Timelines Online: Hypermedia and Information Architecture in the Representation of Intellectual History

Timelines Online: Hypermedia and Information
Architecture in the Representation of Intellectual History

John
Zuern
Department of English, University of
Hawai'I
zuern@hawaii.edu

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

My presentation will address the potential--and some of the problems--of applying
the principles of information architecture and graphic design elaborated in the
work of Nielsen [13], Rosenfeld and Morville [15], Tufte [17], and Wurman [19]
to the creation of web-based educational resources that represent the history of
ideas. While my own work is focused on developing instructional materials in the
history of literary theory and criticism, my presentation discusses general
problems in the graphic design of timelines that are relevant to a number of
humanities disciplines.
Although careful attention to historical issues is commonplace in courses on
literature, educators who confront the daunting task of teaching literary theory
often find that time constraints and the perceived difficulty of individual
texts preclude sufficient consideration of the historical and institutional
contexts which have shaped the formation of concepts, approaches, and
assumptions. Such consideration is, however, crucial for an understanding of any
theory's contribution. Carefully designed hypermedia systems have the potential
to represent intellectual history as a dynamic, networked process driven by
dialogue and contest, providing students a means of exploring the complexity of
that history and of entering into the conversation that sustains it.
In an effort to move beyond an instrumental application of electronic media as a
storage-and-delivery system for learning materials, my project seeks to develop
design strategies that take into account developments in the theory of
historiography (e.g. Foucault [7], White [18], and Ginzburg [8]) that have
important implications for the representation of history in any format. With
reference to recent work in knowledge representation [12] and a series of
concrete examples, my paper will demonstrate some of the theoretical and
methodological challenges that arise when we turn to relatively static spatial
relationships as a means of conveying the dynamic temporal and conceptual
interconnections that characterize intellectual history. Developing solutions
for problems of design is a hermeneutic procedure that engages the designer in a
"dialogue with the design situation" [4] and demands a critical examination of
received frameworks for organizing historical knowledge. In the case of
graphical timelines, the dominant metaphor of the "line" itself tends to
privilege chronology, which presents history as a sequence of events, over
models that emphasize, for example, networks of discourses [7].
The scope of my own project in its present form is restricted to the years
1965-1975, a decade in which a number of influential positions articulated
within philosophy, linguistics, and the social sciences began to inform
literary-critical study. In pursuing this project, I have attempted to meet the
following desiderata for resources of this kind:
to make available clear, accurate historical data, such as
biographical dates of important figures, publication dates, and the
dates and rosters of significant seminars and conferences, as well as
references to major historical, social, and cultural events that have an
impact on the development of ideas;
to augment the above data with the kinds of anecdotal material
valorized by the New Historicism in literary criticism as well as
relations of quotidian events, personal habits, and chance occurrences
of which records exists and out of which "microhistories" might be
assembled [8];
to ensure that the system encourages both browsing and known-item
searching;
to allow users to specify the types of information they wish to access
(for example, a chronological bibliography of an individual theorist's
publications or the genealogy of a particular critical term);
to allow users to control the level of granularity (for example,
choosing to access a chronological bibliography of an single theorist's
or of representative texts of an entire school of thought);
to permit multiple forms of access and interpretation (enlisting the
poetics of hypertext fiction to allow users to construct a range of
narratives that tell the multiple stories of the development of
contemporary literary theory).

These goals entail a number of conceptual and technical challenges. All
timelines, regardless of their form, write history in the course of displaying
it. As much as the historian, the courseware developer has to interpret the
materials at hand "in order to construct the moving pattern of images in which
the form of the historical process is to be mirrored" [18]. The relative
openness of hypermedia in relation to print documents does little to mitigate
the risk of imposing interpretations upon users; Aarseth [1] has argued that
predetermined paths in hypertext can restrict readers to a greater extent than
the eminently browsable formats of traditional print materials. Developers of
instructional media in all fields, especially those whose subject matter is as
complex and overdetermined as that of intellectual history, must be attuned to
the expressive and interpretative functions of content selection and navigation
design, concerns which cannot be extricated from the resource's overall
architecture and operability. One concern in particular is that of correlation:
how can the system encourage users to correlate historical data without
sacrificing the chronological or otherwise rational organizational structures of
the data?
I will illustrate my remarks with demonstrations from my own project as well as
examples of print timelines (Kitts [9], Mann [11], and Davis [5]); interactive
timelines designed for educational kiosks (Skydeck [15]); web-based timelines
that employ HTML (Eckman [6] and Landow [10]), PDF (Bauer et al. [2]) and CGI
programming (Benjamin and Slaughter [3]). I conclude my discussion with
suggestions of how three-dimensional data-management and mapping systems such as
Dynamic Diagrams' MAPA system, Plumb Design's ThinkMap, and can further serve to
accomplish some of the goals outlined in my paper.

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