13

Success! I have uploaded the first final project, Thomas Hardy's, onto the website. It is now fully viewable on the Projects page. I still wait for everyone else's project to come up... but no one has sent me anything. Tom was very detailed with his explanation of how he wanted his website designed:

"I envision broken up into sections that you can navigate around at any time, without having to go through the whole massive text in one shot. It would be great if a linkable outline were present on the page at all time - i.e., if this outline had its own frame on the leftside, for example, and you could scroll down the text and read each page on the right side. I don't know how hard that would be; it's just an idea. If you can't do that, maybe put an outline at the beginning that would allow you to navigate to certain parts on the page."

This made my life much easier.

Enjoy!

12

I worked on the website a lot this weekend. Here's the link again, just in case:

http://visualizingthepast.webs.com/

A couple of things have been improved:

• I fixed the layout on the website so it should work on all computers and stay in the center, as opposed to skewing off onto the right side like it was doing in class. The code could use a little more debugging, but to the best of my ability, I have made it as sophisticated as possible.
• A Glossary of Terms has been added onto the main page. Basically, it's just a pop up with a list of obscure words and definitions, for people unfamiliar with the Inca empire and the Quechua language. These are just the basic words one needs to know, there is a whole lot more that could be added to the glossary.
• The Projects page was added with any missing PowerPoint projects, but the Projects page could be updated with actual projects, although it seems everyone is working hard on them and they will be placed on the website after the Dec. 22nd deadline. For now, the projects remain as PowerPoints.
• A small Penn logo was placed at the bottom of the page to link back to the UPenn website, just because!
• The Contacts page now has a "Contact Us" form in which the viewer of the website must state their name, e-mail address, who they would like to contact (from a drop down list of all of our names), and a text box explaining the reason for contact. It is a formal way of contacting one of us without explicitly putting our e-mails onto the website (for privacy reasons).
• The Credits page credits anyone who helped us with our project, as a whole, and credits any images or information I may have used on the website. It also gives a sentence on the class and where it was taken (at Penn).

That's all I can think of for now, but I think the site is greatly improved.

11

I was inspired by the chronicler's style of drawing; Poma's unique font and this unintentional background of the ink of the words on the back page seeping into the image on this page because the ink is so strong. Also, the simplicity of the forms in the drawings; they are quickly sketched, as if Poma wanted to capture everything he saw right at that moment. This is why I used this image as the splash page for the website; it's so representative of Cuzco, this sort of unique empire that disappeared because of Spanish conquest and is gone now, for us to speculate on meticulously. I chose the dark tone of "darksteelgrey" as the predominant color throughout the website because 1) It is visually appealing and 2) because of the color palette of the city of Cuzco. For example:

This color palette is taken from two images of Cuzco, one of the famous and beautiful stone walls within the city, and the other of the terraces. There seems to be a color motif between greys, blues, and greens, so I picked on a darksteelgrey. For the other predominant color tone, I picked grey, as representative of the stones which I could not bear to omit.

This is the website on a small scale. Note the main colors: greys and green-blues. This page, after clicking on the Poma image on the splash page, displays necessary background information on Cuzco and also information on what the class project is about. The grey box on the left details who each of the members of the team, plus instructors and teaching assistant, are. The links above are "About" (which is the page displayed above", the "Projects" page, and a "Contact" page. Also, on the bottom links, there is a "Credit" page in order to give credit and thanks for the images on the website and thanks to those who helped us with our research. The image in the bottom left corner of the box is a small map of ancient Cuzco given to the class by Clark Erickson. Credit will be given for this.

The information on Cuzco on the "About" page I took from Zuidema's talk, because his explanation of Cuzco was detailed and succinct. Credit will be given, but has not yet, as the site is not yet finished. Still to be completed are the Contact and Credits page, and code needs to be fixed up, as well as mistakes must be corrected throughout the website. The idea was also thrown into the class to create a glossary of Spanish and English terms that are required in order to understand the information given in the Power Points. My classmates will keep sending me updated versions of their Power Points so I will put their final products up on the webpage, or if they so wish for it not to be a Power Point, I will make an internal link to their own webpage for their own projects to accommodate their needs.

I coded everything in basic HTML / CSS, which I have known since I was in middle school. It is truly my passion, so being able to write code for a website in a class setting was an exciting challenge. I spent well over 24 hours coding everything in Notepad (which is actually a pretty primitive method, but I don't know any other way. Note: That will be a new goal. Learning a more sophisticated way of creating websites!).

I still have a lot more work to do, and I may help others with some modeling and texturing, so I'll keep this up to date!

10

Wow, I haven't posted in what seems like forever. It's been a busy semester, but for this class, I've learned so much. We had the opportunity of speaking with Tom Zuidema and Brian Bauer, both experts in the field of ancient Inca culture in Cuzco, and they provided tremendous insight into the details of the culture and the layout of the city, the Ceque system, etc. Clark and Norm have both helped us understand the archaeology component of the project and the computer science component (aka how to make our project look cooler and more fascinating), and I think that the final product for the entire class was better than I expected for the short time that we actually worked on the project.

The class finally decided to create one huge collaborative project which involved some research papers, some ethnographical work, some 3D modeling and animation, and then putting all this information onto Power Points and onto a website, which was my job for the project. The final product, which still needs work done on, can be found here:

http://visualizingthepast.webs.com/

I had a lot of fun making it. In the next post, I'll detail the actual process. It took a lot of time, a lot of remembering old code that I used to use, thinking about the implications of the web design and the information presented in it, and communication with everyone in the class. I feel like I got a lot closer to everyone, even if it was not too much talking with them, but there was a closer sense of community that was absent from the class in the beginning of the semester.