Last week, we discussed some of the design decisions for the website and I implemented them. I changed the fonts for the headers and the text body. I also changed the colors, since we decided to have dark backgrounds with white text instead of the white background with black text that we initially had. I liked the changes a lot because, first, they fit with our theme of exploring the deathscape and necropolitics, and second they helped turn the focus on the cards of the vertical timeline.

We had a bug in the horizontal timeline that we also finally (partially) fixed! Wooohooo. I am using vuejs and the vuetify framework to develop the website. Vuetify makes it easy to use html components and integrating user actions to them and that is what we used to create the vertical timeline. However, vuetify does not have a horizontal timeline component so I chose to create the horizontal timeline using d3js, a JavaScript data visualization library. I started by creating the fish bone structure of the timeline, then binded it to the data. We chose to display the dates at the top. A hover over those dates will show a tooltip that has the event that corresponds to a certain date. This is where we had the bug. The hover action was only detected if the user mouses over the timeline from right to left, it did not work in the opposite direction. I found this very odd, since the mouseover event listener is bi-directional. I figured out part of the issue. When I was positioning the tooltip, I did it in a way where it is too close to the mouse icon, so every time the tooltip shows up, it immediately disappears without it even showing. Moving the tooltip a bit farther from the mouse solved the problem partially, the hover is working 80% of the time. I still need to troubleshoot to make it perform better.

We also recorded the first episode of the Mapping Cemeteries podcast and it was so fun!!!! We talked about the process, how we ended up working on the project and why we chose the cemeteries we are working on and so much more. I’m very excited to record the rest and for everyone to listen to it. I know I won’t be listening, I can’t be the only one who hates hearing their voice in recording!! But no, I will definitely make the exception for this.

[This entry was originally posted on  DHUM 70002 Digital Humanities: Methods and Practices (Spring 2021)  in Personal Blogs on April 21, 2021 by NedjaEM.]

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