iPhone users have the opportunity to relive the events of 16 June 1904 in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom, Stephan Daedalus and other Joycean favorites with a new app celebrating the Ulysses adventure.
The JoyceWays iPhone app, based on Bloom’s epic Dublin journey, is a combination of classic literature and modern technology that offers users a unique look at early 20th-century Dublin through author James Joyce’s eyes.
Transporting users back to 1904, the app provides information, quirky facts, image galleries, cartoons, advertisements and posters for more than 100 Dublin locations. At each location, users can hear writer and broadcaster Frank Delaney – the most eloquent man in the world if you ask NPR – read excerpts from the famous novel.
Users can navigate the app from the comfort of home, or take it on their own odyssey through Joycean Dublin, from Sir John Rogerson’s Quay to the National Library, or from 7 Eccles Street to Dublin Castle.
Functioning as both an interactive tourist map and a study companion for Joycean scholars, the app also comes with six short stories from Dubliners, four hours of explanations, and an animated video performance of scenes from the Nausicaa episode by Senator David Norris.
Designed and developed by Dublin agency Big Top Multimedia, JoyceWays has been a project of Prof Joseph Nugent and his students at Boston College for the past three years and is available on iTunes for €2.99.
Norris will launch the app tomorrow in the James Joyce Centre amidst the Bloomsday Festival celebrations. Among the rest of the week’s events will be readings and songs at the bandstand in St Stephen’s Green, Bloomsnight at Sweny’s in the Mont Clare Hotel, Eilin O’Dea performing Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, and Rob Berry’s exhibition of his graphic novel adaptation of Ulysses in The Bailey Bar on Duke Street.
