Oh CRAP! Where did the time go?

Wow, so much to read and absorb. Of course I loved the statistics and the use of the time axis to show the changing of data over time. I taught introductory statistics at a junior college for 5 years and getting people to see how the study of interrelationships of numbers could be interesting was always a struggle. (It may have had something to do with the instructor, but I don’t see how that could possibly be the problem.) It’s amazing what you can do with data once you apply a time axis to the data. Applying a time component to a planets position in the sky allowed Tycho Brahe, the observer, and Johannes Kepler, the mathematician, to develop the laws that allow us to plot bodies in space. Looking at data relationships using graphs is tricky though. The graphs may imply a causal relationship that is not really there. The one I used to bring up in class was that there is a direct relationship to the cost of diamonds and the number of prostitutes arrested in Quebec. It is a very strong statistical relationship but trying to assume a causal relationship between the two is just plain silly.

I did a lengthy post last week using the Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity (CRAP) principles from Robin Williams’ book to judge some web sites. I found that very useful.

I spent a lot of time with Douglas Bowman and his Zen CSS. I must have visited 15 different sites in that Zen Garden project. It was amazing what they were doing with CSS. They all had the same HTML and just changed the CSS. The effects were inspiring. I tried to figure out how some of them worked and I still haven’t gotten them figured out. For instance in the page by Bowman, 017.css, he uses the h3 tag to display a background image which spans some text. I see where the image is displayed but I haven’t figured out where the  text goes to. It can’t be behind the image because the html is always on top of images in the CSS. So where does it go? A mystery to be solved.

Comments

[gprout]

Hi John

Boy do I agree with you about the Zen Garden. I really wish we had seen those earlier in the class. I am tempted to borrow one of these for my site but I am too far along and not far enough along to start totally revamping. Thanks again for your very insightful comments on my site in progress.

Some day I would like to take on that challenge of the statistical correlation of the value of diamonds and the number of prostitutes. Perhaps the former Governor of New York might wish to take this on in his idleness.

[John Aiken]

John,

I enjoyed this post because it gives me a window into the direction you're going with your project. When you mentioned a week ago that you were planning on doing a comparative analysis of historical projects my immediate thought was "Brilliant, absolutely brilliant". I did a cursory search to see if any other projects like this existed on the web and couldn't find any.

That leads me to believe you're doing something extremely orginal. You are creating histriography for the web. By comparing 3 radically different projects, you're doing more than giving a critque of the site. You are doing an analysis of what works and how we got to there. Even better, you're making an arguement based on visual evidence.

That being said, I think you're point about statiscal analysis is also fascinating. Casual and erroneous relationships can be drawn all the time especially when we view numbers. (There seems to be a wierd cultural sentiment I've noticed that numbers are more powerful than visual evidence) I think back to the Errol Morris debates where the visual evidence drove the arguement.

I wonder when you create your site if it might be possible to analyze your selected sites as visual arguements. Rather do they work? For instance does the Easter Rising site jade us to believe that the inserectionists were celebrated as heros when in fact they were a minority movement? In other words does the visual evidence on the web skew the data?