A behind-the-scenes look at the work that goes into the Rich Media Projects sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Xavier University of Louisiana.
Friday, October 31, 2003
Thinker: Met with Elliott Hammer. We reviewed the new animations and discussed the design of the next one I'll be working on. He will brought information for the brain map; we found a Darwin text for the demonstration of ironic effects of thought control. Elliott has taken some pictures for the demo of change blindness but plans to take some more; he is almost finished writing the next section.
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BibleDudes: Met with Michael Homan and went over the "Bible" section in painstaking detail. We made many desgn decision which I shall implement next week. We also found an electronic KJV bible on-line (a Project Gutenberg e-text) and I modified so that it can be used as a source for the "Biblical Lot" game. (Did you know there are 31,102 bible verses? There are in this version, at least.)
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Haiku of Kobayashi Issa: Did research and experimentation to find a standards-compliant method for including audio files in Web pages. Met with David Lanoue and discussed design goals and parameters for incorporating audio elements nto website. David has created some fifty or so audio files from the tapes he made in Japan, each file being one of Issa's haiku read by a Japanese native. I uploaded these files to our Web server, tinkered with the search engine to make it detect the presence of appropriate audio files, and created apage to display haiku with audio.
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Thursday, October 30, 2003
BibleDudes: Added more illustrations to the "Bible" section, and resized some existing images which were messing up the layout for users with 800x600 resolution.
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Interactive Taxonomic Zoology: Updated the Mac launchers. Ran into a weird problem creating an OS 9 version of the projector: I kept getting a "Problem Writing File" error which seemed to be related to some of the Xtras the movie uses. I seem to have circumvented this by creating the OS 9 projector using Director 8.5 instead of Director MX.
I also changed the font used throughout the interface to Arial Rounded MT Bold, which seems to display better than B Vag Rounded Bold, which we had been using.
Also implemented a true "quit" function so that the Exit button really works.
I burned a new CD (Mac only) and gave it to Mark Schlueter when we met this afternoon. We developed a plan to test the program with students on November 18th and 20th.
posted by Editor B
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
BibleDudes: Added some more illustrations to the "Bible" section.
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Theological Perspectives of the Reformation: Met with Mark Gstohl. We did some troubleshooting and fixed a number of issues relating to display and formatting of the timelines. I gave Mark some new button graphics to work with and coached him on editing his stylesheet in Dreamweaver. We implemented a new version of the timeline which simply displays all events from the database. I urged Mark to add some data to the new people table.
posted by Editor B
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Collage Culturel: Transferred another hour of footage from tape to computer for Carmen Rogers to edit.
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Thinker: Created animations for the demos of feature-analysis and recognition-by-components. Tweaked the style sheet to improve contextual navigation.
posted by Editor B
Monday, October 27, 2003
Thinker: Met with Elliott Hammer. We reviewed the animations and discussed the navigation. He will send me information for the brain map and text for the demonstration of ironic effects of thought control. He will also take pictures for the demo of change blindness and start writing the next section.
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BibleDudes: Created and deployed a few "under construction" pages for the undeveloped sections so that users don't run into broken links. Added some more images that I'd overlooked on the last update.
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Kids to Afrika: A little miscellaneous fine-tuning here and there.
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Friday, October 24, 2003
Thinker: Created an animation for perception, companion to the one for sensation, and also for template matching.
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Theological Perspectives of the Reformation: Did a bit of graphics work on the image that will be used as a banner for the site. Implemented the comparative timeline feature.
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Thursday, October 23, 2003
Thinker: Fine-tuned navigation, adding a drill-down and correcting bugs. Created first animation (besides the test animation on the home page), illustrating the concept of sensation.
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Wednesday, October 22, 2003
Theological Perspectives of the Reformation: Met with mark Gstohl. He requested a comparative timeline view, which I will attempt to prepare for next week.
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Thinker: I am componentizing the prototype, which will speed development and deployment of new content. This includes modelling the site's structure in XML, as we did in BibleDudes.
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Tuesday, October 21, 2003
Interactive Taxonomic Zoology: The ubiquitous glossary is now fully functional, although a bit crude in terms of how it presents the definitions (using a system alert box).
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Monday, October 20, 2003
Interactive Taxonomic Zoology: Hacking Lingo for the ubiquitous glossary. Getting closer!
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Collage Culturel: Designed a new geographic-themed look using elements of a map.
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Theological Perspectives of the Reformation: Extended timeline pages to link to a year-by-year view. Created a people table in database.
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Friday, October 17, 2003
BibleDudes: Exporting images from Flash, processing in Fireworks, and integrating into Web pages....
Thinker: Met with Elliott Hammer. He has sent the text for the section on Perceptual Processes to me and I did a quick and crude dump of some of that text into a prototype page. There are some navigational issues that I will work on next week; he will take pictures for the demo of change blindness.
Haiku of Kobayashi Issa: Tutored David Lanoue on how to edit audio in GoldWave, which we downloaded and installed on his machine.
posted by Editor B
Thursday, October 16, 2003
Interactive Taxonomic Zoology: Further research on how to implement the glossary system. Director's hyperlink function, comined with PRegEx, may do the trick.
posted by Editor B
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
Theological Perspectives of the Reformation: Met with Mark Gstohl. We sketched out plans for extending the timelines to include a year-by-year feature.
Interactive Taxonomic Zoology: Researching the PRegEx Director Xtra, which I believe may provide the necessary functionality for the ubiquitous glossary system.
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Tuesday, October 14, 2003
BibleDudes: Finished tracing in Flash for "Bible" section.
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Monday, October 13, 2003
The second Rich Media Lunch of the semester featured Susan Spillman's "Vive la Louisiane" and a bottle of Smoking Loon.
BibleDudes: Tracing illustrations in Flash...
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Friday, October 10, 2003
Haiku of Kobayashi Issa: Transferred the audio from three tapes made by David Lanoue on his recent expedition to Japan (from DAT to PC to Mac).
Thinker: Met with Elliott Hammer. He has completed a first draft of text for the section on Perceptual Processes. He will refine it, add special instructions (for me) and send it to me electronically. He also borrowed a digital camera to take some pictures for use in the demo of change blindness.
posted by Editor B
Thursday, October 09, 2003
Interactive Taxonomic Zoology: Completed conversion of glossary to XML format. Refined glossary functions and took a stab at implementing a ubiquitous glossary functionality (click a word anywhere and get the definition).
Theological Perspectives of the Reformation: Met with Mark Gstohl. Demonstrated new file-based system for timelines. He will attempt to work with these in Dreamweaver. We reviewed the specs for a "people" database table, which I will implement soon.
posted by Editor B
Wednesday, October 08, 2003
Interactive Taxonomic Zoology: Revisited the glossary feature and implemented a columnar layout for the list of terms. It looks better but is not dynamically generated (yet).
posted by Editor B
Theological Perspectives of the Reformation: Laid the foundation for a file-based system for displaying different timeline Web pages, with an emphasis on making it easy for Mark Gstohl to create and manipulate timeline pages. Experimented with some DHTML trickery to hide and reveal content within timelines, but this ran afoul of browser differences in handling hidden and revealed table rows.
Vive: Messed around with printing CD labels -- the PDF which I made on Monday consistently prints off-center. When I finally got my Mac set up to print, and tried printing directly from the Illustrator file, I broke the printer. Oops! (Actually it's just a paper jam, but I can't figure out how to fix it.)
posted by Editor B
Tuesday, October 07, 2003
BibleDudes: Completed basic layout for "Bible" section.
Collage Culturel: Carmen Rogers took stock and evaluated the video clips she's trimmed up over the last few weeks.
Haiku of Kobayashi Issa: Got the audio tapes from David Lanoue and finally figured out a good way to transfer the audio to the computer.
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Monday, October 06, 2003
Vive: Created PDF of CD label.
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BibleDudes: Working on illustrations and layout for "Bible" section.
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Friday, October 03, 2003
Collage Culturel: Fine-tuned the stylesheet.
Thinker: Fine-tuned the stylesheet. Created a test animation for the home page, so the user can readily determine whether or not he or she has the Flash Player. Met with Elliott Hammer. We discussed prototype and draft of text for section on Perceptual Processes which Elliott has partially completed.
Kids to Afrika: Implemented new photo album (2003 Meet and Greet). Now I need to figure out how to link this into the site...
posted by Editor B
Thursday, October 02, 2003
Thinker: Designed prototype for Thinker homepage.
Interactive Taxonomic Zoology: Met with Mark Schlueter, discussed prototype of glossary. For next time: Aim to improve presentation of word list (columnar?) and definitions, and start thinking about how to implement program-wide access to glossary words.
posted by Editor B
Wednesday, October 01, 2003
Theological Perspectives of the Reformation: Met with Mark Gstohl. I showed him the prototype and it seemed to meet his needs. We expanded the number of people the timelines table references. We discussed further database tables that might be necessary for representing people, locations, works, images and possibly events. Mark will continue to enter data into the timelines table and further mull over the data we'll need in the people table. I will modularize the timelines display to a form that will be convenient for Mark in the Web authoring process.
