Again, not an outline, more of a brainstorm.  Feel free to comment…

So there I was in class, making notes about my project idea.  I began to think about the specific kinds of data I would want to include on my non-artist timeline, and to be concerned about the decisions I would make in regards to that.  I mean, there would obviously be a lot of stuff out there, and I would be making some methodologic choices about what to include.  Perhaps, I thought, I could have more than one “history” (as opposed to artist) timeline, each with a different sort of information: politics, local events, world events, literature, theatre, other artists… anyway, quickly I realized that I had a gazillion timelines and way too much work and data.

So, since this corresponded roughly to what we were discussing on Monday, I began thinking about audience participation.  I initially hadn’t planned for much, but what were the roles that an audience could play?  If there really were a multiplicity of timelines they could certainly have some options for which ones they wanted displayed.  Perhaps they could suggest other timelines, but I didn’t really think this project would have a lot of value added if the users could make their own timelines.  Maybe… moderated input?

The other thing I began to realize, though, is that if I wanted to be in any way thorough (which is to say, reach out to an audience beyond the amateur enthusiasts to make this genuinely useful to academics), I was basically just describing what might be a useful front-end to an archive.  And that’s when I had a conceptual shift, of sorts… these multiple timelines could actually just be based on tags.  So, say, an archive of a newpaper article might be tagged “world”, “colonial”, “london”, “africa”, etc.  And so perhaps you could have a timeline based on every available tag category.

That’s when I realized that what I needed to be focused on was not the specific use for this tool, but the tool itself.  This is something that could be easily ported to different databases… all it would require would be a tag or category, a date and/or title, and a piece of data.  There could be an easy user interface that would allow the visitor to choose the timelines they wanted to look at, manipulate the amount of time covered, and go from there.  They could compare and contrast multiple timelines and have a greater sense of contextualization for specific time periods.

I’m not sure if I’m describing this well, but it seemed like a pretty cool idea to me.  Tune in for the next post to see if someone else has done it first…