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Attempt at a Timeline

Page history last edited by Gabe Baker 10 years, 4 months ago

I struggled with finding a topic for this Practicum.  For a while I wanted to pick the same word as the "something old" and the "something new", picking a word that had undergone significant semantic shift, and I made a few dead-end projects that were just overly-fancified renditions of the semantic history of a word. Bleh.  I ended up looking at a single place that has undergone significant physical and cultural change: the Coliseum. Although I was told to pick something old and new, the Coliseum seemed to embody old and new, having at once the gravitas of antiquity but also throughout its history a shifting set of cultural valences and perceptions. It is also interesting in its problematic status as a marker of "ancientness" and "Romanness", as especially seen in the paradoxical looting of the Coliseum for marble during the Renaissance and its rise of interest in classical antiquity. Then, the marble of the Coliseum was looted for the building of new, yet classical looking buildings.  

 

 I used "Dipity" to make the timeline, but admit I was fairly unsatisfied with it as a whole, because the layout seemed sort of haphazard in terms of where the event descriptions were displayed vertically. I also struggled in the process of choosing which events to mark off on the timeline, and when I zoomed out (digitally and mentally), it became clear that perhaps I was trying too hard to tell a particular story.  Maybe my timeline would have benefited from a more close-knit set of datapoints (only performances, only physical change), or maybe just a set of data points that didn't seem so charged with significance for me.

 

The problem was that for a time period so vast (80-2013), any limited, chosen set of points will be a few from many, and theoretical priorities are laid clear in the choosing.

 

 

 

 

 

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