Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 661.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Sat, 03 May 2003 06:53:14 +0100
From: Bethany Nowviskie <bethany@virginia.edu>
Subject: Temporal Modelling Project
>You are in luck. Check out Johanna Drucker and Beth Nowviskie's
>*Temporal Modelling* project -- still in progress, but more or less
>precisely what you are imagining:
>http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/time/time.html
Steve's right; the problem of visualizing and modeling temporal
subjectivity in a dynamic way is exactly what we're working on. Our work
in progress includes an XML-driven "PlaySpace" which uses Macromedia Flash
to allow the construction and manipulation of timelines (complete with
user-specified points, events, and intervals) and a Zope-powered "Data
Library" where users can save, clone, and share models or edit the XML
representations they've constructed visually in the PlaySpace in a direct,
text-based way. Right now, we're implementing calendrical and granularity
features, so that users will be able to mark and translate lines based on
extrinsic calendars (Gregorian, Mayan, etc.) and on intrinsic notational
schemes that might emerge from whatever data they're modeling (when I was
happy, before the events of Chapter Two, etc.). Our next steps involve the
implementation of more subjective features: temporal "inflections," (such
as moods, foreshadowing, causality, and the like), and a "nowslider," which
will allow users to model and present subjective alterations to a primary
timeline.
This last feature is very like Chris Meister's initial query. In a
"catastrophic" nowslider, new line-iterations spring up when a perceiving
subject alters his view of the past or future based on new
information. We're also building a "continuous" nowslider, in which past
and future morph seamlessly as a perceiving subject slides along a line in
the "present." You can see my mock-ups of nowslider functionality here:
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/time/storyboard/ -- and other areas
of the site (accessible from the bottom menu on that page) will allow you
to read our research reports and tinker with the PlaySpace in progress.
Johanna Drucker and I will be presenting and doing a poster session on the
Temporal Modelling Project at this summer's ACH/ALLC conference, and there
are some pieces on it forthcoming in *Information Design*. In the meantime,
I'd be happy to answer any questions about the project or -- even better --
hear suggestions and criticism.
Bethany Nowviskie
http://www.speculativecomputing.org/~bpn2f
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