In this Daily Iowan story, the Virtual Writing University's upcoming Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature iPhone application is explored, "Bridget Draxler's Interpretation of Literature class is working on a major project about famous Iowa City authors, but instead of turning their reports in to Draxler, they'll turn them into an iPhone app.

The 22 students are only one group at the University of Iowa contributing to the soon-to-be-released iPhone application, Iowa City of Literature.

The design team for the application, which is the brainchild of UI art Associate Professor Jon Winet, includes members from the School of Library and Information Science, the computer-science department, the English department, and the Virtual Writing University.

"Traditionally, literary classes have the stigma of reading old stuff by dead white men," said Draxler, a graduate teaching assistant. "But this is an exciting way of studying literature as a living thing."

When the application launches in October, it will be broken down into five sections, said Haowei Hsieh, an assistant professor of library and information science...

Read more about the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature app here: Users can view biographies and descriptions of written works by a specific author. They can also view video or listen to audio interviews with the author, Hsieh said. And when users jump to the map screen, pins will mark Iowa City locations associated with an author."