Performance History Project Workspace
goal: get students to understand the act of writing history, is an act of selection, go through facts, names ,dates, works -- decide what is important, canonical. Doing so is an act of construction (power), privileges some things, obscures others. What does it mean to do history. Constantly interrogate, as they are doing it, what it means to do history.
This Project will begin in earnest in '06 - '07. This is a preliminary space for notes, ideas, etc ...
idea: blank space on timeline (e.g. early Africa) AND a long range of dates AND items with two dates, contested items, etc. will all be reflected in the webpage (special div?).
It occurred to me that we could present the timeline in a horizontal layout(naturally reading left-to-right following the sequence of years as in atypical timeline) where 1 pixel = 1 year. This simple design premise allows forsome nifty coding. If 1px=1yr, then we can place divs within the timeline withsimple math. I have actually tried this and it works. Nicely I might add. Itcan all be done in XHTML/CSS so we can sidestep the Flash longterm maintenance issue.
1px=1yr is in fact too small, must use some multiple ... x2, x4
1px=1yrcreates a massively wide canvas, compared to the type of web design that we areaccustomed to. 10,600px wide to be exact. I addressed this by placing the image(a table background, that just as easily could be a div background url in CSS)in an iframe that shows 1000px at a time, or one millenium. Now, I have yet todetermine whether 10,600 is actually big enough. That might sound ridiculous,but it might not be big enough. We need to have enough of a margin between ourtimeline events so that the whole is readable. I have also discovered thatlinked anchors (for which we can use "id" rather than "name") will position thebrowser in a horizontal layout just as it does in the customary vertical layout,which means we can link directly to a specific location in the Timeline.
Another thing to consider is grouping of tracks, or layers, of the Timeline --geography seems to be the natural delimiter, but that's not without vagary.Enter Postelwait. and the problematics of a historical taxonomy. We'llnaturally defer to Laura on all of that. I can say, however, that my earlyestimate shows between 20 and 22 "layers" -- e.g. "England" would be a layer,and would include the historical periods of England in sequence, stacked on topof coeval "layers" similarly based on geography.
Update: 22 layers have been reduced to 7-9, roughly by continent. See Updated timeline document TimelineLayers.doc dated 11/28/05
Given that 10,600px widthseems monumental, what then of a height of 4400px? (taking an arbitrary heightof 200px/layer). How can we make an ordinary web browser swallowthese dimensions and make this easy to read? Mike, I am thinking of thatjavascript code you showed me for toggling visibility with CSS
Edited on Nov 28 2005 02:03PM by Zach Chandler
