TimeCapsule is a project directed by Johanna Drucker at UCLA, Department of Information Studies and Design|Media Arts.
Overview
This project supports humanistic and hermeneutic approaches to modeling various modes of temporality and chronology by creating a graphical platform in which to create, display, analyze, and interpret temporal schema. The platform is designed to produce as well as display structured data, and consists of a paintbox of basic components (lines, intervals, points) with attributes (extension, inflections, scale) that can be customized to fit domain-specific and project-driven needs. The modes of temporal and chronological modeling include experiential, narrative, biographical, and discursive sources of information based in texts, data, and images that are part of the human cultural record. The guiding principle of the project is that time-keeping systems from the empirical sciences are not suited to the analysis and representation of interpretative work in the humanities.
Inflections: Interpretative interactions with data
If we consider data practice a central concern for the humanities, we need to find ways to account for the interpretive steps carried out with computational resources. At the moment, the discursive engagement with digital interfaces is largely carried out via textually annotated screenshots and narrated screen recordings. There is only limited support to attach arguments to specific display states or data elements. Since interactivity and thus dynamic display are crucial qualities of digital interfaces there is a need to connect the changeable character of interfaces with humanistic practices. For this purpose, we propose inflection as the intentional alteration of the display and underlying data to make a point, advance a story, highlight evidence, etc. Other than the existing interaction techniques provided for data visualization, inflections are interpretive and discursive interactions that are meant to be saved, shared, and shown. To realize this vision, interpretative capabilities need to be baked into the stack, whose layers could be threefold into: interface, concept, and storage. Inflections are performed in the interface, reflected at the conceptual level, and saved and shared via networked storage. The realization of inflection requires collaborative and interdisciplinary design, conceptualization, and prototyping.
Work outline
The work that needs doing is on three levels:
- interface: ideate visualization/interaction designs for different inflections
- concept: think through, talk over, and write down
- storage: engineer an efficient backend, settle on formats
The three levels:
Interface level:
Workspace: Contains the basic paintbox of graphical tools for doing interpretative work by creating timelines directly or from data, but supporting interpretative modification through inflections, attributes, and other features. The basic components are lines, points, intervals that support actions by the user and encode behaviors (e.g. elastic timelines, variable metrics, causal relations). The goal is to create an intuitive, simple but extensible, graphical system linked to stored, modifiable, data structures.
Potential inflections with the respective interactions (behaviors of the elements and actions by the user)
· Present: add, remove, hide
· Emphasize: highlight, increase size, increase saliency
· Aggregate: group or collapse multiple items
· Focus: Zoom in, filter display
· Connect: Add links, move closer together
· Interact: Attract, repel, absorb, vary dependently in other ways
Conceptual level:
These are the descriptive, formal schema for understanding experiential,
narrative, discursive and chronological temporalities that support analysis and study of project and discipline specific models. The ChronoJSON outline is one possible direction for developing this facet of the research.
Storage level:
Data: These are the structured data formats for storage, transfer, analysis, display of temporal schema and express the graphical features of the workspace and the conceptual components of descriptive or analytic schema in a formal way. These include mark-up schemes and other structured data.
Library: This is the collection of historical and contemporary visualizations and text documents that serve as research objects and from which graphical structures, conceptual schema, and/or data structures are abstracted for interpretation and study.
Each of these components is based on formal structures that allow them to be integrated in the workspace, cross-walked to other data schemes, and customized for individual projects.
