Blog post for 9/6

For this assignment, I chose to concentrate on the Black Liberation 1969 Archive at Swarthmore College. I found that this project was especially easy to navigate and very informative. This project argues that students and alums of Swarthmore don’t know nearly enough about the sit-ins and occupations of campus buildings of the 60s and 70s that helped Swarthmore become a more culturally enriched school today. The audience that the project is searching for is students and alums of Swarthmore, and for them to learn more about the cultural diversity of their school and which events or actions tipped the cultural-acceptance iceberg. The part of this particular project I liked most was the interactive timeline. Here, I had a visual aid that chronologically documented the events in the 1960s and 70s that led to Swarthmore College becoming more diverse. The timeline is something I would definitely be interested in recreating for my own project in Bears Make History. A timeline for this sort of project allows the audience to quickly and effectively relate one event to another and analyze how much time passed between the two. The exhibits section was well done as well, as it too had an interactive edge. Exhibits that included charts and graphs were able to be analyzed when rolled over by the mouse, at which point, information specific to that point on the graph would be revealed. The strengths of this project are its ease of navigation, depth of information, and interactivity. The only weakness I can pick out is its occasional lack of overall color and character. The design is a bit bland and overly consistent, but this complaint is strictly aesthetic.