REDESIGN PAGE

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From Jonathan. August 29, 2011

OutHistory.org: It’s About Time!

Seems to me that time is the essence of OutHistory.org, the thing that distinguishes it from a sociology site, an encyclopedia, or a museum. The actions of people in classes over time, movement and stasis, seems to me to define what OutHistory is about. This identity of the site needs to be made much clearer aesthetically, in the graphic design, functionally, and in terms of content stressed.

So I argue that figuring out ways to convey time to OutHistory users and content creators should therefore be the major focus of the aesthetic, functional, and structural redesign.

Part of my emphasis on time goes back to the very earliest research I did for Gay American History, between 1973 and 1975. To get a quick overview of what kind of sources and events were then known about homosexual U.S. history I got all the existing bibliographies on the subject, copied them, and cut up the entries and scotch taped them them in chronological order to three by five cards. It was completely revelatory. “Oh, that happened two years before that!” “Oh, that was published just after that!” I know that simple chronology is the most basic form of history, but it does remain, I think, a basic, illuminating starting point.

So I would like OutHistory to provide a REVELATORY time-related experience for its users similar to the experience I had years ago. I’d like them to say “Oh!!!” when they look at the site.

Ways the Site Can Stress Time

VIA GRAPHIC DESIGN (aesthetically):

VIA IMAGES

Visualizing Time

Think of all the ways that time is visualized in movies:

calendar pages turn

clocks of different kinds tell the time

A recent art piece using lots of filmed time images and references to tell the current time might prove inspiring. See: Christian Marclay, The Clock. YouTube.com See also the review of this art piece in The New York Review of Books

VIA WORDS

Slogans:

OutHistory.org: It’s About Time!

OutHistory.org: Making Up For Lost Time!

OutHistory.org: Time is of the Essence!

VIA TIME RELATED FUNCTIONS

OutHistory should include a variety of time-related searches

Search by day month and year (eg, June 28, 1969)

Search by day of the week (e.g. what happened on a Monday?)

Search by month and day (e.g., what happened on February 2?)

Search by century and/or decade (OutHistory is set up for this, but we haven't tagged all the entries, so they don't show up. For those that are tagged click here

Search by time period. When we redesigned the search recently this got lossed somehow. Some of the Time Era categories are viewable here

In the redesign, perhaps all searches can have results that have a time factor stated.

VIA TIME RELATED CONTENT

Chronologies of events should be included

Some are already begun on OutHistory: (eg, Chronology for Out and Elected in the USA, Bloomington, Indiana, LGBT History Chronology 1969-2009, History of the Term "Heterosexual"

Titles should include time in a consistent place

(eg: Alberta Lucille Hart/Alan L. Hart: October 4, 1890-July 1, 1962, Alan Hart: "The Undaunted," 1936 )

Entries should stress time.

(e.g., see the main entry on the life of Alberta Lucille Hart/Alan Hart)

CATEGORIZING/TAGGING (time-related)

If time related searches are to work, all content must be tagged or categorized by time. We have not done this consistently in the past. Maybe it can be made easier to do. The site could provide forms to add time related data.