behind AotW

A couple of weeks ago, one of my favorite Internet-friends, Andrew Vande Moere*, mentioned the Simile Timeline API in a post on his information aesthetics blog. Timeline is described by its creators as …

… a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information … Pan the timeline by dragging it horizontally … like Google Maps, you can populate Timeline with data by pointing it to an XML file …

This weekend I finally had a little time to see what it can do, and found it’s great fun.

It is one of those rare, beautiful little software gems with a clear purpose and excellent execution.

The documentation is crap–beyond the basic installation–but that’s just a quibble. Perhaps I can help improve the docs later. It’s also a bit slow in loading events and misbehaves sometimes in IE. Another quibble. For now, I’ll have fun discovering all the controls and features by dint of ‘reverse engineering’ or trial and error. And I prefer Firefox anyway.

So, perhaps obviously, I’ve made use of this fine tool for a new Campaign Timeline on AotW. Give it a spin, won’t you, and provide some constructive criticism? I think it has huge potential.

AotW timeline screenshot

I’ve seeded my timeline with content from the 200-odd battlefield historical tablets. I used those events because I’d already transcribed them in the database, and had serendipitously included time stamps for each as I did the data entry. The timeline application reads events from an xml file, so it wasn’t too difficult to write some php code to extract and write the xml from a tailored Events table in my database.

Now, un/fortunately, I can hear hundreds of other 1862 events calling out to me.

Add me! Add me!

Yet another hungry project mouth to feed.
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* Vande Moere finds people using the most incredibly creative and useful ways to display information and pops them up on his blog. As a closet Tuftean, I’m a big fan. Usually, however cool, I can see no good way to use these amazing techniques. Until now. Thank you Andrew.

In Googling keywords mit, simile, and timeline, looking for other people using the Timeline API (hoping for clues to customizing it) I found about 200 unique references. Only about 10 of these are actual users. Everybody else is just talking about how cool it is. I wonder when/if web timelines built on this will be common?

Covering some odds and ends, prompted by my Internet Friends …

On the community blogging the American Civil War

Joe Avalon has just posted a listing of Civil War-related blogs on his venerable Civil War Interactive site (tip from Drew). Joe already has the preeminent set of recommended ACW web links at Link Central – over which he’s labored for at least 10 years. This is a welcome and logical addition. As a relative newcomer to these blogs, but not to the War or the web, Joe’s first impressions are quite valuable. He opines:

[These blogs] … tend to have something in common: terrific material and not enough comments.

A blog isn’t just a soapbox set up in a vacant lot for people to declaim their voice to the weeds and litter and less identifiable rubbish lying about – it is, ideally, a meeting place for a community where voices go back and forth, opinions are shared, questions are asked and answered, and people who would otherwise never have met get acquainted.

As I hinted to Joe on his board, I wonder if he isn’t expecting too much from us, or blogging generally. Judging from my web server logs and stats posted or derived for other ACW blogs, I believe there’s a group of maybe 50 to 100 regular readers for most of these. A core subset are the bloggers themselves. An almost incestuous little community are we.

For some time now, maybe the last year or two, I’ve felt too closely focused on the events of one day, 17th September 1862. Not that there isn’t a lifetime’s work yet to be done, or that I’ve done much more than nibble at it, but obviously the Battle of Antietam didn’t spontaneously erupt out of the ground. It is surrounded on all sides – in time, geography, and event – by an ocean of context.

I’ve not entirely ignored the ocean, but haven’t paid it the attention it probably deserves.

So I’ve jumped out of the comfortable boat (a dingy, in this analogy) into the water. I’m not going too far really, only expanding the scope of my research and the website to include the duration of the Maryland Campaign. The period of roughly 4 through 20 September.

I have some reservations.

I worry that AotW will become wider than deep, a trait that would reduce it’s value. There are plenty of survey and CliffNotes versions of history online already. Collection of information in detail beyond the standard and the obvious is my goal at AotW.

I worry also that by expanding the scope, I’m diluting the effort. There’s so much yet to learn and document about the battle, and only so many hours (years) in which to do it.

I’ll just have to work with this for a while and see how it goes.

My first new project is mapping the motion of the military units on the Campaign. To do this, I’m building a new series of theater-scale maps, one per day. The physical context to Antietam.

As I have been plotting units, though, I’m finding there are far more of them than I’d read of previously, and the neat orders of battle with which I’m familiar are of less and less help. Local militia, orphaned cavalry detachments, signalmen, state troops; not to mention rear-area logistics, supply, and communications points.

New and exciting territory, but I may have bitten off more than I can chew.