The straw that broke my back would have to be World History.com, which I wrote up a couple of days ago. They are attacking the same problem, and they are actually attacking it. It can’t be a hobby for me and a job for them, unless I want it to suck (in my own head).
So here I go. I will probably keep posting to the blog when I see cool stuff, but, since I’m stopping development, I will stop posting about developing.
So long all.
]]>Uh oh. That should sound pretty familiar to you regular readers, and it certainly sounded familiar to me. I had to check it out.
The site is in private beta so I added my email to their list, and, soon enough, was invited to give it a go. Right off the bat I could see some glaring similarities between the interface I dreamt of 18 months ago and the one they had implemented. Their demos are pretty thorough so I won’t go into functionality too much. If you do watch the videos, you’ll notice they have a simpler version of the slider that I’ve written extensively about, and that you can navigate their map of historical events in the same ways that I envisioned (and implemented) for Visualize History. I really like their site. It’s snappy and from the looks of things, the data and the map are well connected.
But that’s sort of the problem. Here is a real company, presumably with funding and time, or at least more than I have (0 and 0, respectively). They have actual code that actual people are using. And talking about, too. Tech Crunch wrote them up, which led to some teachers, authors, historians, and consultants to do the same. It has also attracted a few people interested in genealogy, which, if you recall, I predicted would happen.
So they got the interface, the press, the data. What could they do better? Glad you asked. I have a few issues with their site, some subtle and some less subtle. I’d be interested to know why thy chose to put ads where they did. I think they are distracting and make the site look ugly (like all ads), but to the point where I would be less inclined to use the site or share it. I’m not sure why, but it reminds me of sites whose sole purpose is to attract traffic and turn it into clicks on ads, in a sleazy way. I don’t mean to say that it’s a sleazy site. Rather, it feels like it was designed by programmers. The ads make it look like experts-exchange, and the options on the left make me feel like I’m using Microsoft Access, not some snappy Web 2.0 AJAXy site.
As long as we’re on the subject of layout, I feel that the map got the short end of the stick, so to speak. For me, the map always deserved the most prominent role, since that was the main point of interaction for the user. Worldhistory.com seems to want to emphasize the content more, by giving it as much space as they gave the map. As a result, the map is cramped and too narrow in its focus. Perhaps the relative size of the map shows that we differ more fundamentally.
I would have never thought a person would want to pick a point on a map and then scroll through that point’s history. That’s rarely how we learn history, and the great advantage gained by displaying history visually starts with the graphical relations that can be displayed. Although they do have tagging functionality, it seems that the ability to link historical events together is still very limited on the site. It’s not an easy problem, and I hope that’s in their presumably long list of features to implement. I will be interested to see how many people like to interact with the map this way.
All that being said, I clearly love this idea. I’ve worked on something sort of similar for a long time, and completely believe that demand for an app like this will rapidly grow. I wish the best of luck to those guys, and hope the features keep on coming.
]]>Two types of business models occurred to me. Really they are the two most prevalent options for web apps these days. My first thought would be to charge people for the data. That is, let’s say a classroom wanted to use US data. Then they would pay a fee for the privilege to view that data. I thought of a lot of variations on the pay-for-data model, but those aren’t that interesting to other people. Also advertising to school age children kind of grosses me out so I don’t want to write it down.
The other business model that has become the default is advertising. On the web these days, traffic basically earns revenue. In the most common of the web 2.0 business models, more traffic means more ads displayed, which hopefully means more ads clicked on, which means dollars. So all I had to do was attract traffic.
I’ve kept an idea out for topics that could fit my idea of the perfect visual user interface. I adopted the advice of 37 Signals’ book Getting Real, which suggests not keeping a list of features to implement. They feel that the most requested features will stick in your heads by nature. I paid attention to the most frequently talked about topics that fit my model, and found 3 that I thought would attract users.
A lot of people put a lot of effort into maintaining their families’ histories. All the intricacies fascinate people, and a big part of a new generation’s job is to learn the family. My Grandfather ran a museum for my Mom’s side of the family, which turned out to be pretty popular. and I know my favorite assignment in grade school was to interview my other Grandfather about his parents and relatives, whom I had never met. I knew that a lot of resources existed already, including a file standard (making it easier to read family data) and large repositories, run by the Mormon church (who knows everything about you, whether you know it or not).
I went on a road trip this summer and I wrote it up online, including pictures. Based on my web traffic stuff, it seems a lot of people liked following along. It would have been even cooler if they could have animated that, moving forward and backward in time, and, as they did, having pictures and videos from the trip come to the forefront. People love playing with stuff like that, whether to show a trip to friends are to plan a trip of their own. It’s easy to see how trips naturally align with history, as well. Maybe a trip would be all the civil war battlefields, in order, or to recreate a famous march, etc.
My last idea probably had a lot to with it being an election year. I watched people watch the CNN Wall. Everyone thought it was pretty cool that Anderson Cooper could manipulate the screen like that, demonstrating how previous elections had gone by county or state. So much of politics is based on history that it felt like a natural fit.
]]>Many of the ways the web is used in schools are fairly obvious. Sites have arisen to fill common tasks, made easier by the web. Digication provides e-Portfolios or places for students to congregate and interact. More education famous software includes Blackboard, or maybe it’s open source counterpart, Moodle.
Teachers also find rich resources online. Houghton Mifflin’s premade Powerpoint slides and MicroModules from 21st Century Information Fluency exemplify the type of specific resources available. Teachers also use portals like Awesome Library or Teachers.net to make their teaching lives easier.
Strategies that have been around have migrated to the web. Education board games can now be moved online, like the site childtopia. Games have always been a great way to engage children, and the web can make that much cheaper and more accessible.
But traditional schools and the web as a resource don’t interest me that much. Instead, I’m fascinated by all the stuff I’ve found out about new strategies that the web enables. The first new idea that I encountered was the idea of online school, often called distance learning. During the pre-election craziness, I saw a lot of ads for Insight schools of WA, which teach the same material as a traditional school, just online. Once I became interested in the idea of online schooling, I started noticing references to it everywhere. I found the Connections Academy, Insight schools, the virtual school of Florida, and many more. It is not clear whether online schools can be effective, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. Still, even the idea that a class can be remote differs greatly with our common idea of elementary education.
Even more innovative, and even more complex, is the idea of distributed learning. Rather than have a professional teacher, sites allow their users to teach each other. I have heard that Live Mocha is a great way to learn a language, for example. For more general teaching and learning, try Teach Mate. Edu2.0 tries an even more explicit teaching model, where you can teach or volunteer in a traditional or public class, online.
Since I’m not a teacher, I can’t evaluate these specific sites, and that’s not really the point. Instead, what I find amazing is the way the web can connect people. Sure, not a lot of people in rural Minnesota speak Chinese and English well enough to teach both, but you can rest assured that someone on the internet knows both, and wants to teach. The trick is finding that person.
Even though I’m a huge proponent of the web, I’m not sure about these new fangled ways of teaching. Lisa addresses the issue of using technology in the classroom much better than I could. I don’t and can’t really have a position, but I did want to share what I had learned about the new world of education.
]]>I still face the problem of a lack of data, but a few sources have cropped up. Amazon has some public data that I think is aimed at bringing people to their web services platform. The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) also looked like a potential source, especially their section on statistical data. Read Write Web also has a pretty comprehensive list of good places to look for data, which I have not yet taken a good look at.
More gradually, and probably more importantly, is the adoption of KML, Google’s markup language, originally for Google Earth, which has now become an open standard. A year ago, when I first wrote about KML, the time-related tags of KML has just come into existence. Now they are commonplace, and finding KML files with time-related data is pretty trivial. Of course finding relevant files, that is history-related KML files, can still be pretty tricky. But once the file is found, it is trivial to parse.
The big news though came today, after I started writing this post. Google has announced that the newest version of Google Earth includes Historical Imagery. They have updated KML to allow finer control of their Time Slider, and while the main differences between my project and Google Earth remain, it is very cool to see them taking on a similar task. Also, you know that if Google does something, that something will get a whole lot more attention, not to mention the extra content that will surely be created.
I also have signed up for a private beta of an API that claims to solve exactly the problem I hope to solve:
We have built a simple to use and robust API that can get all the important data, content, and vital information you need to use on your website or application. We have information on people, events, places and genealogy. Most importantly all of this information is geolocated.
In other words, it is perfect. The actual data the site has is a little lacking, but I will keep an eye out.
As more and more sites make similar projects, the problem of finding and parsing data will, I expect, largely disappear. But not yet.
]]>Visualize History always aimed at synthesizing a large amount of information, but doing so necessarily limits the detail of that information. Luckily, it’s an interconnected web we live in these days, and there are many sites that provide great historical content. Those are good partners to link to and to pull content from.
For instance, a whole bunch of sites exhibit historical photographs, including Life, Time, National Geographic, Nasa, the National Archives, and the University of Pennsylvania. New sites have sprung up, devoted to historical images, like this one, this one and this one.
You can of course find more than pictures online. There are historical documents from Yale, maps from the Library of Congress, and newspapers from Google. I could spend hours in any of these collections.
And if unguided exploration is not your thing, you can find classes online, whether it is history classes from the Ivy leagues or a survey course from George Mason.
Some of the fun of history for me has always been linking my story or the story of my family into whatever I was learning about. More generally, people love to participate in history. Maybe Visualize History could help you plan a trip to historical sites, like up-and-coming website Pastigo does. Maybe it could map your location over some time period, and put that on a map with other data, using your iPhone’s location. Maybe it could provide the data for an exhibit in your museum or classroom, with the help of Omeka.
As you can see, I have grand ideas, and others do to. Mixing and matching those ideas is what the web is all about.
]]>When I started working on the project, I did not have a clear idea about the distinction between what I was trying to build and a standard GIS system. I worried that I was merely recreating something well established. I no longer think that, but nonetheless have encountered several relevant GIS exhibits and projects.
Two stuck out in my bookmarks. I like the first, StatPlanet, because the UI is pretty intuitive. You can explore some common indicators, like the AIDS epidemic or education training by country. There is a time element, but it’s not easy to go between times.
The other GIS-related example that stuck out to me was WorldMapper, which skews a map so that each country reflects its relative size for a given indicator. For example, in the world population map, China and India look large because of their dense population.
From the very beginning of my research I recognized that many specific examples of my project existed already. That is, people had found great ways to visualize specific historical events. At one time, I had a long, long list, which included the Peabody museum in New Haven, CT, but that list seems to be gone now. I have found several since.
I found that the highly customized exhibits were compelling, but not easily applicable to other situations. Some, like the Israel/Gaza timeline, were pretty general and yet maintained the necessary content and interface.
When I first dreamt of making Visualize History a real business, I thought that genealogy might be my ticket in. People love exploring their family history, and many people will pay to do so. Many sites have started to spring up, and I have even started seeing ads for genealogy sites on TV. Clearly at least one company thinks regular old TV-watching people will pay to find out about their family history. I still haven’t seen a great visualizer for genealogy, but I think we will very soon.
For some reason, timelines have been around forever. It could be because they are static, and can therefore be printed. It could be that writing code that shows a timeline is pretty easy (since every operating system in the last 15 years has included a scrollbar, the key to the timeline). I’m not sure why, but they’ve been around. Still, I think recently people have decided to use them interactively, and on the web.
Of the two that stick out, timerime is closest to Visualize History, at least in purpose. They have the exact Time Slider that I tried to build (and mostly succeeded at, by the way). They even have a timeline for the Civil War, my canonical example. I would certainly create a timeline on this site if I had an occasion to.
Capzles, the other timeline-type site, is less like Visualize History but still kind of cool. They allow you to add media, which is mostly audio and pictures, to your timeline, and then play through it, exploring the media piece by piece. Pretty cool.
A few projects I came across actually gave me pause, since they resembled my goal fairly closely. I already discussed the first such project, called Gapminder. Hans Rosling presents data in a fantastic way, and recently I’ve started seeing a lot of people reference his work. Google, which bought Gapminder, added the ability to create such maps with your own data, as Sasha Dichter explains.
The other project, another that I found early in my research, was produced at MIT. The Exhibit part of the Simile project out of MIT takes a slightly different approach. It is meant to be a widget that you put on your own website, using your own data. They merely provide the interface. It looks pretty cool, though it was different enough that I think Visualize History solves a slightly different and more complex problem.
So that’s my list. There is one more big example that I hope to share with you soon, but it’s not quite ready for public viewing yet. Soon. But not yet.
]]>There are two separate issues at hand here, which language to use and which framework to use, given the language. I choose Python over PHP for two main reasons which are really historically the same reason.
PHP rapidly spread across the web after its creation. One reason it developed so quickly was its ease of use. In those days, a file on the server corresponded to a file that the user saw. If I went to http://strassdesign.com/pictures.php, the web server would load /strassdesign.com/public_html/pictures.php and parse it, displaying the result of the PHP code. Any code outside the PHP tags (<?php and ?>)would be output as HTML. Page design closely modeled the imperative style of programming familiar to any C programmer, and since most programmers knew C in those days, people understood the metaphor.
People did not however, want a version of C for the web, since C is so impossibly complex for new or amateur programmers. PHP adopted a more JavaScript-like attitude of forgiveness. For instance, for a long time, the default settings allowed direct reference to variables passed in via GET, which meant any user could get a variable set in your script simply by appending ?name=value to your .php url. Of course “it just works” is fine until it doesn’t, and then finding a bug is nearly impossible. Ask anyone who has done JavaScript development. Still, for a while, “it just works” was all people needed. In those days, web software could easily be modeled as
As web software became more complex, key concepts in modern programming became important, with the most important being object oriented coding. For those not familiar with the distinction, object oriented programming allows for encapsulation and modularity, among other things. That’s a fancy way of saying the code I write for my user logins shouldn’t have easy access to the code I write for the poll, or for my archives, or for any other discrete piece of my site. PHP of course added object orientedness to the language, starting in PHP3 and more completely in PHP5. As an old and well adopted language, though, a lot of tutorials and example code relied on the imperative nature of the language. More importantly, though, the language wasn’t designed to be object oriented, so basic concepts of objects require a fairly complex and non-intuitive syntax and implementation. I don’t usually like to talk about the “feel” of a language, but in this case, PHP couldn’t feel less object oriented.
In school I took a parallel programming course in which we used Python, and I loved it. The concepts made sense to me, and after a while I used Python for all my scripting needs. I like its GUI interpreter IDLE, and the ability not to have look up every function online by using the dir( ) command.
Python’s most important advantage is that it was designed to be object oriented. Modules are fundamental to Python, and almost no fancy functionality exists outside a module. For example, PHP uses built in functions like xml_parse for XML but Python uses modules, which means I can switch or add formats without needing to find the correct function in the core language. I’m not sure I could explain the advantages of object oriented programming without adding another 500 words, but if you are interested, I will gladly chat about pros and cons.
For web development, there are really 3 popular non-Microsoft scripting languages: PHP, Python and Ruby. Having eliminated PHP, I had to choose from the other two. Since I was already fairly expert in Python, I chose to explore that as an option. It already solved my biggest problem with PHP, namely the proper use of objects.
Python may be the coolest thing since sliced bread, but it was not designed for the internet. I had to make sure that I could map web concepts like 404 pages, dynamic urls and GET/POST requests to Python. Django does exactly that. I thought Django might be difficult to learn at first, but it uses the feel of Python well. Its modules follow common practices in Python, and it took me 45 minutes to learn the necessary parts of the framework.
So I knew it could work, but I had to make sure it solved my other problem with PHP, namely the separation of code and presentation. Programmers don’t often make good designers, as Joel, Jeff, and Joel and Jeff all explain. These days it is unusual for a designer and a coder to be the same person. I am both in my little project, of course, but even then I don’t wear both hats at the same time. When I’m in the zone coding, I don’t want to think about <div> or styles. When I’m designing, I tolerate thinking about those things, as well as colors and such nonsense. So for me, that separation is absolutely key. Django provides a simple templating system that supports inheritance in a way that makes perfect sense for the web. All my pages will have the same meta info, the same header and footer, and some other stuff, and I certainly don’t want to write those more than once.
Django provides some added benefit that I didn’t know I needed at the time, but now love. The first is its database access, which abstracts away SQL and instead uses Python objects to represent data. I hate writing and debugging SQL, and for the most part, I don’t need the power and complexity that relational databases provide. All I ever do is add objects, read objects, and find related objects. Once you write one JOIN statement, you don’t need to write any more, ever again. So I don’t.
The second feature surprise was the URLConfs, which map logical URLs to code. I can now have a page like http://www.visualizehistory.com/exhibits/featured map to a function, which is completely transparent to the user. If I ever want to change the functionality, it is trivial to do so. It also lets me manage the URLs of the site in the same way a human thinks of them, that is conceptually and not as pieces of the filesystem I happen to have.
The last feature of Django I rely on heavily is the built in web server. It lets me develop offline, make a lot of changes quickly and generally speeds up development time a lot. The server is simple enough that I can use it and complicated enough that it mirrors my actual set up in the cloud.
]]>I am not a teacher of history, and, having read as much as I can cram in my head over the last 4 weeks, I am no closer to being able to picture a teacher’s needs than I was then. So I cannot pretend to address the needs of teachers. I would like to bill my project as fitting in the world of 21st century learning that is discussed today, but I don’t really know what the term means, and I don’t really know if e-learning is the right way to go. I’ve read good arguments for and against, such as Jay Mathews’ take:
I think the 21st-century skills movement is mostly a pipe dream, promoted by well-meaning people who embrace the idea of modernity but fail to consider how these allegedly new and important lessons can be taught by the usual victims of such schemes, classroom teachers. (A Surprisingly Sensible 21st-Century Report)
For instance, I cannot tell what skills students will need for their jobs, and when to teach them those skills. When I applied for a job my freshman year of college, one section of the application required that I find the answers to about 20 problems in about 10 minutes. I was given access to a computer. My future boss knew that my ability to find answers far outweighed my current knowledge of the answers. Patrick Woessner expresses that particular sentiment well:
In our increasingly flat, information-rich world, the skill of locating information has become as important as the skill of memorizing information. (Effective Search Strategies)
To be perfectly honest, my primary goals never included teaching. For me, the idea, the technology and the implementation are goals in and of themselves. I know that teachers have a tough time keeping up with technology. For them it is about teaching, but, as is so often the case in programming, for us developers it is about the technology. Teachers generally have enough on their hands, at least in my limited experience. Technology can help them solve a problem, but that’s not exactly the type of tool that Visualize History aspires to be.
So, I’m not aiming at teachers. Unfortunately, that means I have no clients for my new business. Some might say that I can postpone my thoughts about clients until later, but I’ve been told otherwise:
You start building the product before you have a (real) client identified. Again, if you can’t sell the idea, you are definitely not going to be able to sell the product.(OnStartups)
Luckily, my primary goals do no include starting a business either. I have a rewarding day job and I do not plan on leaving it. So, a lack of users won’t prevent from starting a business if I don’t try to start a business. And so, I won’t.
So if I’m not focused on teachers, and I’m not focused on a business, what am I focused on? Let’s go back to those primary goals. I like my idea. I may not be a teacher of history, but am most certainly a student of history. I like seeing the relationships of events, both in time and space. So I will build a tool that lets me explore those relationships. Who knows; maybe if I build it, they will come.
]]>Of course that seems intuitive. Understanding a project’s requirements will lead to a better project. I don’t think anyone disagrees with that. In software, the process can be more formal, for example “dogfooding” in software means that a company uses its own software. What better way for Microsoft to find problems in Outlook than by having its 90,000+ employees use it every single day?
Unfortunately for Visualize History, I, the developer, am not the target audience. As I picture things now, the site is aimed at teachers of history. I am not a teacher of history, and I don’t know what they require, how they prioritize potential features and what they think is silly. What am I to do?
There are solutions. I have, for example, been reading a lot of blogs by teachers recently. I used to work at a newspaper called Edweek and have been in sporadic contact with my former coworkers there. I remember my teachers and I try to put myself in their shoes.
So that’s the plan, for now. We will see how it goes.
]]>