Tag: history of 1989

I started thinking and researching for phase 2 of the internship tonight. Plotting all of the objects that a student selects as their “My Favorites” on a map. There seems to be a number of options available, and the most usable seems to be a combination of yahoo maps and flash.

A quick search of the Internets pulled up this page from one of the makers of PHP. Rasmus’ Toys Page has a great writeup on how to mash yahoo maps, flash and GeoCodes into a neato map. What I like best about this (besides the flashy eye-candy – pun intended) is the ability this set up has to automatically grab the longitude and latitude from as little as the city and state. I’m not sure how well it will work for places outside of the US, but theoretically all of the objects in the database will have their GeoCodes as part of their metadata.

Oh, and since I haven’t done a snapshot of the progress on the Flash movie, here’s the latest. Each of the targets are clickable, so you can have a better chance to see the text in the bubble.  I should have put a version from between this and the one before… but I was working feverishly to make it look good. I’ve spent way too much time trying to make it look good. I desperately need some design skills.

I now know the country outlines in Eastern Europe by heart. I could probably draw them in the dark. Contrary to the previous posts claim, I didn’t figure out the trick. It’s not actually the brush tool, but it is the pen tool I need to use. And most importantly WITH THE OBJECT SELECTION OFF!!! I’ve spent many, many hours redrawing, coloring, and making the map look good. Jessica (my wonderful and more artistically talented wife) gave me some great pointers on the color scheme I should be using. The better red is a result of her better judgment.

Well, all of my time tonight was spent on drawing and re-drawing most of the country outlines in order to get the effects that I want. I didn’t get much done on progression of the movie/intro, but I figured a few things out… Like draw with the paint brush instead of the pencil.

I went to a meeting with Mills and others about the ‘tools’ for the 1989 project. The part that applied to me, is a better and distinct idea of what my project will do. It is three parts:

1. Create a flash movie (the very thing I’m working on), that depicts certain key events that led to the fall of communism. This will have the main purposes of presenting the events on a map and time line so that students can get better place the events in time and place. The movie will also show how the movement to end communism started in the north and moved south. This movie will just be an intro, available as a resource.
2. The second part of the project (the internship) is to create a way to display the objects that a student has selected as their ‘My Favorites’ on a map and/or time line.  There are some key technical issues that must be addressed before this can really happen. Firstly, none of the objects in the database have geo-codes associated with them.  Secondly, the code/program that is going to be used is not finished yet, and won’t be until the summer. So that means this part of the project will be a simple page that pulls data from the database and plots it on a map. More a proof of concept, than a working prototype.
3. The last part is to create a map (either an image map, a flash map, or something like that) for navigation and searching the database. When a country is clicked on, all objects in the database associated with that country are returned. Using Flash would enable the user to zoom in on a country and select a city or something.

Anyhow, here’s the newest version of the 1989 intro movie.

Wow. That took a long time! I spent the whole evening working on making a better looking map. I almost had a bit of a scare as well, that all the work I put into tracing the outline of the land masses and the country lines would not turn out. My Flash skills are quite rusty. But thanks to a few tutorials from WebWasp, I figured out the need to draw in ‘Merge Drawing’ mode rather than ‘Object Drawing’ mode. I had drawn all of the lines with the paint brush using ‘Object Drawing’ mode. This made it impossible to use the paint bucket tool to fill in with color. Fortunately, WebWasp came to the rescue with a tip on how to overcome that problem. I simply selected all of the paint brush lines which were objects. Then in Modify->Combine Objects, select ‘Union’. This makes all of the objects into one object. Then in Modify menu again, select ‘Break Apart.’ This makes all of the lines behave, and I could use the paint bucket to fill the land masses with grey and the water with blue. It look pretty snazzy now.

What did I learn of historical importance today… Well, it struck me how arbitrary the dividers and barriers are that humans place on each other. There are divisions such as speech, but really, why did the border between Norway and Sweden end up where it did and not elsewhere? Only because that’s where humans decided it should go. The only real border is between water and land. I thought back on a geography class I had as an undergraduate. That was a really cool class. I love maps. I’ll look at them for hours if I could. That class would totally have convinced me to switch majors to geography, if it wasn’t the very last class I had to take to graduate with my BA in History AND BA in German. It was the only class I had that semester, too. Despite the great temptation to goof off and just get a passing grade, I worked hard and pulled my overall GPA up by enough points to graduate Magna Cum Laude. Well, I digress…

Next step… Probably put some real data into the map. Have the flash points line up with real events. Then add a bubble of text to explain which event the flash point refers to. I’ll change the flash point too. Perhaps I’ll use the hamsickle (the hammer and sickle).

Ah, yes. Almost forgot. Here’s the next version of the 1989 map.