Getting it to work.

I’m finally getting somewhere with the Yahoo/Flash map. The latest is always viewable at http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/maps/yahoo.html. Tonight I worked on getting the title and description to show up nice. The description is usually really long, so I found a php function that truncates it (without cutting of mid-word), and adds an elipse to show more text. I also figured out how to add html links to the xml data. There’s apparently a couple of different ways. I opted to have the first < in the a tag be written in as &lt ; (the HTML entity). That did the trick. Now the marker has a link to see the whole of the data. This should be a link back to the page that’s part of the real site (in Omeka).

Another idea: Add the ability in the admin side of things, to select an item, and then enter the geocodes for that item by clicking on the map in the appropriate spot. Flickr does something like that. It would make it really easy for admins to enter the geocodes.

The Continuing Saga of Map Making

So, I’ve decided to use the yahoo/flash option because it looks better, and it’s a bit easier to implement. The biggest impediment is not having geocodes for each item in the database. Here are some steps that must be taken before the map can work.

  1. The database needs to add a longitude and latitude field for items.
  2. Each item then needs their long/lat entered in.
  3. After that happens use the commented code below in the xml.php file:
  1. //$sql = “SELECT item_title, item_description, item_longlat FROM items ORDER BY item_date”;

There’s a couple of options for the field names and what they contain. This is, of course, all to be determined by the Omeka makers, and not me, but here’s my take on it anyway.

  1. item_longlat = would hold the longitude and latitude in format lon,lat
  2. item_long & item_lat = hold the long and lat separately, that might be cool for searching on items that are on the same long or lat.
  3. item_geocode = same as item_longlat, but a different name.

As for the Flash introduction, I still need to get the list of events that should be displayed. I also played with creating a new flash intro based on the new yahoo map of Europe, and the style of the markers. I’ll also need to think of a way to deal with markers whose information would tend to go off screen. I’ll have to make them ‘stage’ aware, or place them individually.

The last item is creating a map, that, when a country is clicked on, will return all of the items from that country. A couple of options on that are to have it return a yahoo map with markers showing items from that country, or to just return a normal list.

I think I’ll Yahoo!

I did some more researching and playing around with the Yahoo and Flash options and I think this will be the better way.  As an example of why, look at Justin Everett-Church’s work creating custom ‘themes’ for the maps.

Also in my search I came across some neato projects Trippermap plots your flickr photos on a map that you can host or plug into your own web page.

Plazes.com if for those of you who like to let everyone know where you are at any moment of the day. A bit too much of an information overload for me, but there’s 6 billion people in this world, so there’s bound to be a few thousand that get hooked by this idea.

Of course Flickr’s own map deal would be the ideal set up for this project. I’ll get some of the functionality, but it would be awesome to get something like this going.

I’ll be back with more results…

Making a map, part 2

So, I spent another 4 hours working on the Flash map. Mills showed me some really great Flash maps for inspiration. They live at MapsOfWar.com. I like the History of Religion map and the Imperial History map for their use of the timeline and map to convey the information. I want the 1989 map to be similar. The MapsOfWar maps are great reference points, and good examples from which to glean style ideas.

I must say the hardest part of this project so far is the design. I’m no graphic artist, for sure. My attempts at creating something that looks cool are quite pitiful. I can copy and mimic other people’s works, but trying to put my ideas into something concrete is difficult. I should take some art classes.

Anyhow. I worked on Scene 2 of the Flash intro. Getting a decent looking timeline took little effort. Creating the hammer and sickle (the hamsickle) that moves along the timeline was a bit time consuming. At first I used an image from Wikipedia (it was free). But scaling that in the timeline made it distorted and choppy. So I redrew the whole thing in Flash so that it is made from vectors, and scales nicely.

Then I decided that using a single color map with the outline of the countries would work better than using the map I borrowed from the CIA (found it at the Library of Congress’ online map collection). So I started tracing the country outlines. Soon I’ll have a decent looking map of East Europe that I can copy and manipulate in different ways.

I also added some flash points to the timeline. They’re nothing fancy, and don’t correspond to any real data. I’ll get that stuff later.

View the progress so far.

Map research

GIS and Google:

GIS would be a bit complex for this project. It is mainly used for displaying geographic data (ie. population density, economic diversity, elevation changes, etc), rather than pinpointing an items’ location.  While GIS does make some really cool maps, it is beyond the scope and needs of this internship.

Google maps, on the other hand, are more in line with things we would like to do. There are already many similar applications found throughout the web. Some examples are “home grown” at CHNM, like the Hurricane Archive, and 911 archive.

The deciding factors will be the options that work best for our needs (which are outlined in a previous post).