This is not my official outline, just a few thoughts that I’ve had and need to (belatedly) add up here. It’s also an open call for suggestions or thoughts, so feel free to comment away. Then I can add them in to my actual outline later in the week.

My thoughts about my project shifted considerably sometime during the last 10 minutes of class on Monday. Prior to that, I had a plan (and one I wasn’t too excited about), to plan for a timeline project on an artist, probably Picasso, or possibly a small group of artists, maybe Picasso and Braque or Der Blaue Reiter. What I wanted was two fairly simple vertical lines on the left half of the page. One of the lines would represent the direct output of the artist(s), so it would reference letters, visits, artistic production, etc. The other line would represent more of a documentary social history of the time, so it would include things like politics, world and local events, etc. When an event/date was rolled over it would give a one-line synopsis of what it included, and when clicked on the timeline, it would use an AJAX call to bring up a document (which could include pictures or text) on the right-hand side of the page.

Essentially, I was thinking it would be sort of the online equivalent to this: Shakespeare: The Life, The Work, The Treasures, a coffee-table style book that provides history of Shakespeare and his time and includes neat little cut-out reproductions of letters written, wills and other historic documents.

I was a little uncertain about audience, though.  Would it be only for amateur enthusiasts?  Maybe, but I also thought I saw some value for social art historians, by visually contextualizing primary sources.  I was wrestling with this when I had my Better Idea For A Project.  I’ll get to that in my next post…