I decided to deconstruct the project, “The Shape of History: Reimagining Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Historical Visualization Work.” This Digital Humanities project was designed to analyze and give expression to the work of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who transformed historical events into patterns of color and design in order for people to understand the timelines through a unique point of view. The project is interactive, allowing the viewer to really understand the topic at hand while also having fun!
Sources
The project’s sources included readings on Elizabeth Peabody, as well as her own writings on historical events. . The section on further readings mentioned a handful of sources on Peabody including Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Term, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, and A Chronological History of the United States (Peabody’s original textbook). The site also contained many links to the creators’ links, the Georgia Tech Digital Humanities Lab, their research blog as well as a link to read more about why they created this project and the framework behind the research.
Processes
According to the project’s “About the Site” page, the creators of the site utilized HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, and used multiple open-source libraries including jQuery, Bootstrap, D3.js, and two.js.
Presentation
The layout of this project was very clever, utilizing Peabody’s idea of a colorful grid-like representation as the layout for the site. It was extremely easy to navigate and almost helped for a better understanding of the topic at hand. Some big highlights of this project were the interactive sections, which aided understanding of the topic and ultimately allowed for complete immersion with the digitization of historical events the way Peacock envisioned it. The “Play” section was especially nice because you could make your own Historical Visualization Grid with whichever events you want. In my opinion, this formatting was efficient and fun for the viewer. Overall, the project was basic enough to utilize, while giving a significant amount of information.
Hello!
I chose to write about another Digital Project only because I felt this one was too complex to break down; however, your deconstruction and explanation of the project clearly broke down the individual elements in order for better understanding of the work. I like how you broke down the assignment by having textual signage that separates Sources, Processes, and Presentation, which made reading your post that much more organized and subsequently enjoyable.
Thank you!