement stories and to create storylines for different routes (see
Sect. 5), e.g. inside a museum and also along several museums which are interlinked on
a route. Using the main component authors can develop different objects, such as inter‐
active games, quizzes, heroic journeys, “hyperportals” and integrate them into a story
etc. They are able to create objects also for various target groups such as children and
elderly people.
Visitors can interact with objects in museums, e.g. they can touch info-kiosks,
exhibits, and sculptures. To include such tangibles in the stories and story lines, i.e.
objects which visitors interact with along several stations inside a museum or on a route
including different museums, a tangibles component will be provided.
Another basic component allows the communication with other points along the
routes and enables visitors to navigate inside and outside the museums. Here, the tech‐
nical communication e.g. of the “hyperportals”, which are implemented in the main
component and which lead visitors to the next location or supply information about the
next point, could be realized.
The administrative component allows login mechanisms and realizes the technical
link of the other components.
The framework allows the implementation of very different applications that
encourage visitors to visit different locations ‘along a story’. Due to its flexible and
modular architecture it can also be used in other application areas where several locations
are to be “interlinked”.
8 T. Kahl et al.
1
The story events (fabula) and the way they are told (syuzhet).
RheijnLand.Xperiences – A Storytelling Framework 9
his passion, and passive art contemplation will easily bore him. His parents want to
introduce Nic to art, but also enjoy the visit by their own rights.
For the Nic persona, we have first to understand specific issues: (1) How much
distraction is appropriate, and how does it influence the appreciation of the artworks?
(2) How much does the “culture caching” task of collecting objects contribute to the
motivation? (3) How is the family experience affected by the RLX-app?
We have developed the Elevator Man app to approach these questions (see Fig. 2),
and to have a starting point for co-creation, active design participation sessions with
kids visiting museums.
Fig. 2. Elevator Man. Counter clockwise: use of a talking virtual character in an assistance role
(E-Man), of an orientation map, of mini-games, and of an exposition room for reward images.
This test app does not yet implement the full Satorius story, but employs its strategy
of motivating the visitor to collect art items and curate (while avoiding the unattractive
term) his/her own exposition with them. As a means of collecting an item, the user has
to answer a question that requires discovery of the museum space and observation of
the artwork, and has to finish a mini-game that is related to the artwork. The deployment
of the software shall start in summer 2017, and interviews with visitors and co-creation
gatherings shall occur latest in autumn.
Assuming a persona of 12 years, it seems appropriate to place emphasis on the
entertainment aspects of the RLX-app, switching forth and back from a setting where
the experience of the artwork is essential, to moments where the kid can play, commu‐
nicate and move around, even if this means distraction, to a certain extent.
For young adults – 21 y/o, say, alone in the art museum, with genuine interest in the
visit, self-motivated, but more used to digital media and lacking background knowledge
– a quite different approach might be necessary. In this case, for an art museum, we
expect that the RLX mediated experience will be more artistic by itself, in order to induce
10 T. Kahl et al.
an appropriate state of mind that helps focussing on the museum experience, with the
least amount of distraction from it, while at the same time conveying important back‐
ground information. Thus, the function of storytelling becomes different and much more
demanding in this second case. Several concepts are currently being discussed. For
instance, we are examining how to employ a polyphonic approach for young adults who
visit Beuys’ Museum Schloss Moyland, where a story Beuys would enter into a dialogue
with a hare, commenting on the museum visit and reproducing some of Beuys’ art theories.
In the present paper, an approach was presented to encourage visitors to visit different
museums ‘along stories’. For this, a modular and flexible framework was described
which allows users to implement various stories and storylines to manage cross-organ‐
izational museum visits. In the RLX project business requirements and also user require‐
ments concerning the storyline were gathered and analyzed based on expert interviews
and surveys of museum visitors. First storylines and the app Elevator Man were devel‐
oped and will be a starting point for our future research. Currently we focus on scenarios
with kids and young adults as individual experiencers. In future steps, collaboration
within families and joint experiences will be examined as well. Further on, we will devise
innovative narrative concepts and implement further storylines to improve and test the
cross-organizational framework and its implementation in the entire network of
museums. Finally, the framework could be extended to other application areas, such as
motivating people on “shopping tours” to visit different shopping centers in a network
of cities.
References
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4. Katifori, A., Perry, S., Vayanou, M., Pujol, L., Chrysanthi, A., Ioannidis, Y.: Cultivating
mobile-mediated social interaction in the museum: towards group-based digital storytelling
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in-the-museum-towards-group-based-digital-storytelling-experiences/. Accessed 15 June
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Effective Scenario Designs for Free-Text
Interactive Fiction
Agriculture
Forestry
Cattle Industry
Goats have been spoken of as raised with great profit on the well
adapted lands near Barquisimeto, comparatively high, and on
lowlands in the regions of Coro and Maracaibo.
Cattle. The cattle industry has still greater possibilities. The
pastoral zone extends from Barrancas to Colombia and from the
Vichada River to the mountains in Carabobo. While a portion of the
llanos like those in Colombia suffers from severe drought in the
summer, and though in places the grass is thin, in this immense
region there is room for an enormous number of cattle where the
grasses are rich. Hence stock raising can be carried on to great
advantage. There is some difficulty in transportation, but this is
gradually improving, and with the erection of more packing and
slaughter houses, and with improvements in breeding, the industry
has a sure future. Some stock raisers, especially General Gomez,
have made great efforts for improvement, importing full blooded
cattle of different breeds to produce a better kind, perfectly adapted
to the climate of Venezuela. Modern methods are being employed,
and in the valley of Maracay a large number of live stock is fattened
ready to supply the 500 cattle daily killed at Puerto Cabello by the
Refrigerating Company which exports them. A new packing house is
to be erected at Turiamo. It is reported that a contract has been
made for 200,000 acres to be colonized by Germans, who wish to
control the meat packing industry. The number of cattle in Venezuela
is estimated at 3,000,000.
Sheep, horses, hogs are also raised in the valley of Maracay;
acclimated specimens of special breeds have been obtained for
reproduction in other parts of the country. At present horses and
mules are raised in comparatively small numbers.
Mining
Manufactures
Investments
The name Guiana has been applied to the entire country between
the Orinoco and the Amazon. We have observed that in Venezuela
the region south of the Orinoco is called the Guiana Highlands. We
shall notice later that the section south of the dividing mountain
range and north of the Amazon as far west as the Rio Negro is called
Brazilian Guiana; but the country which is more strictly Guiana is
east and north of these, though here, too, adjectives are applied as
there are three divisions: British, Dutch, and French Guiana, the
British on the west, the French farthest east.
Area
Physical Characteristics
The three divisions of Guiana are similar, having first a low marshy
coast land, rising at the back very slightly for a distance of 10 to 40
miles. A broader, more elevated tract of sandy or clayey soil follows
with a still higher region in the rear. Of the southern section the
eastern part is almost all forest, the central and southwest portions
have more grass clad savannas, which might support thousands of
cattle if there were any way to get them out. There is a vast network
of water ways, many rivers in their lower sections near the coast
being connected by caños. The forest varies, being dense in river
bottoms and thin on sandy soils. The longest river, the Essequibo, is
about 600 miles, others a little less. At from 50 to 100 miles inland,
all the rivers are blocked by rapids, but some are accessible to large
vessels as far as these. There are various hills and mountains, the
highest, the Pacaraima Range, marking in part the boundary with
Venezuela, the Acarai Mountains with Brazil; the two form the water
shed between the Amazon, the Orinoco, and the Essequibo rivers.
Mt. Roraima, altitude 8635 feet, rising as a red rock 1500 feet above
the forest, is said to have as its top a tableland of 12 square miles.
Several other mountains are from 7000 to 8000 feet high. Ranges of
hills and mountains from 2000 to 3000 feet traverse the country
elsewhere. In Dutch and French Guiana are almost impenetrable
forests, less explored than those of British Guiana, especially
towards the south. A splendid waterfall is the Kaieteur, nearly five
times as high as Niagara, 741 feet, with 81 feet of cataracts just
below, in the midst of lovely tropical vegetation. Many other beautiful
falls of less height, and cascades provide an immense amount of
water power.
The climate is considered good in most places though there is
large rain-fall, at Georgetown averaging 93 inches a year, in some
places 100; but there is no yellow fever, and other diseases except in
certain localities may be guarded against.
British Guiana
The chief ports of the Guianas are the three capitals, which are
connected with the outside world by the West Indies Mail Services of
the three mother countries, while other steamship lines run regularly
to London, Liverpool, and Glasgow. There is mail service with
Canada and regular steamers from New York. Coast and river
steamers ply regularly along the coast of British Guiana from the
northwest extremity to the Berbice River, at the mouth of which is the
city of New Amsterdam, called a smaller Georgetown, not very far
from the boundary of Dutch Guiana. The country has 95 miles of
railway, 450 of navigable rivers, 39 miles of canals, and 322 of good
roads.
A railway 60 miles long connects Georgetown with New
Amsterdam, i.e., it reaches a point on the Berbice River opposite the
latter city. Five miles of this road from Georgetown to Plaisance,
completed and opened for traffic in 1848, is actually the oldest
railway in South America. Another 19 mile line goes from Vreeden
Hook opposite Georgetown on the Demerara River to Greenwich
Park on the Atlantic at the mouth of the Essequibo. Another short
line running through primeval forest has been laid from Wismar on
the Demerara, 65 miles from its mouth, to Rockstone on the
Essequibo to give access to the upper part of the latter river above
extensive and dangerous rapids, and further to the Potaro and other
gold fields. The Road, besides passenger and tourist traffic handles
a variety of timber. Its owners, (Sprostons Ltd.), who employ over
1000 men, maintain a coast and river service, and own a foundry,
lumber yard, etc. A railway to the Brazil boundary, long planned,
would open up the interior and its valuable resources. From
Rockstone, launches run 90 miles up the river to Potaro Landing. A
service was to be organized to the Kaieteur Falls on the Potaro
River.
Ferries cross the mouths of the three principal rivers, the
Essequibo, the Demerara, and the Berbice. The estuary of the
Essequibo River is 15 miles wide. It contains several large islands,
on some of which are plantations. Vessels drawing less than 20 feet
can enter the river and go up 50 miles. The mouth of the Demerara
River, two miles wide, has a sand bar prohibiting the entrance of
vessels drawing more than 19 feet. To such as enter, the river is
navigable for 70 miles. The Berbice River, two miles wide at its
mouth, is navigable 105 miles for vessels drawing 12 feet and 175
miles for boats drawing 7 feet. The Corentyn River with an estuary
14 miles wide is navigable for 150 miles; this river is the boundary
between British and Dutch Guiana. Roads good enough for
automobiles and carriages, which use them, extend from the
Corentyn River along the coast some miles beyond the mouth of the
Essequibo and a few miles up the rivers.
Resources
Agriculture
Sugar, the chief source of revenue for the colony, in slavery days
brought great wealth to the planters; but after the emancipation
some estates were divided, the negroes refused to work steadily if at
all, and production greatly declined. At length East Indians who were
imported helped to revive the industry. Of 105,000 agricultural
laborers 73,000 are East Indians. The plantations are mostly in the
coastal lowlands where 77,000 acres are cultivated. Attention to the
dams needed to keep out the sea in front and water from the morass
at the side, also to the drainage ditches, necessary on account of the