Harless Weblog

Weblog #14: May 10,2005

The major assignments for the semester are as follows:
Type Assignment: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rharless/Index.htm

Image Assignment: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rharless/Images.htm.

Design Assignment: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rharless/WebProject.htm.

Final Website Assignment: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rharless/WebProject.htm.

There are still problems with the website design although I attempted to address all the issues discussed in last week's class.  I still don't like the captions but I suppose these are better than no captions. All the links and footnotes seem to work. At the last minute I added images to the Credits page and the spacing is less than perfect but I think it was important to indicate the sources for the images used in the site. I checked the site on IE and Firefox and it was interesting that the hand-painted vignette I used in the header showed up in Firefox but  not in IE. I never received the "combat" font I ordered for the header so I went with the best I had available.

Overall this class has been a challenging, but ultimately rewarding, experience. As advertised, it does "take over your life." On more than one occasion I found myself lying in bed thinking about design issues when I should have been sleeping. The knowledge that my wife's family will be examining the site in detail made it very important to ensure that the history was accurate. Both my father-in-law and mother-in-law suffer from dimentia so the site will probably have no meaning for them.  Still I think it's important for them to see it in the hope that it will perhaps evoke some memories.

My best to Dr. Petrik and my seven classmates who have been very kind in their critiques of my work. I hope everyone has a wonderful summer.

Weblog #13: May 3, 2005

This is my thirteenth blog this semester; I hope that doesn't mean bad luck for the unveiling of my project tonight. I'm reasonably satisfied with it. The design is fairly prosaic but I think that fits the topic. Probably I had the worst time dealing with captions but at least I managed a caption for each picture. I notice that the only picture that didn't upload on Explorer was the one of George Patton. Sorry George! I plan to include complete transcriptions of the ten letters I currently have but so far have managed to do only three. The rest will be done by May 10. Eventually, the goal is to include all the ones that have some historical value.

Anyway, here it is: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rharless/WebProject.htm.

Weblog #12: April 26, 2005

  I bought Myst IV for $30 and, with some difficulty, managed to successfully load it into my laptop. After some trial and error I discovered that, in order to play the game, you have to have Disc 2 in the computer. After that I was under way and was transported along with my guide, a little girl named Yeesha, to a mountain hideaway called Tomahna. When we arrived, Yeesha showed me how to enter the heavily armoured entrance by pulling on a lever. Once inside, I didn't see Yeesha again but did encounter her father, Atrus, who referred to me as "my friend" and gave me a task involving the matching of sound waves which I managed to accomplish.
  After that, one of Atrus's impressive looking devices exploded. He then gave me some instructions as to how to deal with this crisis and wandered off. Even after re-visiting the game several times and roaming around the inside of the fortress I was unable to determine what to do next. When the cursor-finger would point in a direction I would follow and then end up in a location that seemed to be a dead-end; I would then have to start over outside the door.
  In one of the articles assigned for this week James Paul Gee talked about the dilemma faced by game-designers who want to attract new gamers as well as seasoned veterans. Games should not be so complex as to frustrate the novices but also should not be "dumbed down" so as to lose the interest of the veterans. My experiences with Myst IV so far indicate that the veterans should be happy with the game experience but first-timers like myself are fairly clueless as to how to proceed. There is a feature in Myst IV called a "Help Map" intended for beginners who are not concerned with the fact that using the map "can alter your gaming experience." Right now I'll take any help I can get.

Weblog #11: April 19, 2005

My "first draft" homepage is at http://mason.gmu.edu/~rharless/WebProject.htm.
  I managed several improvements from last week including the addition of a hand-colored vignette of a wartime photo of my father-in-law. If I can figure out how to do it, I may include this as part of the "header" at the top of the page which would then be the logo for the site appearing on each page. I have ordered a "combat" font from myfonts.com that I will use in the header and elsewhere, if appropriate.
  I also am experimenting with adding links to images of the actual letters that form the basis for the narrative and the site. For today's assignment, I included two randomly selected links just to show how they will look. The writing on the letters has of course faded during the sixty years (!) since they were written but, using Photoshop, I was able to substantially enhance their clarity so that now they are legible. A technical problem that I encountered has to do with the size of the images. I would like to include legible images of entire pages from each of the letters rather than just excerpts as shown here.
  The narrative for the site is probably 75% completed. I have really enjoyed reading my father-in-law's letters along with the newspaper articles, and other contemporary accounts of the events in which he was involved. The letters especially provide a remarkable glimpse into the thoughts of this 24-year-old Texan who participated in these two major wartime operations.

Weblog #10: April 12, 2005

  So one of the assignments for this week was to list information I need to effectively work on my web project. Where to begin? I won't list everything but what is follows is a short list of needs:
  ~On the web assignments we have presented so far I have done the CSS on the same page as the HTML. I could do this because we only had to do one page but this obviously will not work on a multi-page project so I need to know how to set up Dreamweaver so the CSS applies to every page.
~I've heard Rob say several times that an effective way to do a header that would not be affected by different browsers is to make a "graphic" of a header. How do you do that?
~I could use some instruction on how to do internal links, i.e., link one page of the project to another.
~It would be helpful to know how to do templates so as to easily ensure that each page has the same format.
~In Photoshop I still struggle with layers.

A first version of my project's homepage appears at http://mason.gmu.edu/~rharless/WebProject.htm. I liked the colors on the "Rosie the Riveter" poster and tried to match the colors using the technique we learned last week but had a hard time matching the yellows. I also thought that since the subject of my project involves a navy man serving in the army, a combination of navy blue and olive drab might be appropriate although those two colors probably cannot be matched in any aesthetically pleasing way.

Weblog #9: April 5, 2005

  Don't Make Me Think made me think (sorry!) about the differences between commercial sites, which are the subject of this book, and the kind of historical sites which are the focus of our class. If "Don't make me think" is the first law of usability for commercial sites, I wonder if it applies to sites that are intended to  inform and, yes, perhaps even to make people think about the content. I realize, of course, that author Steve Krug's first law applies mostly to navigation rather than content but would the "consumers" of historical sites be more likely to tolerate confusing navigation than those who are simply looking for something to buy. I believe that they would.
  And this raises once again the issue regarding the importance of design versus content. Based on some of the sites we have examined in class, it would seem that some historians not only don't care about design but actually delight in the poor quality of the design of their sites. This might be carrying "anti-design" too far but it seems to me that, for historical sites at least, design/navigation is not as important as content. If a hierarchy of design-content choices were to be constructed in order of priority, it would look something like this:
                    1. good design/good content
                    2. poor design/good content
                    3. good design/poor content
                    4. poor design/poor content
The ideal obviously is to have both effective design and worthwhile content but if one or the other had to be sacrificed in a historical site, it would be design over content. Krug might argue that "make me think" usability hinders access to the content but, in my opinion, that does not make the hierarchy argument any less valid.

Weblog #8: March 29, 2005

  The readings on accessibility revealed aspects of web-use that I had never really considered. Unless they know someone who is disabled, people without disabilities normally don't think about the hardships those disabilities entail. This of course applies not only to web-use but to life in general.  Modified curbs along sidewalks and  entrances to buildings altered for wheelchair access are means to accessibility that we have come to take for granted. Before these modifications were required by law, most people never really considered the restraints on everyday life represented by stairs or streetside curbs. Given the importance of the internet, it stands to reason that accessibility to the web should be given similar consideration.
  This week's readings point out that accessibility requires different modifications depending on the kind of disability being addressed. Obviously, there are different requirements for visually impaired people as opposed to those with impaired motor skills. Particulary interesting was the site demonstrating the kinds of accessibility issues different disabled people face and the site which sampled several kinds of screen readers. The readings provided no small degree of consciousness-raising but the question remains as to just how much effort and resources should web-designers expend to render their sites accessible to disabled users. Perhaps this too will someday be addressed by Congress, if it hasn't already done so.
  Regarding a model for my site, I have changed my project to focus on the exploits of my father-in-law during World War II. During spring break I looked over a vast amount of source material including letters, pictures, newspapers, etc. and decided that this might be the basis for an interesting site which would not raise the same copyright issues I had with TV debates. So far the site I like best as a model is http://timewitnesses.org which is simple enough to be feasible while covering material similar to the site I would like to do.

Weblog #7: March 22, 2005

My images are at http://mason.gmu.edu/~rharless/Images.htm. I think I have gotten fairly proficient at using most of the Photoshop tools, especially the clone stamp which I have found to be particularly useful. I'm fairly satisfied with the final results on my three images. I particularly like the make-over of Buffalo Bill. I think I added years to his life along with improved grooming. The hand-colored version of my restored photo looks somewhat artificial but I tried many different color combinations and this is the best that I could do. I'm still not happy with the lips; I tried many different colors but this seemed to work better than the others. On the engraving, I wasn't happy with the results of the matting process so I tried something different to produce the second image which I liked better.

Weblog #6: March 8, 2005

    As I began working on my image assignment, I used a picture of Buffalo Bill that I found in the American Memory collection and made a number of alterations in his appearance including shortening the length of his hair and removing the "crows feet" around his eyes. I know, of course, from a historian's or a journalist's perspective, such changes are unethical and perhaps even illegal. However, it did occur to me that, if a novice like me can make alterations that, to the inexperienced eye, may not be detectable, what can a Photoshop expert do?
     I have seem references to "doctored photos" in accounts of events as far back as the 1950s, long before the existence of personal computers and Photoshop. In the old Soviet Union, when a leader fell from favor, his image in group photographs would mysteriously disappear. In the the hands of someone not hindered by ethical considerations, a tool as sophisticated as Photoshop could be the source of a lot of mischief. It makes you wonder whether those photos you see in the National Inquirer of aliens and living Elvises are really legitimate.

Weblog #5: March 1, 2005

      Trying to ignore the $45 that Visual Explanations cost, the book is a fascinating exploration of the ways in which information can be most effectively presented in a visual format. Not only is this a book with an eclectic array of pictures, documents, cartoons, charts, etc., it is also a book chock full of ideas and concepts. Websites are only the latest manifestation of design principles that have existed for centuries.The most compelling chapter for me was the one dealing with the contrast between the graphic depiction of the cholera epidemic in London and the depiction of the potential for malfunction of the Challenger space shuttle. How remarkable that "John Snow got it all exactly right," (33) in 1854 while the Thiokol engineers were only able to create "unconvincing" charts to the NASA decision-makers 132 years later. "The charts were unconvincing; the arguments against the launch failed; the Challenger blew up." (40)
     Perhaps it is understandable that a book about visual design is less than chrystal clear in its narrative but I found some of the text in which Tufte tries to explain his illustrations so densely incomprehensible that even repeated readings failed to achieve any kind of clarity. For example, in his chapter on "Multiples" the discussion on the "geometric constructions of the letter A" (112) failed to explain to me either the illustration or its significance. There is also a certain arrogance in his presentation that detracts from the narrative. His reference to "airhead" announcers (145), "dopey" approaches (148), and "distinctly clunky" typography seem out of place in a book by a Professor Emeritus at Yale.