Sprint 7

This week I focused a lot on design and development of the project and also thought a bit about the ethics involved in media and this project.

1. I redesigned the entire project, moving the timeline to the bottom of the content and adjusting the design to be relative instead of absolute. This was a process that needed to happen as the predecessor to this project, Timeline JS was largely made through absolute positioning and was very bad at adjusting to resizing of the browser.
2. Before this sprint all of the timeline and the events were completely hard coded. This week I spent time to dynamically generate these pieces based on the events that are given in the json. It first gets an accurate min and max of the entire timeline by getting the closest multiple of 5. To generate the events theres a quick mathematical difference that is calculated between the current event’s year and the minimum year of the entire timeline. Then this number is just multiplied by the width of each individual tick to figure out exactly where on the timeline that event should be.
3. The last big thing that I worked on was making sure that the events get hidden if they go past a threshold on both extremes of the timeline. Before the pieces of the timeline were properly getting hidden however the events were not.

Ethics

Ethics is a constant problem in media as the “right” thing is not always as clear as it seems. Often I believe the biggest way for this to happen in the world of technology is for a program that has a very specific goal to be used for a bad purpose. A perfect example of this would be Facebook and the negative impacts that they have had on this previous election. Although Facebook didn’t intentionally set out to affect people’s political thought processes, because their advertising algorithms function to serve up content that the user wants to see, it often only served up content that was related politically to their point of view. They are now very aware of this and are working on how to stop this from happening, however the real conundrum is attempting to identify these potentially ethical problems from arising in the first place.

I have a big vision for the tool to be used as a system with content writers curating credible sources to create differing opinions on complicated conflicts. The keyword in that last sentence without a doubt is “credible”. I want to give people their voices, however I believe the real ethical dilemma will be to develop a system that can properly show the different sides objectively which is extremely hard to do when intentionally splitting an issue into different opinions. Vetting content writers has been a consideration I have been having throughout this process and seems to be the solution to solving this specific ethical dilemma. As the project grows it is likely that more ethical problems may arise however I will make sure that the system will adapt to these problems and be transparent with those working with me throughout the process to continue to figure out the best course of action.