SIMILE tutorial

I went through the SIMILE tutorial (http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/docs/create-timelines.html) yesterday to get a feel for how it works. It's a little confusing since you need to dig around to learn about the functionality they have built into their code, but to get a simple working timeline started, it's actually not too hard. My boyfriend, Leif, helped me out with this a bit, too, and he even wrote a python script that will take all the contents from the current working directory and create events from them to be displayed on the timeline (title, links, etc). It works pretty well!

As I was playing around with this I had some thoughts about what would be useful for our ethnographers. It might be useful to have each timeline "band" display information from a given modality (text, video, photos, audio, etc.), with an "overview" band at the bottom incorporating all the data in one place. It would also be useful to have individual events displayed to look like the media they are representing. PDF files would have a PDF logo (and maybe also a title). But JPEG files might be a thumbnail of the photo, with or without a title (depending on if one has been created for that JPEG yet). Currently, it does not appear that SIMILE is capable of doing this. Individual events are displayed either as bullet points or as durations, with simple text titles. Although, clicking on the events will bring up more information about them (such as links to the JPEG source, or external websites, etc.). If we are serious about pursuing this project, we could possibly work with the SIMILE team to implement this. (?)

Another thought I had was that this timeline should really be integrated with the ButterflyNet program. When you click on an event on the timeline, you should be able to annotate that event with a text box from the pop-up window, and that information should be saved with the event in ButterflyNet. I'm not sure how hard this would be to do yet.

I couldn't figure out how to attach my files here for you to download and look at. I'll bring in my laptop next week to show you, or maybe you could teach me how to attach a file in a posting?