Democratization of History

Post date: Dec 07, 2015 10:3:51 AM

Hi everyone,

This past week the team worked on adding new functionality to the application and one of these was focused on democratizing the history of Venice. Letting the users determine which events of Venetian history they are interested in.

Realizing that we had over 6,000 events the group was seeking ways in which we could decongest the timeline. At first, we thought of having different zoom levels in which each higher level zoom levels would have less events and lower level zoom levels would have more events. To achieve this the team was going to go through all the events and hand pick events that we thought were important turning points of Venetian history. But after thinking about this, we concluded that we would be showing users our version of Venetian history and making it very hard for them construct their own version.

In order to work around this problem the team created a functionality which we have named "float ups". This functionality would work hand in hand with a zoom functionality. Through the use of the "float up" functionality the team will be able to move events from lower zoom levels to higher zoom levels depending on how many views an event has. This functionality counts the number of views each event has and then compares and allocates the events in the correct zoom level in respect to the amount of views each event has. Events that are being observed constantly by many users will float-up from lower levels to higher levels, enabling casual users to only look at events that are probably more relevant to them, but not limiting avid users to look at all the events present in the database.