HCI Portfolio / Digital Timeline
The Digital Timeline project was completed for a class called Globalization and New Media. One of the goals of the class was to build a greater understanding for Russian history and culture and how it has shifted and changed alongside the United States. Groups in the class generally worked with another group of students in Russia to produce a report that explored the cross cultural analysis of the topics of authority, home, time, and machine in America and Russia using Charlie Chaplin’s film, “Modern Times,” as a catalyst. Our group tracked the progress of the other groups and worked to create a meta-analysis of all of these topics, the end result of which is the Digital Timeline.
The Timeline itself shows side by side key events related to the topic areas as they unfold in Russia and America. In addition to presenting our findings about these events we wanted to facilitate exploration of the cultural and temporal differences further by making the timeline interactive. Users interact by selecting areas to focus on. A user may, for example, select the button for "Home", and all the events which relate to this area will be highlighted. Selecting multiple areas allows the user to view the intersection of the areas by highlighting events that relate to all of the selected areas.
A screenshot of the timeline, explaining the functionality is shown below.
The timeline runs using Flash, you can play with it here: