Time and history

LifeLines: Visualizing Personal Histories

Using the timeline metaphor is a very powerful way to glean an understanding of a person over time (though it only works if there are specific events to tie the timeline to). In the case of the juvinile corrections system, for example, the user can easily see what trends are forming in the behavior of the particular juvinile.

In the same way, this interface can be mapped to the domain of data portraiture on the internet. We can imagine accessing someone's home page and seeing such a representation of the person in front of us (not worrying about privacy issues right now). We can portray banal information such as addresses (both RL and VR), jobs, friends, projects, interests, etc. All of this information is easily available, so utilizing it would merely be a matter of mapping the data sources to the data constructs within the interface.

Furthermore, the interface allows for the type of impression portraiture I spoke of a couple of weeks ago; What we want to get out of a portrait of someone is a feeling of what that person is like. This of course depends on our perspective when viewing such data, as well as the accuracy of the data itself. I will discuss this shortly.

History-enriched digital objects

Perhaps the most descriptive form of portraiture on the web is the time evolution of pages. Chandler talks about this briefly: on a web page elements are added, updated, or removed in a constant manner, so that a person's representation on the web is constantly changing. This evolution of a personal web page tells the story of the evolution of the person behind the page, perhaps far more intimately than expected.

The problem, of course, is that when web pages change, there is no record available of the past iterations of that page. All we see is the current incarnation. History-enriched digital objects provide a way to include this history data in web pages. When viewing a web page, we can see all of the individual changes.

Presenting this data is a challenge. We don't want to see a conglomeration of all of the past forms of the page jammed together with the current version. This data should be accessable, but should be utilized to get a sense of how the web page versions reflect the person editing them. LifeLines provides an interface for visualizing this history data, but not necessarily the best. A better one (to get an impression of the changes) might look like Tufte's small multiples.

Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web

There is one distinct aspect that Chandler discusses that is paramount to the view of home pages as portraits: that different people view the same page in different ways (socially and psychologically). Portraits are dependent upon the observer for interpretation, and each observer is going to interpret a portrait in a unique way.

An ability to adjust the presentation of information on your home page, based on who is accessing the page makes your ability to paint a self-portrait much more powerful. This capability is discussed below.

Home pages of the future

There are three concepts that are explored here which I believe will in some way augment our current concept of "Home Pages" in the future.

1. A history of publishings/editings of a home page. This temporal information helps paint a picture of a person's evolution on the web.



For changes that add lines to a page, such as a journal, older items fade into the background, while newer items jump out.



For more drastic changes to a web page, small thumbnails show the page at different stages, and the user can click on each thumbnail to get at that version of the page, which would have the smaller changes marked on it like above.

2. Changing representations based on who is accessing the page or where they are accessing the page from. The key here is that a portrait depends not only on the subject of the portraiture, but on the observer of the portrait as well. To provide a custom representation of the home page for each person--this could be dependent upon previous visits from that person, or on general categorizations of that person, or upon the domain from which the person is accessing the page (educational readers see a different version than commercial readers)--would allow the creator of the portrait to ensure that the portrait is properly recieved.

For example, a business user, who is interested in my work, might get a page that has my resume on it: Dana Spiegel, whereas a professor is probably more interested in papers that I have written for class: Dana Spiegel

3. Pages on the internet will become more interconnected, to form real communities, and the method of linking to pages will change such that there is always a reliable link. Also, dependent on when the link is created, the page accessed will be the proper one temporally. For example, if a page is linked to specifically because of some information is present on that page, then when the reader clicks on the link and is sent to the linked page, the reader will get the proper (older) page (if so intended by the linker), and not the most up-to-date version of the page.

page last updated 3/27/2001