Oakwood Cemetery
Stories by Numbers
by Lauren Caddick
Side Effect
My goal for the next phase of this project is to continue to work with the data from Oakwood Cemetery, but to make an application that could interactively show the changes in the data through time. Some potential tools for achieving this are Adobe XD and Adobe Animate. I will start with building the narrative of the West Branch section of the cemetery, a section with infamous stories and a large population. I am inspired by the interactive work of Cloudred, a design firm whose specialty is data visualization. Their award-winning projects, specifically Shakespeare at the Delacorte and New York City Trees visually organize large sets of data in a way that is simple, navigable, and engaging.
Cloudred’s work is achieved using Javascript, a high level programming language I am unfamiliar with. To move forward, I wanted to find an application that would allow me to have interactive elements within my application without requiring too much coding on my end to make it happen. The first program I explored was Adobe Animate, the new replacement program for the now-defunct Adobe Flash. Adobe Animate has the ability to Adobe AIR applications for both Desktop and IOS, enabling developers to "create and package cross platform games/apps for major platforms like iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OS.” Following the instructions in this tutorial video (originally designed for Adobe Flash), I was able to create navigable pages within my project.
I ultimately decided against using Animate due to technical glitches. Part of the appeal of this program was the ability to animate the individual elements on my pages, however the animation of graphic elements, images, and symbols was unpredictably glitchy. For some elements, the animations would ‘tween’ perfectly with no issues. For others, there would be no motion at all and the effect would snap at the end of the tween. This glitch carried over into exports and I decided it was not worth continuing to pursue my work in this program if I could not resolve this issue.
I switched my focus to Adobe XD, a user-experience design prototyping application. There are some favorable reasons to use this program, but also some drawbacks. While Adobe XD does not allow for animations within pages or changing button states, it allows for click-through interactions within the prototypes while the interface allows the designer to more quickly build pages (mirroring an application like Photoshop or Illustrator.) With Adobe XD, I won’t be able to publish a full application, but I will be able to more efficiently build a prototype that reflects a more complete view of the cemetery that can be demonstrated in a public forum. Potentially, this prototype could be given to a programmer/developer and coded into a full application.
Plan of Work (Kanban-chi for G-Suite):
November 6: Complete West Branch - This first “thread” should be completed by the date. This is the first of two “threads” I will unraveling as part of the final deliverable. The West Branch of the cemetery is one of the most populous sections and includes Rachel Blythe Bauer, the “Indian Princess” of Oakwood Cemetery. By tackling this section first, I will be able to see how the pages are connected between the Section portion of my application and the Timeline portion of my application. I intend to build out and make navigable the rest of the app, so it is important to see this structure.
November 13: Complete Section 1 - This is the second “thread.” Section 1 is the most populous of the Confederate burial sections. I intend to analyze the data given to me in the Confederate database and create a page/linked pages of information for this section.
November 20: All Pages Established - Each section of the cemetery and each decade should have a unique page with some sort of unique information contained within (ex. Map, data point, interesting story, etc.)
November 27: All Pages Linked - Application is fully navigable
December 4: Point of No Return - Final
Demo:
